The Grass Widow by Nanci Little Read Free Book Online

much; he slid the skillet to a cooler place on the stove and sat. “It’s a thought you told me not to think that I couldn’t help thinking when I saw it. Open it.”
    Carefully, she lifted the cover. “Oh, Doc!” Tears stung her eyes as she took the china teapot from its nest of excelsior. It was delicately curvaceous, with a scalloped neck and handsomely finialed lid, painted with violets and winding leaves, almost a match to the cup she had given Joss. “Doc, it’s lovely! But you shouldn’t have—”
    “I swept up the shards of our disaster a week ago, to know
     
    the quality lost to my thoughtless intrusion. This was the least I could do. And Miss Josie—” He offered a tin of tea and grinned at the way her eyes lit up when she saw the label. “This vile brew you favor, direct from China via Kansas City. Did Miss Aidan get you to church yesterday?” He aimed the question more at Aidan than at Joss; Aidan shook her head.
    “I’m still feelin’ pretty peaked.” Joss dug in her front pocket for her folding knife. “Hitchin’ up the horses seemed an awful lot of work.” She opened the knife to pry the lid from the can so she could smell of it. “I love this tea. Ma says it smells like a ol’
    anchor rope rottin’ on a clam flat. Not knowin’ from a clam flat, that’s by me.”
    Aidan raised a dubious eyebrow, reaching for the can. She sniffed and gasped, “Oh, my stars!” and shoved it back at Joss, her fingers pressed to her lips. “She’s right! Joss, surely you don’t drink that!”
    “It don’t taste like it smells. It’s good.”
    “I’ll never know. Don’t you dare brew that horrid leaf in my new pot.”
    Dolefully, Joss sighed. “Back to strainin’ it through my teeth. Ma never lets me use her pot, neither.” She lidded the can and set it on the table. “Thank you, Doc. Where’s your watch, sir? You leave that with some Cowtown card shark?”
    His hand went to the place on his vest where the chain had rested. “That’s more story than I can tell in mixed company, but in a nutshell it involved a Baltimore drummer selling toothbrushes—I ended up with a lot of them—and a Mexican who didn’t know any English except, ‘Señor, you got to eat the worm,’ and a game named Red Dog.”
    “Red Dog! Hell’s bells, Doc, even Ethan knew better!”
    “He never ate the worm,” Doc said ruefully. “I did.”
    “Don’t sound good to me. What about these toothbrushes?
    You got to show me one o’ them. Ma said a hundred strokes on my hair; do I need to do as many on my teeth?”
    “My father doesn’t believe in them,” Aidan supplied. “He says they abrade the gums and cause premature aging.”
     
    Doc tried not to let his reaction to the last part of Dr. Blackstone’s opinion show. “Well, invested of fifty of them as I am, I tried one. I’d seen them, of course, but they’d never impressed me until” —he stifled a laugh— “until I’d eaten a Mexican worm. It got the taste out of my mouth, anyway. You all right, Aidan?”
    he asked, for she’d gotten up from the table; she sent him back a reassuring smile and went into her bedroom.
    “Sounds like that worm was a powerful feller, impressin’ you into buyin’ fifty of a thing you’d got along without all this time—
    an’ losin’ your watch to boot. Hope it wasn’t your daddy’s.” Joss got up to move the ham back to the hotter part of the stove, turning the pieces with a fork.
    He dismissed the watch with a wave of his hand. “I won it in a poker game while I was going to medical school.”
    “Get any schoolin’ losin’ it?” Joss asked dryly. “Ethan told me all about them Kay Cee poker parlors.”
    He could imagine that Ethan had, including the fact that most poker parlors were also whorehouses of one description or another; Joss had never felt like mixed company to Doc, either. “The name of the drink is tequila. The first one tastes like kerosene, but after that it’s like drinking silk.