When she was finished with the women, she started on the men. She arranged for the roof to be repaired and the shed to be mended, then hired a carpenter to repair the front door. When she asked if anyone had a porch on his or her house, a porch that they’d like to take down and put up on the front of Josh’s house, there was a bidding war on the porch. Carrie went with the man who had the porch with the white posts. She arranged for the house to be painted.
“How soon do you want this done?” one man asked.
Carrie smiled sweetly. “For every job that’s done by sundown tonight, I will pay twelve percent more than the agreed-upon price.”
About twenty people tried to get out the door at the same time.
“Now,” Carrie said, turning back to the store owner. “I’d like to make a few purchases.”
She bought one can of everything he had in his store. She bought bacon and ham and flour, as well as anything the store owner’s wife told her she’d “need” as a wife. Smiling as though she knew what she was doing, Carrie purchased a can opener, a strange-looking contraption that made no sense to her. She purchased a cookstove that the store owner said anyone could cook on.
She bought lace curtains and panes of glass, then hired people to install them.
By this
time people were running into the store and offering Carrie things to buy, for Eternity was a poor town, and people used any opportunity to earn money. Carrie bought rag rugs, more rose bushes, a solid oak kitchen cabinet, four matching chairs (she traded Josh’s chairs for these), quilts, blankets, pillows, and sheets. She bought dishes and silverware (plate, unfortunately, not sterling) from a widower, and she hired women to come once a week and do the laundry.
When a wagon full of furniture came rolling by, owned by a family moving out of Eternity, she bought several pieces, including a big tin bathtub.
By two o’clock she rode out of what was nearly a deserted town, for most of the townspeople were already at Josh’s house working, but two big, strong boys came running up and asked what they could do. Carrie hired them to go into the mountains, dig up four sapling trees, and plant them in Josh’s front yard.
By three she was back at Josh’s house. A circus would have seemed calmer than the chaos around his house, as women tried to plant roses right where men wanted to stand while they painted. Women stole ladders from men fixing the roof, then the painters stole the ladders back. Tempers were short, and there was a great deal of shouting while everyone tried to get his or her job done before the sundown deadline.
Carrie sat on the sidelines, eating bread and butter, feeding tidbits of this and that to Choo-choo, and paying men and women as they finished their jobs. She didn’t have to worry about quality of work, for the people were glad enough to report any task that was only half done.
It was summer, so, thankfully, sundown was late in coming, and by the time there was a reddish glow on the horizon, the house was unrecognizable. Smoke poured from the repaired chimney, and over the stench of fresh paint, she could smell roast beef and possibly carrots simmering.
It was almost dark and, thankfully, there was still no sign of Josh or the kids yet when the last tired woman left the house, her money clasped in her hand. Carrie left her place under the shade tree and went back to the house, knowing that what she most wanted was a long, hot bath. She certainly deserved one after the day of work she had done. Having anticipated this need, she had arranged for several buckets of hot water to be waiting by the tub set up in the bedroom, so all she had to do was undress herself—a task in itself, considering all the buttons on her habit—and step into the water.
Sighing and smiling, pleased with herself and anticipating Josh’s forthcoming apology, she went back to the house.
Chapter Six
When Josh and the children rode up the path toward the house, all of them on the same horse, they halted and stared in disbelief. At first Josh thought he’d made a wrong turn, so he reined the horse away and started back down the path. But there was that big clump of aspens that he knew was at the corner of the woods and there was the old fence post so he knew he was in the right area. Turning the horse, he started back toward the house and halted in front of it.
Moonlight shone down on the little building, but the wreck of a house he’d left this morning was gone. In its place was a house with a porch on the front of it. This house was whitewashed instead of being covered with dingy gray boards, and roses grew in front of it; there was sparkling clean glass in the windows.
“Did the Good Fairy come?” Dallas asked, rubbing her eyes, thinking she was asleep and dreaming.
“Something of that nature,” Josh said through clenched teeth. “A good fairy with lots of money. Her father’s money.”
Josh urged the horse forward, helped the children down, and opened the front door of the house—a door that now moved easily on oiled hinges.
Inside the house, light reflected from several candles and lanterns set about the room, and against one wall set a new cookstove, enameled in bright blue and looking very cheerful. The walls, no longer bare but covered in pretty, rose-printed wallpaper, gleamed. There were rugs on the floors, furniture in the room, the table laid with a cloth and pretty porcelain dishes.
“It’s a fairy castle,” Dallas said and Josh winced. The child was too young to remember a time when she’d lived in anything but a hovel, and she didn’t remember anything but poorly cooked food and bare floors and an unhappy father. She didn’t remember a time when it was her father rather than an outsider who gave her what she needed.
When Josh looked at his son, he saw that Tem, too, was impressed by his new surroundings, and Josh felt angry because he had not been the one to give his children simple, basic things such as good food and a pretty house. Instead, some rich, empty-headed do-gooder from the East Coast had come into their lives and decided to bestow her charity on the poor little family in the mountains. It must have given her great satisfaction to act the Good Fairy, as Dallas called her, Josh thought. When Carrie left, she could tell herself that she had done well, that for a whole week she had given happiness to the dreary little family. She would be able to leave with her conscience clean and free of guilt knowing that she had done so much for the poor dears. But it was going to be Josh who’d have to hold the children when they cried.
Looking at the closed bedroom door, his mouth set, he went to it and turned the handle. But when he opened the door, he almost forgot his anger, because Little Miss Charity was sitting up to her neck in a bathtub full of suds. Her face was pink from the hot water, her hair was loosely piled on top of her head in a jumble of fat curls, and her breasts were just breaking the surface of the water. Josh stood gaping in dumbfounded stupefaction.
“Good evening,” Carrie said, smiling, brushing a lock of damp hair off her brow. That look of desire was on his face again, and it felt so very good to have wiped that smug, patronizing look off his face. “Did all of you have a good day?” she asked as if they were in a drawing room, but as she spoke, she noted Josh’s torn and dirty work clothes and thought that they suited him much less well than his suit had. Some men look good in canvas pants and cotton shirt, but Josh looked out of place, as though he were pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
As Josh struggled to get himself under control, he realized that his life was very different from what it used to be. No longer did women often greet him in their bathtubs, and no longer was he free to do what he wished with them. Now he was a sensible, serious, responsible person—a father—and he had to think of serious matters. And serious matters did not include what he most wanted to do in the world right now, which was to close the door to the bedroom and climb in the tub with this delicious, delectable, luscious young woman.
He straightened. “I’d like to speak to you,” he said as sternly as he could manage, but then a curl fell over her eye, and she tried to brush it away with a soapy hand. She was going to get soap in her eye, he thought, and someone ought to help her.
Dallas pushed in front of her father and stood for a moment staring in wonder at the bedroom. There was wallpaper on the walls in this room too and a new brass bed and fluffy covers on the feather mattress. “It’s beautiful,” Dallas said.