Free Falling by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

anything to eat? I’m starving.”
    “You just ate breakfast.” Sarah felt a kernel of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. It was so easy to take care of him back home. She could just pop a toaster streudel in the oven and pour a glass of milk from the fridge. Now, the simple matter of providing him with healthy snacks—or even making sure he didn’t go hungry—was an exhausting and often impossible proposition.
    “I’m hungry. I’m helping Dad and it makes me hungry.”
    “I’m making bread,” Sarah said as she picked up the jar of starter and peered at it.
    “When will that be ready?”
    “Not for awhile,” she admitted. “Here.” She pulled out one of the jars of jam they had gotten from Dierdre. “Have a spoonful of this.”
    “Without bread?”
     “If you wait a minute, I’ll make you a fried egg,” she said.
    That seemed to satisfy him so she set about lighting the gas stove and putting two of the precious eggs in an iron skillet.
    John watched her. “You’re doing it without butter?” he said.
    “I didn’t know you knew so much about cooking. I’m going to watch it carefully. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” She was not at all sure about that but she didn’t have any choice. They had no butter.
    David came into the kitchen and dropped a heavy hammer onto the dining table.
    “How’s that trap coming, son?”
    Sarah frowned. “Trap?”
    “Oh, yeah,” John said. “I made a rabbit trap.”
    “To catch as in for eating?” Sarah tried to keep the note of incredulity out of her voice.
    “Well, not for pets, eh, sport?” David tossled his son’s hair. “Lunch?” he said, hopefully to Sarah.
    “You just had breakfast,” Sarah said with exasperation.
    “Of a sort,” he said. “Two spoons of jam and tea without sugar or milk. Pretty crappy breakfast.”
    Sarah added two more eggs to the skillet and felt her own stomach growl. Feeling like she was throwing gemstones down a well, she added a third for herself. “We only have seven eggs left,” she said. “We need to be really mindful of our rations.”
    “I’m going back to Dierdre’s tomorrow,” David said. “I’ll trade my services for another dozen eggs.”
    “And maybe some milk, Dad?” John took his plate of eggs and sat down at the kitchen table. “I hate drinking tea without milk.”
    “He needs milk, David,” Sarah said, the panic still with her. “He’s a growing boy.”
    “I’ll bring back milk and eggs,” he promised. “Don’t worry.”
    The lunch was eaten quickly. David and John returned to finding ways to safeguard the house and barn and Sarah turned her attention back to the stove and bread-making. Although never much of a baker she had, in one of her more industrious moods, typed in a recipe for bread on her phone. But the battery had long since gone dead and, besides, the robbers had taken all their phones last night. Sighing, she tried to remember the ingredient amounts. Baking is a science, she knew. You could wing it to a certain extent when you cooked, but baking needed exactness. She pulled open drawers in the kitchen, looking for a bread recipe.
    She glanced at the starter on the counter and knew she couldn’t waste it by experimenting. She thought of the disappointment on John’s face if she had to tell him tonight that there was no bread. By God, she was going to make him bread today! Was it so much to ask that she give her child a slice of damn bread?
    Sarah crossed the living room and began pulling books off the shelves. Mostly they were paperbacks left by previous vacationers. She stacked them carefully—in case they ended up being the only things they had to read for the next few months—and even opened the pages to see if, by some miracle, a recipe index card had been used as a bookmark. Before she’d abandoned books entirely and gone strictly to e-readers, she’d kept favorite recipes on index cards which she laminated and used for bookmarks. She paused for a moment remembering