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“They are cookies, of course. Molasses crisps. I made them according to my new recipe book.” Hesitantly she touched his shoulder, but the boy edged away.
“Teddy, what is wrong? You do not like cookies? Are you sick?”
“Naw, ain’t sick or nuthin’.” He rolled onto his side and listlessly poked the cookie once more. “It’s Pa, I guess. He’s hardly even looked at me all day. How come these molasses things look so funny?”
Leah studied her cookies. They did look funny. She had tried to pat each piece of dough into the shape of a horse, but during baking her horses had swelled into elephants.
“What’s wrong with Pa?” the boy asked, his mouth full. “Did I do somethin’ bad?”
Leah scooched down beside him on the bed. “You have done nothing bad, Teddy. Your father is distracted. And worried.”
“How come?” Surreptitiously Teddy folded a cookie into his hand. Leah picked up one, as well, and nibbled off the horse’s thick legs as she pondered how to answer Thad’s son.
“With all this heavy rain, your father is concerned about his wheat field.”
“Pa’s never planted wheat before. Nobody around here’s ever planted wheat. All the other ranchers say he’s crazy.” The boy bit off the head of his horse cookie. “Is Pa crazy?”
“No, your father is not crazy. He is…well, he is preoccupied.”
“What’s ‘procupied’ mean?” Teddy swallowed his morsel of cinnamon-dusted cookie. “Pa doesn’t hardly talk to me. Maybe he’s mad at me? Or maybe he doesn’t like me anymore.”
Leah’s teeth clenched. “Teddy, your father is not mad at you.”
The boy said nothing.
Leah patted his bony shoulder. “Your father loves you very much,” she said quietly. “But he is a man, and right now a man would be thinking about…He would have a lot on his mind.”
“Like what? What’s so important?”
“Well, Teddy, I wish I knew, exactly. But it does feel as if he is ignoring us, does it not?”
“Sure does. Feels awful.” Teddy polished off the horse’s hindquarters.
Leah’s heart gave a little lurch. Yes, it did feel awful. It felt as if Thad didn’t care about either his son or her. He was treating them both as if they did not matter. It made her feel hollow inside. Unwanted. It must feel even worse for Teddy.
She shook off an insistent thought, but it popped right back into her brain anyway. In one way, family life in America was much like life in China; fathers worried about food and shelter and ignored their children. And their wives. Perhaps men the world over were like that. Missionaries in China struggled to survive, just like their flocks. She was beginning to understand some of her mother’s sadness when Father was worried.
“I bet Ivanhoe’d never forget about his son!”
Leah found her throat so tight she could not speak for a moment. “Would you…would you like me to read more about Ivanhoe?”
“Yeah, I guess so. You read pretty good, even if you are—” The boy grabbed the last cookie to hide his embarrassment.
She climbed down the ladder and found Thad sitting motionless in the armchair by the fire, staring into the flames, both hands curled around a mug of coffee. Deliberately she walked in front of him on her way to the kitchen, but he did not even look up.
A black finger of despair scratched at the edges of Leah’s mind. Whatever he was struggling with, his actions were distancing himself from Teddy. And from her. If his unreachable moods continued, his son’s feeling of well-being, and her own, would shrivel and die.
“Told ya you was loony to plant wheat, Thad.” Carl Ness leaned over the mercantile counter and spit the words in Thad’s face.
“What would you know about it, Carl? You’ve never farmed so much as a patch of mint.”
The older man grunted. “I hear the talk around town. Seems like you’ve bit off something you can’t chew.” Carl’s thin lips pulled back into what passed for a grin. “Two somethings, as a matter of fact.”
“Yeah?” He’d had about enough of Carl Ness this morning. Something festering inside him felt as if it was going to explode any second.
The storekeeper took one look at Thad’s face and checked whether the area behind where he stood was empty. He sure didn’t need six feet of Thad MacAllister charging over the counter at him.
“Yeah,” Carl blustered.
Thad took one step closer. “What’s the second something, Carl?”
He edged backward. “That wife of yours. That Celestial. Ain’t never gonna work out.”
