Grace and Grit Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stove. Now I had nowhere to look but straight into her eyes.
    “I suppose now you’ll have someone else to count on besides me and your daddy,” she said. Then she stood up. “If that’s what you want, I’ll sign the papers.” She turned to start chopping more apples for her next batch.
    It was that matter-of-fact. She didn’t even have to discuss it with my father. I was more than a little stunned. I had been ready for a fight. Instead, I wanted to jump up and dance, but I sat at the table for a minute trying to contain myself and figure out how to say thank you. When Mama started frying the next batch, I stood beside her, chopping the rest of the apples in silent gratitude, picturing the whole time what my own kitchen would look like.
    O NE COLD afternoon when school let out for the Christmas holiday, I got married. Charles picked me up at school and rushed me home to change. My mother had taken me shopping earlier in the week and helped me find my dress. It was perfect. In my bedroom, shivering a little, I pulled the glistening navy dress over my body. Pinning my hat on my head, I looked at myself in the mirror above my dresser, my face blurred behind the silver netting sprinkled in rhinestones. I touched my white collar, all stitched in pearls. I felt important and grown-up. I grabbed my pocketbook off the bed, ready to show Charles how wonderful I looked. Then I thought of my mother; I wanted her to see me, too, to recognize me as all grown up. I stood still, listening for her in the kitchen. It was silent.Charles was waiting in the car, so I took one last look at myself, trying shake off my disappointment that my mother hadn’t been there to see me off. I didn’t expect my parents to come to the wedding. No one in my family had been married in a church, and my mother had made sure I understood that this occasion warranted the least amount of expense and attention. I guess Charles’s parents felt the same way, because they didn’t come either.
    On the way to the preacher’s house, we picked up my cousin Louise and my friend Carolyn, who giggled all the way there. On the surface it felt like just another outing with friends, except that I was so dressed up and excited. When the preacher opened the door, he was still wearing the dirty coveralls he wore driving his peddling truck to sell flour and seed. He told Charles and me to take a seat on his sofa in the living room. I thought he was going to make us wait while he changed, but he just stood in front of us and started preaching.
    “Now look each other in the eye and hear what I have to say.” Louise and Carolyn stood behind him smiling almost as much as I was. Our smiles disappeared pretty quickly, though, when it became clear that we were in for a sermon. I could see my friends’ eyes turn gradually toward the window to the pastor’s tree-lined yard as they braced themselves. My mind wandered back to the times when Louise and I were little, how we liked to go to the nearby Congregational Holiness Campground to watch the holy dancing in the wooden tabernacle, whitewashed a dull white like the concrete bunk buildings surrounding it. Later, when we played in the woods, she stood on top of uprooted pine trees, blown over by recent tornadoes, and acted like the preacher while I swayed my hands in the air singing “Jesus Loves Me.”
    The preacher snapped me out of my reverie when he asked, “Have you thought this through?” and paused for our response. A shock went through my body, a startling sensation as strange as hitting your funny bone. When we didn’t answer right away, hesaid, “Marriage is a lifelong commitment. Once you’re married, it’s for eternity. You will have to look at the world differently. When you’re married, you’re no longer an individual, but part of a whole. The marriage, not yourself, comes first.”
    All of a sudden I didn’t want to look Charles in the eye. I could get lost in those blue eyes, usually full of comfort