Chapter 24
It was a perfectly beautiful day—blue skies, plenty of sunshine, temperatures in the upper seventies, a subtle breeze—but Rose had been dreading this day, and now it was here.
The mid-September potato harvest would mark the end of the WLA session.
The girls were due back at school—the university had shortened the school year by a few weeks to accommodate summer farm work—but it was time for their return.
They would come back next year in late spring; they had all promised to do so.
And while Rose felt certain some of the girls would in fact return, she knew it was the last time she would see others.
Who knows what the next school year will bring for these young women?
One was bound to get married; one might graduate and begin full-time work, while another might drop out of school to work for the family business.
Rose couldn’t say which future belonged to which girl, though of course, she had her predictions.
But she also knew how surprising life could be, what cards could be dealt to the least suspecting player.
You could fight life, but sometimes it was best to just go along for the ride.
The same could be said for Rose. Although she’d been emotionally preparing for the girls’ departure, for the house to plummet into a deafening silence, to return to worrying only about her own needs, the change would not be easy.
She’d done it before—when Charles died, when Albert headed to Hollywood, when Hank left to fight the war, when the telegram arrived—and she’d likely do it again.
But that didn’t mean she’d ever get used to saying goodbye.
Today would feel like a loss.
But there was work to do, and she woke earlier than usual to prepare a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, potato pancakes, and applesauce for the final day of the potato harvest. The girls woke earlier as well, as if they, too, were trying to squeeze more minutes from the day.
One by one they came downstairs with smiles that masked their own conflicted feelings.
Likely, they had missed university and felt ready to return to their studies.
They were a family, however—had become a family over the past three and a half months—and she knew the girls would also miss each other.
Rose watched Peggy pull an extra chair from the parlor and squeeze it into the already full table. She set a coffee cup and plate there too.
“Is someone joining us for breakfast?” Rose asked.
“Yes,” Peggy answered. “You.”
Rose did not usually sit with the girls at meals. Despite the friendships she’d forged with them, she always maintained that division. But Peggy insisted, and the other girls cheered and clapped. Rose found herself unable to say no.
Like any other morning, the girls buzzed about the kitchen table, passing around the eggs and sausage and pancakes.
They all had so much to say, and it was beautiful, the harmony of their voices, each girl providing her unique pitch and timbre to the orchestra of their friendly banter.
It rose and fell in volume like a symphony.
Rose sat quietly and took it all in. She wanted to remember this moment tomorrow, and through the fall and winter, when the house quietly waited for a return to life.
She was caught off guard when Peggy stood and clanked her coffee cup.
“I’d like to make a toast,” she announced.
The girls quieted and sat up in their chairs, grabbing their mugs or glasses.
“To Rose,” Peggy said.
Rose blushed at the sound of her name. She smoothed her apron, suddenly self-conscious. She wasn’t expecting this attention.
“The best host a girl could ask for,” Esther added.
“Thank you, Rose, for everything you’ve done for us,” Clara chimed in.
And then all the girls clanked cups and tipped them back like champagne flutes. Meanwhile, Rose sipped her coffee and held the mug in her hands, prayerlike.
You’ve done far more for me than I have for you.
After breakfast, Rose was in for yet another surprise. The girls called her outside. When she stepped onto the porch, she saw the group standing huddled in a mass.
“Okay, now,” Peggy exclaimed.
When they dispersed, Rose saw the surprise: a carved wooden sign erected in the front yard that read “Rosehill Boardinghouse.”
“We thought your farmhouse needed a proper name,” Peggy exclaimed.
“Do you like it?” Clara asked.
Rose beamed and stepped closer. “It’s beautiful,” she said, running her fingers along the grooves. “How did you make this happen?”
“The Jensens have a woodshop,” Peggy explained. “We’ve been planning it all summer. The hard part was agreeing on a name.”
“But we kept it simple,” Esther said. “Your name is Rose and your farmhouse is on a hill.”
“It sounds fancy, doesn’t it?” Peggy asked.
“Rosehill Boardinghouse,” Rose said, rereading the sign. “It’s perfect.”
Then the girls hustled away in preparation for the rigors of potato day, and Rose found herself alone with Esther by the sign.
“I’m not sure I’ll be back in the spring,” Esther said quietly.
Rose knew why. She’d had an inkling since the night of the dance, when Esther came home nauseated from wearing a too-tight girdle.
Morning sickness, a completely inaccurate name for an all-day ailment.
The look on Esther’s face when Rose mentioned her own pregnancies with Albert and Hank told her the truth that night.
She’d been studying Esther ever since—how much she ate and slept, her energy levels, even the growing roundness of her face.
“What’s his name?” Rose asked.
Esther flinched. “Please don’t tell the other girls.”
Rose nodded solemnly.
