12 Years Later
June 1845
I’m not going to wait on you forever, Adria Starr.” Carlton Damon ran his hand through his hair, mussing it even more than usual. He had a couple of cowlicks that only going bald was apt to tame, but with his thick brown hair, that looked a long time away.
Adria tried not to sigh, but she couldn’t help it. Usually she could tease Carlton out of talking marriage, but tonight she was tired. Ruth had been baking all day. Pies and cakes. Adria had helped her as soon as she got home from work. A few cakes were still cooling before they could frost them. Adria was sick to death of sugar icing. Why couldn’t people just want bread? She liked to make bread. But Ruth said desserts sold better, and when school wasn’t in session, they needed the extra money.
That wasn’t quite as vital as it used to be since Adria started working at Billiter’s Mercantile. All day long she had waited on customers, smiling whether she felt like it or not, and then came home to get elbow deep in sugar. That hadn’t made her the first bit sweeter when Carlton showed up to complain about her working at the store. He didn’t like her waiting on the drovers and wagoners who came through town. A lady didn’t need to be exposed to that kind of riffraff. Especially his girl.
Carlton was always pushing her to quit her job and get married. Everybody in Springfield thought they were headed to the altar. Everybody. Even Adria most of the time, but she still hadn’t said yes. She hadn’t said no, but tonight she was wondering if maybe she should.
They’d known each other forever. Carlton started following her around before they got out of primary school and then asked Ruth if he could come calling on Adria when she turned sixteen. Ruth thought that showed proper manners, but he should have asked Adria, not her aunt. She was the one who could decide what she wanted to do when it came to romance.
Ruth had never really told Adria what to do. About romance or anything else. Not even when Adria was just a kid and started living with her after the cholera. Ruth seemed to assume Adria could figure things out for herself. Not that she didn’t take care of Adria. She did. She put food on the table for Adria, heated water for her baths until Adria was old enough to do that herself, and saw that her clothes were clean and suitable for the occasion, whether that was school or church or baking pies.
She and Ruth had worked things out step by step, two strangers thrown together by need. Ruth was kind to Adria, but sometimes Adria felt like she was living with her schoolteacher instead of family.
Adria smiled at the thought. She was living with her schoolteacher, and she was glad about that. But sometimes she longed for a family like the one she’d lost in the cholera epidemic.
That made her not jumping at the chance to get married even odder. Here was Carlton right in front of her, ready to be family. Ready to start a family with her. He wanted sons and daughters. A houseful, he sometimes said. She had always assumed she would get married, probably to Carlton, and have children someday, but that day hadn’t come yet.
She summoned up her sweetest smile to make Carlton forget her unfortunate sigh. His lips were pressed firmly together, as though he was trying to keep the wrong words from exploding out of his mouth. She ran her hand up and down his arm. “Why are you in such a hurry?”
“You’re nineteen. My mother had two babies by the time she was nineteen.”
“I’m not your mother.” Adria tried to keep her voice soft, but an edge of irritation came through. Carlton’s mother was great. Adria liked her, but she didn’t want to be her. She wanted something more. The problem was, she wasn’t quite sure what the more was.
“You need to get your nose out of storybooks and start seeing what’s right in front of you.”
It was useless. She was too tired to dance around and pull up sweet words. Not when he was attacking her love of books. “Maybe you should try reading a few books.”
“I do read books. History books. The Bible. What’s real. Not romantic nonsense that keeps your head in the clouds all the time.”
“Sometimes the view is better from up in the clouds. Better than what’s right in front of my eyes anyway.” Adria planted her fists on her hips and glared at Carlton.
Nothing was wrong with reading books. Ruth would back her up on that. Reading was what had helped the two of them find a common ground. From the very first night they had lived together, they had ended almost every day by reading to one another. So many stories through the years. And the Bible too.
She was sorry she thought of the Bible. That brought to mind all that James wrote about how your tongue could get you in trouble. Aunt Tilda had made her memorize that one about being swift to hear and slow to speak. Slow to wrath.
Dear Aunt Tilda. She had tried to step in and be the mother Ruth seemed unable to be. Aunt Tilda didn’t let Adria get away with anything and she taught her so much. Ruth too. Not about mothering, but she taught Ruth to cook and shared her recipes for cakes and pies. Any time Aunt Tilda could steal a few minutes away from her work at the hotel or her mistress, she was in their kitchen, helping Ruth and making sure Adria behaved.
