hypocritical army forts off my boots. I am in your debt.” He bowed then, and sat down, handing her a sandwich. “Army cheese, Susanna. Let’s see … fromage?”
Amazed at him, she accepted the sandwich. “This is wretched,” she said after several bites. “How can you mess up a cheese sandwich so completely?”
“It’s a mystery.” He chewed and swallowed. “I only eat to stay alive. I hear there are excellent restaurants in Paris.”
Susanna stared at him. “You are the strangest man,” she murmured.
“Standard issue, that’s all,” he replied. He leaned his elbows on the table, and there was no mistaking how tired his eyes looked.
“Do you ever sleep?”
“Not much.” He finished half his sandwich. When he looked at her, his expression was serious. “I went to Major Townsend this morning, and told him to hire you to work with Private Benedict.”
“I’m too ashamed to walk across the parade ground, let alone teach,” she said.
“You will. All I ask is that you be brave a little longer. Please. Private Benedict needs your help, and company funds will cover the cost. Maeve Rattigan has rounded up three other women who would like to learn to read. Perhaps you can teach them two evenings a week. I doubt you will make more than a dollar a week with the evening classes. Private Benedict’s school is scheduled to run until the end of May, the same as yours was.”
He returned his attention to his sandwich.
“Didn’t you just hear me say I wouldn’t do it?” she asked.
“I ignored it. This would be better with butter.” He finished his sandwich as she fumed. “By May you will have a hundred dollars, plus whatever you earn from evening classes. That will give you enough to get to Cheyenne, and maybe beyond.”
“To go where?” she asked, setting down her half-finished sandwich.
He put it back in her hand. “That will depend upon you.”
Joe felt like a bully as he sat there, making sure she finished the miserable sandwich. He bullied her into another bowl of breakfast oatmeal and warm canned milk with cinnamon. By the time fatigue call sounded and the fort began afternoon duties, she had finished eating, and brushed her hair. He hadn’t thought to ask Emily for a hairbrush, but it cost him not a single pang to get Melissa’s hairbrush from the chest where he kept those articles of her life he could not part with.
Susanna took the hairbrush and just looked at it for a long moment, her eyes troubled. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She brushed her hair, and he felt his own heart lift, as though that simple, womanly gesture had brushed aside years of cobwebs.
“What was her name?” was all she asked.
“Melissa Rhoades. She was from Ohio and very pretty.”
Susanna smiled, her eyes not so troubled. “Would you … would Melissa have any hairpins?”
She did. He took them from the cedar chest and returned to the kitchen, as Susanna finished braiding her blond hair and coiling it into the black hairnet that Emily had thought to include. With Melissa’s hairpins, Susanna Hopkins was tidy again, but still unwilling to leave his quarters.
Joe helped her to her feet anyway, steadying her. He had second thoughts about hauling her across the parade ground. Maybe she was still too weak. He appraised her as a physician. Her color was good, her eyes lively. She trembled a little, but she stood erect.
Then his mind took a sudden, great leap and he looked at her as a husband would. He asked himself if he would have treated his beloved Melissa this way. He could arrive at no conclusion, beyond the obvious fact that while Mrs. Hopkins was too thin, she was so lovely. He could see something in her eyes that looked a little bit like resolution; maybe a thin, wavering resolution, but resolution. Where it came from, he had no idea, considering how beaten down she was.
He took a chance then, and folded her in his arms, pushing her head gently until it rested against his chest. To his relief, her arms went around him and she clung to him. Whether it was from exhaustion or emotion, he couldn’t tell.
“I just want to put the heart back in you, Susanna,” he whispered. The thought struck him that maybe she was doing the same thing to him, probably without even knowing it. “Can you make it across the parade ground? It matters.”
She pulled away from him, her hands on his chest now, not