The Barter by Siobhan Adcock Page B

traveling bag. The young woman’s pride prevents her from asking for Frau’s help, which would have been gladly and lovingly given (no doubt for the younger Rebecca’s benefit, when Frau told these stories, she tended to paint a portrait of Florencia as a bright but inexperienced child rather than a grown married woman). Just as Frau discovers Florencia’s predicament and is on the point of teaching Florencia the right way to do whatever it is she’s attempting—and at this point in the story, Frau always leaves the kitchen to go down cellar for more apples for the cake, or goes upstairs to find her needlework kit and put it to use—the good world intervenes on Florencia’s behalf. A magic stone smashes the bloodstain out of the shirtfront; a cat knocks a tin of milk into the batter; a bird singing to her from the backyard reminds her to check something twice. “The good world loved that girl as much as she loved the world, and it never once forgot her,” Frau liked to conclude.
    Rebecca finally found her father out in the yard, near the small shed where they normally kept the buggy and the Doctor’s one horse, the mare whose name Rebecca liked to change every month or so since she had always figured horses to be too indifferent to care—on her wedding day the horse’s name happened to be Lucy.
    Even though she had gone to search for the Doctor, the effect of actually finding him was still as if he’d come around a corner to surprise her rather than the other way around. She had been tired and dispirited, but the sight of his trim, compact self, whiskered and competent and yet endearingly helpless, invigorated her as it always had. Nothing could be so wrong in a world in which her father still lived. The Doctor was sitting on a low bench near the horse shed, squinting into the dusty stillness where Lucy stood, bored, staring in the way that some horses do.
    â€œPapa,” Rebecca said, then cleared the dust from her throat. “We are going.”
    â€œYes, Mrs. Hirschfelder.” Dr. Mueller stood as briskly as if she hadn’t just found him in an attitude of inert melancholy and faced his daughter. “Come here and give me a kiss, dear girl. And you had better rename my horse one last time, too.”
    Rebecca moved toward her father and embraced him tenderly. It wasn’t his fault. However she felt now, however unprepared and unstudied and untethered, it wasn’t the Doctor’s fault. She could only blame herself for never having bothered, never having tried. And now she would see what she was made of.
    â€œPrimrose,” she whispered, and gave his cheek a peck. “Or, no. Patience.”
    â€œPatience,
ja
. Like ‘patients.’” Her father smiled at her. His eyes were wet. “
Sehr gut.
”
    â€œ
Ja.
” She smiled.
    â€œYou are not a German girl,” Dr. Mueller reminded her. “You are an American girl. Go be an American wife.”
    He led her on his arm around the house to the farm wagon in the street in front of the porch, where John Hirschfelder waited to take her away, and where the wedding guests had gathered to see them off. When her father had led her down the aisle that forenoon, Rebecca had hardly been aware of him. She had been thinking of how good her dress smelled, the fresh, clean linen smell of the new fabric, and how hot it was in the church; she had been thinking about the cool, stiff stems of the rosebud nosegay she held; she had been thinking about John’s arms, the yard, the nighttime. She had allowed her father to relinquish her at the altar without so much as a second glance back at the old man, and she had stepped toward the spot where she would stand and be married like a high-strung pony steps into a market stall, all the same bright anxiety and prancing dismay and all the same fundamental lack of understanding of how she had come to this place.
    Now, as she neared John’s