“You’re free, child. You can do anything you want. But it ain’t good to want to do what ain’t right. Or to lose your temper over ev’ry little thing. Best remember that slow to wrath verse in the Good Book. You understand that?”
Sometimes Adria wondered what Aunt Tilda would think about her hesitating on the edge of matrimony. She wished she could ask her, but Aunt Tilda had gone on to glory four years ago. Happily. Rejoicing in the thought that in heaven she wouldn’t be a slave. She would finally find freedom in eternity.
The black woman was buried toward the back of Cemetery Hill with other slaves, but Adria kept the place in mind and carried flowers there whenever she and Ruth visited the cemetery.
With Aunt Tilda’s words whispering through her mind, Adria shut her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “Look, Carlton. I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Then don’t. Kiss me instead.” Carlton put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her toward him.
Adria jerked back from him. She could never understand how Carlton could say things that made her mad enough to spit and then the next instant expect her to kiss him. She might not want to fight, but she didn’t want to make up either. Tomorrow, if he came around talking nice, might be a different story. Then she might entertain the idea of a kiss.
“Why don’t you just go home?” Adria said.
“Maybe I will.” Carlton dropped his hands back to his side. “And maybe I won’t come back.”
“Fine with me.”
Ruth stepped out onto the back porch behind Adria. “Whatever are you two fighting about now?”
“She won’t listen to reason, Miss Ruth.” Carlton dropped his head to stare down at the ground. He looked something like his nine-year-old self from their school days.
“And what reason is that?” Ruth asked.
That was one thing about Ruth. She didn’t let a person slide past an explanation. A person needed clarity of thought, she was fond of saying. In the schoolroom, the answer “I don’t know” would get her ruler pointed toward your forehead. Think, she would say. Think. She wanted her students to figure out more than an answer but the reason behind it.
Instead of a ruler, she pointed the spoon she held at Carlton. Once a student of Miss Ruth, always a student, no matter how long it might have been since he sat on the schoolhouse benches.
“You know she should marry me. You said so yourself.” Carlton glanced up at Ruth.
The whine in his voice made Adria want to grab him and shake him. She supposed he couldn’t help it if he was the youngest child in a family with money where he got nearly anything he wanted. His father ran the town haberdashery, making silk top hats along with the slouch hats. A booming business, but Carlton wanted to have a plantation like his mother’s family, with slaves doing the work. Another reason Adria had not said yes. She couldn’t abide the thought of owning slaves. Not after loving Aunt Tilda.
When Adria frowned and opened her mouth, Ruth held up the spoon to silence her. She turned back to Carlton. “Wait right there, Carlton. I think you have added to what I actually said. I said you could ask her to see what she said. I certainly would not answer for her. Adria makes her own decisions.”
“She makes the wrong ones,” Carlton said.
Adria’s frown grew fiercer. If they were simply going to talk about her as if she wasn’t there, then she wasn’t going to be there. “I’ve got cakes to frost.” Without looking at either of them, she whirled around and went in the kitchen.
The icing was simmering on the back of the stove. Adria pulled it to the front and stirred it. That was what Aunt Tilda said made the difference. The stirring. A person wanted it to be right, she couldn’t worry about her arm getting tired. She had to keep stirring and waiting. She said there wasn’t any way to rush things up. That a good cook had to learn to wait until things were right.
As Adria stirred the sweet concoction, she remembered asking Aunt Tilda how she could know when it was right.
“You just know. It’s something you can feel in your arm whilst you’re stirring.”
Adria took the pan off the stove and beat the sweet mixture. Was love like that? Something a person just knew when it was right? Or maybe she was simply waiting for a feeling that would never happen, like frosting taken off the fire too soon. You could beat it until your arm fell off and it still wouldn’t thicken up.
This caramel batch was perfect. With a knife, she smoothed it on the cake while out on the porch Ruth tried to smooth down Carlton’s ruffled feathers. Her words drifted through the open window into the kitchen.
“You can’t push her. You should know that by now.”
“But I love her, Miss Ruth.”
Now that Adria wasn’t facing off with Carlton, the longing in his voice touched something inside her. Maybe she was wrong to want more.
“I know that. But do you love her enough to give her the time she needs?”
“I’ve given her plenty of time.” He sounded cross again.
Then nobody said anything. Adria almost smiled, thinking about how Ruth was surely staring at Carlton with her teacher look that could make a person squirm. Adria knew that look well.
After a moment, Carlton started talking again. “What if we’re wasting the time we have? Something could happen. Like it did with the cholera in ’33.”
