Tommy approached the post office, the book stiff against his chest. One hand in his pocket, he flipped the lucky Indian Head penny back and forth. He couldn’t wait to surprise Pearl and hoped no one else was collecting mail so he could give it to her alone. He opened the door, lifting it slightly to ease the squeak that usually announced a patron’s arrival. He entered and sneaked forward, breath held tight in his lungs.
There she was.
Pearl sat on the stool behind the counter, back to him, slight and straight as a flagpole. Her head was cocked to the side, her hair tied half-up in a knot, errant crimson strands swirling down her back, bouncing as she shifted. Something about the sight of her made him hesitate. He felt a tickle in his belly, and a happy shiver danced up his spine. He edged closer. From this angle, he saw she was doing it again—reading letters that weren’t hers.
He jogged the rest of the way to the counter and pulled himself onto it, stomach flat on the wood, book off to the side.
“Gotcha, Slim!”
Pearl’s bottle-green eyes widened as she startled and fell off the stool with a screech.
Tommy swung his legs over the counter, sitting on it, amused at her reaction. Flat on her bottom, skirts up around her knees, worn black stockings barely hanging on to their garters, pages of the letter she was reading fanned around her, Pearl caught his gaze on her legs and hopped to standing, pushing her skirts back into place.
“Whose letter?” Tommy said.
She looked away.
“Yours?”
Pearl pursed her lips. “Tommy Arthur, git off that counter right quick. I’ll sock ya one.” Chin in the air, she was confident and bristly. He grinned.
She pegged her fists on her hips. “Don’t call me Slim no more. Tired of that. Name’s Pearl.”
He squinted and shook his fist, mocking her outrage before setting the book aside and sliding off the counter, wanting to help her pick up the scattered pages of the letter. He squatted and rubbed his chin. “Whose letter’s that? Best not be mine you’re pushing your tiny . . .”
She froze, meeting his gaze, sending thrills throughout him. He hesitated, taking in her pretty, heart-shaped face. “Your little button nose…”
She pressed the end of her nose.
“Pushing it into… not my…”
A smile crept onto her face. “Button nose?”
“Well, you know.” Tommy’s cheeks flooded hot, liking her response to his clumsy wording, overcome with something he’d never felt before. To prune back the sensations he couldn’t control, he focused on gathering the scattered pages. “So whose letter?”
Pearl scooted from one corner of the space to the other, rushing to put the papers into a neat pile. Tommy glimpsed the fine cursive writing and inhaled deeply as a rose scent lifted from the correspondence and filled his nose.
“Mine. It’s mine.” She stopped and looked over her shoulder at him. “You ain’t the only one in Des Moines to get mail.”
Tommy grimaced. Were those tears threatening to spill? Aww, no. That wasn’t what he needed. The flash of sadness in her eyes stabbed at his chest. He pressed his hand to the spot and felt the strangest pulse of pain at seeing her turn delicate, mixed with a rushing thrill at being near her.
The intense sweep of feelings and sensations confused him. She was nothing like the girl he imagined someday making a home with. Yet her serrated edges grabbed at him, kept his gaze longer, held him in her universe in a way he couldn’t resist. Perhaps it was that sense of admiration in her eyes when she looked at him. Yes, that was it. The very something Tommy normally associated with the way people had looked at important men. And he saw a specialness in Pearl, something beyond the obvious, something lovely, hidden from the eyes of all others.
Tommy knew the letter wasn’t hers. Anyone sending perfumed pages with schoolmarm-type writing wasn’t corresponding with his orphaned friend Pearl. She loved working at the post office because she could see the world through the comings and goings of other people’s correspondence.
She kept a list of places she would one day visit from the postmarks of the letters that came in. She kept a second list of words she stole from mail she wasn’t supposed to be reading. When she told Tommy that she made such lists, her little treasures she called them, she had meant to imply she drew only from postmarks and stamps, but he knew she was doing more than eyeballing addresses.
“Hop back to the other side,” Pearl said. “I’ll lose my position if Postmaster Brandt returns and catches you back here.”
Tommy absorbed the silence of the space. No one was there but them. He sat back against the counter and sighed. “In a second.”
He squared off a set of pages. Pearl sniffled. Based on her ease with her pearl-handled knife and deer blood, he wouldn’t have thought she was the crying type.
“You ain’t gonna report on me?” she asked. “For you know . . .”
Tommy shook his head and pointed just beyond where she was kneeling. “Under the cubbies. Another page.”
She reached under the cabinet and retrieved it. “So you won’t?”
“’Course not. Never. You know that.”
She sat beside him and held out her hand. “Pinkie promise.”