“Henry,” Esther said. “We met at school back in May, just before the end of semester. He dropped a book, and I picked it up and chased him across the quad to return it. We chatted for a long while,” Esther went on, “and then my stomach growled. He said he should buy me a meal as a thank-you, and we went to the local lunch counter and talked all afternoon. And then he asked me to have dinner that night too.”
Rose reached for Esther’s hand and nodded for her to continue.
Esther kept her eyes on the grass beneath her feet.
“It all went very fast.” She blushed. “Except then the semester ended, and Henry took an internship back home in New York, and I joined the WLA.” She paused and frowned.
“He wanted to write, to call, to keep in touch over the summer. I guess I wasn’t sure what would happen once school started again.
I thought it would be easier for him to end things with me,” she said, “if we weren’t in touch to begin with. ”
Hearing Esther’s story, Rose reminisced about her husband, Charles.
They’d met at a boxed-lunch social, a fundraiser for the local school to purchase a bell.
Young women from town prepared a lunch for two, packed it with their name on a slip of paper inside, then decorated the outside with bows and ribbon.
Eligible men bid on the boxes, not knowing who had prepared them.
Once all the boxes were spoken for, they’d learn the identity of the girl who’d prepared the meal, and the two would enjoy the contents together.
Rose had made curried egg-salad sandwiches on homemade rye bread and oatmeal cookies.
She’d decorated her wooden lunch box plainly, with a single blue ribbon tied in a bow, and hoped whoever bid would appreciate simplicity.
Because she was a simple-looking girl. She’d noticed Charles Brodbeck as soon as he came into the schoolhouse—he had a chiseled jaw and intense brown eyes—and she secretly hoped he would bid on her box when the time came.
To her surprise, he did. And later, when the two sat on a picnic blanket, she asked why he had bid on her box.
“Was it because it was different from the others?” she’d asked, pointing to the now untied blue ribbon. “Because it was so simple?”
“It was because it was yours.”
She crinkled her nose. “But how did you know?”
He’d swallowed a final bite of egg salad. “I followed you here. And I memorized the box in your hands.”
It was the first time any man had shown such interest in her, ordinary girl that she was. And he had won her heart forever.
Her thoughts returned to Esther. She cataloged the timeline of Esther’s love affair. May. “You’re due in February then?” she asked.
“I counted,” Esther said. “February 14.”
This child will be full of love. “Are you planning to tell him, when you go back to school?” she asked.
Esther nodded, bit her lip. “I’m scared.”
“But remember, he wanted to stay in touch with you all summer,” Rose reminded her. “It was you who rejected him.”
Esther’s eye grew wide with hope. “That’s true.”
“He loves you, Esther. And he’ll want to marry you. If that’s what you want.”
Esther met Rose’s gaze. “Do you really think so?”
Rose didn’t know the young man, could not vouch for him. But he had fallen for Esther—plain, sweet, shy Esther—and a man attracted to a girl like her, a young woman of subtle, beautiful, and remarkable substance, was likely a very good man.
“I really do,” Rose told her.
As Esther walked away, Rose thought about writing Hank again. Ever since the telegram arrived, she’d been writing him whenever she missed him, whenever she couldn’t sleep and her thoughts swirled, whenever she felt like it.
She missed his letters, even though the sight of his penmanship used to make her cry at times.
She swore the paper even smelled like him.
Sometimes, she could tell from his tight, left-slanted cursive that he was holding back, that there was so much more he was feeling and thinking but couldn’t put into words.
Hank had never wanted to burden her. He’d been like that as a small child too.
He’d go with a hole in the big toe of his sock, so as not to add to her mending.
When he enlisted, he said the only downside was the worry it would inevitably cause her.
His letters had always detailed the mundane aspects of war—the food they ate, the games they played off duty, the names of his bunkmates.
They read more like letters from summer camp than from enemy lines.
Hank never mentioned death, though thousands had lost their lives, and thousands more had lost their limbs.
There was never a sign of despair, of fear or fatigue, though she knew there was plenty of that.
Although her son had been missing for several months, Rose held on to the belief that Hank was still alive. The war did not take him. He is somewhere. That was the hope of any mother. That her child had a future.
The letters she wrote Hank now were different than the ones she’d actually mailed in the past. Those letters had been about Hank, how he was doing, and how she could support him while stationed overseas.
But these letters, the ones she addressed but didn’t mail, were about her, her thoughts and feelings and ramblings, things she normally wouldn’t have told him.
The letters had helped her survive, to keep going.
Once, when Hank was a child, he’d hidden his toy planes and trucks under a loose floorboard in the attic after his father had threatened to take them away for bad behavior. So Rose had been putting her letters to Hank there too, for safe keeping.
Dear Hank, she began.
It seems my suspicions about Esther were correct . . .