A Fireproof Home for the Bride Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Catherine, Ann, and Hedda,

  the glittering points of my triangle

  What shall I do, if all my love,

  My hopes, my toil, are cast away,

  And if there be no God above,

  To hear and bless me when I pray?

  —ANNE BRONTË,

  “The Doubter’s Prayer”

  Prologue

  His Wonders to Perform

  October 1952

  A hazy dawn broke over a small lean-to of weathered gray planks and multicolored leafy branches that had been meticulously assembled the day before, the work completed mostly between the morning chores and those dispatched in the afternoon. Emmy looked up at the speckled yellow covering of boughs that she had carefully chosen from the row of shrubs and smaller trees that edged the barren late-autumn field of sheared cornstalks, their papery remains bent toward the earth, waiting for the punishment of the long Minnesota winter to grind them into dust.

  Emmy exhaled into the frisky air of late autumn, gauging the temperature by how quickly the cloud of visible breath dissipated. She’d been quiet for the better part of an hour, too excited to long for the fitful sleep that had been disrupted by her mother’s insistent “get up and out, he’s here, go on,” as though the girl needed more encouragement. Her heart had felt as though a small, tremulous rabbit had somehow gotten down inside of her and wanted desperately to be out in the field, in the shelter, waiting. Emmy had been given a cup of black coffee from Ambrose’s thermos when they had first arrived, and the sweet, bitter taste of it now lingered in the pockets of her cheeks, where her tongue kept poking in an attempt to keep her voice still. All summer, she’d waited for this day to arrive, for Ambrose to return from college in Michigan and make good on his promise to take her on her first deer hunt. When he’d gone off to school four years before, she’d been only eight—old enough to shoot a BB gun, but too small to keep a rifle from bruising her shoulder. Since then, determined not to fail when the time came, she’d carried endless pails of milk and loaded countless hay bales onto flatbeds until her shoulders were high and square like those of a young man.

  It should have been her grandfather next to her in the blind. He’d always told her that when the time came, when he felt she was ready, he would take her out into the shelter belt of trees next to the strip of land they planted every year with feed corn in order to draw the big and small game for hunting. Instead she waited with the neighbor boy—now a man—who had served as the third point of their triangle: the replacement grandson, the respectful and diligent student of the outdoors. The three of them had trapped gophers and fox, caught walleyes and northerns, and on lazy afternoons sat in a row, whittling objects out of soft wood, the careless soapy shavings drifting across the porch at their feet. It didn’t seem right that the old man wasn’t present, but at least his gun was there, cradled in Emmy’s lap. The rifle was exactly like the one he had used in the army—not ideal for a young girl, but its familiar length of walnut wood and the satisfying throw of the cold metal bolt felt right to Emmy. When her grandfather died quick-slow from a thing gone wrong in his head, this rifle was promised to her, and she was promised to Ambrose. That had been when she was ten. Now Emmy was twelve, and with each passing year, her understanding of the world grew by inches to where she was almost a woman, certainly no longer content to be a child.

  The first orange ray of sun split through the slot they’d carved in the screening plank, and a sharp stripe of light illuminated the skim of grassy green behind Ambrose’s blue eyes. He’d gone away to college a lanky, quiet boy and come back a sturdy but no more voluble man. Emmy looked at his nose in profile, surprised by how it had taken on the prominently pointed shape of an arrowhead, the kind chipped from opaque flint that her grandfather had taught her to find, brown against the windblown black soil of spring. Once they had found bones as well, and not far from where she currently sat, a jawbone that retained long, sharp, glossy yellowed teeth.

  At the crunch of rustled leaves in the distance, Ambrose moved from his squat into a creeping crawl, picking up his shotgun as he squinted into the piercing daylight. A slight nod of his head brought her gaze level alongside of his. The deer was small and tentative, its spindled legs lifting as though recoiling from the singe of a hot frying pan; the animal’s velvety nose lowering and stretching toward the mound of shucked corn Emmy had piled a respectable distance from the blind. From instinct, she bit off her right mitten—the rough red wool of it lingering on her bottom lip—and raised the smooth wooden flank of the gun to the point of her high cheekbone, letting the stock settle into its groove against her shoulder, just as she had done hundreds of times since her father had allowed her to take ownership of the gun in January, her twelfth birthday. Most girls would treat a baby doll as well as Emmy had polished and cleaned that Springfield, meticulously running the oiled rags over, around, and through the elegant length of it.

  “Go,” Ambrose said so minutely above a whisper that she might have imagined the word. Emmy silently righted the tiny ladder sight atop the gun’s metal and lined it up with the notch at the end of the barrel. She recalled her grandfather’s scorn of men who had come back from the war and affixed fancy scopes to their hunting rifles, as though this gave them an advantage over the animal that they didn’t deserve. Emmy inhaled deeply and began counting as she waited for the deer to finish feeding. It raised its head in Emmy’s direction—a mistaken benediction—the tufted white ears pointing forward and then back, a hasty indication of something ill on the wind, which caused the deer to lift its nose higher. Emmy opened her left eye on the number sixty and then pinched it shut again. Though she had tossed on her pillow the night before, her nerves were now absent as she slipped her finger into the trigger guard on the next inhale and gently squeezed. The crack of the shot echoed beyond the small makeshift room and out into the field, where it ripped through the flurrying sound of many wings ascendant, and Emmy couldn’t help sitting back on her heels, defeated, knowing that this was the one shot of the day, certain that she’d acted in haste. His low, soft whistle told her otherwise.

