Fairest in the West- Chapter Eight:

Dalton had to admit she was a good cook. He’d even go so far as to call it amazing. And his boys seemed to take to her- after they’d gotten over the fact that her name was Snow.

“Snow White?” Andy demanded when she was properly introduced to everyone at lunch. “That ain’t a name!”

“Yes, it is,” the girl insisted.

“Nuh-uh.”

“He’s right,” Drew jumped in. “Snow ain’t a name.”

That was funny, coming from twins named Andy and Drew.

“I think it’s a nice name,” Aaron noted, his tone of wonder still present. He hadn’t quite gotten over the idea that she was a fairy.

“I think it’s stupid,” Jacob felt the need to add.

Cyril grinned. “Yeah, who’d go and name their girl Snow?”

“My mama,” she said, with a small smile. “The way my daddy tells it, she was carrying me one winter when she got herself stuck in a barn during a snow storm and she felt me coming. She had me there on the barn floor, keeping her mind off the pain by focusing on the barn’s little window, which had come open in the storm. She liked that image- the dark wood of the window’s frame, the red shutter with the peeling paint that banged open and shut, and the snow outside, white and clear and pure. And there I was, all white skinned and red-faced, with my shock of dark hair. And so she decided Snow White was a good name for me.”

She wrinkled up her nose and laughed then. “I know it’s a silly thing, but it’s all I have of her, the only thing I still have from before she died.”

She blinked back tears, wiping at the few that escaped and rolled down her cheeks.

That shut them up. Even for a lot of boys, they all knew you didn’t make jokes about someone’s mother. Especially someone’s dead mother.

“Don’t mind them, ma’am,” Cyril said, knocking the one closed to him- who happened to be Jed, a completely innocent bystander- upside the head. “They’re not so bad once you get to know them.”

She looked up and smiled at him. “It’s all right. I think you all aren’t so bad already.”

“So are you planning to stay then?” Andy asked, blunt and to the point. Dalton cringed at the words and opened his mouth to respond when she beat him to it.

“If you’ll have me,” she replied. “I have nowhere else to go.”

They all clambered to tell her that of course they would have her and then it was Drew who asked what she meant by having nowhere else to go.

“Don’t you have a pa?”

Her face grew sad and distant and it took her a moment to speak. “I have a daddy, but he’s away more often than not. Leaves me alone with my stepmother who doesn’t much like me. She- she tried to kill me.”