The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen Page B

have to marry you.”
    Idella saw Maddie turn red and her head go down. Her hair, still wild and windblown, fell forward and hid her face.
    Dad pulled his suspenders up over each shoulder as he walked to the table. “You two are up early. Going fishing?”
    “Dalton, he has gone.” Maddie placed a full cup of coffee in front of him and hurried back to the stove.
    “He does everything alone.” Dad picked up the mug and held it under his nose. “This here is like a bed of roses to me, Maddie. To wake up and smell coffee. Not since Emma.” Idella watched as Dad took a cautious sip. “Jesus H. Christ!” His eyes sprang open. “Holy Mother of Jesus!” His voice boomed. All three girls froze as they watched him. “Did you add water?” He turned sharply and looked at Maddie. Then he threw back his head and laughed full out so that they could see the buttons of his long underwear rippling up and down like waves coming and going. “Is there new hair on my head?” he asked when he was able. “Did that sip do anything to me yet?”
    Slowly, cautiously, the three girls shook their heads. None of them dared go beyond a smile yet.
    “You make damn strong coffee, Maddie!” He took a larger swallow. “And it’s damned good!” They all started laughing then, happy and relieved.
     
    There got to be a pattern to things pretty soon. Every morning when the girls woke early, they’d know to look out the window if they wanted to find Maddie. There were a few mornings when they could hear voices together out in the front yard. When they looked out, they saw Dalton talking to Maddie before he went down the ladder. Once they saw Maddie clap her hands and laugh at something Dalton said. Another time he was showing her how to do something, but they couldn’t figure out what it was. It might have been something to do with being in the boat, by the look of things, or with fishing. Dalton didn’t get excited by too many other subjects.
    The coffee continued strong and hot. Dad got so he asked for a second cup before he’d finished the first and said he didn’t know how he’d gotten on drinking that watered-down piddle piss he used to call coffee. Maddie blushed.
    For breakfast she cooked potatoes and then fried eggs in the black pan. Every day. The potatoes were hot and brown and crisp and the eggs all cooked through till the yolks were a crumbly light yellow and the whites mottled brown at the edges. Everyone ate them as she presented them, sliding onto the plate with a slap.
    Dinner was potatoes and dried salted fish from the barrels. Supper was beans and salt pork and potatoes.
    “Maddie, how come we eat the same thing every day for every meal?” Avis asked one morning after Dalton and Dad had left the table. “We ever gonna have something different?”
    Maddie pursed her lips and kept scrubbing a plate. “You like what I cook?”
    “It’s good,” Avis said, “but it’s sort of tiring to have the same thing every day.”
    “Your father, he is complaining?”
    “Not to me.”
    “I’m getting awful tired of it,” Idella said, looking up from her plate. “I don’t think you know how to cook anything else.”
     
    The girls soon learned there were things Maddie would not talk about, would not even finish listening to the question about—mostly about where she came from, what her folks were like, who her people were. It was as if she came out of nowhere.
    “How come you never wear them boots you brought?” Avis asked her one morning. “You walked in here carrying ’em and hardly nothing else. Whose are they? They’re awful big.”
    “They’re mine.”
    Even Avis knew not to keep asking after that.
    As she got more comfortable in the house, Maddie loved to question the girls—about growing things, about how things were done in the house with their mother. How was a table set properly? How was a hem sewn on a skirt? These were things that Idella, at ten, knew way too much about and that Maddie, at fifteen,