Wild Horses (Sadie's Montana #1)(15)
Sisters were like that. A grin, a look, a soul connection, a mutual knowing that one was just as glad to see the other, an understanding of “Oh, goody, you’re home!” but with no words.
Leah was only two years younger than Sadie, and, at 18, one of the prettiest of the sisters. Blonde-haired, with the same blue eyes as Sadie, Leah was always light-hearted, happy, and upbeat about any situation. Mam said Leah was the sunshine of the family.
But today there was a soft, gray cloud over her sister’s blue eyes, and Sadie raised an eyebrow.
“What?”
“It’s Mam.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. She’s…” Leah shrugged her shoulders.
“She’s what?” Sadie asked, feeling a sickness rise in her stomach like the feeling she used to have in school before the Christmas program.
Leah shrugged again.
“I don’t know.”
Sadie faced her sister squarely, the sick feeling in her stomach launching an angry panic. She wanted to hit Leah to make her tell her what was wrong with Mam.
“Is she sick? Why do you act so dumb about this?”
Sadie fought to keep her voice level, to keep a rein on her sick panic so it wouldn’t make her cry or scream. She would do anything to stop Leah from looking like that.
“Sadie, stop.”
Leah turned her back, holding her shoulders stiffly erect as if to ward off Sadie’s obvious fear.
“Leah, is something wrong? Seriously. With our Mam?”
Leah stayed in that stiff position, and Sadie’s heart sank so low, she fought for breath. The lower your heart went, the harder it was to breathe, and breathing was definitely essential. It wasn’t that your heart literally sank. It was more like the sensation you had whenever something really, really scared you.
Sadie sat down hard, weak now, struggling to push back the looming fear. Sadie put her head in her hands, her thoughts flooding out any ability to speak rationally to her sister.
Nothing was wrong. Not really. Leah, can’t you see? Mam is okay. I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. You haven’t either. She’s just tired. She’s weary of working. She loves us. She loves Dat. She has to. She loves Montana. She has to do that, too. Dat loves our mother, too. He has to. There is nothing wrong in this family. Turn around, Leah. Turn around and say it with me: There is nothing wrong in our family.
Leah turned quietly, as if any swift or sudden movement would enable the fear to grip them both.
“Sadie.”
Sadie lifted her head, meeting Leah’s eyes, and in that instant recognized with a heart-stopping knowledge that Leah knew, too.
Leah knew Mam had been … well … weird. She had been acting strangely, but not so strange that any of her daughters dared bring up the subject, ever.
They all loved Mam, and if she changed in some obvious ways, well, it was just Mam—just how some people became older. Mam had always been meticulous. Her housekeeping was her pride and joy. Her garden was tended lovingly.
Mam was always hoeing, mulching, or spraying, and her vegetable garden produced accordingly, which kept them busy canning and freezing all summer long.
One of Mam’s secrets to gardening was how she kept the weeds at bay. She attacked them with vengeance, using old, moldy mulch hay. She brought it in and spread it until the weeds had no chance of maturing or taking over everything.
Sadie could still feel the slimy hay in her arms, the outer layer scratching her legs as they lugged the gruesome stuff from the wagon to the corn rows. The cucumbers and zucchini squash grew in long, velvety spirals over thick chunks of “old hay,” as Mam called it. The old hay kept the plants moist. So they produced abundantly, as did all Mam’s vegetables even though the growing season was short in Montana.
Lime was absolutely necessary, Mam said. Pulverized lime was like talcum powder in a bag, and so smooth and cool, it was fun to bury your hands deep into the middle of it.
The strawberry patch was weeded, mulched with clean, yellow straw, and sprayed so it produced great, red succulent berries every year. There was nothing in the whole world better than sitting in the straw beside a plant loaded down with heavy, red berries and pinching off the green top before popping the berry into your mouth.
They grew their peas on great lengths of chicken wire, held up by wooden stakes that Dat pounded into the thawed soil in the spring when the stalks were still tiny. As the rain and sunshine urged them to grow, the peas climbed the chicken wire, and little white flowers bloomed with vigor. Later they would turn into long, green pods, heavy with little green peas.
Picking peas was not the girls’ favorite job, but sitting beneath the spreading maple trees on lawn chairs with bowls and buckets of peas to shell definitely was. They would spend all afternoon shelling them—pressing on one side with their thumbs and raking out all the little, green peas from inside the pods.
They talked and laughed and got silly, Mam being one of the silliest of all. And they would make great big sausage sandwiches with fresh new onions and radishes from the garden along with a gallon of grape Kool-Aid that was all purple and sugary and artificial and not one bit good for you, Mam said.
After the pea crop was over, they all had to help with the most hateful job in the garden. Taking down the pea wire and stripping off all those tangled vines was the slowest, most maddening task, and every one of the sisters thoroughly disliked it.