After lighting the lamps, he gazed unhappily at what was definitely a woman's bedroom. Rose paisley wallpaper. Ruffles and lace, lots of lace. A skirted vanity. Fringed tiebacks on the draperies. The decor had amused him when he'd planned it to surprise and indulge Philadelphia . Now it stifled and smothered.
Pressing his lips together, he glanced inside the dressing room, noting a row of his clothing on one side, and Louise's bought and borrowed items hanging on the other side.
By the time his unwanted wife came upstairs, he was in bed reading, and wearing a nightshirt, which was not his habit. Pretending to be engrossed in his book, he watched her enter the dressing room, then emerge a few minutes later completely covered by the voluminous tent-like nightgown. She'd taken down her hair and plaited it into a long braid that swung over her shoulder as she pulled back the blanket and sheet on her side then tucked herself and yards and yards of nightgown into bed.
Having arranged nightgown and covers, she pushed her pillow against the headboard and sat propped up as he was, her arms again crossed over her chest. A signal if he'd ever seen one.
"Is the light bothering you?" he inquired irritably. If she answered yes, as he expected she would, his choice would be to abandon the pleasure of reading before slumber or to ignore her wishes and be inconsiderate.
"Maybe I was feeling a little bit sorry for myself," she admitted in a low voice. "Your family's being nice, but I know they blame me for all the trouble." She cast him a quick hazel glance. "Then I start blaming myself and feeling bad and thinking that everything would have worked out a lot better, just like you said, if I'd picked a piano or something else. But I didn't want a piano, and everyone including you said I should pick what I wanted. It's just not fair, and I don't see an end to it. How long are we going to be fighting blame? That's what I want to know. A few weeks? Months? A year from Sunday?"
He closed the book with a snap and laid it on the bedside table. Concentration had been impossible; he doubted that he'd read two pages in the last forty minutes. He studied the wallpaper, trying to pick out the seams.
"Acknowledging your responsibility isn't the same as blaming you," he said finally. "If anyone's to blame, it's me. I should never have gone to Piney Creek."
"That occurred to me, too. So why did you?"
The answer wasn't simple. He'd failed to make Philadelphia understand his reasons; he doubted Louise would. But he told her about Jason McCord anyway, needing to remind himself what had driven him into the mountains despite Philadelphia 's pleas that he stay here.
"I was born in Mexico ," he said finally. "Wally was born in California . Gilly arrived in a mining camp near Central City. What those places have in common is gold or silver."
"Your father was a prospector?" Surprise caused her to shift on the pillow, and he felt her gaze on the side of his face. "I thought your pa was a rancher."
"No, it was Ma who grew up on a ranch down south. She met my father when he was working in a nearby town to earn enough to stake his next prospecting venture." Why two people with such different backgrounds, dreams, and personalities had fallen in love and married remained a mystery to Max.
Maybe it had been a mystery to his parents, too.
"You remember the men in Piney Creek who brought their families to the diggings? My father did the same. In the early years maybe my mother enjoyed traveling to places she wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Maybe living in mining camps felt romantic and adventurous. My father would have been content to chase the dream forever, but one day Ma realized she had three children growing up in rough camps. No house, no security. Only a hand-to-mouth existence and no future."
"Go on," Louise said. She'd propped her elbow on the pillow and rested her head in one hand while stroking the end of her braid across her cheek with the other hand. If he hadn't been focused on his parent's story, he might have laughed as the stubby end of her braid reminded him of a shaving brush.
"Ma started selling bread and pies out of the tent we lived in. She earned enough to buy a boardinghouse on Central City's main street. Three years later, she bought this land. A year after that she sold the boardinghouse and the four of us left Central City and came here to the ranch. We lived in a tent by the creek while the main house was being built."
"The four of you?" He heard a frown in her voice.
"My father stayed in Central City," he said, the words coming hard even now. "The dream was so strong that he let his family leave the mountains without him." And Max had been old enough to read the pain in his mother's eyes, old enough to feel himself abandoned and rejected.
"By the time he decided that being with his family was more important than searching for gold, the house was built and the range stocked. He came home hat in hand. But he never forgave my mother for finding riches in the mountains when he couldn't. Never let her or himself forget that she had bought the ranch with her earnings and he was living off the fruits of a woman's labor."
"Nothing costs so much as what is given us," Louise murmured with a sigh, and he looked at her, startled by her understanding.
"When Ma left the mountains and camps, she found stability and security in the land. But my father lost some vital spark. He never went into the mountains again, but he was never fully here, either. He left the better part of himself up there. And during the time they were apart, their marriage changed. Maybe Ma couldn't forgive him for choosing a sluice and a pan instead of her. Maybe she'd discovered she didn't need him after all. Maybe he blamed her for the loss of his dreams. Or maybe they were never suited in the first place."
"And you?" Louise inquired softly, her steady hazel gaze fixed on his face. "Did you forgive him for choosing a dream instead of you?"
"Good God," he whispered, staring at her in shock. When he looked down, he saw that his hands were clenched into fists. "I thought I needed this summer to understand him," he said slowly, his thoughts racing ahead of his words. "But you're right. That was only part of it."
Yawning, Louise plumped her pillow, then slid under the covers as if she hadn't just delivered a stunning insight. "I think you needed to go to Piney Creek. And this summer was your only chance to do it," she said in a sleepy voice, turning her back to him and the lamp. "Good night."
"Piney Greek was like Central City used to be, before the boom, before shaft mining," he said, speaking to her braid.
Long after he'd extinguished the lamp and Louise slept beside him, he sat in the dark remembering his childhood. Camping in a series of tents beside a series of creeks and streams. Helping his mother knead bread dough or roll out piecrusts. And later, emptying slop buckets in the boardinghouse, washing the stairs every morning before he gathered eggs for breakfast.
And then the ranch and his joy in the land—knowing the wandering had ended and he'd come home to a place where he belonged. Eventually the pain of missing his father knotted into anger so deep that he resented it when Jason McCord finally did rejoin his family.
Had he forgiven his father for letting them leave? For joining them eventually but leaving his heart beside a mountain creek? Not when he stood dry-eyed at the grave site, holding his mother's arm while the Reverend Dawson prayed.
