Mail Order May: Planting A Garden of Love

By Helen Keating

Mail Order May: Planting A Garden Of Love, is a beautiful story about a reluctant mail order bride who is sent off to California by her parents after a cholera epidemic. What she finds there is a potential husband who is not as promised, and the desire to run right back home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Hart
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310383908

Book preview

Mail Order May: Planting A Garden Of Love

By

Helen Keating

Copyright 2014 Helen Keating

Smashwords Edition

May was a strong woman. Everyone had always told her so. Back home, she’d never been afraid to take on a spider even as the rest of her sisters shrieked and fell over each other trying to flee ahead of its spindly legs.

Even as a child, May had played rough with the boys at school, running around, falling down, getting dirty and hurt and coming away laughing.

Whenever the teacher switched her for misbehaving — which was often, as high-spirited as May was — May would never, ever cry.

I don’t know where you get all this spirit from, her mother would lament, putting a soothing paste on the palms of May’s hands when she would get home from school.

I do, her father rumbled. All of your other daughters are mice.

They were his daughters, too, of course, but he would never admit it when they acted like ninnies. May knew that her father had longed for sons — he had said as much more times than May could count — and she wondered sometimes whether it was that desire that had made her become bold — bolder than any of the other girls she knew.

It was her boldness that forced her parents’ hand when the influenza epidemic had swept through town, taking one of her sweet mouse sisters with it.

Don’t do this, May begged, crumpling the letter in her hand. I want to stay here with you. I can help. I’m eighteen years old.

A woman grown, her mother had said, her nose pink with grief.

We can’t stand to lose you, her father said, tears trembling as they rolled down his jowls. This is the only way.

This isn’t the only way, she protested, but her words were ignored. Her parents had made a decision, bolstered by the fact that May had never been afraid of anything her whole life.

Until now. Until that hateful letter.

As much as her father had complained about how timid her sisters were, May knew that he loved them dearly. Losing one of them to the epidemic had nearly killed him.

What he really feared had to go unsaid. If May herself had fallen to the scourge, there wouldn’t have been any coming back from that for him.

That didn’t mean, though, that she had to accept her parents’ decision. She fought them tooth and nail, as they tried to pack a trunk for her, stuffing her clothes and shoes into them, adding a few sets of bedding, including the family bible.

I don’t want to go, she cried, resorting to tears when reason, rage, and begging had all failed her.

Treat it like an adventure, her father said, tears glimmering in his own eyes. "You’ve always wanted to go on adventures. Think of all the times you went traipsing down to the river with