Smoke River Bride by Lynna Banning Read Free Book Online

chin up with his forefinger. “No, you don’t, Teddy. Things are plenty difficult for all of us right now, so you’ll hold your tongue. From now on, if you want to say anything about my wife, you say it directly to Leah, understand?”
    “Okay.” Teddy sucked in a breath and sent a venomous look at her back. “I don’t like you, Leah.”
    Thad grabbed the boy by his shirt collar, then heard Leah’s calm voice offer a retort he could not have predicted with a crystal ball.
    “I do not like you either, Teddy.”
    The boy’s mouth dropped open. “Huh? How come?”
    “Because,” Leah said, turning to face him, “the things you say hurt my feelings.”
    Thad blinked, then caught Leah’s steady gaze. He raised his eyebrows and gave his new wife as much of a smile as he could muster.
    In an agony of unease, Leah watched Thad and Teddy seat themselves at the wooden kitchen table. She poured Teddy a glass of fresh milk from the pail Thad had brought in, then filled Thad’s china cup with coffee that suddenly looked too black and too thick. Thadreached 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 adribble 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 intricatelyassembled 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