Page 11 of I Do, I Do, I Do
“I haven’t met the man, and I don’t know him. But I’m wondering if it’s possible that your husband is taking advantage of you.”
Shock widened Zoe’s eyes, and it was hard not to take offense. “How can you say that?”
“Think about it, Zoe. Your pa would never go off and leave me without access to our money.”
“This isn’t the same thing at all. I don’t need to depend on Jean Jacques’s funds. I earn enough from my job to pay my expenses. You couldn’t support yourself on your egg money.”
“Way back, I offered to buy your pa some decent boots and pay his union dues so we could get married sooner. But he wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t take a cent from a woman. We didn’t tie the knot until he’d hired on with the company and had a place for us to live. I’d feel better if I saw that sort of thinking in your man. He should have straightened out his affairs and taken care of his wife before he went traipsing off on his Yukon adventure.”
Anger deepened the color in Zoe’s cheeks. “I didn’t turn down all those proposals and wait all these years to end up marrying badly. I’m not dumb, Ma. If you’d met Jean Jacques, you’d know that he’s wonderful and he loves me. He’d never treat me wrong.”
“I worry, Zoe. That’s all.”
“Rich people do things differently. They don’t think like we do. Jean Jacques never had to scrape pennies, money just appears when he needs it. I doubt he thought about leaving me without access to his money. I doubt it entered his mind. Rich people don’t think about paying rent or buying food or things like that. They’ve never had to.”
“One more question, then I won’t say any more about it.”
“Good.”
“How much of your reward money did you spend on outfitting Mr. Villette?”
“A lot,” she admitted eventually, resenting the implications behind her mother’s question. “I would have spent it all because a man like him is used to the best of everything, but he wouldn’t hear of it. In many ways, he’s like regular people, Ma. You’ll see when you finally meet him.”
Inside she cringed at the thought of bringing Jean Jacques here to meet her family. She didn’t think he’d look at her home and the people in it the way the swells in the carriages did. He wasn’t like that. But still, he’d see the grime and the chipped dishes and all the rest. In fact, she couldn’t imagine Jean Jacques in this tiny house at this dusty table focusing his charm on a tired woman who didn’t place much value on charm.
“One last thing. Did you tell Mr. Villette about us? About your family?”
Standing, Zoe looked around for her hat and gloves. Ma had placed them atop her small overnight bag. Taking up her hat, she pinned it on before a cloudy mirror framed next to the window where the light was good.
“I told Jean Jacques about Newcastle and Coal Creek and about the family.” She’d never been able to look into her mother’s eyes and lie, so she kept her gaze fixed on the mirror. “He knows I didn’t grow up with advantages.” That much was true, but she had kept the details vague. She would confess her complete history eventually. Feeling guilty, knowing she hadn’t done right, she avoided turning toward her mother.
“Will his family accept you? Are you worried about meeting those rich folks?”
The inevitability terrified her. She pulled on her gloves and smoothed down the fingers. Jean Jacques had promised that his family would love her as much as he did. But she felt certain they would have preferred that he marry in his own class.
“That’s a bridge I’ll cross when I reach it,” she murmured, giving her skirts a twitch to shake dust from the folds.
Her mother stood and came around the table. “I’ll walk to the train with you.” She didn’t mention Jean Jacques again until Zoe was about to climb onto the narrow porch behind the caboose. Then she caught Zoe’s face between chapped hands and looked into her daughter’s eyes. “I’m so proud of you. I know you’re too smart to let some scoundrel bamboozle you, but I can’t help worrying about my chicks. I just want you to be safe and happy.”
“I know, Ma. Don’t worry.”
“I trust your judgment. I’m sure Mr. Villette is as wonderful as you say he is or you wouldn’t have married him.”
Zoe stood on the little porch of the caboose waving her handkerchief until she saw Ma turn up the road toward the company store, then she stepped inside to get out of the wind and the blowing soot and smoke.
A visit home always left her with a disturbing mix of feelings. It was good to see everyone, but no one in her family could talk without shouting, and the house seemed smaller each time she came. Though it made her feel guilty, she felt relieved when the coal-laden train rolled away from Newcastle and she left behind the black dust and the chickens scratching for treasure in dirt yards and men scratching for coal under Cougar Mountain while their women waited and worried.
Thank heaven she had escaped all that. And she had done it by working hard to better herself through evening classes to improve her education and by taking Miss Lydia’s weekly classes in decorum.
Bending her head, she closed her eyes and touched her wedding ring through her gloves, thinking about the conversation with her mother. She wished they hadn’t talked about Jean Jacques. Decisions that had felt perfectly reasonable at the time seemed odd and puzzling when examined through her mother’s hard-eyed skepticism.
Since Zoe didn’t doubt her husband for an instant, she could only conclude that she had explained things poorly. Still, she hoped Jean Jacques would write soon. A letter would go a long way toward putting to rest a strange niggling restlessness that she couldn’t define.
The stage driver informed them that forty thousand people resided in the Seattle area. If anything, Juliette believed the driver might have underestimated the number. Every shop, every restaurant, every street, every place she went to or saw teemed with people. She’d never seen so many folks in one place, and it awed and frightened her.
Fortunately, she and Clara had found rooms at the Diller Hotel, which was jam-packed to the rafters. Actually, the registration clerk had informed Juliette there were no rooms, but Clara spoke to the same man, and in five minutes she had rooms for them both. It annoyed her to the bones that Clara could obtain rooms and she could not.
The hotel was situated too near the railroad depot and the docks, but they were lucky to have found a room at all. One of the positives was discovering the business district lay within walking distance. That’s where she began her search for Jean Jacques’s import-export shop.
