For Every Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

blue and red glows coming from a few electronic gadgets.
    Once in Camilla’s dining room, Rhoda went to the hutch and found an emergency candle and matches. She missed the warmth of the farm’s kitchen with its large, open fireplace. No matter how early the day started, she enjoyed the lively conversations that took place around the table—even the heated discussions between her and Samuel. At least then he’d been willing to face her and stand his ground.
    Refusing to think about Samuel, she put the candle in a holder and lit it. She removed from the hutch the stacks of new recipes she’d been working on and set them next to the copies she’d made of her great-great-grandmother’s apple canning recipes.
    Long before Rhoda was born, her Mammi Byler had ten or so apple trees she tended on the same property where Rhoda had grown up. The trees were gone, but when Rhoda met Samuel, she’d been excited by the idea of sharing these recipes with him. Rhoda’s one-acre fruit garden had all types of berries—strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries—but she hadn’t canned apple products.
    She soon discovered she couldn’t find her grandmother’s recipe book. So her sisters-in-law began hunting for the recipes. By then her stormy relationship with Samuel and Kings’ Orchard had reached the point where she needed to decide whether she would partner with them. When, after some difficulty, her sisters-in-law found the recipes, Rhoda believed it was a sign to partner with the Kings. Samuel and Jacob remodeled an old summer kitchen on their property and turned it into a canning kitchen. But they had little more than a week of harvesting and canning before the tornado came through.
    Maybe she wasn’t supposed to partner with Kings’ Orchard after all.
    Or maybe, as her community had believed since she was a young child, she was simply bad luck.
    “Good morning, Rhoda.” Camilla tied the sash to her housecoat, but her gray shoulder-length hair looked freshly washed and dried.
    Rhoda pulled from her thoughts, realizing the candle was giving off a black, smoky light. “Oh, what am I thinking? It’s daytime.”
    “Not really. Just threatening to be in a bit.”
    “Still, I should get my shoes on and hair pinned and—”
    Camilla moved next to her and put her arm around Rhoda’s shoulders. “Would you mind taking some time to share a cup of hot chocolate with me before going to the farm? Bob won’t be up for hours. We don’t have to talk about uncomfortable subjects.”
    Rhoda didn’t walk through the woods in the dark, not since she’d gotten lost, but it’d be daylight soon. Some days she stayed here until later in the morning, working on new recipes. Did she really need to hurry to get to the orchard on any day? She couldn’t go to the office for fear Jacob would think she was sneaking time alone with Samuel. She couldn’t step inside the house to speak until Samuel and Jacob had gone to the orchard—in opposite directions—or it’d start a fresh argument or deepen the angry silence between the two men.
    No one looked forward to her arrival.
    Camilla squeezed her shoulder. “Rhoda?”
    “I’d like that.”
    “Good, because I’ve been pulling recipes from lots of places. What do you think about apple salsa?”
    Before long they had steaming cups of hot chocolate in hand and recipes scattered across the table. Even though dawn had arrived, Rhoda remained put. She had no desire to trade a good conversation here for being ignored at the farm.
    “This one looks like a pretty good recipe for apple salsa.” Rhoda placed the card on the table and scratched out the word dried in front of cilantro . “I tried this kind of salsa once before.” She picked up the card. “Not so sure its failure had anything to do with the recipe.”
    “It didn’t sell well?”
    Tell her .
    The child’s voice was so clear … and yet imaginary. It felt as if someone had thrown cold water on Rhoda. The words had