With nowhere else to turn, Rusty had brought the girl to Rachel’s house. She now sat on her suitcase in the front yard, looking bored with the entire conversation.
“Rachel, can we please go somewhere private to talk?” He looked back at Amelia, who immediately turned her head, unwilling to acknowledge them.
“‘Mrs. Stevens to you. And I don’t see why you’re involving me in your private affairs.”
“Please?”
Rachel opened the door wider, but pushed him aside. She walked to Amelia and squatted in front of the girl. He couldn’t hear what she said, but Amelia shrugged, then stood and picked up her suitcase. She followed Rachel into the house. “The kitchen is straight ahead. My son, Will, is having a bedtime snack. I’ll be right with you.”
She crooked her finger at Rusty and he followed her into the room on her right, which was a parlor of sorts. Crossing her arms and tapping her foot as if addressing a disobedient child, she said, “All right, now tell me.”
Rusty rested his hands on his hips. “It turns out the visitors I had earlier today was Amelia and her grandfather.”
“Your father?”
“No. Both my parents are deceased. He was Beatrice’s father.”
“Beatrice?”
“Look, can we sit down? This is a long story, and frankly, I don’t even know where to begin.”
Rachel sat on the edge of a worn char and waved to the one across from her. “I think a good place to start is with Amelia’s mother.”
“Yeah. Well, Beatrice—Amelia’s mother—and I were engaged to be married. We were young. I was eighteen, and she was seventeen.”
“Go on.”
“A couple of weeks before the wedding, I returned to the bunkhouse in the middle of the day to get another pair of gloves. I had brought my older, worn ones with me, and they weren’t working well enough. Anyway, I found Beatrice and another one of the cowhands in his cot.” He looked up at her. “They weren’t taking a nap.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Actually, I was more angry than sorry. I whipped that boy’s ass—pardon—and left the ranch. Never looked back. Haven’t seen her since then.”
“And Amelia?”
“If she is mine—and based on what I had witnessed, there is some doubt about that—I never knew about her. I moved a few times over the years, but she never wrote.”
“What about her mother?”
“According to Beatrice’s father, she claimed the kid was mine. But when the girl was only about four, Beatrice died from influenza.” He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. “That was about ten years ago. It seems they’d been looking for me all this time. Just now caught up with me.”
“That poor girl. Abandoned by her mother, unknown to her father—”
“If I am her father.”
“—and now dumped by her grandparents.”
Rusty stood and paced. “What am I going to do? I can’t keep a young girl in my house. I have no idea what to say to her, let alone finish raising her.”
“You are the adult and you need to put aside your problems with it, Mr. McIntryre.”
“Can we please do away with the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.?’”
Ignoring his request, she continued. “You need to concern yourself with the little girl in there who nobody seems to want.”
“It’s not that I don’t want her. I just—damnation, Rachel, can y
ou understand how I feel? You’ve had Will in your life even before he was born. I just found out a couple of hours ago that I may or may not have a daughter.”