“Indeed.”
Adria stilled her knife and barely breathed as she listened for more. Carlton’s words would have stabbed through Ruth and brought back the loss of her husband and how the cholera epidemic had stolen so much from her. As it had Adria, but Adria hadn’t clung to her grief. She wished her parents had lived, but at the same time, they had faded in her memory. It wasn’t that way with Ruth. She claimed not a day went by that she didn’t think of Peter and wish things were different. She had never once entertained any of the suitors who came to her door. None of them could compare to her Peter.
“There are other girls in Springfield.” Carlton’s voice got a little louder, as if he knew Adria was listening to his every word on the other side of the door.
“So there are. Some very nice girls,” Ruth said quietly.
For a second, Adria held her breath. She imagined Carlton not at her door but stepping up to Janie Smith’s door. She’d seen Janie eyeing Carlton at church. Janie would run to the altar with him. Outside, Carlton mumbled something she couldn’t quite hear, and then Ruth was coming back into the kitchen.
Adria very carefully made swirls in the caramel frosting on the cake and didn’t look at Ruth.
“That looks pretty.” Ruth brought another small cake over from the cabinet. “Do you have enough frosting to cover this little cake? I thought maybe you could take it to Louis tomorrow. He does love Matilda’s jam cake.”
“Everybody loves Aunt Tilda’s jam cake.” Adria scraped the sides of the pan to get out every bit of frosting. “Except me. I wouldn’t care if I never saw another cake.”
Ruth smiled. “I guess we can be thankful the people here in town don’t feel the same.”
“I know. You should put up a sign out front. Ruth’s Bakery. You could make more selling cakes and pies than you do teaching.”
“Baking is fine, but I love teaching.”
“I wish I knew what I loved.”
“Or who?” Ruth gave her a look that demanded she think about the question.
“Or who.” Adria blew out a breath as she managed to spoon out enough frosting to cover the little cake. “Tell me, Aunt Ruth. How do you know if you’ve met the right man? That you’re in love?”
“If you have to ask, then you may not have met the right person.”
“Did you know right away with your Peter?”
Ruth paused in putting the cakes and pies in boxes to deliver the next day. “While I did feel an immediate attraction the first time I saw him, I don’t know whether I could say that was love right away. He was so handsome I had to keep sneaking looks at him when he showed up at church. He had moved here from Lexington to teach school. He was tall, with wonderful eyes that were an interesting gray color but at times flashed blue. But the best thing about him was his smile. He smiled at everybody and you could tell it wasn’t forced. He liked people.”
“And especially you.” Adria raised her eyebrows at Ruth.
A blush warmed Ruth’s cheeks as she laughed. “Yes, I think especially me. A year later we were married.” The laughter went out of her eyes. “We had so little time together. And I did so want to have a baby, but it wasn’t to be.”
“You’re not too old to marry and have a baby now.”
Ruth gathered up the dirty spoons and dropped them into the dishpan. “That takes a husband.”
“You’ve had opportunities there too.”
“Stop it, Adria.” She softened her stern words with a smile. “I’m not the one looking for romance. That’s you.”
“Am I, Aunt Ruth? Sometimes I don’t know what I’m looking for. Maybe something more than romance. Like I should do something important with my life since I’m all that remains of my family.”
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you want to go on to school, we’ll find a way. I’ve been saving some of our baking money.”
“But all those finishing schools teach you is how to catch a man. I don’t care about how to swish my skirts or fill out my dance card. I want to do something that matters. Fight for women’s rights. End slavery.”
“Matilda taught you well there.”
“Well, it’s not right that she was never free. That her children were sold away from her.”
“What about Louis? He doesn’t seem to be angry over being a slave.”
“Aunt Tilda always said Louis was an uncommon man, but don’t you think he would rather be free? Wouldn’t anybody rather be free?”
Ruth reached over to touch Adria’s cheek. “My young firebrand. You’ll have the whole town against you if you keep preaching that sermon.”
“Another thing a woman can’t be. A preacher.”
“True enough. But you could be the mother of a preacher or perhaps raise your own revolutionary sons.”
Adria stared down at her hands. She had caramel on her fingers. “You think I should marry Carlton, don’t you?”
“You know I’ve never tried to make decisions for you.” Ruth dropped her hand away from Adria’s cheek. “But if you keep putting him off, you might lose him.”
“Yes.”
“He’s a nice boy from a good family. You’d never want for anything.”
Except the wants she couldn’t name.