Summer Moon Read Free

portly man with fingers thick as the sausages he stuffed, and almost entirely bald.
    With no alternative in mind, Kate accepted. She rode the butcher’s cart back to the shop, a sturdy whitewashed building near the center of town that was frequented all day long by housewives and maids.
    The room was adequate and clean, a refuge where Kate spent the better part of the morning scouring up the courage to go out and find employment.
    That afternoon, the butcher’s wife knocked timidly on the door and told her that she would have to leave on the morrow.
    “Not that we don’t want you here, you see. It’s just that, well, some folks still remember your ma, and folks tend to gossip. We can’t afford to have our business ruined, you understand. It’s nothing against
you
, of course.”
    That was how Kate learned that Applesby had not forgotten Meg Whittington—that like Mama’s, her name was still as tarnished as an old copper pot.
    She packed her somber dresses and scant personal belongings again. The next day she held her head high, kept her tears inside, and moved on.
    She rented a room in an old, gray weather-beaten shack by the wharf. It belonged to a sickly old woman in need of coin more than she cared about Kate’s name or her mother’s reputation. The stoop sagged and the corners of the front door had been scratched raw and splintered by the old woman’s flea-bitten dog.
    It reminded Kate so much of the places she had lived with her mother that once inside the small musty room, she sat down on the lumpy mattress and burst into tears.
    To escape the dreary place, she pulled herself together, put on her hat, and picked up her crocheted reticule—a misshapen, handmade gift from one of her girls. She slipped the drawstrings over her wrist and walked away from the wharf, up Main Street and toward the remnants of the tall evergreen forest that once grew down to the sea.
    She could not help but notice that some of the older folks stared as she passed by. Slowly the shame she felt as a child began to attach itself to her again.
    She drew herself up tall and straight and walked on. The stares of passersby confirmed what her mirror had always revealed—she was the image of her mother. She had grown up looking into a reflection of her mother’s eyes, wide-set and dark brown. She thought her lips too full, her mouth far too toothy, like her mama’s, so she never smiled too wide. Her arms and legs were long, her waist thin, her breasts embarrassingly full. Thankfully, the few serviceable dresses she owned were unadorned and drab and so overly modest that they did not call attention to her figure at all.
    She never thought she’d experience that old shame again, but the sting was uncomfortably familiar, even after all these years.
    She stopped by the printer’s and purchased a copy of the
Applesby Sentinel
; then she strolled over to the small park in the middle of the town square. She chose an empty bench beneath a maple covered with dried leaves that refused to fall. The paper snapped as she folded it back on itself, the corners luffed in the same breeze that set the maple leaves whispering. She began to scan the advertisements.
    Since the school term had already begun, she doubted she would find a teaching position, but someone in a nearby town was surely in need of a nanny.
    Quickly glancing past advertisements for real estate, gents’ clothes, and Aladdin stoves, she found one ad seeking a maid for a boarding house in a village just up the coast. There was another for a seamstress, but she had no talent for sewing.
    A lumbermill needed a cook, but cooking was out of the question, too, unless the men were of strong constitutions. Whenever she was on kitchen duty, the nuns always offered up extra prayers.
    Suddenly a small, boxed advertisement set off with fancy block type one-third of the way down the page caught her eye.
    RANCH R SEEKING WIFE
SEND A PHOTOGRAPH
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY
LETTER
TO: R D BENTON
LON STAR