Until We Reach Home (48 page)

“I’m not giving up. He’ll find me, I know he will. And in the meantime, the job at the theater is the answer to my prayers. I signed a contract, and I’m going to keep my word. I love both of you, but I think it’s time for me to grow up.”

Elin still wasn’t sure that Sofia and Kirsten were making the right choices, but both of them seemed determined to carry through with their plans, with or without her approval. They all started walking again, taking their time. Elin didn’t want to return to the boardinghouse yet and deal with Aunt Hilma after the emotional upheaval she’d experienced today. Her sisters seemed fragile, as well. They kept walking.

Kirsten was pregnant. Elin still couldn’t comprehend it, nor could she shed the feeling that it was somehow her fault. She had promised Mama that she would take care of her sisters . . . but Sofia had said it wasn’t up to Elin to fix everything. And Mrs. Anderson had said that even parents weren’t responsible for their children’s decisions, much less sisters. Being an adult meant living with your mistakes.

Kirsten and Sofia had their own lives to live—and Elin had hers. The thought frightened her. What purpose would she have without her sisters to care for? They rounded the corner and the little park came into sight.

“Don’t go to Wisconsin, Elin,” Kirsten said. “You can live with me.”

“Or with me,” Sofia said. “The rent is all paid. We can move in right now, in fact.”

“No, let’s squeeze one more free meal out of Aunt Hilma first,” Kirsten said with a smile.

“We did make all that jam for her today,” Sofia added. “Do you think she’ll give us a jar to take with us?”

“Ha!” Kirsten scoffed.

It was good to see her sisters laughing again after all the tears they had shed. But Elin realized that she hadn’t answered their question about moving to Wisconsin. “I don’t know if I can stay here with you or not,” she finally said. “I told Gunnar Pedersen to write and let me know if the offer of marriage is still good—and if I would still be welcome up there. If he and the others want me to come, I can’t renege a second time.”

They moved out of the boardinghouse that evening after supper, dragging their trunk through the streets once again, this time to the room that Sofia had rented. Kirsten would live there until Knute found a house and arranged their wedding with Pastor Johnson. Elin would stay until she heard from Gunnar.

“Maybe those farmers are fed up with us by now,” Kirsten said, “Maybe they just want their money, not you.”

“Maybe,” Elin said. But she knew from Gunnar’s friendly letters that he would likely accept her offer, even if the other farmers didn’t. She couldn’t turn him down and dash his hopes again, even if it meant leaving her sisters behind.

Kirsten paused to rest, setting down her end of the trunk. “I’ll be glad when we finally have a real home so we don’t have to drag this trunk around anymore. It would have been easier to haul a dead troll all the way from Sweden than this thing. At least a troll would have been soft enough to sit on.”

They had stopped to rest in front of a dress shop, and Sofia gazed at the gowns in the window. “You know what?” she said. “I think Kirsten should buy an American dress for her wedding. Her birthday is tomorrow. I still have one dollar left after paying our rent. Do you have any money, Elin?”

“I spent all of it on train tickets to Wisconsin. They might let me cash them in, but I don’t know.”

“Do you still have your money, Kirsten?”

“I do, but what about food? Don’t we need to eat?”

“No, I think a new dress is much more important,” Sofia said. “Don’t you, Elin?”

Elin looked at her sisters’ hopeful faces. She didn’t want to be as stingy as Aunt Hilma, and she was tired of worrying. “Yes, I do,” she said. “As soon as the stores open tomorrow morning, I think we should all go shopping.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“H
APPY BIRTHDAY
, K
IRSTEN
,” Elin said the moment Kirsten opened her eyes.

She sat up and looked around sleepily before recognizing the hotel room that Sofia had rented. It had bare walls and an odd musty smell that had intensified overnight. The bed they shared was too cramped for all three of them, so they had slept crosswise with their feet hanging off the side. It wouldn’t be comfortable to sleep that way for very long, but Kirsten knew she would be leaving soon. She and Knute were getting married in three days. She wanted to savor these last few days with her sisters.

“Yes, happy birthday,” Sofia said. “This is going to be a wonderful year for you, I just know it.”

Kirsten turned nineteen today. When she and Knute had applied for their marriage license she’d learned that he was twenty-nine. The sorrow he carried with him made him seem much older.

