Carla Kelly Read Free

attention to the man seated beside her. He had unbuttoned his collar in the August heat. “Did you know him?”
    He nodded. “We all came across the plains together. He never cared much for church and had an itchy foot. I guess he just kept going. He loved you, though.”
    “I know,” she said softly, thinking of the nights he'd come out of the mine, clean up, cook for dinner whatever they happened to have in the shack—sometimes a lot, sometimes a little—then read to her. Sometimes the reading had to substitute for food. “We never had much. Uncle Karl called him a dreamer.”
    It irked her that the memories were fading. Frederick Anders was growing more indistinct with each year. “I wanted to be blonde and blue-eyed like my father. And then when I went to Salt Lake, I wanted to be blonde and blue-eyed like my cousins.” Anything to fit in , she thought.
    “Then you'd look like three-quarters of Utah.” Uncle Jesse took a long gulp of the lemonade and set down the glass with an “ahh.”
    “I'd fit in better.” Funny how sitting on the side porch with the Knights limbered her tongue. She'd never said that out loud before. She glanced at Amanda. “Once I asked my father what my mother looked like. He just picked up a mirror and held it to my face.”
    “And what a pretty face.” Uncle Jesse turned to his wife, his voice not even half serious. “Amanda, I ask you, why on earth hasn't this … let's see … this shirttail relation of ours … found some lovesick swain to lead around on a leash?”
    “I can't imagine,” Amanda said, her eyes lively.
    “I can tell you,” Della said. “Aunt Caroline made sure everyone knew my father had never married my mother. Could it be she wanted people to see how noble she was to take me in?”
    This was turning into a day of surprises, this first day of her independence. Della had never admitted that out loud, and here she was blurting out family skeletons. Maybe it was the wrong thing to say.
    “I spoke out of turn,” Della said, fearful of distressing these kind people. “I thought you knew.”
    “We did know, and from that same source,” Amanda said finally, and there was no avoiding the hard sound to her voice. She turned back, and her eyes were filled with tears. “How could Caroline do that?”
    “She thought it best to warn people.” Della took a deep breath, relieved. “I want to go someplace where no one knows me and no one will judge me for something that I had nothing to do with. My students in Winter Quarters won't care.”
    Jesse was silent a long while. Della's dread turned to hope because there was nothing in his face—in either of their faces—of condemnation.
    “Maybe I'm just trying to figure out who I am,” Della explained.
    “You could have picked an easier place than Winter Quarters,” Jesse chided gently.
    “I could have. That's what my bishop said too.” She looked at her hands, the soft olive of her skin more pronounced in summer. “I think I want to pick up where I left off in Colorado, at the Molly Bee.”
    “I'm not sure you can do that. It's hard to go back.”
    “I can try.”

o Della's infinite pleasure, Amanda Knight let her sleep in the turret-shaped room with the Moorish cupola, even though it was her sewing room. The sofa made nicely into a pull-out bed. They both laughed over the Persian carpet, Amanda telling Della not to stand on it too long, and certainly not to make a wish, or she would be flying low over Provo.
    Breakfast was another pleasure, when Uncle Jesse insisted on taking her to Spanish Fork in his private railroad car. “I'm heading south on business, so why not?”
    “I won't argue. Tell me something about the miners at Winter Quarters,” she asked over bacon and eggs.
    “You can walk from one end of that narrow canyon to the other and not hear a single American accent,” he told her. “The Welshmen are the little dark ones, and every sentence sounds like a question. The Scots think they own