Free The Rose Legacy by Kristen Heitzmann

they—”
    “Because they do.”
    Carina sank back into the cushions. “Mr. Beck would have told me.”
    Mae raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “Well, maybe. He’s given you a job, you say?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s what brought you here?”
    No. But what would Mae think of her true reasons?
    Mae shook her head. “I guess you know what you’re doing, but Crystal’s not exactly abounding with opportunities for women. Though that’s not to say that those of us with a mind to it can’t make it happen.”
    “I intend to.” Crystal may be far from what she expected—worse than she could have dreamed—but she was here now, and she would make the best of it.
    Mae nodded. “Well, put on the feed, then, so you won’t be passing out on the porch.”
    Carina bit into the bread, coarse and brown and heavy. Not at all the crusty white loaves the size of her thigh that Mamma had sliced and drizzled with thick green olive oil, vinegar, and salt. Carina sighed. If the Carruthers had not taken her house, she might even now be baking a loaf … but the olive oil and vinegar were gone with the tomatoes and wheels of crumbly black-rind cheese.
    She had lost all of the things she would have used to make a home. How would she replace them? Work. By earning enough to buy again what she needed. “I hope Mr. Beck won’t change his mind.”
    “I’m sure he won’t. He had a daisy in his lapel.”
    Carina frowned, but Mae laughed, a thick mezzo laugh that shook the rolls at her neck and squeezed the pouches almost shut around her eyes. It was a contagious laugh like Mamma’s, a laugh that wrapped around and squeezed you. In that moment, Carina wanted to hug her, to grab Mae’s arms and dance, throw back her head and laugh as she had with Mamma when she was very small. But that was the Italian, not American, way.
    “I remember when Herb Dixon came courtin’ the first time. He was so nervous I thought he’d faint same as you did right out on my floor.” Mae laughed again.
    Carina turned to the picture on the wall, a small, square, unremarkable man with thinning hair and round, guileless eyes. “Is that Mr. Dixon?”
    “We were married only a year. He took a fever and died on me.” Mae wiped her eye. “Twenty-nine years, and I still miss him. He hardly ever spoke, but he listened. A warmer-hearted man I never knew.”
    Carina quaked suddenly. Twenty-nine years! Eight more than her full age. Could the hurt last so long? “He brought you up here?”
    “My nephew did. Mr. Dixon left me with a handsome sum, and my sister’s son had a use for it. So we moved up to Placerville and staked a claim.”
    “Placerville?”
    “The remains west of town are Lower Placer. We lived in Upper Placer, farther up the gulch. It was hardly more than a gulch camp at its best, forty-niners who staked out here instead of haulin’ all the way to California, fifty-oners who’d failed in the sunny gold fields of their dreams, slogging homeward and snagging on the Rockies with enough dream left to dig in once again. Then others trailing in for one reason or another.”
    “Did you find gold?”
    “Sure. Dug the riverbed all day long, sluicing gravel for a handful of dust. Then Matthew had enough of it and went his way, but I had the mountain in my blood. A new rush of folks were startin’ to work other gulches. Let’s see, that would’ve been ’59. They weren’t just lookin’ for gold in the creeks. They were surveying other metals and coming in with machinery and real know-how. I had a head for business. Where there were men, there’d be a need for a roof and food for their bellies.”
    She chuckled. “I was never in much romantic demand, not after Mr. Dixon. And not a one ever suggested such. They knew better.”
    Mae patted her belly. “But I kept a good house for them that wanted such. The first was a tent in which twelve men slept in six cots taking shifts. They had regular meals same as I give them now, though the accommodations