The Bridegrooms Read Online Free PDF Page A

cheese from her family’s small farm just outside of town and spent the day clattering pots and pans, slamming cupboards and drawers—all the while singing tales of heartbreak in her thick Irish brogue.
    But every Thursday night, promptly after serving the family supper, her meaty hand swiped the pay envelope from the kitchen counter and stomped out the back door, yelling over her shoulder that she’d be back Monday mornin’ if the good Lord willed it and the drink didn’t kill her.
    More than once the Allenhouse daughters implored her to leave a little something bubbling on the stove to get them through the week’s end, but she always refused, saying it was a sorry lot of girls they were that couldn’t stir a stew.
    So it was Vada who found herself rattling around, finding a few of Thursday’s sausage-stuffed corn muffins in a bowl covered with a blue-checked towel and the remnants of yesterday’s fish wrapped in waxed paper in the icebox. Four potatoes were left in the basket hanging above the icebox, a tin of peaches in the cupboard, and half of a blueberry cobbler in the pie safe.
    “It’ll have to do,” Vada muttered to herself. She lit the stove’s burner and put a pot of water on to boil. Just as she touched the knife to the firstpotato, the back door opened, ushering in the third of the Allenhouse sisters, her arms full of brown-wrapped packages.
    “Althea, let me help you with those!” Vada took the largest of the packages, feeling its familiar bulk within the coarse twine. “Pork roast?”
    Althea’s weary nod mirrored Vada’s lack of enthusiasm.
    “And let me guess. Yams, turnips, and carrots?”
    Althea silently confirmed each item on the list, and the two busied themselves stowing the vegetables in the hanging basket and the roast in the icebox until the next morning, when all would be assembled in the oven to simmer while the family was at church.
    The Allenhouse girls knew how to prepare exactly four meals: the pork roast being one, followed by pot roast (with similar vegetable trimmings), fried bacon and eggs, and corned beef hash, provided they had leftover corned beef. It made for monotonous Sunday rotations, but to linger in the kitchen for the culinary tutelage of Molly Keegan meant being at the mercy of her unpredictable temper.
    Vada poured her sister a glass of water from the cool pewter jug and placed it on the table before resuming her chopping. “Anything interesting come over the wires today?”
    She spoke with her back to Althea, knowing full well she wouldn’t get an answer. Not that there was anything wrong with Althea’s ears. She could hear a whisper in a windstorm; she simply didn’t speak. She wasn’t a mute—not in any medical way. In fact, she had been a normal little girl, born when Vada was nearly five years old, and the older girl clung to memories of Althea’s little voice singing songs, counting pebbles, and wailing at childhood injustices. Most of all, Vada remembered the sound of Althea’s voice the morning the sisters woke up to find their mother gone.
    “Where’d Mama go?” Althea had asked. “Is she coming back?”
    Though Vada never asked about their mother, she had followed Doc day and night around the house, trailing his gloomy footsteps from one room to another, down to his basement exam room, and up again to the kitchen where he gave them bread and sliced cheese for supper three nights in a row.
    Then on the fourth night, sitting around a table full of empty, crumb-scattered dishes, he dragged his reddened face out of his hands and looked across the table at three little pleading faces. “She’s not coming back. Ever.”
    Young Vada and Hazel clasped each other’s hands, their feet swaying in tandem beneath the kitchen chairs, but Althea would not be silenced.
    “But why? But where? Papa? Papa!”
    Until the man rose to his terrible height. “Never!” he roared. “Never! Never! Never!” His fists slammed into the table with each