Tomorrow's Promise (The Hawks Mountain Series) by Elizabeth Sinclair Page B

on the knob, she paused and turned back to Faith. “From all I’ve heard, Cole is a good man. You may want to keep that in mind. Just because the good didn’t take in some men, God didn’t shut down the factory.”
    Faith stared at the closed door for several minutes after Granny Jo left. Could she be right? Had Faith misjudged Cole’s motives?
    Lizzie let out a wail. Faith roused herself from her thoughts. Poor Lizzie. Faith had gotten so engrossed in her own troubles that she forgot the poor baby was probably hungry. “Momma’s making supper, sweet thing.” She hurried off to the kitchen to add the pasta to the rapidly boiling water. Then she went back in the living room and picked up her daughter. “Momma’s sorry. Supper will be ready in just a bit.”
    The sound of a car in the driveway drew her attention from Lizzie. Cole? Apprehension riding heavy on her shoulders, she carried Lizzie to the living room and peeked around the curtain. What she saw took her breath away.
    Just what she needed to cap off an already crappy day.
    Chapter 9
    FAITH GRITTED HER teeth and opened her front door for her impromptu visitor. She stared into a face that she knew so well and had hoped she’d not have to see until she steeled herself for the meeting.
    “Hello, Mother.”
    “Faith.” Celia Chambers looked from Faith to Lizzie. The uncompromising line of the woman’s mouth clearly exhibited her condemnation of the child.
    Lizzie seemed to sense her grandmother’s censure and cuddled closer to Faith. Fuzzy was clutched so tightly against the child that his head was bent backwards.
    Celia turned her attention away from the cowering child and back to Faith. When she spoke, her tone was cold and unrelenting. “Since you seem to have forgotten your manners and never came to call on your daddy and me, I decided that I’d come to you. However, you could have come to your home and said hello.”
    Disbelief washed over Faith. Not for a moment did she think that her mother missed her, or her reason for showing up here unannounced was as simple as a social call on her “wayward daughter.” Faith almost said that she’d planned to stop by, but it was a lie, and her mother was an expert at telling when her only daughter was lying.
    Instead, Faith said, “ This is my home, Mother.”
    Her mother looked around the small, but neat living room. She raised one eyebrow. “Hmm, such as it is.” She turned back to Faith. “Are you going to ask me in, or have you forgotten everything I taught you?”
    Forgotten? Not likely. Faith remembered every excruciating moment of her childhood. It still had the power to make her want to scream that God never intended for people to be like her mother. He wanted children to be happy and to live lives that didn’t include being reprimanded for breathing the wrong way “because they’d go to hell.” And her father should have stood up for his daughter, not hovered silently in the shadows while she endured her mother’s unrelenting rules and reprimands.
    Faith stepped aside and prayed that this visit would be brief. “Come in, Mother. Have a seat.”
    Celia walked to the sofa, looked at it for a moment, and then sat on the very edge, as if getting ready to run if some warrior germ should launch an attack on her. Faith had forgotten her mother’s aversion to dirt, among a long list of other things that had caused her to turn up her nose. Dirt and germs wouldn’t have dared cross the threshold of the Chambers’ home. Faith refused to make Lizzie grow up in the same antiseptic surroundings that she had. She wanted the house to be clean but comfortable.
    While her mother arranged the dark brown skirt of her dress just so, Faith took stock of the woman who had raised her. Celia rarely smiled, so no laugh lines creased the skin around her mouth. Contrarily, the frown lines across her forehead had dug deep furrows in the skin. Blue eyes, the color of a frozen lake, held no emotion. More gray peppered