Caught in the Middle by Karen Sommers

Author:Karen Sommers [Sommers, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Thomas closed the door. He was proud of that. His instinct was to slam it shut, but he’d managed to close it quietly. For the most part. It might have shut a little more harshly than it would have otherwise, but it wasn’t a slam.

He walked back to the kitchen and stopped at the door. Rachel was furiously going through every part of the kitchen, pulling out flour and eggs and lard, piling them on the table next to the sticky mess of jars. She was a deranged butterfly, moving from one task to the next, scrambling to get each job done. One moment she was sweeping the mass of dirty dishes into the sink, the next she had the door open to the oven and was trying to grab more wood and cram it into the open maw. Tears streamed down her face.

Have I done this?

“Rachel?”

He’d startled her. She turned, and the misery in her eyes tore at his heart and stopped his breath. My God, she’s shaking!

“I’m sorry, Poppa, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize it was so late and I didn’t have anything ready for you and me…” The tears that had drawn a line down her cheeks became a torrent, and her fragile features collapsed into a rictus of abject misery.

He didn’t have to think about it. Thomas swept her up in his arms and slammed the oven door shut before the smoke could fill the kitchen. He dropped to one knee and held his little girl against him, the dirt and sweat and little scrapes from a day riding the fence all but forgotten. He buried his head in his daughter’s hair and made little reassuring sounds in her ear.

The child was inconsolable. Her small hands grabbed his shirt and bawled into his chest, sniffling, weeping, smearing him with jam and flour and ash. She made sounds that had no meaning, but the one that did tore through him, and he felt his soul begin to bleed.

“Mommy….” It was the only comprehensible thing she could work out as the sobbing wracked her body and clung tighter and tighter. Thomas held his child, trying to protect her, save her from the monsters of memory and confusion and trauma and knowing that he couldn’t. He couldn’t protect her from the past, from the world, from her legacy.

He found himself weeping as he held her, crying because she was too small to bear the stress she felt, and he needed to help her, to ease the pain in any way he could.

He scooped her up and carried her to a chair, setting her on his lap, covering her with his arms and resting his chin over her head. “Shhhh,” he whispered and began to rock back and forth on the chair. “it’s ok, honey, it’s ok…”

Desperate, he cleared his throat and softly sang,

“Sleep my child and peace attend thee

All through the night

Guardian angels God will send thee

All through the night

Soft, the drowsy hours are creeping

Hill and vale in slumber sleeping

I my loving vigil keeping

All through the night.

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