Smoke River Bride. Lynna Banning
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that suddenly looked too black and too thick. Thad reached his spoon to the milk glass, dipped some out and dribbled it into the cup. Now it looked like water from a mud puddle.
Teddy poked his fork at his father’s cup. “That sure looks awful.”
Leah’s face grew hot. “I have never made coffee before,” she confessed. “In China we drink tea.”
Hiding her face, she gathered up the three plates and whisked them over to the stove, where the skillet rested with her steaming dinner dish. There was no wok, so she had used the iron frying pan to cook in. She scooped a large dollop of the mixture onto each plate.
She placed Teddy’s dinner before him. The boy wrinkled his nose. “What’s that stuff?”
“That is called chow fun. It means ‘vegetables with noodles.’ In China, we make it with chicken.”
“Eww,” Teddy muttered.
Leah tried to see the dish through the eyes of a young American boy: a pile of thinly shaved potatoes covered with fried onions and topped with crumbled bacon. Of course, some ingredients were missing—not just chicken, but the noodles, crisp green peapods and a dribble of plum sauce. In China, the dish was special; here in Oregon it was obviously not.
Teddy dropped his fork and laid his forehead on the table next to his plate. “I can’t eat it, Pa.”
“Nobody’s pushing you, son.” Thad jammed his own fork into the mound on his plate and purposefully shoved a bite into his mouth. The apprehensive look on his face faded to surprise.
“Not bad,” he said. “Pretty good, in fact.” He gobbled another bite, then another. Leah ate quietly beside him, noting that he took only one tiny sip of the coffee she had made. Her throat tightened.
For dessert she had baked a traditional Chinese tart made of layered apple slices, but now she hesitated to present it. She would never understand American cooking. She feared she would never fit into American life no matter what she learned to cook. Finally she gathered up her courage, set the tart in front of Thad and handed him a knife to slice it into wedges.
The tart met with a broad grin from Thad and a glimmer of interest from Teddy. At least he tasted a bite. Then, without a word, he wolfed down his portion of the intricately assembled creation and held out his plate for another piece.
“Good!” Thad pronounced. Teddy said nothing, just sat staring at the empty tart pan. “Mama used that pan to flour the chicken before she fried it.”
“Oh? What does ‘flour the chicken’ mean?”
Teddy smirked. “You don’t know nuthin’, do ya? You take a chicken leg and roll it around till it’s all floury and then you fry it.”
“Could you show me?”
“Uh, I guess so, if I—I have to,” the boy stammered. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s Monday, son. Don’t forget school.”
Leah looked up. “I would like to walk to school with you tomorrow, Teddy.”
“What for? You need to learn somethin’?”
“Oh, yes. There is much for me to learn about life in America. But that is not what I meant.”
“Miz Johnson doesn’t teach that stuff, ’cuz we already know it,” Teddy snapped.
“Teddy,” Thad said in a warning voice.
“I wish to meet your teacher, Teddy.”
“Leah,” Thad warned, “the schoolhouse is a three-mile walk.”
“An’ if it snows, Pa takes me on his horse. I bet you can’t even ride a horse.”
“No, I cannot. But I am used to walking. My father’s school was two miles from our house, and I walked there every day, even in the snow.”
“That was dumb,” Teddy muttered.
Thad made a move toward his son, but Leah laid her hand on his arm.
“My father did not own a horse,” she said. To avoid explaining, she cleared the table, poured Thad’s coffee into the slop bucket and washed the dishes in water she’d left heating on the stove. Her anxiety mounted with every plate she dried. She knew he had not wanted to marry her; what would he expect of her? Would he want to sleep with her? And…perhaps more?
Thad seemed to be a reasonable, sensible man. And he’d had a wife before, so he knew…what to do in bed. But she most certainly did not.
A cup slipped from her shaking fingers and shattered against the floor. Before she could reach for the broom to sweep it up, Thad’s hand closed over her shoulder.
“You’re wondering about tonight,” he observed in a low voice. He turned to snag the broom. “I’m wondering, too. We’re husband and wife now.”
“Yes,” Leah murmured. “We are.”
Thad cleared his throat. “But I don’t really feel married, so maybe I should still sleep in the loft.”
Leah met his steady gaze and her stomach flipped. He had offered marriage to give her a respectable way of escaping what was inevitable in San Francisco. He could never know how desperately she needed the safe haven he offered. If she had stayed in the city, Madam Tang would have quickly auctioned off her virginity to the highest bidder.
This was Thad’s house. Thad’s bedroom. She could not usurp it.
“I think perhaps we could share your bedroom.”
He said nothing, just swept up the pieces of china and dumped them into the trash box next to the stove. Then he straightened to face her, and swallowed hard.
“You go on to bed, Leah. I’ll be along in a while, after I have a talk with my son.”
She lifted the broom out of his grasp. “Please do not. Have a talk, I mean. It will make him feel even more resentful. I will handle Teddy in my own way.”
At that, Thad propped both hands on his hips and stared at her. “I keep being surprised by you, Leah. You’re turning out to be some woman!”
“What does that mean, ‘some woman’?”
To her astonishment, Thad’s cheeks turned pink. “It means you are unusual. Not like other women.”
She hesitated. “Is it…is it because I am Chinese?”
“Oh, hell no, Leah. That doesn’t much matter to me.” He reached out and gently squeezed her narrow shoulders while she stood before him, the broom still clutched in her fingers. Moisture burned at the back of her eyes.
“It will be all right, I swear.” He lifted the broom out of her hands, turned her toward the bedroom and gave her a little nudge. “Go along to bed now.”
She moved away quickly so he would not see her tears.
For more than an hour she lay in the big double bed and, despite the flutter in her stomach, her eyelids kept drifting closed. Thad did not come. The moon rose, sending a cold silvery light through the single bedroom window, and still Thad did not come.
Had he changed his mind and climbed up into the loft to sleep with his son? Or perhaps he was sleeping in the barn? Why did he not come to his own bed? Was it because she was there?
At last she heard the front door open, then close, and suddenly there he was at the foot of the bed. Bathed in moonlight, he looked to be coated in shiny armor. Like Ivanhoe, as she had imagined him when she was growing up. It had been her favorite book.
“You still awake?”
“Yes,” Leah murmured. “I thought it polite to wait for you. I kept myself from falling asleep by thinking about…Ivanhoe.”
A laugh burst from the tall shadow by the bed. “Ivanhoe!”