“I’m hungry,” she said as she buttoned up her skirt. The smell of toast was drifting up from the hotel dining room, below them. “I can’t believe Aunt Hilma didn’t at least give us some bread crusts when we moved out last night.”

“I was hoping for some of the jam Sofia and I made,” Elin said.

“We’ll buy food while we’re out,” Sofia said. “We’re going shopping this morning to buy Kirsten some new clothes, remember?”

They finished getting dressed and were trying to decide which store to visit first when someone knocked on their door. Kirsten, who was standing closest to it, unlocked it and opened it a crack.

“Knute! What are you doing here?”

“I’m on my way to work, but I wanted to tell you that I found a small house for rent yesterday. The landlord will be there at eleven o’clock this morning if you want to go over and see it. If you think it is suitable, you may pay him this rent money, and he will give you the keys.” He pushed an envelope into her hands.

“Of course it will be suitable,” she said, laughing. “Anything is better than this creepy place—or the jail cell we stayed in for a night.” He didn’t smile at her attempts to be lighthearted. Kirsten tried to recall if she had ever seen him smile. “Listen, Knute, I’m in no position to be choosy, so—”

“I am not a very good judge of kitchen facilities. I was concerned that they may not be adequate.”

He was so serious and intense that Kirsten’s mood sobered, as well. “I see. In that case, I’ll be happy to walk over and have a look at the house.”

“I wrote the address on the envelope. The house is close to the streetcar line that I take to work. And it’s only a few blocks from the market. Here, take some money for the streetcar. It’s a long walk from here.”

She let him dump some loose change into her hand, thinking she would walk to the house instead and buy breakfast for her sisters with the money. Besides, she didn’t want him to know that she had no idea how to travel by streetcar. Kirsten closed the door after Knute left and turned around to tell her sisters the good news.

“Look!” she said, waving the envelope. “Knute found—”

“We heard everything,” Elin said. “Sorry. It was impossible not to hear.”

“That’s all right. Do you want to walk over there with me at eleven o’clock and see it?”

“I can’t,” Sofia said. “I have to rehearse at the theater this morning at ten.”

“I’ll go with you,” Elin said. “Where is it?”

Kirsten looked down at the address. “Knute said it’s a long walk. He said to take the streetcar, but the exercise will be good for me. I don’t want to get too fat. Remember how huge Mrs. Jansson from back home used to get every time she had a baby?”

“You won’t get that big,” Elin said, laughing. “Mrs. Jansson was huge even when she wasn’t expecting.”

“How could you tell?” Sofia asked. “She was always expecting! Didn’t she have about two dozen children?”

“It sure seemed like it,” Elin said. “But none of them ever stood still long enough for anyone to count.”

Kirsten felt tears stinging her eyes as she listened to her sisters’ laughter. “I’m going to miss you both so much,” she said softly.

“Don’t start talking that way yet,” Elin scolded. “We have three more days until your wedding, and I don’t want to run out of tears before then.”

“Let’s go shopping.” Sofia stood and herded Kirsten and Elin toward the door. “Wait until you see how nice it is to have something new. You’ll feel like a real American once you look like one. I felt like I had finally left Sweden behind when I put on my new clothes.”

They couldn’t afford to shop at Marshall Field’s, where Sofia had shopped. Instead, they went to a store in their Swedish neighborhood that sold everything from ladies’ dresses and men’s hats to dishes and household goods. Kirsten purchased a simple black skirt made of patterned brilliantine for $1.35 and a white taffeta waist for $1.65, spending all but one dollar of her pay.

“We can get by on one dollar until Sofia gets paid,” Elin said. “We can buy day-old bread at the bakery and bargain for damaged fruit and vegetables at the farmers’ market the way Aunt Hilma does.”

The clerk folded Kirsten’s new clothes and wrapped them in a brown paper bundle tied with string. “I’m going to save these clothes until the wedding,” Kirsten said.

It took her and Elin half an hour to walk to the house Knute had rented. Sofia showed them the Viking Theater on the way but had to remain behind to rehearse.

“I still can’t imagine our shy little Sofia singing on a stage in front of hundreds of people,” Kirsten said as she and Elin walked on. “Who would have ever thought?”

