Free Mittman, Stephanie by A Taste of Honey Page A

Hanson's
Mercantile. Annie was halfway through making the cookies she had promised
Hannah and Julia when she reached into the sack for some flour to dust her
cutting board and hit something that crackled. She looked into the bag. The
corner of a piece of paper stood sticking up from the white flour like a flag
planted atop a mountain by some brave explorer. Her hands were covered in flour
and she hesitated, realized that the paper was already coated, and reached in,
pulling it out gently so it didn't rip.
    It
was a small slip of paper, folded carefully in two. On the outside was her
name, written in the neatest Spencerian hand she had ever seen. She tried to
remember whether she had ever received a note addressed to her before. Of
course, she'd gotten one whenever one or another of the children had misbehaved
in school, or when Mrs. Winestock needed something done for the church, even a
thank-you here or there. Annie looked at the note again. This was different.
Besides the fact that it was coated in Hanson's best all-purpose flour, it was
addressed to Annie Morrow. Not Sissy. Annie.
    Only
one person called her by her given name. Only one person would have put her
given name on a piece of paper and slipped it into her grocery order: Noah
Eastman. She put the note, still folded, on the edge of the table and returned
to her baking. Anything concerning Mr. Eastman could certainly wait. There was
a sheet of little girl cookies in the oven almost ready to come out, one
waiting to go in, and enough dough left to make her nephews some cowboys and
Indians.
    Cooking
for seven people over the years had left her unable to make small batches of
anything. Her math was good enough to cut down a recipe, should she ever
actually use one, but somehow her brain could never tell her hands that all her
babies had flown the coop and she wasn't cooking for an army anymore. Well,
with Risa expecting again and Willa, though Bart had never actually said as
much, likely to be carrying, there'd be five little ones come a year from now
to be watching over and cooking for.
    Not
on this old cookstove, though. Oh, the pies she could turn out with Miller's
new Sterling range! Elvira had hardly used it before she'd passed on, and since
her death Miller took his meals out. The town, especially the spinsters in it,
took pity on the widower and invited him over or brought food in. His range was
practically brand new.
    At
Miller's place the pie safe wouldn't have to be draped with cheesecloth to keep
out the dust. And she'd be just a few blocks from Charlie and Risa and not far
at all from Della and the boys. If she married Miller in six months or so, and
that was giving him a little extra time to break the news to the congregation
slowly, she'd be close enough to Risa to help with the birth of the new baby.
    Willa,
of course, would be farther away, but, it being her first, Annie could still
get out to the farm with plenty of time to sit around and wait for nature to
run its course.
    The
kitchen was stifling. She'd kept the windows closed in an effort to keep the
dirt off her cookies, but she could feel sweat dripping out of every pore and
turning the flour on her hands to glue.
    Trying
to pull herself together, she rinsed them in a basin of water that sat by the
sink, getting cloudier and cloudier as the morning wore on. Her mind might be
on a hundred other things, but her nose told her, as it always did, that her
cookies were done. The sweet warm smell of butter and sugar melting filled the
kitchen and softened her fears, as baking had always done from the time she was
little.
    Waves
of heat blasted out of the oven and she backed away from the stove. She was
going to have to open a window after all, she thought, as she removed eight
perfect little girls from the oven and placed the new sheet gingerly inside.
How Francie had loved these cookies! Annie had already received two letters
from her. In them Francie had thanked Annie over and over again for making