Read A Wilder Rose: A Novel for Free Online

and iron. The potatoes to peel and biscuits to bake, three meals a day to cook and serve and wash up after. The milk to strain and skim, the cream to churn, the chickens to feed, the pigs to slop, the garden to plant and weed and harvest, and all of it mindlessly, continuously, endlessly.
    I didn’t intend to go back to that drudgery. This time, I had money, cash cash cash. And a plan.
    Troub, seeing the handwriting on the wall, gave a resigned sigh. “How long are you thinking of staying?”
    “Only as long as I have to,” I said. “Will you come with me?” Troub and I were close, as close as two friends could be, and closer. I didn’t like to think of going back to the farm without her.
    “I’d come in a minute if it weren’t for your mother,” Troub said. “I’m pretty easygoing, Rose, but the farmhouse is crowded with four of us, and there’s no place to escape. She’s always begging us to sit down and have a cup of tea, or go to a club meeting with her so she can show us off, or drive her to town. And all in the sweetest way, of course, which makes it impossible to refuse.” She made a face. “And then there’s the bickering.”
    I sighed. What Troub was saying was perfectly true. A few years before, I had bought my parents a car—a 1923 blue Buick they named Isabel—and my mother could drive just as well as my father. But she preferred to be driven and, in a smooth-as-cream voice, would ask us to drop what we were doing and take her into town. For her regular Wednesday trip to the grocery, she would put on her best hat and gloves and call out instructions for every stop and turn, as if the driver—my father or me or Troub—were her chauffeur.
    As for their bickering—well, Troub was right again. My father was a lamb. I adored him, and I’m sure my mother did, too. But my parents argued endlessly about the farm: whether they should hold on to a piece of it or sell it to a neighbor; whether my mother should give up her chickens or my father should sell his cows or both; whether they could afford to buy another heifer or perhaps a pig. Eventually, my father would escape to the workshop or the barn, but in the meantime, the voices from downstairs (Troub and I usually worked or read upstairs on the sleeping porch) would be vehement. And loud, because Papa was hard of hearing.
    “You have a point,” I agreed. “But I have a plan.”
    Troub snickered.
    “No, seriously , ” I said. “The first order of business is to hire somebody to help my father with the farmwork. That means building a tenant house, something simple that can be put up in a few weeks. About the crowding and my mother—” I glanced at her. “That part of my plan will take a little longer, but it will be the answer to everything.”
    “Oh, really?” Troub wrinkled her freckled nose, interested but skeptical.
    “Yes, really.” I made myself sound more confident than I felt. I wasn’t sure that my mother would go for my scheme. “I’m going to build them a modern cottage with electricity and central heating and hot water and an indoor bathroom, all on one floor, so Mama Bess doesn’t have to climb the stairs and Papa doesn’t have to haul coal in and ashes out. Just the other day, I saw an ad for a Sears kit house in a magazine, an English-style bungalow that would be just about perfect. There are plenty of pretty places to build it on the farm. All my mother has to do is pick the spot. They could be moved in by October, snug and ready for winter.”
    “A new house.” Troub, who had plumbed the depths of my passion for houses, eyed me doubtfully. “Won’t that be expensive?”
    “The price for the house I saw was around twenty-two hundred dollars, so even with the extras I have in mind, it’s not likely to be more than four thousand dollars. And the Palmer account just keeps growing—I can afford it.”
    Troub cocked her head. “What about the old farmhouse?”
    “That’s where the real fun comes in.” I was