They’d shared plenty of pinkie promises since meeting, keeping both of their failings secret, even though the routine was silly. He offered his finger and shook hers.
Her finger wrapped in his made him think of the fairy tales he’d bought. He reached up and pulled the book from the countertop above them and held it out. “For you.”
She stared, frozen.
“Got it today. A little broken-down. But the words are clear. The stories are complete.”
She leaned closer and ran a finger over the mushroom on the cover, then over the frolicking fairies and the embossed letters of the author’s name, awe lighting her face.
“Go on.” Tommy pushed the book closer to her.
She held it tight against her chest.
“It’s a thank-you,” he said.
She tilted her head, staring at him with wonderment, and again he thought she might burst into tears. He drew back, hoping she didn’t.
“I inscribed it.”
Her mouth fell open. When she didn’t move to look at the inscription, he took the book and opened it, setting it in her lap.
To Pearl,
Read these stories and imagine all that might be yours—words, places, princes. Your discretion is admirable. And I thank you for it. Safe travels to you.
T.A.
She read aloud, choppy, like a much younger student. She attempted the word discretion several ways.
“Discretion with a soft e not a hard vowel,” Tommy said. “Not like secretion.”
“Discretion, discretion, discretion,” Pearl said.
“Know what it means?” he asked.
She drew her hand over Tommy’s writing and nodded. He wasn’t sure she did, but he knew she’d find out. She would understand him being grateful at how she banked his secret failings as though they might earn her interest someday. He couldn’t have felt more princely in that moment, giving something to Pearl she so clearly loved like he’d hoped she would.
“Helloooo? Anyone?” A voice came from near the door. Tommy and Pearl stiffened, staring at each other.
“Anyone?” The voice grew closer.
Pearl set the book aside and jumped up. Tommy started to stand, but Pearl gripped the top of his head and pushed him down, her fingers digging into his skull so hard the force slammed his eyes shut.
“Mrs. Calder,” Pearl said.
Tommy batted Pearl’s hand away, then stuffed the pages into the envelope.
He pulled his long legs to his chest, making his length as small as possible. Sweat gathered under his hat as he studied the address on the letter. It was hers, Mrs. Jeremy Calder’s letter. He knew the name well. Just one year ago, Tommy had been in Judge Calder’s courtroom, sent to jail for doing nothing wrong except saving the life of a child being tormented by a fat, cruel baker.
Luckily the judge hadn’t recognized him as Tommy Arthur, son of a former family friend of his wife’s, and he believed the phony name Tommy had given him. Still, Tommy couldn’t gamble on Mrs. Calder not recognizing him. He’d spent plenty of time in her company as a young boy. Since the scandal broke, Elizabeth Calder had been punishing to Mama, one of the people who had dug through the Arthur home, not only taking things that were owed them, but marauding, abandoning the orderly line and list of items assigned to specific people. Elizabeth had taken Mama’s sapphire necklace and waltzed around town in it to this day, torturing her with its daily wearing.
Tommy’s pals, Hank and Bayard, were willing participants in Judge Calder and Reverend Shaw’s system of cash for children. The scam provided two payoffs. One came when boys were farmed out to workhouses and private correction farms for fees paid to Judge Calder upon delivery. The other remuneration was paid in the form of bolstering the judge’s and reverend’s reputations. Children were provided for the judge to hold up as examples of cleaning up the streets. Then he’d send them out to get in more trouble to show off his iron-fisted justice all over again. They were faceless souls to those who happened to notice them tossed in jail at all. And the process worked well for Judge Calder, phony keeper of civility and fairness.
Pearl shifted from one foot to the other, dragging her shoe up one calf, scratching it. “Your mail, right. Will that be all today?” Her voice cracked.
Pearl and Mrs. Calder discussed an order of calico coming in later that week. Tommy studied Pearl from his crouched position. The toes of her black nicked boots curled up.
He’d seen that type of shoe before, the ugly, utilitarian, too-big boots that a woman wore only when desperate, when she was dirt-floor poor. It was then he noticed the odor, the scent of Pearl, a young woman who didn’t get regular bathing. The odor took him back to the prairie, the way his family had smelled, the contrast to before they lost it all, the least being the ability to bathe on a regular basis.
Pearl dropped to the floor beside Tommy, startling him. She whispered, “Give me that one.” Her eyes were wide and panicked.
“It’s not sealed!” Tommy said.
“I ain’t stupid.” She snatched the letter.
Tommy pressed his chest, his heart pounding. Elizabeth Calder was not the kind of woman who would embrace molested mail.
