Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All by Jane Yolen

wondered. Celebrate what? But I didn’t ask. Instead, looking down at the ground, I asked, “Which church?”
    I tried to speak casually, as if the question didn’t matter, but she’d guessed in a moment. Smiling that serpent smile, she waited for me to look up and notice, and only then turned away.
    It should have been a warning. It certainly was a sign. But I didn’t recognize it until later. Much later.
     
     
    Stepmama’s church was far enough away that we had to drive to get there. It was rare that I was allowed in her car. I’d been in it only twice in my life, once when I’d had a toothache so bad my cheek swelled up to twice its size and I had to be taken to the dentist out in Cowan, fourteen miles away; once when I’d had a tonsillitis attack that was so bad, Stepmama took me to the hospital in Richwood, over an hour on the twisting road.
    If I’d been looking for signs, the weather was bright and the sky still shining, the color of apricots. The roads were clear as we made our way up the mountain. It was warm enough that we had the windows down. Anyone watching us might have thought they were seeing a girl and her mother driving off into the evening in companionable silence. A girl dressed in a modest long skirt, her mother with a face scrubbed clean of lipstick and powder and a navy blue scarf covering her hair. I thought it a peculiar way to dress for church. Cousin Nancy and her friends always wore their finest. But there we were, in the dowdiest of clothing, and Stepmama was looking decidedly unlike herself.
    Well, at least the silence was real.
    The night birds were already singing. One had a high-pitched squeak that sounded like a door that needed oiling: Aek-aek, aek-aek. And then the whip-poor-wills started up. I tried to pretend they were angels following me, just in case, but it was just the ordinary kind of birdsong you hear on a spring night.
    Soon enough, I knew, the sky would be full of stars. Sometimes on the mountain, they seemed close enough to touch.
    When we rounded the hairpin turn going out of town, the trees closed in overhead like curtains, and cold air suddenly rushed in through the open windows.
    “Close your window tight,” Stepmama said. It was to be the only thing she said to me until we reached the church.
     
     
    We drove for maybe a half hour more along the curving road, then suddenly turned off the blacktop onto a country lane. Another few hundred yards and I saw an old building backed up against the tall, dark trees. Once upon a time it had probably been somebody’s house, but now it had a plywood steeple tacked up over the second floor, the top of it reaching above the roof like a hand signaling for help.
    There was something carved over the front door. As we got closer, I could read it: With Signs Holy Church.
    I said the words out loud, then turned to Stepmama. “What does that mean?” But she didn’t answer.
    We drove nearly up to the church door, and I was afraid we were going to drive right in, but at the last moment she turned the wheel sharply and landed us up on the grass. There were about a dozen dark-colored pickups parked close by.
    Only one man was outside the church, standing by the front door. He was sucking hard on a cigarette as if to get it all smoked down before the service began. When he saw Stepmama, he let some of the smoke drift back out through his nose, suggesting a banked fire.
    “We’re here,” said Stepmama to me.
    I didn’t say, “Obviously.” Stepmama never said anything obvious. There had to be a reason that she told me. Maybe an emphasis, I thought. Like underlining something in an essay, which my teacher said was one way of letting the reader know you really mean something.
    We got out of the car and walked to the door.
    “Evening, Miz Morton,” the smoking man said. “Things are about to start. Reverend Fred has some new—”
    Stepmama stopped him with a hard glance.
    “Some news,” the man said, flicking away the