Read Online The Keeper by Suzanne Woods Fisher - Free Book Online Page B

ridiculously . . . naïve. Absurd! He was shocked by her forwardness. So bold! So audacious. After all, Julia was four or five years his junior. A child, really. Still, there was a willful tilt to her chin that surprised Rome. She was a woman and a girl at the same time. He looked at her in a new way, as if he had seen her for the first time. His mouth lifted with the beginnings of a new smile.
    How had he never noticed? She was darling.

5
    S adie had been working indoors most of the day, ironing for Fern. Before dinner, she wanted to sneak off to see the cherry orchards in bloom. She walked between the long rows of cherry trees and finally sat down in the middle, under her favorite tree, and lay on her back to look up at the sky through the pale pink blossoms. If she squinted her eyes, it seemed as if the blossoms were like a lace tablecloth that covered the cerulean sky. She drew in a long breath, inhaling the woody scent laced with a subtle fragrance of sweet cherry flowers.
    For just a moment, she could pretend that everything was fine, that her father was getting better, that Fern would return to Ohio, that life could go back to the way it was. And that Sadie would find something she was good at. Was everybody born knowing what they were good at? She wasn’t good at anything, not really. Julia could do everything well. Menno had a way with animals. M.K. was smart as a whip. Sadie was . . . what? Polite? Even-tempered? A friend to all? Boring.
    She saw Julia cross from the garden to the house. Julia had chestnut-brown hair, smooth and shiny as a satin curtain, and a twinkly smile. Her body was tall and slim and perfect. Best of all, most important, Julia could talk to anybody, parents or boys, and everything that came out of her mouth—the words and the sound of the words—was always just right. It was hard to believe that she and Julia were related. She was flat where Julia was curvy, large where Julia was small. Usually when Sadie got upset about her appearance—which even her own sisters described only as “nice”—she reminded herself to be grateful for her good features: a pair of very nice blue eyes, thick lashes, and a peaches-and-cream complexion—give or take a few zillion freckles.
    She knew she shouldn’t feel jealous of her sister. Her mind drifted to a proverb Julia would tell her when she was in a funk: “Compare and despair.” Or had she said, “Despair and compare?” It was difficult to remember these things when there were so many proverbs jostling in her head, eager to spout advice. Was meh as zwee wisse, is ken Geheimnis. Three are too many to keep a secret. Wammer Dags es Licht brennt, muss mer nachts im Dunkle hocke. Burn the candle by day and you’ll sit in the dark at night . . . . so on and so on and so on. All of these sayings were undoubtedly true and just as easy to dismiss—until the moment you found yourself doing the very thing that the proverb warned you against.
    She heard someone call her name and she popped up. The Bee Man! She didn’t know that he had arrived in Stoney Ridge. Her heartbeat kicked to double time. He’d still had the same effect on her that he’d had since she was nine. And now Roman Troyer was less than eight feet away from her. Eight feet!
    “How are you, Sadie?”
    Roman Troyer walked right up to her and offered her his hand to help her stand. The Bee Man was talking to her! She scrambled to her feet. She wheezed for air, choked, and started to cough. He waited patiently. Her eyes began to tear. She pressed her fingers to her throat, trying to clear the air passage. No words came out of her mouth. Seconds ticked by. Sadie had to say something. Anything! But she couldn’t adjust to having the man she’d had a crush on since she was nine years old stand in front of her.
    Finally, somehow, Sadie managed to squeeze out a wheezy, “H-hello.”
    “I’ve brought my bees,” Rome said. He pointed to a towering stack of wooden beehives, humming with