“Something happened,” Pearl said, clearing her throat, speaking louder. “Feller threw the mailbag from the train topsy-turvy like, and it sailed onto the tracks and got run smack over. Yours was one of the only letters to survive the bag being sliced right in half. Like a fat ham, they said, sliced right through.”
Tommy heard the letter crinkle as it exchanged hands. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut, hoping Pearl could get the woman out without the kind of ruckus that would land them in front of a judge—Judge Jeremy Calder, to be specific.
Pearl put her hand to her side, dangling it just beside Tommy’s head. Each oval nail bed was blackened, the edges ragged, like her shoes. She grabbed her skirt and bunched it in her small fist, her knuckles whitening as she held tight. Tommy felt as though she were doing the same thing to his heart. He wanted to rescue her, to leap up and tell Mrs. Calder to move along and tend to her flock of maids and butlers and cooks. But Pearl would lose her job, so he didn’t do anything except squeeze his eyes shut again.
“Well,” Mrs. Calder said. The envelope crinkled louder as he imagined the woman removing the pages to examine the condition. “The railroad ought to be more careful with precious cargo. It’s protected by the U.S. government, you know.”
“Yes.”
“This is serious. I’ll be filing a complaint when Postmaster Brandt returns.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Pearl did a little curtsy, lifting her skirt and knocking Tommy in the nose.
Elizabeth Calder’s heels clicked away. When the door squeaked shut, Tommy shot to his feet. Not wanting to take more chances he’d get Pearl in trouble, he hopped back over the counter.
He straightened his hat. Pearl’s expression was indignant, as though her mail had been violated. This girl! He couldn’t stop the smile from lifting his lips at the sight of her. His tongue tied into a knot, and he couldn’t speak.
“What?” she said.
He cleared his throat and collected his senses, unwilling to reveal that she often turned him inside out with her every emotion and reaction. “My mail. I’m expecting letters.”
She stomped to the cubbies behind her, pumping her arms the way she did when set on something important. She ran her fingers along one wooden row of cubbies, then the next. She pulled out a stack of envelopes and slapped them on the counter.
“Thank you, Tommy Arthur. For keeping quiet when Mrs. Calder was here.”
He stuffed the letters into his pocket. “You’re welcome.”
She lifted the book of fairy tales from the floor and patted it. “And for this.” Her words came in a whisper. She traced the title again. “It’s really . . .” She cleared her throat, glancing at him, eyes glistening. Before she finished her thought, she’d swung around, busying herself at the cubbies, book under one arm. “Thank you is all.”
Suddenly he wished they were back on the floor, gathering the scattered mail, his pinkie finger hooked around hers. “You’re welcome.”
She riffled through the envelopes. “Go on. I’m busy.”
“Pearl?”
Keeping her back to him, moving from one cubby to the next, straightening the envelopes, she spoke. “Hmm?”
“You don’t read mine, do you?” He couldn’t bear the thought of Pearl seeing that his current circumstances put him even further from a prince than he wanted to admit.
She turned and flicked her hand at him. “Skedaddle ’fore you get me in trouble for fraternizing.”
Tommy drew back. “Fraternizing? That’s a mighty big word. A five-ton, heavy-lifting word, I’d say.” He didn’t want her to know that his father had financial limitations at the moment.
“Out.” She pointed at the door. “You lily-livered beast!”
Tommy walked away. “Where’d you get that word, fraternizing?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Old Lady Mitchell drops a good one at least once a letter.”
He turned back and opened his arms. “Pearl. Stop. I’ll give you words. Heck, you have a whole book of them now, all to yourself. Stay out of people’s envelopes.”
She grinned and patted the fairy tales again. “Oh, here.” She pulled a newspaper from under the counter. “Day old. For your ma. Sorry it’s not fresh.”
Tommy strolled back to her, unwilling to tell her Mr. Alcorn had already given him the same issue. He knew she liked to help him help Mama, and Pearl didn’t mind that sometimes day-old news was all a man could afford. Their gazes locked. He reached for the paper, fingers sweeping past hers as he took it. She pulled a sack of mail onto the counter and yanked envelopes out. “Go on, pull foot,” she said, sorting.
He drew back, the stirring deep inside him.
“Out.” She lifted her chin in the direction of the exit.
He couldn’t make himself move. A smile came to him as he watched her hands fly, categorizing the envelopes. She pointed toward the exit again. “Scat.”
There she was. That was the Pearl Tommy was accustomed to seeing in the post office, and that was the way he liked it—strong, assertive. Unusual to catch a glimpse of vulnerability in her, it nearly made him fold up and die. He simply didn’t know how to be someone else’s strength.