  “Well, I never,” Ambrose said, lifting the earflap of his winter cap with a finger and scratching at his scalp before picking up a leather haversack that she knew had been given to Ambrose by her grandfather, who had used it during the First World War. “Let’s go dress her.”

  “Is that all?” she asked, the gun only one bullet lighter in her hands but bearing the same weight as a length of folded cloth for all it meant to her in the order of the morning.

  He took his hat off completely and struck his thigh with it. “All? You kill your first deer in the first hour of the first day with your first shot?” She fought down a prideful smile as she looked up into his reserved face, though she could sense a glint of ownership flicker deep in his eyes. He broke open his shotgun, slipping the unspent cartridge i
nto his coat pocket before bending the gun in the crook of his arm and muttering, “Is that all.” He shook his head and walked away from the blind. She followed, her legs unsteady in the warmth of the sun. They’d had a good number of Indian summer days, and the heavy field coat she’d chosen in the cold kitchen was now smothering. She shrugged it off and let it drop to the inky dirt as she took two steps to each of his in order to reach the prostrate animal in stride. He lifted the doe’s head and turned the snout skyward. The eyes were wide open and seemed to Emmy as if they hinted at a more complicated purpose than simple life or death. As she leaned closer, Emmy’s tight white braids brushed the deer’s cheek, and Emmy caught her own beveled reflection in the glassy eye. Under the muzzle, at the base of the velvet tan neck, Ambrose pointed at a muddy-colored dot where the bullet had entered.

  “I did that,” she said, reaching a bare finger to the hole.

  “Heart shot,” he replied. “Cleanest I ever seen.” With a quick flick of his wrist, he shifted the deer onto its back. “Yearling. She’s small, but pretty fattened up.”

  Emmy stayed in her crouch next to the doe’s head as Ambrose unrolled a length of leather he’d pulled from the haversack, revealing an assortment of knives and a small saw. He anchored his knees between the upended hind legs of the doe, then picked up the largest knife, slipped it from its leather sheath, and pointed the serrated tip into the lowest part of the doe’s belly. “Give me your hand,” he said, and Emmy complied, feeling the bumpy calluses that dotted his palm scrape across her knuckles as they grasped the smooth white handle of the heavy knife. He drew her hand quickly and with precision up the tender front of the animal until the blade reached the rib cage, at which point Ambrose gripped her hand tightly enough to make her wince as he forced the knife through the hard sternum. The cracking sound their effort produced caused Emmy to shift her eyes elsewhere, taking in the rising steam from the gaping incision, the milky sack of odd-shaped organs pressing out of the animal and jiggling with the pull of Ambrose’s intent. Where is all the blood? Emmy wondered. Where is proof that a living thing is now dead? She slouched back onto her heels as he released her and reached into the cavity, drawing into the daylight a bright red misshapen ball still connected to the interior of the animal by snarly cords. Emmy flinched slightly as she imagined the heart beating in his large bloodstained hand; saw the tear of metal into flesh where he pressed his thumb and glanced at her with more reserved approval. He handed it to her, richly warm with the last unpumped, unspilled fluid. Here was the evidence she had sought, the warrant for her crime. Ambrose cut free the veins and arteries, and her hand jolted away from the deer, sending the bloody orb into the air.

  “Pay attention,” he said, sticking a curved knife into the cavity with a practiced twist.

  This is not me, she told herself as the resolve to be like them abandoned her and she stood up. A dozen yards away in the trees something moved. The girl stumbled blindly toward the sound, feeling a burning need to relieve herself of the coffee and all else it had washed down. So much of her life had been like this: slow until it was fast, right until it was wrong. She would cautiously pad forward on kitten feet only to find the milk pail overturned and empty. This is how it felt—the anticipation of joy shifted in a moment to regret. As she neared the edge of the field, a resettled brace of pheasants flushed at her feet and caught her up in their swirling ascent. She spun away from the towering line of elms and waved her hands above her head, shooing the lifted birds in an empathetic panic, tired of the world proving her place was not where she thought it to be.

  “Stop playing,” he shouted, the deer now draped over his shoulders, the entrails mounded next to the darkened patch of ground where the animal had bled out. Ambrose held two twiggy legs in each hand, and his arms were speckled a rusty red up to the elbows, where he’d pushed his jacket sleeves out of the way. “We need to get her skinned before church.”

  “Of course,” Emmy whispered, her voice an empty honeycomb, brittle in the cooling wind. She would be more cautious, she resolved as she watched his deer-slung figure move away, more patient and careful. She followed him slowly, gathering her coat, the guns, and the haversack as she went, hoping that this thing now done—this deer now dead—would be the last by her own hand.

