Julia's Hope by Leisha Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

“you’ll make plenty of friends again. We’ll look about the school first thing.”
    I hadn’t been able to take a good look at the cookstove last night, but I could see now that it was a beauty. Maybe the finest wood-burning one I’d ever seen, once I had the dust washed off. The stove had cream-colored enamel and a warming shelf built right in. Not very old either. Someone had paid good money for it, that was for sure.
    I opened the double doors of the big oven, wishing I had some flour. That’d be what I’d buy if we got into town and found a grocer. Flour. Beans. Maybe potatoes. But sixty cents wouldn’t go far.
    I scooped the ashes and what looked like an old mouse’s nest out of the firebox just as Sam came upstairs with the wood. He stopped for a minute, seeing me at the cook-stove.
    “You’re not wanting a fire in here tonight?”
    I shook my head, knowing it wouldn’t seem quite right yet. It would be like taking another step, thinking we belonged here, and even I wasn’t ready for that. “I’m just cleaning, Sam,” I told him. “As a kindness.”
    I dashed out in the rain again to cut the fiddlehead fern fronds for supper that night. We ate them roasted with salt, and the rest of the popcorn.
    “Do other people eat stuff like this?” Robert asked me.
    “It’s been a bad year for a lot of folks,” I replied. “When people can’t get to a store, they eat whatever’s around.”
    “They look like big curls,” Sarah said. “Only green.”
    “Rolled up like a jelly roll,” Robert fantasized. “Too bad we got no jelly.”
    “Or bread,” Sarah added solemnly.
    Sam looked from one to the other, his face ashen. “That’s enough,” he said. “Both of you.” He got up and walked away from us, into the dark bedroom with the boarded window.
    “Why’s he so cross all the time?” Robert asked me. “He was nicer when he had a job.”
    I was stunned by my son’s words. Everything had been nicer then; that was surely true. But I couldn’t let him blame Sam for that.
    “Honey, your father will always have a job. God made him your daddy, and the most important thing he’ll ever do is love you the way he does. If he seems cross, it’s because he’d like nothing better than to give us the best home we could ever imagine, plus all the jelly and bread we want. Lots of men have lost their jobs, through no fault of their own. He’s thinking of you, wanting you to be happy.”
    I looked in the direction Sam had gone, hoping he’d come out and offer to tell the kids a story the way he used to when Robert was little. That would help. If he could just do that, it would be almost like old times between them again.
    But something in Sam had changed. I knew it as well as Robert did. I wondered if there were any stories left in Sam to tell. The ache in him had swallowed all the stories, plus the spring in his step and the smile I loved so well.
    I had filled my children with wild vegetables and a few cheerful songs, but I had done nothing to fill the void in my Samuel’s heart.

EIGHT
    Samuel
    I sat on the floor, just listening to the thunder outside. It was too dark to see anything in that musty room, but I didn’t care. I would have closed it off if I could have— sealed it like a tomb and stayed in there forever.
    What would tomorrow hold? If it rained again, we were stuck here. And what else could Julia manage to scrounge up from that yard outside?
    If it didn’t rain, we could set out again, but even if I bought my children bread with the rest of our money, the knowledge that it wouldn’t last crushed me into the ground. We could go on for awhile, eating whatever Juli found, sleeping wherever we could. But even if we managed the summer, come winter, we’d freeze or starve. It all came down to money. A job.
    I heard Juli’s footsteps and almost told her to leave me alone. I was angry, not at her, but at myself for not being more like her, not finding a way on my own.
    “Sammy?” Her voice