Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page A

away but her mouth smiled. She gave me a hug and said, “Of course, your papa most of all.”
    With that, I pushed closer to her than she was to me, my arms around her till I could feel her backbone stiffen. I thought it meant that she wanted me to hold her tighter. When I tightened as much as I could, she sighed.
    “We have work to do, Snow,” she’d say, twisting out of my embrace. Though what she really meant was that I had to go outside and rake or hoe or bring in salad greens while she did her nails. “Because you know the garden so much better than I do and I might do it harm,” she told me. And I never thought to ask why she had all those seeds and plants in her room then.
    Or she meant that I was to scrub her underthings till my knuckles were bruised on the washboard. “Because your hands are small and my big old hands would likely damage my underclothes, in which I want to look lovely for your papa.”
    I truly wished at those moments that I could have called her “Mama,” as she demanded. But though I thought my heart was willing, my mouth revolted, becoming as serpent-like as hers, refusing to speak the word aloud, no matter how often she insisted.
    Still, I like to think that—in the early days, for a short while—we were both reasonably content. Why shouldn’t we have been? We each had what we wanted, or at least what we thought we wanted. Me an attentive mother living in the house, she a biddable child who did all the work without complaint.
    We had it then for a short while, but it was not to be what either of us would get for long.
    The truth was: I was beguiled by Stepmama. That old word. It means “enchanted.” “Deluded.” “Cheated.” “Charmed.” Not besot like Papa, but close enough.

•9•
    COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS
    C ould I have stopped Lem from marrying that woman? Sooner stop a runaway horse heading back to the barn. He had the bit tightly between his teeth. Besides, my own papa used to say that life is simpler when you plow around the stumps.
    After all, Lem had married Ada Mae in the same feverish rush, and she turned into a sweet, lovely woman and an exceptional mother. Perhaps he’d just been lucky that time.
    He was certainly unlucky now.
    The new woman was as different from Ada Mae as could be. All hard, sharp angles where Ada Mae was soft curves. A slash where Ada Mae was a comma. All about herself where . . . You can see where I’m going with this. I didn’t like her. No, it was more than that. I distrusted her, feared her, even hated her. That simple sentence, true as it may be, will take me weeks in confession to work out, no matter what penance the priest gives me. Perhaps confession won’t help and it’ll have to work itself out the way a splinter does from the bottom of a person’s foot, leaving a scar that no one can see but the body always feels.
    That woman. She had a name, though it took me till the wedding to discover it. Even then the town clerk mangled it so badly in the ceremony that none of us quite knew what to call her. The name was a mouthful and foreign: Constanza Reina Maria Barganza. Tom Morton called her that Con woman, which stuck. You’d think with a name like that she’d have been a Catholic, but she refused to set foot in church, not mine or any of the others. Like a near man with a dollar, she kept the coins of her religion close and let none of us know what they were until it was far too late.
    I asked the priest and he said, “Fallen away, most like,” meaning she’d been a Catholic once but chose a different path. A personal choice, and one I would have understood if only she’d owned up to it. But she didn’t. She didn’t own up to anything, leastwise to me.
    And that wedding—a farce from beginning to end. There was no love, no cherishing, no obedience, no promises, no hope in it anywhere. All I could do was to hold Summer’s hand and let her know I was always there if she needed me. Strangely, she pulled away from me, so I had