“I don’t know—”
But then there was a knock at the door. Mother Pedersen frowned, put down the skillet of cornbread she was about to slide into the hot oven, and dashed to answer it, muttering, “Now what?” All the visitors were beginning to wear on her, Anette could tell.
Anette heard a commotion at the door, then a voice, a voice from her memory, or a dream, perhaps. Then into the kitchen rushed someone radiating emotion and exuding a familiar smell—a combination of potatoes and horse and sweat. Before she knew what was happening, Anette felt arms around her neck and for a moment, the world turned black as she was enfolded into those arms that might have once rocked her, but probably not. Still, the sensation she felt with them around her reached back to before she’d been born. It was both familiar and startlingly strange.
But her heart knew; her heart forced the cry of “Mama!” out of her throat before her mind could put everything together. Anette was astonished to feel a rush of tears flood down her cheeks; longing—pent up this last year and a half, longing for something she’d never truly known—nearly burst her chest wide open. She sobbed with pure relief, a feeling as basic as breathing, as natural as seeing, to be in her mother’s arms.
Other emotions—anger, hurt—beckoned at her across this great gulf of belonging, but for now she shut her eyes to them. Wasn’t this what she’d wanted? Wasn’t this what she’d forbidden herself to cry for, because she knew it would never happen? And yet here she was!
“Mama!”
“My Anette! My poor girl! Oh, to have you in my arms again, my poor thing! What have they done to you?”
At this, Mother Pedersen began to sputter angrily. But before she could say anything, Anette’s mama was pulling her down on her lap and rocking her, none too gently—Anette winced as her mother touched her stump too roughly—and Anette laid her head against her mother’s shoulder and allowed herself to feel like someone’s daughter again. Or maybe for the first time?
Because even as she fell into this womb-like embrace, she couldn’t help but think that never, not once that she could remember, had she been cuddled and exclaimed over. Loved.
So why was her mother being so nice to her now?
CHAPTER 32
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WHEN GAVIN WOODSON MADE THE now-familiar journey from the Newman Grove train station to the Pedersen homestead on a borrowed horse, lugging all the letters and gifts that were small enough to carry （Christ, this good deed of his, while it may have given him a conscience, a soul, and a heart, was about to break his back）， the last thing he expected to find was Anette’s mother sitting on a chair in the kitchen like a queen on a throne—and Anette cuddled on her lap.
Good Lord, the woman was ugly—that was his first, uncharitable thought. He actively flinched from her. His Anette—yes, that was how he thought of her now, with no embarrassment—was not a pretty creature, not at all. But she was not ugly, he would never hear her called that. She was as yet unformed; she still had time to grow into a beauty—he knew he had an idiot’s touching faith in the transformative power of a few years. But when Gavin beheld Anette’s mother, for the first time he doubted whether that would happen.
The woman hadn’t seen a bath in weeks; her hair was greasy and scraped into a bun, and she had a round, porous nose, few teeth, heavy eyebrows. She obviously had not put on her good clothes for the occasion—then it struck him with horror that maybe she had. Misery and poverty clung to her like the ragged shawl she was wearing, the dirty apron, the soiled dress. She was the most pathetic creature he’d ever laid eyes on.
But there was a gleam in her eyes, which were small and shrewd. She smelled opportunity, that was immediately obvious even to someone who played poker as badly as Gavin did. Opportunity in the being of the daughter she had sold to the Pedersens a year and a half ago.
“Sold her for two chickens and a pig,” Gunner confirmed when he came in from the barn a few minutes later. The two men were in the parlor, while Anette’s mother fawned over the girl in the kitchen. “The woman sold me her child for livestock. I heard of the situation through a neighbor, that there was this family that lived about a day’s ride away in a hovel. The mother was eager to get Anette out of the house—she didn’t seem able to stand the sight of her; she didn’t shed a tear when she left the girl here. We’ve not heard a peep from her since.”