American Pie Read Online Free Page A

inspect Stefan's home, now hers.
    The smallness impressed her first, the sense of not having enough space to breathe. There was nothing in the bare-floored room but a scarred table, a mismatched set of chairs and a cast-iron stove, cranky from the look of it. Slowly Lucie unpinned her hat and removed her jacket, then hung them on the exposed nails driven into the wall near the door.
    Darkness formed her second impression. One of the walls might have been light colored once, now it was dark with smoke and age. Brown wallpaper bubbled and peeled from the other walls, shadowed deeper in spots by oily stains.
    A cramp of homesickness tightened Lucie's small shoulders. With all her heart she longed to run home to her parents' snug bright cottage and the sweet green scent of the fields. In a week her mother would clip rosemary and thyme to spread over the new straw in the loft. The cottage would smell of spring and fresh herbs and her mother's lamb stew.
    Knowing Stefan watched, not wanting him to recognize her shock and homesickness, Lucie smoothed shaking hands over her quilted skirt and walked to the stove blinking rapidly as she bent to inspect the rust-crusted oven door. When she could control the moisture welling in her eyes, she straightened and focused on a tin coffeepot that had boiled over and splattered the surface of the range.
    "Exactly what I was wanting," she lied, thinking of the ice wagon she had seen and the children running behind to catch the chunks that had been jostled into the street. An hour ago she had not known it was possible to have ice in June.
    Now she longed for a tiny piece to press over her throat and face. "A good cup of hot coffee. Do we have cups? Yes, here they are." On the wooden shelf in front of her nose.
    "There's another room," Stefan said stiffly, watching her. "Many have only one room."
    "Then we are fortunate," Lucie said brightly. She followed him into a second minuscule room and waited while he struck a lucifer to light the windowless blackness. Two thin mattresses were rolled and tied and pushed against the wall. When they were opened for the night, there would not be space for anything else.
    "I made a private place for you." Stefan pointed to a length of faded cloth strung across one corner.
    "Thank you," Lucie whispered, swallowing the lump in her throat. She pressed his hand.
    They returned to the kitchen and Lucie poured coffee, noticing the grounds were not fresh and the coffee was pale as tea. She sat across the table from Stefan and lowered her eyes from his painful expression.
    "I'm sorry." He ran a hand through his hair and tugged his mustache, a gesture she remembered. "It isn't what you expected."
    "We all thought" Pressing her lips together, Lucie bit off what she had been about to say. His pride suffered enough, she could see it in his dark eyes, in the wooden set of his shoulders.
    "After two years I had hoped to be able to rent something better." Frowning, Stefan looked into the cup he turned between his hands. "But even a small house rents for eight hundred to a thousand dollars a year. When a man earns a dollar a day"
    "What does our home rent for?" Lucie asked, looking at the peeling walls, the broken window pane.
    "Three dollars a week."
    Barter was the basis of the economy in Wlad. Lucie knew to the feather how many chickens were required to buy enough cloth for skirts for her mother and herself. A half dozen eggs equaled a loaf of good black bread. A pound of autumn honey equaled a bushel of winter apples. American coins confused her.
    Using her fingers she counted and figured, then raised a look of concern. "After paying the rent, you have three dollars to live on. Is everything else in America so cheap that three dollars is enough?"
    Stefan's laugh was harsh. "Nothing in America is cheap."
    "But you saved my passage money"
    "Until this morning I rented space to two additional men."
    "I see." She could not imagine three people sharing the space around her. But it