A Promise to Love Read Free Page A

hair and freckles, stuck out her lower lip. “Aggie took my slingshot away.”
    Joshua climbed into the wagon. “Why did you take your sister’s slingshot?” He took the reins from Agnes’s fingers. One of the many challenges of raising his family alone was having to drag the girls along with him everywhere he went. Sometimes it felt like he was traveling with a circus. It was tempting to leave them all at home, but he was afraid he’d come back and find one of them strung up by her shoestrings.
    â€œEllie hit the rear end of Buttons with a big ol’ rock,” Agnes explained. “He nearly run off, but I held him back.”
    Joshua turned around and gave Ellie a hard stare. “Did you do that?”
    â€œI didn’t mean to,” Ellie said. “My hand slipped.”
    â€œBut you were aiming at Buttons when it slipped?”
    â€œYep,” Ellie admitted. It might have been his imagination, but he could have sworn he heard a note of pride in the little girl’s voice.
    â€œI’ll take that slingshot away from you for good if you ever let it ‘accidentally’ slip and hit that horse again.” Considering how things had been going around his house, he added just to be on the safe side, “Or if it ‘accidentally’ hits one of your sisters.”
    â€œIt won’t happen again, Pa.”
    He made a clicking sound with his tongue, and Buttons obediently headed down the old logging road to their home. For a moment, he thought he had managed to establish peace among his girls. Then a wheel hit a rock and his youngest daughter, three-year-old Polly, let out a yowl. She had been in the process of standing up, and the bump had caused her to fall.
    Ellie and Trudy scrambled over to comfort her. All three huddled in the corner of the back of the wagon, glaring at him like little animals—as though Polly’s discomfort was all his fault.
    Other men had daughters who were demure and well behaved . . . but not him.
    Diantha had not been like other mothers. Some women endured childbirth, then forgot the pain and fell in love with their children, doting on them from the moment they were born. With Diantha it was the opposite. She always felt at her strongest while carrying a child, gave birth as easily as a cat, and then seemed to lose interest in each child soon after their birth. The older their daughters grew, the more disinterested she became. She went through the motions, but he could tell her heart was not in motherhood.
    He had never figured it out. Coming home to his little girls every evening was his reward after a hard day’s work—even if they did sometimes act like they had been raised by wolves.
    Marriage to Diantha had meant being perpetually off balance because he had never known what to expect. During their courtship, he found her mercurial mood swings fascinating. After thirteen years of marriage, he wished her up-and-down emotions would even out.
    Some days he would come home to domestic bliss. Diantha would be humming while doing some household task, and the girls would be gathered around the kitchen table, happily involved in some small project that she had created for them. She would be neatly dressed and she would have taken the time to smooth her hair back into a bun. She would greet him with enthusiasm, and the evening would be memorable.
    Other times, especially after the birth of little Bertie, he would come home to find the children unkempt and hungry, the baby soiled and screaming in his cradle, and Diantha sitting on the front porch, her hair in tangles, staring into the woods, barely able to acknowledge his arrival.
    He had been at a loss to know how to help her or how to read her. All he knew was that she sometimes struggled with emotions that he could not understand.
    Well, at least she would no longer have to endure the hardscrabble life they had been living as they waited for his cherry tree orchard