Free Gaffney, Patricia by Outlaw in Paradise Page A

all fifteen pounds of him, and settle him on her lap,
whereupon he yawned, purred, and fell back into a coma.
    "Some pet you turned out to be." She ran a finger around
his ear, halfheartedly trying to tickle him into wakefulness. He'd appeared on
her doorstep last winter, scrawny and scabby, fresh from a fight he'd obviously
lost. She'd liked nursing him back to health, and especially his heavy, earnest
devotion afterward, when he'd lumbered after her everywhere, a black, constant,
overweight shadow. But she'd succeeded too well, because now all he did was
sleep in her chair, or in her lap on the rare occasions when he relinquished
the chair. "Boo, you are a deep disappointment," she murmured,
coaxing a soft purr out of him before he went back to snoring.
    She let her head fall against the high back of the padded rocker,
closing her eyes, smiling a little. This was nice. In an hour the noise from
the saloon would be deafening, but this time of the day it was still nice.
Sundays were the best, though. The Rogue closed down for the Sabbath (unlike
Wylie's bar, which stayed open all day every day, even Christmas). Sunday
mornings she took care of any leftover bookkeeping matters and saw to any
emergencies from the night before—broken chairs, shattered mirrors, and the
like—and usually by three or so in the afternoon she was free. She didn't go
out, didn't ride over to the old River Farm and wander around the orchard—that
was strictly a Friday afternoon pleasure. On Sundays she stayed in her room and
listened to the quiet. Sat in this chair, propped her feet on her crocheted
footrest, lit the tasseled lamp on her piecrust table. Put on her mail-order
spectacles and opened a book. Or wrote a letter to the only friend she still
kept up with from Portland. Or read the Paradise Reverberator she'd
saved from Friday, for the local gossip and the smattering of "world
news." "Ahhh," she would say from time to time to Boo.
"This is the life."
    Every great once in a while she'd wonder if she was happy or not,
considering that the finest hours in her week were the ones she spent alone in
a rocking chair with a cat on her lap. But usually the question didn't trouble
her; she was either too busy or too tired, or enjoying too much the respite
from business and tiredness, to think about it. And whenever she was seriously
blue, which luckily wasn't often, she had a saying that always put whatever was
getting her down in the right perspective: It beats canning salmon.
    Sometimes on her Sunday afternoons she didn't do anything at all,
just sat here and gazed around the room. Even after two years, the fact that
she owned it and everything in it still amazed her. That was her brass bed and
blue-flowered quilt, for example; her two pillows with embroidered sayings on
the pillow slips. She owned this old wooden rocker. She owned that Wellington
phonograph and the four opera discs she'd played so often they barely sounded
like music anymore. This was her window, overlooking the live oak in her
postage stamp-size backyard, and her very own cedar-shingled outhouse.
    Not that she'd done much to earn them. (She certainly hadn't done
what most people thought she'd done to earn them.) She'd been nice to a
dying old man, that was all. As a result, she now owned everything he'd owned.
Last week she'd passed by two ladies staring in the window of Jurgen's
Retail-Wholesale Furniture Co., and overheard one of them say to the other,
"That sofa's all right, but if s not really to my taste." She'd
thought about that all day, and on and off since then, fascinated by the
brand-new idea of "taste." Imagine picking out something like a
sofa—or a bed, or a rocking chair—according to whether or not it suited your taste. How did you know what your taste was? She'd been studying her room, or
rather Gus Shlegel's room, in a different light ever since, realizing how
masculine it was, and the little ways in which it didn't really suit her. The
lady's remark hadn't