Under a Gilded Moon(38)
Maybe, she thought, grown-up life was not so much finding your perfect place in the world, but aching for all the faraway places and people you loved—and learning to look at right where you are now, as Rema would say, through a long eyepiece of grateful.
Kerry tousled both heads. “You let me do the fretting if there’s fretting to get done.” From her skirt pocket, she plucked the two pennies she’d found last night in the cabin when she’d changed soiled bedding for her father again: all the cash money they had. “You all run and buy stick candy. I’ll stop in real quick to this department store here. Meet you back on this spot in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
Jursey loped on ahead, penny in hand. But Tully hung back. “You still got the worry from the train station awful. And you got us to think of. You commenced to panicky yet?”
Kerry chucked her sister under the chin. “We’re MacGregors, aren’t we?”
Tully’s face slid into a grin. Whistling, she strolled after her brother.
Which was a good thing. Since Kerry was nearly hurling up her breakfast with all that panicky yet. And she’d only had a handful of bleached apples and a bite of a half-rotted potato to start with.
Pausing at the threshold of Bon Marché, she scanned the mannequins in their ridiculous poses: The back of a hand to a forehead. Two arms overhead, both palms parallel with the sky. The mannequins’ clothes gleamed with silk in long, flowing folds, the backs of the gowns studded with mother-of-pearl buttons.
That silk would shred down to a fringe with one good walk in the woods.
In one half of the store hung gowns with wingspans of puffed sleeves and not but a wisp of a waist, like it’d be a dragonfly wearing the dress. In the other half hung striped waistcoats for not-from-here men who cared more for fashion than for splitting a good cord of wood. One table held tortoiseshell combs and strings of pearls apparently meant to be woven through complex twists of the hair.
Each salesgirl looked to Kerry like the Gibson Girl model: tight, corseted waist and high, starched collar and swoops of coifed hair, little curls around the face. Kerry swept a hand back over her own mane, already falling out of her mother’s half-rusted hairpins. The walk from the farm and then through Best was more than four miles—in addition to walking all over Asheville today. The mess of her hair was only a symbol of the far worse that actually mattered: of a falling-in roof and a sick father and only three hens left. Of winter’s coming and the harvest of corn and turnips and potatoes counting up too short to be lasting.
Her skirt swung stiffly over the marble floors. She could feel the doorman drop his eyes to the dusty brown of her hemline. But she wasn’t about to play the role of pathetic local girl. Beggar. Waif.
From across the department store, Kerry heard a male voice. Polished. Assured. And familiar. One of the gentlemen from the train station—Grant, the shorter one with the thick brown mustache.
“Building a palace here in a virtual backwater. George’s grandfather, the Commodore, would have positively keeled over.”
Whatever his taller, frowning companion Cabot said, Kerry could not hear. Nor did she care.
That they’d apparently chosen to come here or tagged along with the women in Vanderbilt’s party was no surprise—Asheville was a small town, and Bon Marché was the only department store around that even hoped to meet a New Yorker’s standards. Still, it was poor timing.
She’d intended to sweep well past the two men before they could recognize her. But in stepping out of her way, John Cabot backed against a rack of ladies’ hats, feathered and bowed and bright colored. He sent it toppling, feathers catching the air on the way down as if the hats had taken flight.
Madison Grant reached to set the rack upright as he craned his head to address someone behind him. “Our friend Cabot, infamous for his brutality in other spheres, now turns his force on innocent, unarmed hats.”
The remark may have been meant to be only teasing, but Cabot took Grant’s measure a moment, then kept his voice low. “How ironic. For you to speak of the innocent and the unarmed.”
Trapped between them, Kerry pretended to consider the hats.
“C’est n’importe quoi.” A young woman inspecting an evening gown tilted her head. “Really, Mr. Grant, if you’re trying to convince us Mr. Cabot here is a man to be feared for bouts of violence, I’m not yet persuaded.”
Another young woman, though, turning from a rack of white evening gloves, sounded enthralled. “But there’ve been several deaths, haven’t there been? In the game of football, I mean. It sounds rather barbaric.”
“Precisely its appeal.” Grant winked at her. “Unless one happens to be on the receiving end of John Cabot’s assaults.”
Cabot’s face hardened again to marble. He turned now, his eyes resting on Kerry.
An intensity behind those eyes that stopped her breath.
A salesman tumbled out from behind a green curtain and hurried to her. “Welcome to Bon Marché. And how may I . . .” His voice trailed off as he took in the whole of her. She watched his face register that she—of the falling hair and no hat and no gloves—couldn’t possibly have come to purchase something. Clearing his throat, he straightened his cravat. “Help you.” These last two words were only placeholders while he studied her.
Kerry kept her voice steady, but low. “I’m seeking employment.”