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eyes dwell on little Rachel and went to stir up the embers in the cookstove to start the preacher’s supper. Preacher Palmer would know Miss Sadie Rose had come to call. The cookies on the table gave evidence to her being there. If he knew the purpose of the woman’s visit, it could be he might send Lacey away. Lacey would just have to pray that if that happened, he’d let Rachel go with her. He had never shown all that much interest in the child. More times than not, the very sight of her seemed to be a hurt to his eyes.
    Miss Mona said that was because he’d wanted babies of his own and looking on Rachel reminded him of that loss. A loss Miss Mona always took complete blame for. She cried sometimes when Lacey was reading about Hannah in the Bible. Said she supposed the Lord never answered her prayers for babies because she couldn’t have ever willingly surrendered her baby completely to the Lord the way Hannah had done Samuel.
    But then she’d mop up her tears with her handkerchief and smile as she said, “But the Lord, he answers prayers in all sorts of ways. Now I’ve got both you and Rachel. Some blessings pop up like mushrooms around a dead tree stump and surprise you when you least expect it.”
    Lacey needed a few of those mushroom blessings right now.

3

    It wasn’t right. Lacey knew that as she stood beside Preacher Palmer in front of his preacher friend. It was worse than not right. She felt the wrongness of it down through the core of her being, all the way out to her toes. But nobody with the first lick of sense expected everything to go right all the time. At least nobody who had piled up a few years of living. Sometimes a body had to do what had to be done, right or wrong, to make something more important right. That’s how this was. She didn’t have any other choice. Not if she wanted to keep mothering Rachel.
    Rachel stood beside her, her face pressed up against Lacey’s leg so hard her nose was bound to be mashed sideways. The little girl didn’t like strangers. Lacey figured that was because of how she’d once been left lonesome on the preacher’s doorstep, even though there was no way the child could actually remember that. All she had ever known was Miss Mona and Lacey taking care of her. Lacey put her hand on Rachel’s back and held it steady there. She wasn’t sure which of them was drawing the most courage from the other’s touch.
    “We come here today to join this man and this woman in lawful matrimony.”
    The Reverend Williams had a deep voice, somber and cold. Lacey imagined him preaching on hell and shuddered. Or maybe it wasn’t his woeful sounding voice so much as the matrimony words he was intoning that made her shudder. In her fanciful dreams, the idea of marrying had joy, like July sunshine warming a meadow full of daisies with butterflies all aflutter and meadowlarks trilling their songs. But here in this man’s parlor, Lacey couldn’t imagine the first bit of joy—only condemnation.
    Condemnation was what Preacher Palmer claimed to be trying to keep away from his door, but Lacey had doubts this ceremony would stop the church ladies from talking. None of them had come along to the town to witness what their gossipy imagining had brought about. The only people in the small parlor besides Lacey, Preacher Palmer, and Rachel were the Reverend Williams with his resonating voice of doom and his thin, sharp-featured wife who stared at Lacey as though she were some kind of Jezebel. Lacey supposed churchwomen were churchwomen wherever, and she was just as glad none of the Ebenezer churchwomen were there to add their frowns to the load of misery Lacey was already feeling.
    Preacher Palmer said there wasn’t any need in a crowd gathering. Especially since Miss Mona hadn’t been in the ground overly long. That’s why the church ladies weren’t going to be all that happy with Preacher Palmer’s solution to their worries about the propriety of Lacey continuing to sleep under