Never Again Nellie

Victoria and Audra were playing a game of cards when Jarrod came back to the house from taking Kate Wilson to Stockton for her transportation back to prison. Victoria looked up from her hand, but not long enough to see the look on her son's face.

"Did you see Kate off all right?" Audra asked.

"She's on her way," Jarrod said.

The sound of his voice was strange. The women both looked up at him and got the full view – his eyes were dark and his face was like grey stone. He was angry.

"Audra, would you leave us alone for a few minutes?" Jarrod asked.

Audra put her cards down, wondering if she could get away with eavesdropping from the hall but deciding she really didn't want to. She did not really like being around her brother when he was angry. Audra just got up and went out the front door.

"What's wrong?" Victoria asked, worried that something had happened with Kate Wilson.

Jarrod gave a long, angry stare down at his mother before he sat down beside her on the settee. "You were," he said flatly.

"I don't understand," Victoria said.

"Yes, you do, and if Miss Wilson hadn't been here, I'd have told you so before now," Jarrod said. "Just who do you think you are, putting yourself in prison like it was a day at the beach?"

"Jarrod – " Victoria started to explain.

"No," he said flatly. "No, you are going to listen to me this time, none of this 'Jarrod, let me explain' or anything like that. You could have been killed. You very nearly were killed, and you very nearly got me killed. I won't even ask you what you were thinking, because you obviously were not thinking."

"It was something I believed I had to do," Victoria said, but the rage in Jarrod's eyes kept her voice quiet.

"If Audra had done something like this, you'd be turning her over your knee."

"That's entirely different."

"No, it is not. It's not different at all. You're every bit as vulnerable as she is, and probably more so, because she's a lot younger and stronger than you are. Damn it, Mother – and don't go cautioning me about my language! You're damned lucky I'm not using the language I learned from the type of people you just locked yourself up with."

"Jarrod – "

Jarrod got up. His rage was building even more. "No, I'm not going to hear it! If you ever, and I mean ever pull a stunt like this again, I just may leave you to get out of your trouble yourself! Don't tell me it was to help the women who were at the mercy of the men in charge of them! I don't care!"

Now Victoria was getting angry. "Jarrod – "

"I said I don't care! I don't care what your reasons were! It was not your place to put yourself in this kind of danger, and especially not without any of the rest of us knowing about it!"

Victoria got up. "You'd have said no!"

"You're damned right I would have! You were completely out of your element! You had no idea what you were getting into! You should have let me handle it! And don't try to pull rank on me or use any of your other tricks to get your way on this, because it's not going to happen! If I say another word to you for the rest of the year, you're going to be lucky, because I have never been so angry with another human being in my entire life!"

Jarrod was too furious to continue. He just walked out the front door.

"Jarrod!" she yelled after him.

He slammed the door and left.

She had been ready to fight back with him a few sentences ago, but when he walked out like that – so unexpectedly out of control that he couldn't even be in her presence for another moment – she found herself about to cry. She didn't want to – she wanted to be angry right back at him. But tears just came all by themselves. She sat down again, and just sat there, her head spinning.

Audra came hurrying back in. "Mother, what – "

Audra didn't get any farther. She saw her mother, and the minute Victoria looked at Audra, she did begin to cry.

Audra hurried to sit beside her. "Mother, what's happened?"

"Oh, Audra, he's angry," Victoria said. "He's more angry with me than I've ever seen him before."

Audra held her mother, not knowing what to say. The truth was, she had been angry too when she found out Victoria had gotten herself imprisoned without saying a word to her family about it. There was still a part of her that wanted to scream at her mother for doing such a thoughtless and dangerous thing, but Jarrod seemed to have blown the roof off for both of them.

He had passed by Audra in the front yard without saying a word, without even looking at her. He was so angry he just went into the stable, and Audra could picture him mounting up and riding away.

Now Audra was left not knowing what to say or do.

"He's right," Victoria said, wiping the tears from her face. "I shouldn't have done it, not that way, not without telling you. I just – " She didn't know what to say.

"You just thought you were strong enough to take them on by yourself," Audra said softly. "You thought you were indestructible. And you knew, if you told us what you wanted to do, we'd have kept you from doing it."

Victoria looked at her daughter. "Yes, you would have, and I couldn't. For Maude – I couldn't."

Audra remembered the woman who had cared for her and Victoria when they got diphtheria. What she didn't remember was how much her mother had grieved for her, or how much her mother never let a debt go unpaid, no matter what the cost. But –

"Still, Mother," Audra said, holding her mother more tightly, "you shouldn't have endangered yourself like that. Maude would have been the last person to want you to do that."

