The Letters by Suzanne Woods Fisher Read Free Book Online

Such as this morning.
    Her daughter-in-law Rose did not follow the old ways. The old ways would never have approved of turning a home into a . . . stopping station for strangers. The old ways respected that the Plain people were set apart, that they were not to mingle with the English. The old ways . . . She could go on. And what was the point? No one listened to her. She was always the last to know anything, anyway.

    Vera tried to lift a coffee mug and couldn’t raise it an inch off the table. Her chest tightened with sudden despair. Something terrible was happening to her, something she couldn’t fight and simply could not stop. Her right side kept getting weaker and weaker—not stronger like the quack lady doctor promised, after tossing all kinds of pills at her and charging her an arm and a leg. Vera couldn’t get words out the way she used to, but she had them in her head. Lately, her thoughts felt like a tangled ball of yarn. They flitted through her mind like a robin hopping from tree to tree, never staying in one place long. The confused state she often found herself in was occurring more and more often, and she didn’t like the idea of Bethany and those other children—what were their names? the dark-haired girl and those two wild boys?—well, whatever their names were, she didn’t like them seeing her this way.
    She was frightened.
    Terrified.
    At least she was when she remembered.
    And then those horrid hiccups would return.
    Rose had tried a number of fail-safe cures to stop hiccups that she got from the healer, Sadie something-or-other. She used to be Sadie Lapp, Vera did remember that, but she couldn’t remember her married name. Anyway, last week, she had Vera pinching her nose shut with her two thumbs, and plugged up both ears with her fingers, while Rose or Bethany would pour a glass of water down her throat. Vera stomped her foot when she was close to drowning, and then the glass was taken away. It had worked.
    Just thinking of that horrid cure made her even more anxious, and sure enough, those awful hiccups started up.

4

    I f it was going to happen, Bethany just wished it would go ahead and happen. The basement had been cleared out, remodeled, freshly painted. She couldn’t wait to get the furniture moved in and a shingle hung so that Rose’s ridiculous bed-and-breakfast was officially under way. She was sick and tired of giving up her bedroom for strangers. Twice now, she’d had to sleep with Mim in a scrunched-up bed and listen to her whiffling snores all night long. Mim should know that any little thing would wake Bethany. She hardly slept. Too much responsibility weighed on her mind. She was the oldest now, since Tobe had vanished, and she had to take care of everybody.
    The man who stayed in Bethany’s room had the gall to come downstairs for breakfast and complain about the loud sound of mooing cows! “Well, we are close to a dairy farm,” Rose said. “And this is the countryside.”
    But the man was not happy. And his “donation” was a mere twenty-five dollars.
    To top it off, Mammi Vera heard the man’s complaints about the mooing cows and pitched a fit. No wonder hergrandmother kept having these mini-strokes. She was constantly pitching fits.
    And here was another thing: Bethany was growing weary of getting yanked away from whatever she was doing to settle her grandmother down. It took a fair bit of work to calm Mammi Vera. Being her grandmother’s favorite wore her out. She knew the only reason was because she looked so much like a Schrock. The younger ones took after Rose, her father’s second wife.
    Bethany didn’t think of Rose as a stepmother but as a real mother. Part of the reason, she supposed, was because Rose didn’t believe in labels that fractured a family and divided them up. She insisted that Bethany and Tobe think of Mim and the boys as siblings, not steps or half. Rose referred to herself as Bethany and Tobe’s mother. She did all she could to keep the