  Part I

  Disinheritance

  January 1958

  One

  Faith Alone

  The day after her eighteenth birthday, Emmaline Nelson sat with her spine hovering a good two inches away from the straight, cold back of an oaken pew, her feet planted next to each other on the pine floor, knees pressed together as she’d been taught. Her wool serge skirt should have been cozy, but the nylon slip her mother had insisted she wear crackled like electric ice against her dark stockings from its contact with the charged January air. Her coat hung cold and useless out in the makeshift foyer, where her mother had made her leave it, even though the inside of the church was not much warmer than the air outdoors.

  Emmy worked hard at achieving what she hoped would look like a good Christian demeanor—eyes focused on the front of the church, Bible open to the day’s scripture reading on her lap, hands folded on the Good Book, mouth slightly open and whispering along with the Nicene Creed. She knew these words so well she no longer had to parse their meaning. She knew the service so well that she barely kept her thoughts on God. No, Emmy’s mind was quite understandably drawn over her right shoulder, pondering instead the man who would soon officially become her betrothed.

  The prayer over, Emmy cocked her head to the left and turned it just enough to steal a glance of Ambrose Brann. She could feel his steady gaze warm on her neck, even as the congregation stood to sing another hymn. It seemed as though Ambrose had always been there, somewhere, in and out of her memories of youth. They had played together when she was small, endless indulgent games of hide-and-seek at one farm or the other on Sunday afternoons while the grown-ups visited over coffee and her sister toyed with dolls on a flannel blanket stretched out in the grassy sunshine. At times inseparable, Emmy and Ambrose had walked through muddy spring-dense fields of ankle-deep black soil in order to place a penny on the railroad track down at the end of the farm’s quarter section, returning later in the day to find the bright copper disc pressed flat and smooth. He had taught her how to hunt, to clean a gun, to shave a piece of soft wood into a palm-sized cross, and after Grandfather Nelson died when she was ten, Ambrose’s economy of words had made her feel her loss less keenly, even though the few things he did share revealed little of his heart.

  Ambrose was a good deal older—nearly ten years—and yet he never seemed to mind his young companion, always extending to Emmy a level of familial love that promised to keep her comfortable the rest of her life. She tried to imagine what the weight of his silence might feel like in the stretch of time about to be set before them, and an unexpected feeling rose against it, a slight hiccup of concern.

  The Brann family’s status was considered a significant step up from her family, with Delmar Brann’s vast acreage of sugar beet fields and hundred head of fine beef cattle comprising the largest farm in the township. Unlike her Norwegian-born grandfather, Mr. Brann was second-generation American—a fact he frequently worked into conversation. Still, the two men had been the kind of friends who were more often seen together than apart, and it had been Grandfather Nelson’s dying wish for Emmy to marry Ambrose. She could learn to live in a quiet house, she supposed, or fill it with the noise of children by and by.

  Emmy waited to join in the singing a moment too long and felt a quick, sharp pinch delivered with dogged expertise to her upper left arm by her mother. As Emmy slowly stood, she took quiet note of the increase of her stature, for she recently had cleared the brim of her mother’s hat by a solid three inches. Emmy’s life up to now had been constrained by her mother’s views, her instructions, her limits. Yet somehow, a strange miracle had happened in September: Her father moved them from a shack on her grandmother’s farm near the sl
eepy town of Glyndon and into a small, tidy house in the much bigger city of Moorhead, Minnesota, across the Red River and in the shadow of Fargo, North Dakota. Emmy had entered her final year of high school surrounded by the kinds of ideas and knowledge that unfolded a crumpled sheet of possibility inside of her, and Karin’s influence had started to pull away from Emmy like warm taffy. The move had revealed tiny windows that were now opening onto new opportunities.

  On Emmy’s right the bright singing of her sister, Birdie, cut through Emmy’s preoccupations. Birdie had burst into the Nelson household three years after Emmy, a gift of uncomplicated grace and laughter among a previously glum trio. Sometimes Emmy wondered what would have become of them if Birdie hadn’t been born. Emmy’s own arrival had been less auspicious, coming as it had three months after their brother, Daniel, had died. With so much grief in such a small house how could anyone joyfully greet a red-faced, colicky girl? Instead, Emmy had slept in her grandmother’s bed, fed from a bottle and carried around on the older woman’s hip until Emmy was big enough to walk. When Karin had come home with Birdie, three-year-old Emmy eagerly accepted the role of mother’s helper, happy to be useful and wanted. She couldn’t remember much from those early years, and besides, she had quickly learned to appreciate the feeling of being needed more than loved. Now that she was eighteen, Emmy was ever more mindful of what kind of wife and mother she wanted to be, itching to cook meals the way she preferred, keep her own house, and create for her children a pocket of happiness that no one would fill with the pebbles of grim self-sacrifice. Marriage to Ambrose was not merely a promise to be fulfilled, it also seemed the only way forward, a destination she knew as well as any other, a place she could feel finally at home.