Read The Circus in Winter for Free Online Page B

were discussing her contract when the storm started. I couldn't very well send my star acrobat out into the blizzard to freeze to death, now could I?"
    "No, I suppose not. But, Wallace, would you be involved with her? With a woman like that?"
    Porter said nothing for a few seconds. Then, finally, he'd answered. "No."
    Now he was in her bunkhouse, in her brass bed, and after they made love, Porter fell into a fitful sleep, suspended between wakefulness and dreams. He was immobile, his eyes pasted shut so he couldn't see, only feel, Jennie straddling him. Then she spoke, she commanded, although her lips never moved. And Porter answered.
    Do you love me?
    Yes.
    Have you loved Elizabeth?
    Yes.
    After Irene died? In your grief you went to her?
    She came to me.
    She comforted you. Eleven years ago.
    Yes.
    And since then?
    Nothing. Not once.
    He woke before dawn. Jennie was already up, sitting beside him in a red robe. "Good morning," she said. "That must have been some dream you were having last night."
    Porter groaned. "I didn't drink that much, did I?"
    Jennie rubbed his temples. "You were thrashing all around and mumbling about love and secrets." She kissed his forehead. "I hoped you were dreaming of me."
    "I was, I think. I don't really remember."
    Porter left at first light, stumbling out the door like a blind man without even kissing her good-bye, but she knew he would return. Jennie Dixianna remade her bed with fresh sheets, sprinkling them with perfume. Pumping a basinful of water from the spigot, she washed herself in the firelight's glow. Water splashed onto fireplace bricks, sizzled, and disappeared.
    Clean and naked, she took her cedar box down from the mantel and opened it with the key around her neck. Jennie counted the silver (twenty dollars and two bits), polished the rings (worth at least two hundred, she guessed), and tallied the paper (five crisp ten-dollar bills). The last she folded into a monogrammed money clip gleaned from a stoop-shouldered drummer she'd met in a St. Louis hotel, the one who'd asked if he could watch her use the chamber pot. Jennie surveyed the remaining contents: A to-do list written in a wife's delicate script."
Coffee. Sugar. My laudanum. Your headache powders. Sally's penny candy. Potatoes.
"A punched ticket stub. A folded-up family portrait"
The Hartley Family, Mendota, Illinois, 1866.
"Penciled doodlings of strangers' faces. A priest's Bible. Did it belong to the one who'd wanted to have her in switched-around clothes—he in feather boa, she in collar and robe? Or was it the priest who liked to play with candles? Jennie thumbed through the Bible, smiling at the underlined fire and brimstone passages, and let her finger rest on Sister's secret verse.
    And then Jennie wasn't in her bunkhouse, but back in that rarely remembered Alabama shack. Her past was a black cat that wanted to sit heavily on her heart, but most nights, Jennie kept the cat shooed away. How had it gotten inside? Perhaps it was the flicker of firelight, the opened box, the smell of clean skin. For a moment, Jennie was a little girl again, sitting on her mother's lap, looking down into a cigar box full of mementos (long since bartered or lost). Dixie Anna Marchette was telling her the story of her life one button, one bauble, one pressed flower at a time.
    And then the box in her lap turned to cedar, brimming with paper and silver. It held nothing of her inside, nothing of Jennie Marchette. That girl was long gone. Years ago, the battle flag outfit had turned to tatters, and she'd burned it without a single regret. Instead of personal keepsakes, Jennie Dixianna's box contained the flotsam of men's pockets, the skeletons that hung like ghosts in their back-hall closets. This was her story—a collage of broken glass from a thousand shattered bottles, and each new shard made her stronger and more beautiful. Jennie placed a slip of paper inside the cedar box,"
Checking on stock. Breakfast at 8. Love, Wallace