Victoria sighed, rubbed her tears away again, and sank back into the settee. "Perhaps your right. Perhaps I need to remember I'm not twenty-one anymore, and that I have people to answer to for the things I do."

"I don't know where Jarrod's gone," Audra said, "but he'll be cooler when he gets back."

"I don't know," Victoria said and got up. "You didn't see how angry he was. I'm going to go lie down for a while. I'll see you at dinner."

Victoria took herself slowly up the stairs, and Audra ached for her. Jarrod had apparently been awfully hard on her, but he was right. Is this what it took for her mother to accept that she had done something horribly wrong?

XXXXXXX

Jarrod came in late for dinner, offering no kisses for either Victoria or Audra, offering no apologies. He simply sat down and reached for the food, and as he put some on his plate and began to eat, it was in silence. He didn't even look at them.

Audra was just about finished. She looked at her mother staring at Jarrod. She looked at Jarrod staring at his plate. And she decided to push herself away from the table. "Please excuse me," she said. "I have some sewing I need to finish up."

Victoria did not take her eyes off her son as her daughter left, but Jarrod still had nothing to say. Victoria put her fork down, her hand shaking.

Abruptly, Jarrod put his own fork down, leaned back in his chair and just stared at his mother.

"I wish you'd yell more at me," Victoria said. "Your silence is ten times worse."

"What do you want me to say?" Jarrod asked quietly.

"Anything," Victoria said. "Swear at me, scream at me, anything." Her voice broke. She started to cry again.

Jarrod let her cry. He took almost a full minute before he said, "If I tell you that I understand how you feel, it would be a lie. I know what Maude meant to you, but I still don't understand, and I certainly don't approve. If I told you everything between us was going to be all right, it would be a lie, because I'm not letting you off that easy. If I do, you'll do this again the next time you want to."

"What do you want me to say, Jarrod?" Victoria asked, her own ire rising up again. "There's nothing I can say other than to explain what this all meant to me, and you already know that."

"And I don't care," Jarrod said, leaning forward. "All I care about is you. I wish you cared as much about me and about the rest of us."

Jarrod dug back into his food, ate quickly and threw his utensils down onto his plate after a few bites.

Victoria said, "I was wrong. I was thoughtless and I was wrong, and I apologize with all my heart for what I did."

"But you'd do it again, wouldn't you?" Jarrod asked angrily.

Victoria looked at him. "No," she said. "When I said I was thoughtless, I meant exactly that. I never gave a thought to how what I was doing would affect you or your brothers or your sister, except to think you'd stop me and I didn't want to be stopped. And I suppose I thought you'd support my decision once I was home safe."

"I don't support it. I'll never support your doing anything like that, never."

"You've made that perfectly clear." Victoria took a deep breath and steadied her thoughts and her words. "I was thoughtless in the truest sense of the word, and I've hurt you and I don't know how to make it up to you."

The tears came back out without warning. Victoria felt so many conflicting feelings – she felt abandoned but foolish, unsupported but undeserving, proud of herself for helping those women but ashamed for not considering her family. She finally cried so hard that Audra in another room heard it and came back, but she stopped in the doorway. Audra's eyes were full of tears when she looked at Jarrod, begging him to fix this somehow, but he was still so angry he wasn't sure he wanted to do it.

Audra's begging eyes turned into demanding eyes.

Still furious, Jarrod put his napkin down and slowly got up. When he went to his mother and pulled her into his arms, Audra turned and left, but by then Jarrod had softened a little.

"Don't, Mother," he said, more softly now. "Don't think about making it up to me, because if you try and I tell you you have, you're just going to do this again. I don't want you to make it up to me because I don't ever want you to do this again. If you become angry with me – if you never say another word to me for the rest of your life – I'll consider it worth it if you never do anything like this again. I'd give up every happy moment we might ever have again if it meant you would never do anything like this again."

Victoria cried even harder. Jarrod pulled her closer, and he finally kissed her on top of her head. She grabbed hold of his arm.

Jarrod said, "I love you, Lovely Lady. I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to you. Surely I didn't need to tell you that."

Victoria just said, "No, you didn't."

Jarrod held her silently. Finally, he said, "I'll always be angry about this, and if you ever even think about trying anything this foolish again, you will hear my anger. But I love you, and that won't change, ever."

"I know," Victoria said.

Then Jarrod just held her for a long time.

The End