Read Online Mail Order Misfortune by Kirsten Osbourne - Free Book Online

didn't mind at all.  She was happy he'd understood what she was trying to say.
    Jesse raised an eyebrow at Ernie.  "You'll treat her with the same respect you treated your ma with, though.  Won't you?"   He understood Anna's purpose in the words, but he needed to know his son would be respectful.
    Ernie nodded reluctantly.  "Yes, Pa."  He looked back down at his plate, but he didn't seem nearly as upset as he had earlier.
    "Are you going to pray for us?" Anna asked, looking at Jesse. 
    He nodded, and they all bowed their heads for his simple prayer.  As soon as he'd finished, he stuck his fork into the pork roast and took a huge bite.  He almost moaned with pleasure.  His new wife really could cook.  In fact, he'd never had a woman cook so well in his life.  "This is good."
    She smiled.  "I cooked a lot in the orphanage.  It was one of my favorite chores."  She'd always begged the other girls to trade with her when they were on cooking duty.
    "Orphanage?  You were raised in an orphanage?" Jesse asked with surprise.
    She nodded.  "My pa died in the last battle of the War Between the States, but I was already on the way.  My ma died of a fever a few weeks after I was born.  There weren't any relatives who could take me in, so a neighbor found me and dropped me at the orphanage."  
    "Where was that?  Here in Texas?" he asked.  Her accent didn't seem quite right for Texas.
    She shook her head.  "No, I was raised in Beckham, Massachusetts.  I've only been here two weeks longer than you two have."  It was strange to realize she was married to a man who knew so little about her, but the circumstances were odd all around.
    Jesse stared at her for a moment.  "You came out here to teach?" he asked.
    "No, I came out here to be a mail order bride."  She took a sip of water, before continuing.  "I'm terribly shy, and I was nervous about coming here, so I sent a telegram to the man I was supposed to marry and told him I'd be two weeks late. I wanted more time to get ready.  The woman who was coming here to teach school had the same last name as me, and she arrived on the stage I was supposed to be on.  Somehow, she ended up married to my groom, and when I got here, he was married, but the town needed a teacher."  Her eyes met his for the first time since she'd started her story.  "I hate teaching, but I'd done it back East, so I was qualified.  It was better to take her position as a teacher than try to find something else."  She didn't add that she'd been petrified that she would have nowhere to go once she arrived in town and realized what had happened.
    "That's crazy.  Why didn't she tell him that she was the teacher and not his bride?"
    Anna shrugged.  "She said she kept trying to tell him, and he kept kissing her, and it muddled her brain."  She hadn't understood that when Julia had first told the story, but she certainly did now.  After kissing Jesse in the schoolhouse that day, she understood what it meant to have a truly muddled mind.
    Jesse shook his head.  "Did they even apologize?"
    "Yes, they did.  It was an honest mistake, and really, I found Tom to be very intimidating.  I don't think I'd have been able to marry him anyway.  I'm extremely shy."
    "You don't seem at all shy to me," he told her.
    She blushed.  "Well, you made me angry from the first moment we met.  I was more of a fishwife with you than I've ever been with a man."
    "I can understand that."  He looked down at Ernie for a moment, wishing he knew how to explain how much his son had changed since his mother died.  "We're all going to church in the morning.  We go every Sunday.  I'll work when we get home, though.  I have a lot that needs to be done to get the ranch in shape.  I purchased it sight unseen from an older couple, and the man hadn't really kept things up in a couple of years.  I'd like it to be how I want it before winter rolls around."
    She nodded.  "I won't say anything about you breaking the Sabbath.