Chapter Eleven
The knock at the door was sharp and sudden, and Rachel let out a gasp as the bowl she was washing slipped through her fingers and clattered into the sink. Does no one ever do things gently around here?
And who would be knocking? Anxiety shivered through her.
She was the only one at home. Mason was doing his chores—he had a lot assigned to him on Saturday mornings, given that it was the only day apart from Sunday that he wasn’t busy with school.
She didn’t expect to see him until the sun was high in the sky.
Adam and Ruth, meanwhile, had left right after breakfast, saying something about a fence that needed repair on the east side of the ranch.
More to the point, any of the three of them would have walked right into the house without knocking.
She peered out the window. There was a wagon there, but she saw no sign of a person. She drew a breath. She was going to have to answer the door—whoever was there might have something important they needed to talk to Adam about, and at the very least she could let them know they had to come back.
She left the dishes, dried her hands on her apron, and went to the door, doing her best to force her nerves to settle. Pulling the door open a crack, she peered out to see who it was.
Then, with a frown, she pulled it open wide.
Jennifer stood on the porch. She was dressed in another one of her floral dresses, and today her hair was tied in a careful bun and positioned with a comb.
She looked rather pretty, Rachel thought, and felt a moment of grief for the fact that they weren’t the kind of sisters who could say those things to each other.
Jennifer shifted from one foot to the other on the porch, biting her lip. “Can I come in?” she asked.
“I suppose,” Rachel said, standing back to let her pass. “But why are you here, Jennifer? Does your father know you’ve come?”
“No,” Jennifer said, her hands knitting and un-knitting. “And you can’t tell him, Rachel.” Her eyes darted back and forth like a frightened rabbit’s. “You know he wouldn’t like it.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Rachel murmured. “All right, sit down. I’m not going to tell him anything, but…I don’t know what you’ve come for.” She sighed. “Let me get you something to drink. Lemonade?”
Jennifer relaxed ever so slightly. “That would be lovely.”
Then her shoulders tensed. Rachel noticed it as she went over to get the pitcher of lemonade.
She hadn’t meant the offer of this particular drink to be a pointed thing at all, but apparently Jennifer was taking it that way.
Rachel filled two glasses, then intentionally walked around the table to where Jennifer could see her before setting them down and pushing one gently toward her stepsister.
After a moment, the tension left Jennifer’s body. She picked up the glass of lemonade and took a sip. “That’s very good,” she said, biting her lip. “You know, I didn’t…I didn’t realize how good you were at…things like this. Cooking. Making lemonade.”
“How could you not have realized?” Rachel asked frankly. She wasn’t offended, but it didn’t make sense. “I’ve been serving you food for years. You didn’t have an opinion on the quality of it?” She sat down at the table.
Jennifer hesitated. “I suppose I never really thought about the fact that you were the one preparing it,” she said.
“Or rather…you were the one putting it on the table. But I didn’t think about where it came from before that until you were gone.
Edith is also a very good cook. It’s not as if the meals have suffered.
But there are some things you do better. ”
The conversation made Rachel uneasy. She didn’t want to hear about Jennifer’s sudden realization that she was a person after all. “I’m glad you’re still getting food you like,” she said curtly. “I assume that isn’t what you came here to talk to me about?”
“No, I…” Jennifer wrapped both hands around her glass of lemonade. “I came to ask you for help, Rachel.”
“Help with what?” It was as though a wall had come down inside Rachel. That her stepsister would approach her seeking help now, after the years of ridicule and abuse, bordered on offensive. She wanted Jennifer out of this house.
Jennifer looked up, and her eyes were pleading, her features soft.
“With the school,” she said. “With the teaching. I know that when I was studying to become a teacher, you used to borrow my teaching notes and look at them while I was asleep. You’re probably as well-versed in the skills I learned as I am. ”
“I doubt that.” Rachel frowned. “Wait. You knew I was looking at your notes?”
“You never put them back quite the way you’d found them,” Jennifer explained, sitting up a little straighter. “I could tell.”
“But you never said anything. If you knew, why didn’t you tell your father? Why didn’t you try to get me in trouble?”
