The Promise of Home by Darcie Chan Read Free Book Online Page B

with me, but she didn’t dare go against my father. She was trapped and terrified by him. I think this silver was her way of providing me some sort of escape route that she never had.”
    Michael looked carefully at the flatware. There were tiny four-leaf clovers and clover blossoms etched into the silver. The designs were perfect, miniature likenesses of the clumps of clover that grew all over the farm in the summertime.
    His mother carefully lifted a small round spoon from its place among the other, larger serving pieces. “The pieces aren’t monogrammed. Mama knew engravings would diminish the value of the set if it needed to be sold. But she did have something engraved on this one special spoon for me. It’s a sugar spoon.” She held it out to him. “Look at the handle, in the little space between the clover leaves.”
    Michael took the spoon and squinted down at it. The dim light in the root cellar made it hard to read the fine script, but he tilted the spoon up and down until the minuscule etching was illuminated:
Anna
    “And now, turn it over and look on the back of the handle.”
    He flipped it over and saw the words
My sweet girl
in the same tiny script, engraved into the thin silver surface. When he looked back at his mother, her eyes were brimming with tears.
    “It was a little joke between Mama and me. When I was a little girl, I used to sneak into the kitchen and eat sugar straight out of the bowl. The hired girls would scold when they caught me, but Mama was gentle. She always hugged me and said that I couldn’t help it because I was her ‘sweet girl.’ ”
    Michael didn’t know what to say, but he smiled and passed the spoon carefully back to her. After a moment, his mother gently placed the sugar spoon back in its place. He watched as she closed and latched the lid of the flatware case and hid it again behind the burlap sacks.
    “Father and Grandma really don’t know about it?”
    “No, nor does Seamus, and you’re not to tell them about it, either, Michael.”
    “But you’ve had it for so long, and we’ve moved more than once. How have they not seen it?”
    “I’ve been very careful, and I change the hiding place from time to time,” she said with a slight smile. “Now, Michael, I need to know—I can trust you, can’t I?”
    “Yes, Mother,” Michael said. “You can trust me.”
    His mother nodded. “For all these years, I’ve honored Mama’s wishes to keep her gift a complete secret. I’ve showed it to you only as a precaution, in case something happens to your grandmother and me while we’re here alone.”
    “Nothing will happen to either of you. I promised Father I’d take care of everything, and I will.”
    “I know, Michael. You gave your word.” His mother patted his arm before she took up two of the burlap sacks and began walking along the bins of vegetables, looking into each one. “Let’s start at the end here,” she said as she knelt down near the large potato bin at the end of the row. “Anything that’s soft or rotten will go in one bag, and anything starting to grow that we can still eat goes in the other. The good potatoes, we’ll pile up to go back in the box.”
    Together, they tipped the box forward and dumped the remaining potatoes onto the earthen floor. After a few minutes of silence, his mother looked at him with her brow furrowed. “I don’t want you to think that my keeping the silver means that I believe I might need it someday to leave your father,” she said softly.
    “I didn’t think that.”
    “Good. Marrying your father was the best thing I ever did. I keep the silver now only so our family has something to fall back on. I’d sell it if we were starving or desperate, but we’re not—not yet, anyway. But I rest easier, knowing it’s here. Since Roosevelt made it illegal to keep gold and took away forty percent of our dollars, silver is the only sure money. And I’d be afraid that your father and grandmother would want to part