“All right, then. We can focus on getting to know each other,” said Rebecca. She folded her hands in her lap. “I understand you’re an accountant, Kurt. Is that as fascinating as I’ve always imagined it to be?” There was just a faint flicker of a smile in contrast to her sister’s wolfish and cold smile.
Rebecca might have more children than I did, and her life circumstances were certainly very different, but her manner made it easy to feel at home with her. I felt an instant connection to this woman. I’d heard some Mormons say that when that happened, it was a sign that you had been friends in the premortal life, as spirits, and destined to find each other again.
Kurt laughed gently, as easy with her as I was, it seemed. “It pays well and I’m good at it. It’s been a blessing to our family.”
“Except perhaps around April fifteenth?” Rebecca said.
“Well, it feels like less of a blessing then, certainly,” Kurt said. “But not all blessings feel like blessings when we’re getting through them.”
“That’s certainly true.” Rebecca’s face tightened and I wondered what “blessings” she was thinking about right then.
“Being the wife of a physician must be difficult, as well,” Kurt said.
Rebecca’s mouth twitched. “Relatively speaking, that is not the most difficult part of my life.”
We were all dancing around the elephant in the room at this point. Where was Stephen? Where were the other three wives? Why hadn’t he made sure they were all here in a row to greet us? I answered the question myself—because he wanted us to see how normal they were. Rebecca was normal. This one main house was normal. All of this was supposed to feel normal to us.
Except that it wasn’t.
“And you have five boys, I understand,” Rebecca said, turning to me. “Kenneth is, what, the third?”
“He’s the fourth,” I said, and then listed them off in order. “Adam, Joseph, Zachary, Kenneth, and Samuel. In fact, Samuel, the youngest, just left on a mission to Boston, so we’re empty nesters now.” There was pride in that, and just a tinge of sadness for me.
“I hope to meet the others some time. They must be good men, if Kenneth is a measure of them. I’m sure you’re very proud of the kind young man he is. He’s certainly won Naomi’s heart, which is no easy thing, let me tell you,” Rebecca said warmly. “When she left the house for college and I asked her how she would manage telling men she dated about her family, she said that she didn’t plan to date. I think her exact words were, ‘No man is worth that kind of trouble.’ And for more than four years, she continued to believe that. Until Kenneth.”
I felt oddly touched by this tribute to Kenneth, and I could see that Kurt was struck speechless.
“Thank you,” I said. “You must know, as a mother of grown children, that it’s always nice to hear good things about them when they’re out on their own.”
It occurred to me belatedly that I ought to say something nice about Naomi, but Kurt got there before me.
“Naomi seems very intelligent and ambitious. But to be honest, I was most impressed with how attached she is to her younger brothers and sisters. She must have a big heart,” he said.
I tensed, worried Kurt was going to say too much about Talitha and why we were really here, but he narrowly avoided it.
“Well,” Rebecca said, “Naomi has always taken good care of her younger siblings. She started babysitting when she was very young and I worried she would become resentful about it. When she was a teenager that was certainly a problem between us. She hated it when I asked her to watch the other children instead of doing her schoolwork. Then she would be up till all hours of the night finishing while everyone else was asleep. I thought going to college away from the family might make her selfish, but she still comes home and brings treats for the younger ones every time.”
Other teenagers argued with their mothers about spending too much time with friends; Naomi had apparently resented not having time to do schoolwork. That told me something about Naomi, and about how strict the rules of the family here were.
“I suppose you have another older daughter who has taken her place now as the main babysitter at home,” I said. I was thinking about Talitha, and how maybe it was possible that it wasn’t an adult who was abusing her at all, but one of the other trapped, older children.
“After Naomi, the next two oldest are Aaron and Joseph,” Rebecca said. “But they are both at the U of U and don’t live here, either. After that comes Ruth, who spends weekends at home, but goes up to USU during the week for school.”
So she had four children who were out of the house, similar to my five. But she had a younger family, as well. What would my life have been like if I’d had five more children after Samuel? What if I’d had to deal with other wives and children, and a gated compound that was difficult to leave? I could hardly imagine.
“Were they all homeschooled?” Kurt asked.