Excerpt: Losing Independence

Maggie tossed her bonnet onto the table and grabbed her own apron while Rose unloaded two baskets of groceries onto the shelves by the window. They glanced at each other, and then at me. Maggie spoke first.
“Really, Nory. Caleb Pringle?”
“What about him?” I grumped.
They glanced at each other again. “Well, for starters, he’s much too good looking,” Rose remarked. “If you were going to risk getting caught like that, you’d have done better to have been with someone pathetic like Virgil Barker. Then Mama and Papa would have thought you were just having pity on his humpback and walleye so as to make him more of a success with the other girls in town. But there’s no reason for you to have been kissing someone like Caleb Pringle in the middle of the day besides for pure lust.”
“That’s exactly right,” agreed Maggie. “But you never seem to mind the risk, huh? Well, serves you right, letting yourself get caught out like that.”
“Indeed,” put in Rose. “And in the stable? In broad daylight? Were you trying to get caught?”
“How did you find all this out already?” I groused.
Maggie rolled her eyes. “Don’t be foolish, Nory, we heard Papa shouting about something from clear across the street at the general store. We left the girls with Tim sorting buttons, and snuck up to the porch window. Papa and Mama are in the office now, no doubt plotting something horrible by way of punishment.”
“I wonder what they’ll cook up this time?” wondered Rose. “Remember the time I broke Coll’s nose with the fireplace poker because he was teasing me about liking Linus Stillwell? Papa told the chimneysweep to go home and made me crawl up there myself.”
“Oh, I remember. You smelled like soot for days, and stank up our bedroom with it. But I think I had it worse. Remember when I snuck out to go walking with Tim on Sunday afternoon, and we got caught in a rainstorm down by the river? And then there was a tornado and the skirt of my best dress got blown off by the wind, so I had to walk back home through town wearing nothing but the bodice of the dress and my pantalettes?”
“I surely do” laughed Rose. “I never could untie the knots Papa made in that rope, so you were stuck tied to your bedstead every Sunday for a month.”
“Oh, this is much worse, I’m sure” I grumbled. “They’ll probably make me stay home from every church social from now until Christmas. Or set me to cleaning the outhouse with a toothbrush.”
Maggie shook her head. “Naw, the punishment always fits the crime in this house, Nory, you know that.”
Fear gripped me. “So what do you think they’ll do? Cut off my lips? Scare off any boy that tries to court me until I’m thirty?”
Maggie pressed pie crust into an enormous pan, then wiped her hands on her apron. “I couldn’t say. But I do know that there’s no use in brooding about it. Now, where did Mama leave those chickens she plucked this morning?”