Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All by Jane Yolen

enough knowledge of real mothers except what I read about in the fairy stories, where stepmothers and grandmothers and even fairy godmothers don’t always show up in the best of lights.
    Certainly I couldn’t have sworn then that Papa was hurt by the apple concoction. Just that he became distant from the moment he began drinking it, no longer responding to any of my questions. Not hugging me, even when I hugged him first. And of course he didn’t sing again except in my dreams, though to be fair, he hadn’t actually sung to me in years.
    But he was still a powerful man. Didn’t he go out into the gardens every morning and work until dark, Stepmama bringing him out the lunch she’d made with her own hands, so he didn’t have to stop to come inside?
    And didn’t his heart still beat strongly? I could feel it pounding away when I snuggled into his lap of an evening, putting one of his arms over my shoulders like a woman adjusting a shawl. At these times a strange smile would flit across his face, like a mule eating saw-briars. Then his mouth moved as if to speak, though not a word fell out. And he’d shuffle his feet as a hound does, chasing after a deer or a rabbit in its dreams. It felt at those moments as if Papa was coming back to me when he was really moving on to a farther place.
    After a full summer of this, even I couldn’t ignore the fact that Papa was a changed man. Here and gone. Here and gone.
    “What’s wrong with him?” I finally asked Stepmama. It was on one of those wind-driven, rainy days when I couldn’t go outside to play and Papa couldn’t go outside to work in the garden and so he sat dozing in his big chair, fretting in his sleep.
    She sighed. “Child, child, he’s growing old is all!”
    I knew he wasn’t that old. Pop Wilber, the sawyer who lived up the nearest holler, was old. Nearly ninety, he still chopped wood for a living. Miss Skidmore, who lived a little way farther along, was eighty-seven and she still made quilts that won the top prizes at the county fair. Papa wasn’t like them, white-haired, with lines like cursive writing up and down their faces. He didn’t walk hunched over. His hands weren’t all crabbed and cramped with time.
    Papa was just distant. And increasingly strange.
    But perhaps, my traitor’s mind thought, no stranger than he was after Mama died. At least now he stayed home instead of running off to the churchyard every evening. At least now I could sit on his lap and he didn’t throw me off.
    Sometimes Stepmama led him by the hand out into the herb garden and sat him down on the wooden bench. Then she’d bend over and whisper in his ear as if she was aiming to have a conversation only with him. I could see her mouth moving as I sat by the kitchen window doing my homework. But what she whispered to him, I didn’t know. And didn’t dare ask. He rarely answered her; the few times he did, she would shake her head and her face got puckered like an old peach and her beauty fell away so that even I could see she was a different woman from what she ordinarily showed the world.
     
     
    I should have relaxed, what with Stepmama taking care of Papa and her spending time talking to me and showing me how to grind things in her big mortar—nuts, herbs, flowers. Giving me hugs each time I did a good job. Calling me a beauty and a smart child.
    However, little things made me wary. For instance, Papa stopped taking care of himself. His beard grew out long and scratchy, and I didn’t want to sit on his lap anymore, or even rub his head, or come close, because he also began to smell. He smelled of unwashed bed linen and pee. He smelled musty, like a closet that’s never been aired out. He smelled like the old stuffed bear at the hotel in Addison, the one that stands on its hind legs eight feet tall in the front greeting hall.
    When Papa’s hair began to flop down across his face, Stepmama herself cut it short with a fierce-looking pair of silver shears she’d brought