wished she could say something to help.
“You’ve been awfully quiet today,” Rose said.
“Unlike my usual chatty self,” Elsa said to deflect a conversation she didn’t want to have.
Rose bumped her shoulder against Elsa’s arm. “Tell me what is wrong. Besides the obvious, of course.”
“Loreda is angry at me. All of the time. I swear, before I even speak, she gets mad at whatever it is I’m about to say.”
“She is at that age.”
“It’s more than that, I think.”
Rose stared out at the devastated fields. “My son,” she said. “Stupido. He is filling her head with dreams.”
“He’s unhappy.”
“Pssht,” Rose said impatiently. “Who isn’t? Look at what is happening.”
“My parents, my family,” Elsa said quietly. This was something she rarely talked about, a pain too deep for words, especially when words wouldn’t change anything; Loreda’s opinion of Elsa lately had brought all that heartache of youth back. Elsa remembered the day she’d taken Loreda, swaddled in pink, to her parents’ house, hoping her marriage would allow them to accept her again. Elsa had worked for weeks on a lovely pink dress for the baby, trimmed it in lace. She knit a matching cap. Finally, she borrowed the truck and drove to Dalhart alone, pulling up at the back gate. She remembered every moment in detail: Walking up the path; the smell of roses. Everything in bloom. A clear blue sky. Bees buzzing around the roses.
She had felt both nervous and proud. She was a wife now, with a baby girl so beautiful even strangers remarked upon it.
Knocking on the door. The sound of footsteps, heels on hardwood. Mama answering the door, dressed for church, wearing pearls. Papa in a brown suit.
“Look,” Elsa had said, her smile unsteady, her eyes filling with unwanted tears. “My daughter, Loreda.”
Mama, craning her neck, peering down at Loreda’s small, perfect face.
“Look, Eugene, how dark her skin is. Take your disgrace away, Elsinore.”
The door, slamming shut.
Elsa had made a point of never seeing them or speaking to them again, but even so, their absence caused an ache that wouldn’t go away. Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better.
“Yes?” Rose said, looking up at her.
“They didn’t love me. I never knew why. But now Loreda has turned so angry, I wonder if she sees me the same way they did. I could never do anything right in their eyes, either.”
“Do you remember what I told you on the day Loreda was born?”
Elsa almost smiled. “That she would love me as no one else ever would and make me crazy and try my soul?”
“Sì. And you see how right I was?”
“About part of it, I guess. She certainly breaks my heart.”
“Yes. I was a trial to my poor mamma, too. The love, it comes in the beginning of her life and at the end of yours. God is cruel that way. Your heart, is it too broken to love?”
“Of course not.”
“So, you go on.” She shrugged, as if to say, Motherhood. “What choice is there for us?”
“It just … hurts.”
Rose was silent for a while; finally, she said, “Yes.”
In the distant field, Tony and Rafe were hard at work, planting winter wheat in ground that was as powdery as flour at the surface and hard beneath. For three years, they’d planted wheat and prayed for rain and gotten too little and grown no crop at all.
“This season it will be better,” Rose said.
“We still have milk and eggs to sell. And soap.” Small blessings mattered. Elsa and Rose combined their individual optimism into a communal hope, stronger and more durable in the combination.
Rose put an arm around Elsa’s waist, and Elsa leaned into the smaller woman. From the moment of Loreda’s birth, and in all the years since, Rose had become Elsa’s mother in every way that mattered. Even if they didn’t speak of their love, or share their feelings in long, heartfelt conversations, the bond was there. Sturdy. They’d sewn their lives together in the silent way of women unused to conversation. Day after day, they worked together, prayed together, held their growing family together through the hardships of farm life. When Elsa had lost her third child—a son who never drew breath—it was Rose who held Elsa and let her cry, and said, Some lives are not ours to hold on to; God makes His choices without us. Rose, who spoke for the first time about her own lost children, had showed Elsa that grief could be borne one