Asked For Read Free Page B

was still something princely about him.
    She’d eased across the room a little at a time instead of in full flight like she wanted. He smelled like smoke, like a thin layer of soap over hard times, when she reached his side. She laced her fingers through his and tried not to let him see how hard she was breathing. He had nice eyes, and she could see he was thinking as he looked at her. There seemed to be questions in his gaze instead of answers, but she didn’t mind. This was the first time they’d officially met, since she’d been living her whole life with Grandma. She held onto his hand and refused to let go, looking for similarities between him and herself. She’d cried when he left. All she had of him after that was his best, sent to her in her mother’s letters, a promise he loved her, and an apology he was so busy.
    But now he was coming back, coming to see her for the second time, and this time to stand with her as she married. She felt his heart beating in hers, jumping off those letters her mother had sent all these years. He was making this one last trip to be by her side while she was still a girl to help her make the step from childhood into sudden adulthood. He’d be here. Her mother said he would. She couldn’t wait.
    “If Cletus had put this off a few more years, I might not have had to alter this dress so much,” Grandma muttered from below, leaning back and eyeing the gathers. “You’re still so gangly. Just a child. Not sure what he sees in you.”
    Lana hadn’t met Cletus yet. He lived a few towns away, and the deal had been made while she was at school. “Someone asked for you,” was all her grandmother had said one afternoon when Lana came home. “His name’s Cletus, Cletus Paine. He’s got kin nearby, and he asked for you for his wife. He’ll give me a little something too, to help out now and then.” Grandma had refused to answer Lana’s questions that afternoon, questions about where she and Cletus would live, how often Grandma would visit, and would she have to make new friends. Grandma was gruff, gruffer than usual, and kept her back to Lana most of the evening. Lana told Jeanie the next day at school about her arranged marriage, and Jeanie’s eyes grew wide as she described men in greater detail for Lana, what they looked like all over, what they smelled like, and how they acted. Those details were frightening. They didn’t sound princely at all, but Jeanie assured Lana they were.
    “Will my husband want me to finish eighth grade?”
    Grandma snorted and took a pin from between her lips. She tugged the bottom edge of the dress taut, the place where the hem had come loose, and she rolled the ragged edge up and pinned it. Grandma struggled to her feet. She was weathered from too many years of hard work, slightly stooped at the shoulders, but still stubbornly mulish in her frown. “I swear, I don’t know where you get all these silly notions. From Jeanie, no doubt. When a man asks for you, he’s just looking for a wife, and wives don’t need to be educated for what they have to do. You don’t need any smarts at all other than to cook, keep his house clean, and don’t sass him. And whatever he wants to do, you let him do it.” Grandma paused. She looked Lana in the eye, then stepped back to study the dress. The creases of her frown deepened.
    Grandma had been a wife once, but Grandpa was long gone, and Grandma said he was dead. There were no reminders of him anywhere, just like there were no reminders of Lana’s father other than the letters her mother had written that Lana kept. Grandma had been the only real family Lana had ever known, and Grandma took care of her with a grumbling determination to keep food in Lana’s belly and a scrap of a dress on her long, gangly limbs.
    Lana glanced around the house she’d grown up in, barely more than one room, barely enough furnishings to say she and Grandma did anything but survive. Grandma said things would be better for Lana