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passing—I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bring it up that way. But I believe you can do it. If anyone can do it, you can.”
    The funny thing was, of course, she meant it. For all his fears he was considered the most capable of the young men in their community, and he probably knew it, and if he didn’t, well, there, she’d told him. Dark-eyed John Hirschfelder and his easy, competent, surprising— Goddamn it. This was his way; this was how he got to her when she didn’t mean to let him think she could be got to.
    She’d be a terrible farmwife, and she knew it even then, even that night in the buggy, on the road between the fields.
    She would be the first to admit it: She didn’t know how to doanything. Her father, the town doctor, had raised her himself, with the help of his poor spinster cousin Fräulein Adeline, whom Rebecca had always half respectfully, half irreverently called Frau and who oversaw all the cooking and washing and housekeeping and made sure the Doctor had coffee at three o’clock. Frau kept house pretty well, but she hadn’t made it her especial priority to teach Rebecca how to do it. Oh, Rebecca could sew, at least she could do that. The thought of marriage made her miserable, even shy—she, who cared so little about what people thought. She supposed she’d have to do it eventually, get married. She supposed she could do worse than to marry someone who loved her well enough to overlook the fact that he’d have to survive on cornmeal cake and boiled potatoes.
    Oh, for God’s sake.
    â€œYou don’t have to tell me anything,” Rebecca blurted.
    â€œI know. I know, Beck. I want to, though. You know I do,” John said tiredly. Her heart ached with pity for him then. The air was purple, and the fields stretched out to either side of them like long hounds under a tent of sky, and her childhood friend sat next to her on a wagon bench, weary and worried and still grieving for his mother, and longing for
her
, for Rebecca Mueller of all people, without much hope. How could she be so cruel, she wondered, not to love him back. How could she be so foolish, when half the women in town would dearly love to take her place, take his hand, here in the dust and clatter where no one but the two of them existed or cared.
You stupid girl. You know what you have to do.
    So she held the reins with one hand and with the other reached over and clasped John Hirschfelder’s hand with her gloved fingers andsqueezed hard, harder than was strictly romantic. Too hard. Dark-eyed John Hirschfelder, with his beautiful face and his strong back and his good heart. The poor man.
    *   *   *
    W
hy do women marry, anyway. To make a house? To have babies?
It was a question she couldn’t answer yet herself. Unless it was to build a life with the one person who seemed to understand you even a little bit. She wasn’t sure she loved John, but she knew she admired him. And he wasn’t afraid of her, old Dr. Mueller’s daughter with the odd temperament, the pride and the vagueness and the sharp gray eyes, and—as she was forced to admit—the confounding ignorance about how to do most of the things women were supposed to know how to do.
    They were to be married in the Lutheran church in town, and in the short weeks before the wedding that spring Rebecca took steps to avail herself of some little understanding of what might be expected of her as a farmwife. She consulted Frau, who managed in the amount of time they had left under the same roof to teach her how to tend the stove and bake a loaf of bread, which at least gave Rebecca some confidence that she and John wouldn’t starve. Also she got a few lessons in cooking and laundering, which went as poorly as she thought they would—not because the principles themselves were especially difficult but because laundering was as backbreakingly boring as Rebecca had always suspected