“That’s really how you think of me, isn’t it?” Jennifer asked sadly. “You think all I cared for was how I could make trouble for you.”
“Well, don’t act as if I’m pulling that from thin air.
” Rachel swallowed hard. She hadn’t meant to sound so caustic.
God, I know You would like me to show patience and forgiveness here.
She closed her eyes briefly. “All right. So you knew that I was reading your materials and, for whatever reason, you chose to keep that to yourself.”
“And now I need your help,” Jennifer said earnestly. “I didn’t really connect it until you came to speak to me about Mason. But you saw the trouble he was having, even without being in the classroom. You knew that something had to be done.”
“I know Mason fairly well,” Rachel pointed out. “That doesn’t mean I’m equipped to be a teacher.”
“It’s more than that.” Jennifer fidgeted.
She picked up her glass of lemonade, looked at it, and then set it back down.
“It’s my abilities as a teacher in general.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to help the children learn.
I don’t want to lose my job, and I don’t want them to suffer because I’m not good enough… can you help me? Please?”
Rachel rose from the table and turned her back to her stepsister, on the pretense of getting more lemonade for her glass. The truth was that she didn’t need any. She just couldn’t bear to look at Jennifer right now.
Her heart ached to hear Jennifer speak this way.
How many nights had she lain awake, fighting through jealousy?
Praying that God would lift the envy from her heart?
She had loved the thought of teaching, once upon a time—that was why she had been so determined to read Jennifer’s notes.
But there had never been a chance that she would be permitted to pursue that dream.
Jennifer was the one with a future. Rachel’s role had been made clear to her. She was to serve Nathan, nothing more.
And I don’t want to be bitter about that.
I don’t want to be resentful over the life I could have had and didn’t.
She braced her hands on the counter. ‘If we have food and clothing, we will be content with that’—that’s what it says in 1 Timothy.
And it’s a good message. It’s powerful. I’ve been given so many things in life.
I should be happy with what I have, not angry over the things I don’t.
Knowing that was one thing. Fighting back the anger was something else. It rose within her like flames, tempting her, beckoning her to spin around and shout at Jennifer. But that would be wrong.
She corralled her emotions. “You really need help with this?”
“I really do,” Jennifer pleaded. “I know things have been difficult between you and me, Rachel, and you must think it’s wrong of me to even ask you for help.
But it isn’t about me. Not really. It’s about the children.
I know you care for them. I know you want the best for them.
You’ll help me, won’t you? For the sake of the children? ”
Rachel turned back to look at Jennifer. Her face was open and vulnerable, her eyes wide. Her hands were clasped together.
Did she mean it? Had she really come here just for the sake of the children?
Well, it didn’t really matter, Rachel supposed.
It was for the sake of the children that she would help.
Because she cared so much for Mason already, and because every child in that school deserved the best they could get, she would help her stepsister.
Even though it felt a little like a betrayal of herself to do it.
“I’ll come up with some ideas for lessons,” she said.
“Oh, Rachel…thank you,” Jennifer enthused, jumping to her feet. “You’re the kindest sister anyone could ever ask for.”
She threw her arms around Rachel. Rachel stood stock-still in her arms, frozen. It was the first time Jennifer had ever called her sister, and the word was barbed even though Jennifer’s voice and actions were sweet.
Jennifer released her. “I’ll come back in a few days to see what you’ve come up with,” she said, bouncing lightly on her toes.
“You can’t come to our house, of course.
Father can’t know you and I are in contact with one another—that wouldn’t be good for either one of us.
But I can’t wait to talk about lessons! Oh, thank you so much, Rachel.
The school is going to be just wonderful, and it’s all thanks to you. ”
She turned and hurried out of the house.
Rachel went to the window and gripped the edge of the counter to steady herself, watching as Jennifer boarded her wagon and drove away. As the wagon disappeared into the distance, Rachel’s head drooped, exhaustion catching up with her. The emotions of that encounter had left her wrung out.
She turned back toward the kitchen table and regarded it for a moment, feeling frozen.
