The Good Daughters Read Online Free PDF

and those road trips to check in with the Dickersons.
    She was eighteen when she met my father, nineteen when she married him,though he was seven years older. There were hardly any men around in those days, with the war going on, but my father had been granted an exemption from military service, to stay back home and run the family farm. As the oldest of the three Plank brothers, the rest of whom had enlisted in the armed services to fight in Europe, my father was needed at home, and even the government agreed.
    All his life, the fact that he had not fought in the war was a source of shame and guilt to my father, but the absence of competition in the form of other available suitors had no doubt also made it possible to persuade my mother to marry him, even if, as she told us regularly, the role of farmer’s wife had never been her ambition.
    Once she was installed on Plank Farm, though, she did not question it, or him. For all the years of my growing up, and plenty after that, my mother put in fourteen-hour days, in the kitchen mostly—baking bread and tending the baked beans and feeding our laundry through the wringer washer, hanging my father’s overalls on the line every morning, canning vegetables in the pressure cooker to get us through the winters and, of course, running our farm stand.
    Ours wasn’t the kind of family she’d grown up in—the cheese business having been more lucrative, evidently, than farming was for us—but she displayed not an ounce of nostalgia for the life she’d left back in Wisconsin, and anyway, that was over. Once she made her bed, she liked to say, she’d lie in it.
    For my father, there was never a day in his life he didn’t know who he was or where he was headed: to the barn first, to milk our cows, then out to the fields, to start up the Massey Ferguson. Except for winters, that’s how his days went, and he waited out the winters with a controlled impatience, preparing to start the cycle all over again in the new year, beginning with the arrival, every January second, of the new catalog from Ernie’s A-1 Seeds.
    My father’s family were lackluster Presbyterians, but my mother brought a stronger dose of God into the mix, coming as she did from midwestern Lutheran stock. And though, in most departments, my father’s word dictated how we lived our lives, when it came to religion, my mother steered our course.
    Back then she was a rare midwestern transplant in New England. Her twosisters and her parents remained out in Wisconsin. Money being in short supply, and with a family our size, we didn’t go there. That was the reason our mother gave us at the time, anyway, for why we never visited. I never questioned this, or wondered why, among the framed photographs of Plank ancestors that covered our mantel and every wall on our old farmhouse, no image of her own family was part of the display. I questioned little in those days.
    I think now my mother must have led a lonely life on the farm—my father not much of a talker, the women of the church having all come from around those parts and, even after twenty years, after thirty, viewing my mother as something of an outsider. She attended women’s Bible study and Rainbow Girls gatherings during which recipes and household hints were exchanged, and remedies for childhood ailments, and where, once a year, the women got together to perform skits based on lessons from the New Testament.
    When the annual holiday bazaar rolled round, she made her pot holders to raise money for starving children in Africa, but my parents didn’t socialize with anyone outside church. My father didn’t go out anyplace but the feed store and to meetings of the volunteer firemen. Evenings, our mother read Agatha Christie novels, or the Bible, though once we got our television, she developed a deep and surprising affection for Dinah Shore—a woman of the Jewish persuasion, she said. But with a voice like an angel.
    “If that Dinah Shore lived here in town, I