“I’m still not too sure I like the idea.” Elin said. “I hope she’s safe and that nothing happens—”

“She’ll be fine. She has grown up so much since we left home, hasn’t she? Sofia used to be so quiet and shy and prissy; now she’s reading the Bible all the time and telling us to pray about everything.”

“She reminds me of Mama.”

“Yes . . . Mama would be very proud of her.”

Kirsten found the white-shingled house on a quiet side street a few blocks from the main thoroughfare. It was small and square with a peaked roof and a tiny front porch, and it sat perched on a patch of grass like a rock in the middle of a stream. The landlord sat waiting for them on the porch steps with the key. Kirsten recognized the first word he said to them—the American greeting
hello
, but that was all as he babbled on and on in a friendly way.

“I don’t speak English,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry. May I see inside?” She smiled and pointed to the door. “Inside . . . ?” He finally seemed to understand. He unlocked the door for her, then stood aside as she and Elin went in to look around.

The three downstairs rooms—living room, dining room, and kitchen—were lined up in a straight row from the front door to the back door. The house had wooden floors and plenty of windows to let in sunlight and fresh air. A staircase led to two small bedrooms beneath the eaves.

“This is a very nice kitchen,” Elin said as she looked around. It had a sink with indoor plumbing, a small cast-iron cookstove, and a cupboard for dishes hanging on one wall. “It’s just right for the two of you.”

“There will soon be three of us,” Kirsten said. “Knute is going to send to Sweden for his son. And the baby will make four of us, of course.” It was still hard for Kirsten to imagine that a real live baby was growing inside her. When she did remember, the idea of giving birth and caring for a newborn terrified her.

“It’s a nice little house,” Elin said. “You’re going to take it, I hope.”

Kirsten came out of her reverie. The landlord stood with the key in his hand, waiting for her answer. “Yes,” she told him, using one of the few English words she knew. “Yes . . . yes.”

She handed him the money Knute had given her and kept the envelope with the address printed on it. The landlord gave her the key, then pulled a second key from his pocket and handed it to her, chattering on and on in English. She hoped he wasn’t giving important instructions about how to take care of the house, because she didn’t understand a word he said.

“Thank you,” she told him in Swedish. “Thank you very much.” When he was gone she turned to Elin. “We need to be smart like Sofia and start learning English.”

“You should learn,” Elin said. “I probably won’t need it up in Wisconsin.”

Kirsten exhaled. “I wish you would change your mind about going there. I need you, Elin. Especially with a baby on the way and—”

“I know, I know. But let’s not worry about it until I hear from Gunnar Pedersen. Shall we take a look at the backyard now?”

The little plot of grass had a scrawny oak tree in one corner and a square patch of weeds that might have once been a vegetable garden in the other. A clothesline stretched from the back porch to a pole on the side of the yard. Kirsten pictured a row of flapping diapers on it and suddenly felt alone. And scared.

“This will be a nice place for Knute’s little boy to play,” Elin said.

Kirsten nodded, but the truth was, the yard looked desolate and bleak to her. She remembered how she and her sisters had roamed the woods near their farm at home, searching for fairy glens and pretending that a pile of boulders was a giant’s castle. She turned and went back into the house.

“Where will you get furniture?” Elin asked as they walked through the empty rooms again.

“Knute is going to look through the advertisements in his newspaper. He says people are always buying new furniture and selling their old things.”

“Really? Don’t Americans hand things down to their children and grandchildren like we did back home? It means so much more when the tables and chairs were in your family for years, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but a lot of Americans immigrated here from someplace else, remember? They had to leave all the furniture behind, just like we did.”

“I guess you’re right. Things change . . . and life goes on.”

Kirsten didn’t want to think about change—there had been too many changes in her life as it was—but she knew that she had to. Elin was right. Life went on.

“It’s a nice little house,” Elin said again. “You’ll make it into a home.”

On the night before the wedding, Elin unpacked the trunk and divided up the things they had brought with them from Sweden, letting Kirsten have first choice of what she wanted for a wedding present. Kirsten decided on the silver candlesticks that had belonged to their grandmother. Elin chose the copper coffee kettle. Sofia took Mama’s hymnbook and the wooden bowl painted with rosemaling. Then they divided up the linen towels and aprons and table runners that Mama had embroidered and the wooden utensils that Papa had carved.