“That’s a lie!” Lan burst out. His hand was clenched around mine so hard that it hurt. “Eff was playing skip-jacks on the back step, all by herself, and Marna came up behind her and yanked that ribbon right out of her hair and ran off. I saw it out of the window.”

Papa looked at me. “Is that what happened, Eff?”

I nodded, feeling the beginning of hope. Then Uncle Earn stepped toward me and bellowed, “Liar! She’s a born witch and a liar, and she’s corrupting your precious seven-and-seven. She—”

All of a sudden, I couldn’t see anything but navy blue pleats. It took me a second to realize that Mama had moved right in front of me and Lan. It must have surprised Uncle Earn, too, because he broke off in mid-bellow. “That is quite enough, Mr. Rothmer,” Mama said in an icy calm voice I’d never heard her use before, not even the time she’d seen a man whipping an overloaded horse in the street and given him what for. “No one calls my children liars in my home.”

“I—I—”

“You’ve had your say, Mr. Rothmer,” Mama told him in the same cold, calm voice. “Now I’ll have mine. I’ve watched you and your wife come near to ruining your own children between spoiling them one minute and whipping them the next. You know my views on that, and I’ll say no more of it now. But when it comes to you and Janna ruining my children as well as your own, I have more to say than you’ll like hearing. And first, last, and foremost is this: It ends now.”

“Sara, you’re overset,” Uncle Earn said. “I allow for a mother’s partiality, but surely even you can see—”

“I can see plain enough that an angel straight from heaven itself would grow up crooked if she was watched and chivvied and told every morning and every night that she was sure to turn evil,” Mama said. “And I can see equally plain that fussing and fawning over a child that hasn’t even learned his numbers yet, as if he were a prince of power and wisdom, will only grow him into a swell-headed, stuck-up scarecrow of a man, who like as not will never know good advice when he hears it, nor think to ask for it when he needs it.”