In Love with a Single Farmer-Daddy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Twenty-Two Thousand
On her wedding day Betsy finds her sister counting the cash the farmer paid for her, takes the envelope off the table, asks the groom at the altar if he bought her, and says I do, then meets his silent daughter, who hands her a note: GO HOME.
My sister was counting the money on the table where the church ladies cut the funeral ham.
I stood in the doorway of the side room in my mother's old white dress and watched her do it.
Hundreds, licked and flicked, in stacks of ten.
"Twenty-two," Kendra said, and fanned the last stack like a hand of cards. "He didn't even haggle, Grandma."
My grandmother sat beside her with her purse open on her lap.
"Farmers don't haggle," Mavis said. "They just pay and grumble later."
Three of the church ladies were by the coffee urn pretending not to listen.
Nobody had seen me yet.
"What is that?" I said.
Kendra jumped and then grinned at me.
"That's you, Bets."
Mavis snapped her purse shut. "That's my business."
"It's twenty-two thousand dollars on the ham table," I said. "Whose business is it?"
My grandmother looked at me over her cat-eye glasses.
"Roscoe Ketchum is taking my best worker. I'm not running that diner short for nothing. He paid what it costs to replace you."
"You told me he was doing you a kindness."
"He is. So am I. You were going to be thirty in that kitchen with nobody."
"He asked for me first, you know. I met him at the feed store. He had manure on his boots and a kid that just stares at you." She shuddered. "I said I'd rather die. So Grandma said, well, there's always the other one."
The other one.
I had worked in that diner since I was twelve.
I had never been paid a wage in my life.
My tips went into a coffee can Mavis said she was keeping safe for me, and the can was always empty when I looked.
I walked to the table.
I squared the stacks back into the bank envelope one by one while my sister watched me with her mouth open.
"Betsy," Mavis said. "Put that down."
I folded the flap shut and held it against my chest.
"Fourteen years," I said. "No wage. I figure this covers about half."
"That's my tax money," Mavis hissed. "The county will take my house."
"Then the county can come see me."
One of the church ladies set her coffee cup down very carefully.
Mavis stood up and reached for the envelope.
I stepped back, and her hand closed on air.
"You ungrateful little thing," she said. "After I took you in."
"You took me in and put me to work, Grandma. Those are different."
The organ started up in the sanctuary.
I walked out of the side room with twenty-two thousand dollars in one hand and my bouquet of grocery-store daisies in the other.
There were maybe thirty people in the pews.
Diner regulars, mostly, there for the free cake.
At the front stood the pastor, and beside him stood Roscoe Ketchum.
He was tall and brown from the fields, in a pressed blue shirt that still had the store creases in it.
He had a short beard and a scar through his right eyebrow.
I knew him from the diner.
Every Saturday for a year he'd brought his little girl in for pie.
In the front pew sat that little girl, six years old, in red rubber boots.
She held the hand of a gray-haired woman in a pink cardigan.
I walked up the aisle too fast, and the organ lady couldn't keep up.
I stopped in front of Roscoe and held up the envelope.
"Did you buy me?"
The church went so quiet I heard the furnace click on.
Roscoe looked at the envelope.
Then he looked at me, and he didn't look away.
"I paid what your grandmother asked," he said. "To get you out of that kitchen."
"And if I walk out right now?"
"Then you walk. The money's yours either way."
Behind me, Mavis made a noise like a stepped-on cat.
I looked at the front pew.
The little girl was watching me with her mother's gray eyes and no expression at all.
Her name was Posy.
She hadn't said a single word to anyone in two years.
Every Saturday I'd slid her a second slice of cherry pie, and every Saturday she'd eaten it.
I knew that look.
I'd worn it.
I turned back to Roscoe.
"Then I do," I said.
The pastor blinked. "We haven't gotten to that part."
"Get to it," I said. "I'm ready."
Somebody in the back laughed out loud.
It was Roscoe.
We were married in ten minutes.
He kissed me on the cheek, very carefully, and his beard was softer than I expected.
Kendra filmed the whole thing on her pink phone and didn't clap.
The Ketchum farm sat nine miles south of town on a gravel road.
The house was white and old with a deep front porch.
The woman in the pink cardigan was standing on it with Posy.
"Bonnie Lautner," she said, and gave me a hand that was cold as a jar from the cellar. "I'm Posy's great-aunt. I live just up the road. I've kept this house running for two years."
"Thank you," I said. "I'll take it from here."
She smiled.
"We'll see, dear."
Posy stepped forward with a folded square of paper.
She held it out to me without looking at my face.
I opened it.
Two words in careful red crayon, every letter pressed so hard the paper was torn.
GO HOME.
Bonnie touched the top of Posy's head, very gently.
"She has a mother," Bonnie said. "She doesn't need a bought one."
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