A Fireproof Home for the Bride Read Online Free Page A

would die to live in Moorhead, away from the gophers and milk cows and hay-smelling boys.” She propped her dreamy, round face in one hand. “What are the boys like in your school? Have you made a new best friend?” Svenja was an only child with poor prospects who, Emmy imagined, would choose a life like so many of the women in the basement below, settling down with a local farm boy and losing her beauty slowly over time to successive babies and the layers of flesh they’d drape around her ample figure. Emmy had watched this progression plump the older girls in Glyndon, and she couldn’t deny that marrying Ambrose might seal for her a similar fate. Emmy felt a sliver of solidarity as Svenja pulled her into a confidential hug. “You know, when we graduate this spring, I might just join you there,” Svenja whispered.
    “Oh, I don’t plan on being in town for that long,” Emmy said. “I’ll be back around here for good before you know it.”
    Svenja shrugged, playing with a loose button on her threadbare cotton coat. “Don’t you ever wish there was more than this?”
    “Sometimes.” Emmy looked Svenja in the eye. They had been baptized on the same day and confirmed together fourteen years later, but had very little else in common other than parallel time lines pointing forward from the step on which they were huddled. “Of course there’s more out there, but there’s plenty here as well. Do you?”
    “Me?” Svenja shook her head with a light laugh before a cloud passed over her expression. “Can you keep a secret?”
    “I’d rather not.”
    Svenja took her hand and leaned closer, though Emmy hardly thought that possible. “My mother says that I should marry John Hansen. Apparently he’s been asking about me.”
    “That’s good, right?” Emmy said, trying to sound cheerful. John was even older than Ambrose, and a longtime bachelor who lived with his aging parents on a disheveled sheep farm that smelled in a way that made Emmy roll up the window of the car on a hot day whenever they drove past. It didn’t smell much better in the winter with them closed.
    “They do have quite a few acres of beets. Enough to afford a field hand, who comes all the way from Texas every spring.” Svenja attempted a hopeful aspect.
    Out of kindness, Emmy chose not to speak the obvious—everyone knew John to be slow of thought, and beyond hiring himself out to work with the Branns’ cows, his prospects were slim.
    “I know he’s not as worldly as Ambrose.” Svenja sprang to her feet. “But I suppose there are far worse fates. I’m going in. You?”
    “It’s quiet out here, and too hot in there,” Emmy said, pointing at the door.
    “Okay, then. You know where to find me.” Svenja sat on the iron handrail and slid down the length of it, just as they had done over and over again when they were small.
    “God be with you,” Emmy said as Svenja slipped through the cellar door. Soon enough Emmy would have to follow, tie on her apron, and clear cups, as she did every Sunday. Then they would all get into the car and drive the half mile to the Brann farm, make the polite small talk, eat the over-done roast, and wait for the details of her fate to be decided. How could she not at least try to take a step in another direction, one small step to know what she might be missing? Emmy found great comfort in her life with her family, but she felt as she sat and looked out on the graves of people she had known, and people who had known her whom she didn’t even remember, that the distance between where she sat and the rectangle of earth awaiting her had precipitously shortened. Her foot itched and her stomach growled. The inertia of passive solitude stretched within her as a deep shiver began to rack her body. A scrim of dread descended as she imagined the next ten minutes: rejoining Ambrose, having another chat about the weather with Mr. Brann, and saying a ten-minute good-bye to the pastor as he slowly worked his hot, damp