Rebecca's Promise by Jerry S. Eicher Page A

dryly. “A little young, both of them, if you ask me. Inexperienced too. I guess we have to take what they give us.”
    Rebecca nodded. She supposed by the time she had her own children, it would all have changed. For now she largely ignored the yearly search for parochial schoolteachers to staff the little schoolhouse in the valley just north of the town of Unity.
    “We always had Emma,” she commented, nostalgia in her voice.
    “Of that you can be thankful,” her mother replied. “A solid person Emma was. It did you school children good. Smart too. A little strange in some ways. Never being married like she was. Still good. Year after year, the same teacher. That’s the way it should be.”
    “We all liked her,” Rebecca said, the inflection still in her voice.
    “With good reason,” her mother agreed. “Not that everyone liked her, but most did. She really knew how to run a schoolhouse. Did twice the work as these youngsters do nowadays. She never asked for or needed another teacher—ran the whole twenty of you by herself.”
    “Eight grades,” Rebecca added, vague numbers running through her head. “Now there are close to forty students here, aren’t there?”
    “Something like that,” her mother said. “I suppose even Emma couldn’t have taken care of that many. She was good, though.”
    “She always liked me,” Rebecca said quietly.
    Mattie huffed. “A little bit of a teacher’s pet you were. I never saw that it did you harm.”
    “Of course not,” Rebecca assured her. “Emma never showed favorites. I just knew.”
    “Well, that was then. No sense going on about it now. Set the table and stop thinking about your school days,” her mother told her. “Being special can give you the
grohs kobb.
The past is the past.”
    “Now, Mom. You’re making a big deal out of this.” Rebecca placed the first plate on the table.
    Her mother sighed. “I just never wanted my children to be teacher’s pets. We are called to be ordinary people. That’s our faith. Secure in God’s love for all of us. Then in our love for each other. Being special makes for trouble I say.”
    “She didn’t like everyone in school,” Rebecca said, thinking that was a good defense for Emma.
    “That’s what I mean,” her mother said. “See where this leads?”
    “She had a good reason,” Rebecca insisted, coming to the end of the table and the last place setting.
    “That’s what they
all
think,” Mattie said. “Now start the eggs. Dad will be in any minute.”
    Setting the heat on low, Mattie opened the oven door and carefully placed the platter of round golden pancakes inside to keep warm.
    Rebecca wanted to continue the conversation and tell her mother that Emma
did
have reasons. Good reasons they were, she was certain, but that would require saying his name. Atlee. Then, with the name and her mother’s eyes upon her, might come questions.
    Even if she tried to answer with her best explanations, there might come more questions after that, each more difficult to answer. So she simply set the egg pan on the stove and turned the gas burner to a medium flame lest the eggs burn when she dropped them in the pan. Reaching for the butter, she dabbed a large slab into the just warming pan. It slowly melted, sliding across the surface toward the lower left-hand corner, in the direction the kitchen floor slanted in this area.
    Splitting the eggs expertly, she dropped them in, just in time to have them sizzle as they hit, their outer edges turning white in seconds.
    “So, who were the children Emma didn’t like?” her mother asked from across the kitchen.
    Rebecca’s face, flushed with the heat from the pan, kept its color, although she felt her strength draining away.
I can’t lie,
flew like a dagger through her mind.
I’ll just have to confess it later if I do, so I can’t. Better to stick with the truth.
“One of the boys,” she muttered, without turning around. She stabbed her spatula at one of the eggs,