Chapter Two

Eileen found herself huming as she began to sort the clothes. A few T-shirts for the white pile, a pair of work jeans for the denim pile. The dark were mostly Shari's tank tops, and the brights consisted primarly of her own calico house dresses; she had a pattern for a drawstringed one that made excellent use of a few yards of $2 quilting cotton.

As she loaded the whites in, she let the words escape her lips

The trees they grow high
And the leaves they do grow green.
Many's the time my true love I've seen,
Many a hour I've watched him all alone.
He's young but he's daily growing.

Washer loaded and running, she smoother ehr blue T-shirt and walked into the dining room where the sewing machine was set up. And as she began to pin together the side seams of her latest project, her mind wandered back to the note.

She automatically knew there was no way the the looped handwriting belonged to her dad; she was too familiar with his chickenstratch. It couldn't be her ganrdmother's, either. No. She was instinctively certain it belonged to a man.

Dawson was her mother's name, the name on her birth certificate, but she was ususally called Slaughterback out of convenience. Whoever he was, he knew a lot about her. Straining her memory, she tried to recall anything that could help.

When she was sixteen, her father had explained it as best as he could. Her mother had died when she was six years old, that much she had already known, but she hadn't known any of the other circumstances.

He was meeting a friend from Ohio in Eureka Springs when he met Laura, and he loved her instantly. They spent the night together, with her assuming they would be married in a few days down at Judge Bean's. What he had neglected to tell her was that he already had a wife.

Now Laura, a waitress with no family, was pregnant in a strange town with nowhere to go. She was waiting for the trolley, and trying not to cry, when a woman with a nine-year-old boy walking dutifully behind her skirts took off her sweater and dropped it around her shoulders against the cold spring rain.

She spent the next six years living with the woman and her husband, deeply rooted Christians. The husband wouldn't hear of Laura working outside; instead, she and his wife froze dinners and sold them when they needed extra money.

Apparently, they had even wanted to keep Eilee after Laura passed, but couldn't. Shari couldn't have children, and when Laura died, she convinced her husband to fight for her, even though it took a scant few weeks of step-motherhood for her enthusiasm to fade.

It took Eileen a minute to realize she had stitched at an agle, right off the side of her fabric. With a shake of her head and a smile, she took her knew scissors out and began to snip away the wayward threads. It had to be from one of them, altough she wasn't sure why they would go all the way to Millicent just to drop off a birthday present.

"Eileen!"
"Coming!"

She heard Shari's coughing as she walked down the hallways. She was finished with her breakfast, and

"I need more coffee."

After Eileen brought it, she went back to her sewing, and her thought process. She kept at it, stitching and wondering until she heard the washer click off for the final time.