iron fork if Bess hadn’t immediately dragged him into the parlor, a rarely used room on the opposite side of the tavern. It was smaller than the taproom, long but very narrow, with sharp gray light coming from the windows. Molly moved fast, entering through the front just as Lem and Bess entered from the back.
Lem was oddly dapper in a waistcoat and unstained sleeves. He’d combed his greasy hair, or slapped it down flat, and he had bathed and trimmed his beard and didn’t look drunk. In spite of his enormousness, he shrank in front of Bess, although he hardened some and frowned when Molly stood beside her.
“Are you going to be nice?” Molly asked.
“If I’m given leave to talk,” he said, speaking with a voice more righteous than abusive.
“Talk,” Bess said. “I have things to say, too.”
“I come to say the tannery’s been doing good without you. I hired the Button boys for extra help. We have skins in all the pits and enough hides to keep busy through the winter. And I ain’t had more than two drinks a meal for half a fortnight.”
Bess took a breath and shook her hair behind her, looking spirited and young and vigorously flushed. Molly fought a nervous and irrational urge to laugh.
“I ain’t been myself since the pox took your mother,” Lem said. “She had a softness and a easiness, a look full of comfort. We was sick and she was dying but she quieted the fear. I haven’t felt that since, ’cept with you. You’re all I got.”
He was teary, Molly thought, or else perspiring into his eyes. Was it love that made him cry, or something else that made him sweat so profusely in the cold? Molly looked at Bess and sensed beneath her confidence a pint-sized girl who wished she had a parent. She remembered how it felt to embrace her own father and to feel, through his bones, how he faltered underneath.
“I regret the way I left,” Bess told Lem. “You should have known about it first. I wanted to hurt you and I shouldn’t have, however much you earned it. You’re my father and I don’t want us fighting anymore.”
Lem smiled with relief and raised his arms to hug her.
“I’m staying at the Orange,” Bess said. Lem dropped his arms. “I won’t change my mind, not if you drag me off, or beg and plead, or storm around the tavern breaking fiddles with your head.”
Lem’s smile grew deformed, tangling in his beard. “We can make it like it was, clean the vats come spring—”
“But you won’t!” Bess yelled with a sudden step forward. “You’ll drink and blame luck and freeze to death by Lumen Night. I want you to fix the house and work for more than a month. I saved my earnings all summer—you could have it, every pound, if you showed real effort and convinced me I was wrong.”
Lem scrunched his face and seemed to honestly consider it, the way a man of doubt might regard a glimpse of God. “And then you’d come home?”
Bess shut her eyes. “I want to choose my own way. I want you to respect that.”
“And where is your respect for your own bloody father? Coming home cold to nobody and nothing, not a friend or kind relation caring I’m alone. I’ll be buried in a hide pit, moldering in shit, without a soul upon the earth noticing I’m gone. Poor and pocked, cruelly widowed—so I drink, aye, and rant, and curse what I’ve become. But here I am, in spite of hardship, with rights to what is mine.”
“Doesn’t Tom have a right to live without your foolery?”
“Tom,” Lem said, hunching at the name. “He disrespects his own blood. People listen and believe him. I only ever asked for respect.”
“You haven’t earned it!”
“Neither’s he,” Lem said, turning now to Molly as a stand-in for Tom. “He ain’t above rolling in the dirt, now, is he?”
Molly answered in a single, unhesitating outburst and felt a rush of clarity and dizziness together. “Say whatever you like. Tell the whole town. Nobody will listen to a tar-hearted brute who doesn’t fix his house, or comb his raggedy beard, and acts a menace in the tavern and a scoundrel in his home until his daughter offers money just to let her be.”
Bess gawked, either startled or confused by Molly’s vehemence.
Lem quivered like a beast newly branded, at the instant when the sizzle hasn’t yet burned. He swung his forearm and shoved Molly