The Bramble Bush by Ch. Mergcndahl

As Fran Walker, one of the nurses of the Mills Memorial Hospital, was sitting between rounds behind her duty desk, she often recollected her childhood, which would return to her as it had existed in reality bewildering, lonely, and frustrating.

Her father, Mr. Walker, had owned a small lumber business' in Sagamore, one of Indiana's numerous smaller towns, where Fran had lived in a large frame house on six acres of unused pasture land'. The first Mrs. Walker had died, when Fran was still a baby, so she did not remember her real mother at all. She remembered her stepmother, though – small, tight-lipped, thin-faced, extremely possessive of her new husband and the new house which had suddenly become her own. Fran had adored her father, tried desperately to please him. And since he desired nothing more than a good relationship between his daughter and his second wife, she had made endless attempts to win over her new mother. But her displays of affection had not been returned. Her stepmother had remained constantly jealous, resentful, without the slightest understanding of the small girl's motives and emotions.

Fran felt herself losing out, slipping away into an inferior position. She began to exaggerate – often lie about friends, feelings, grades at school, anything possible to keep herself high in her father's esteem, and at the same time gain some small bit of admiration from her mother. The exaggerations, though, had constantly turned back on her, until eventually a disgusted Mrs. Walker had insisted she be sent away to a nearby summer camp. " They award a badge of honour there, " she had said, " and if you win it – not a single untruth all summer – then we'll know you've stopped lying and we'll do something very special for you."

" We'll give you a pony, " her father had promised.

Fran wanted the pony. More than the pony, she wanted to prove herself. After two months of near painful honesty, she finally won the badge of honour, and brought it home clutched tight in her fist, hidden in her pocket while she waited, waited, all the way from the station, all during the tea in the living-room for the exact proper moment to make her announcement of glorious victory.

" Well? " her mother had said finally. " Well, Fran? "

" Well – ", Fran began, with the excitement building higher and higher as she drew in her breath and thought of exactly how to say it.

" You can't hide it any longer, Fran." Her mother had sighed in hopeless resignation. " We know you didn't win it, so there's simply no point in lying about it now."

Fran had closed her mouth. She'd stared at her mother, then stood and gone out to the yard and looked across the green meadow where the pony was going to graze. She had taken the green badge from her pocket, fingered it tenderly, then buried it beneath a rock in the garden. She had gone back into the house and said, " No, I didn't win it, " and her mother had said, " Well, at least you didn't lie this time, " and her father had held her while she'd cried and known finally that there was no further use in trying.

Her father had bought her an Irish setter as a consolation prize.