Get the glasses. Clean up. After a few heartbeats, her body unlocked and she was able to walk over and pick up the lemonade glasses.
She carried them to the sink, noting that neither glass had much lemonade missing from it.
She was as nervous as I was, being here with me. It wasn’t easy for her either. But had she been nervous because she knew that she was asking for more than she had any right to? Or had she just been afraid of hearing the word no?
God, guide my hands in this. I want to help the children.
Perhaps I even want to help Jennifer. But it will be such a challenge for me.
Little though I like to admit it…I am still angry with her.
Perhaps I always will be. I know it isn’t her fault that she was so favored over me, that I was treated so poorly.
But at the same time, it would have been possible for her to treat me with kindness even as her father was cruel.
She never chose to do that. She always chose to be harsh and unloving.
Help me find a way to set aside the hard feelings I still have about those years so that I can be what the children need me to be.
Help me to help Jennifer—even though she never helped me.
***
That night, after everyone was asleep, Rachel sat awake in the bunkhouse she shared with Ruth, thinking about her visit with Jennifer.
Sister, Jennifer had said. The word had stayed with her, and Rachel couldn’t help feeling the weight of it. Jennifer had never been her sister. There had always been distance. But a part of Rachel had always longed for closeness.
Was it possible it was truly being offered?
If it was, she couldn’t turn it down.
Ruth was a heavy sleeper. Rachel had learned early that it wouldn’t cause problems for her to light a candle and keep it burning into the night.
Sometimes she liked to lie awake reading through her favorite Bible verses at the end of the day, and Ruth was always so exhausted from ranch work that she fell right to sleep.
Tonight, though, Rachel wasn’t reading. If she was going to help Jennifer, she had work to do. She pulled her worn notebook out of her drawer, flipped it open in front of her, and sat cross-legged on her bed, hunched over and scribbling ideas for lessons.
As she wrote, the last remnants of her resistance to her stepsister seemed to waft away.
Perhaps God had answered her prayer—or maybe it was just that she was so excited about the idea of having the chance to help with teaching that she had found herself willing to look past their history.
Whatever the reason, ideas flowed from her pen.
She thought of creative writing assignments she could give the children—requests for them to write stories about their own lives, or about characters they had made up.
She thought of the possibility of teaching arithmetic using pieces of candy, which ought to excite any child to work hard.
She thought of days spent out in the schoolyard talking about nature, about what made the grass grow and what different kinds of animals liked to eat.
Teaching—and learning—were all about imagination, and she would encourage the children to use their minds.
And through it all, she would remind them that everything they saw around them came from God, and that they should be thankful to Him. She would lead them in daily prayer…
Her pen stopped, scratching against the paper.
No, she wouldn’t do any of that. Because even though she was writing up these lessons, even though she was being permitted to contribute her ideas, she wasn’t a teacher.
And she wouldn’t be. This was still Jennifer’s class, and Jennifer would be the one teaching these lessons.
All Rachel was doing was writing down ideas.
The flame of jealousy flickered back to life.
She closed her eyes, breathed slowly, and released that unworthy emotion.
God, give me the strength to do the right thing—to help Jennifer, and to help the children, without making it about myself or what I wish I could have.
Help me to recall that I am building a beautiful new relationship by doing this—that I may walk away with a real sister instead of an enemy. That would make everything worthwhile.
God, please open Jennifer’s heart to me and let her truly love me as a sister.
The prayer acted as a soothing balm, and she was able to release her jealousy once more. It was odd…she hadn’t struggled so much with these feelings when she had been living in Nathan’s house. It had been easier, in a way, to accept that she and Jennifer were living two very different lives.
All she had cared about then was getting away.
Now she had gotten away. She was free of that life. But it had left her, somehow, wanting even more. It was no longer enough for her to be out from under Nathan’s thumb. Her dreams had gotten bigger.
That was a frightful thing.
She shut her notebook and tucked it under her pillow, determined to stop thinking like this.
If we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.
She had those things now. More than that, she had all the freedom she had ever dreamed of.
It would be greedy of her to ask for anything else.
God—make me grateful. Let it be enough.