wife, the keeper of his heart, would be outside, but she was, walking from Emily Reese’s quarters to their own home.
“Your mother, lad,” he whispered to Tommy, and gave him a little push.
Tommy stood still, suddenly shy. “Let’s go together,” he whispered back, which touched Joe to his very core.
“With pleasure.”
They were still not close, walking past the post trader’s store now, and he knew Suzie’s left eye saw only blurry images. Still, she stopped walking and stared. She slowly put her hands to her mouth, then brought them down to pick up her skirts and run. The wind caught her dress and showed off a fine pair of ankles but her arms were open wide now, her hairpins probably escaping with every step. Joe knew her.
“She’s going to grab us both,” Tommy said.
“I believe she is, son.”
Suzie stopped only steps from them, her eyes on her son, adoring him, then on Joe, with an expression so happy that it stunned him. He and Tommy took the last few steps into her arms, both of them holding her close as she cried, her hands first in Tommy’s hair, and then his. She gave Joe as fierce a kiss as any woman had ever given a man, then knelt beside her son, just running her hands from his head to his face to his shoulders and arms, saying his name over and over.
Joe knelt, too, because she was suddenly too far away, this wife who had become everything to him. They stayed that way, arms around each other, Tommy between them, until she looked up at his face. She didn’t say a thing, but her expression burned itself into his soul and heart.
Neighbors came and went all evening, bringing food, heaven knows why. Mrs. Burt visited briefly, left, and returned with two pairs of trousers. “My son outgrew these. I knew I was keeping them for some reason,” she said, pressing them into Suzie’s hands.
The biggest surprise was Lavinia Dunklin, still pale from her recent medical ordeal. She had three shirts over her arm, which she handed to Suzie, and left without saying a word.
The news traveled almost as rapidly across the footbridge to Suds Row, which meant Maeve and Maddie, then Mrs. Hanrahan came by to hug Tommy and kiss Suzie, who was starting to resemble a woman on her last legs.
In the kindest way he knew how—it took all his Southern diplomacy—Joe finally closed the door on well-wishers. With a doctor’s eye, he looked at the two patients in his care and sat them both down on the settee.
“We’ve had enough visitors,” he said. “Tomorrow, my prescription is that the only person who leaves this house is me.” Suzie nodded, her eyes never straying far from her son.
He looked at Suzie’s son, the boy he already considered his, and saw exhaustion writ large.
“You will sleep here tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow I will procure a cot from the quartermaster’s clerk and you’ll have a bedroom upstairs.”
“I haven’t had a bedroom in a long time,” Tommy said. He leaned against Suzie’s shoulder, not too tired for the impish humor Joe had come to know on the ride from Fort Russell. “Mama, I’ve been living rough and traveling with Saint Paul.”
Suzie laughed. “This missionary journey is over! I believe I can prevail upon my husband to round me up some sorry cases from the guardhouse to move our bedroom upstairs, too, where it belongs. It’s time we turned the dining room into a dining room, now that we’re …” She stopped as her eyes filled with tears. “Now that we’re a family. Oh, Tommy, how I yearned for you.”
“I know, Mama. Joe told me about the letters,” her son said. He yawned. “I’m so tired.” He looked at Joe seriously, man to man. “You can tell her.”
Joe found a nightshirt of his own and cut off a foot of it using his surgical scissors, while Suzie pointed her son toward the privy. She handed him a candle and stood at the back door, not letting him out of her sight. When he came back in, he went to her and put his arms around her. She held him close as he started to sob. She picked him up and sat with him on the settee, crooning to him like a baby.
Joe watched the boy who had been through so much, and the woman who had suffered so long.
Through his tears, Tommy pleaded with her to understand what had happened. “Mama, I couldn’t