floor near the bookcase and heads into the kitchen.
She’s going to make such a perfect wife and mother. I can already envision her belly stretched with my baby nestled safely inside.
“Elijah, let’s go!” Mark calls from outside. I roll my eyes and yank the door open.
It’s going to be a good day.
“I was thinking about Nicolette this morning,” I say to Elijah as he shovels dirt around the form tube I’m holding in place in the hole we created for the post. This stupid fence is a pain in my ass. We tried to refit the hole with Papa, but it still won’t hold, so we’ve had to make a new one.
“About what?” Elijah asks, sitting back on his heels and reaching for the bucket of quick cement I have stirred up.
“Well, once she takes that test and we know she’s pregnant, she’ll be our wife.” I press down on the cardboard tubing to keep it steady while he fills it with the cement.
“Yeah,” he says, like he wants me to get to the end of it already. “So?”
“Well, I bet she’d like to have some sort of ceremony. Girls like that sort of thing. And it will really drive the point home, you know? Like she’ll be willingly giving herself to us as our wife. Her choice.”
“Like a pledge of loyalty?” he asks, shoving the trowel through cement, working the air bubbles out.
“Yeah. Sort of.” I let go of the tube and leave him to finish filling it while I move around him to get the fence post ready. Once we have the post in place, we can let it set until tomorrow, then finish putting up the rest of it.
“I don’t understand why you question her like this.” Elijah shakes his head. He drops the trowel into the empty bucket and holds his hands up to grab the bottom of the post. Together, we guide the newly cut wood post into the cement, working it to stand center.
“Mama,” I say.
Elijah looks up at me with a furrowed brow.
“She promised me she’d be good. She swore she would make Papa happy, that she would keep my lessons going. But she lied, Elijah. She stopped teaching me, then Papa had to take over.”
Elijah’s eyes lower. “Nicolette isn’t Mama. She knows right from wrong. She’ll be a good wife.”
“Then promising it to us won’t hurt, will it?” I ask him. “It’s one thing for Papa to simply declare her our wife, but if she stands before us in front of Papa and pledges herself to us—that means more.”
Elijah thinks it over, his lips screwed up to the side.
The screen door out back slams.
“She’s getting her compost bucket,” Elijah says absentmindedly, but I keep my head turned toward the house, listening for her movements.
“What do you think?” I ask him when he still hasn’t answered me. “A ceremony.”
Elijah shrugs. “Fine by me. But you have to get Papa to say it’s okay. He won’t like it if we just do something like that without his approval.”
“Of course I’m going to talk to him first. He’s got to be the one to give her away, asshole.” I nudge him with my boot.
Elijah pulls off his work gloves and grabs the bucket. “After she takes the test, go on and ask him.”
“We need to set up our expectations with her too. Like Papa said, we have to lay out what she’s to do. We’re going to be assigning her chores from now on and making her rules. We should ask Papa if he wants us to keep all of his rules and add to them.”
Elijah sighs. He hasn’t given this as much thought as I have. He still thinks Nicolette is going to be the sweet little girl she’s been this whole time. But once he has full responsibility for her, it’s going to be harder. He can’t afford to make excuses when she messes up. He’s going to have be firm like Papa, or she’ll walk all over him like Mama.
“He’s going to want to keep his rules,” Elijah says after a moment. “What would you want to add?”
I lift my left shoulder. “First of all, she shouldn’t have her own room anymore. She’s our wife and should be in our beds, unless she’s loving Papa.”
Elijah nods. “I like that. Yeah.”
“She spends too much time out in the yard lately. We need to limit that before she starts thinking she can wander into the woods. Once she’s ours, she needs to get permission