The Grass Widow by Nanci Little Page A

embrace.
    “Aidan, what is it? Are you—please, are you all right? What’s the—”
    “It’s just the baby,” she managed. “I’m fine, I just feel like hell—oh, Joss.” It was part sob, part laugh. “Now you’ve taught me to cuss.”
    “There’s naught wrong with a cuss if you feel better for the sayin’.” Her hand was cool, holding her head to her shoulder.
    “Should I go for Doc?”
    “No,” she whispered. “No. Just stay with me. Just for a minute—”
    Joss held her. For a moment, that was all she wanted. She hated the raw taste in her throat, the tears, the stuffy nose; she felt like a child ill with something, wishing for a mother to hold her as gently as Joss did now, and that want shivered through her like a leftover from the night before. After Jared, all she had wanted
     
    was to huddle in her mother’s arms, to know the elemental bond of women wounded by a common enemy, but that day she had learned what it meant to be alone.
    “It’s all right—” Joss was all arms and legs and comfort around her, keeping her close to the hard curves of her body. “It’s all right, little cousin. I’m here.”
    I’m here.
    I’ll just love you, so you’ll always know there’s someone who does. She drove her face hard into Joss’s chest, clenching her jaw against the tears that wanted to come, against the words that wanted to come: I love you too. She didn’t want to say them; she didn’t dare say them. She was afraid she didn’t know what they really meant. “I need some water,” she whispered, and felt Joss’s lips brush the top of her head before she untangled herself enough to stand and offer her hand to help Aidan up. She sank into a rocker, wondering when she had ever felt so awful, or so pampered, and while Joss got her water she missed her with a low, lonely ache; her last conversation with Doc turned over in her mind the way her breakfast had turned over in her stomach. She wished she could so easily get rid of the words. Joss brought a glass of water for her, and a cup of tea for herself, but she didn’t sit; she tapped a booted toe against a rocker of the chair, and finally, hesitantly, she said, “You said it was the baby. Aidan, should I go for Doc? If you’re—”
    “It’s just morning sickness, Joss. The baby’s all right. Didn’t your mother go through this?”
    “No. Did it happen while I was sick?”
    Wearily, she smiled. “I didn’t have time to be sick while you were sick. It’s simply self-indulgence now that you’re well.”
    Appeased, Joss sat at the edge of the porch with her cup.
    “Indulge yourself, then. I owe you an’ welcome the debt.”
    She snorted a laugh. “Some self-indulgence, puking off the porch.”
    Joss laughed, too, a burst of spontaneous amusement at her crudity. “There’s those who’d choke ere they’d suffer the indulgence! Lord, I’ve no use for them who’d falute so high the
     
    porch rail’s past their possibility.” She had started earlier to roll a cigarette, and found her makings now to complete the job; Aidan watched in bemusement. “Seems to me” —Joss paused to lick the seam of her smoke, then sealed and shaped it— “as like too many got their noses too high up in the air to scent the difference between commonness an’ common humanness. We all puke, an’
    we all call it that to ourselves. The difference is what we call it in polite company” —she scratched a match on the sole of her boot— “which I ain’t.”
    “My stars,” Aidan said faintly. “You’re going to smoke that.”
    A smile twitched at a corner of Joss’s mouth; she lit up and blew out the match with a smoky breath. “I’ve been known to take the occasional an’ not entirely medicinal dose of whiskey, too. I’ll warn you now to save surprisin’ you later.” She slid a sidelong glance at Aidan, seeing her shock; she sighed and used the matchstick to coax a bit of something hard and brown out of the crease between her boot and