Excerpt from The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"When we were living in Las Vegas, your dad asked Grandpa if he could court me."

"Court you? What's that?"

"It means that he wanted to get to know me so that he could marry me." Mom slid more beans across the tabletop. They sounded like plastic pieces moving over a checkerboard. "I was fourteen years old when I first heard about your dad. We were living in Utah, and your dad and his brother Ervil were on a mission trip there. One day, they put a pamphlet on Grandpa's windshield. Grandpa saw the pamphlet, took it out from under the windshield wiper, and brought it home." Mom paused to take another handful of beans from the sack. She spread them out on the table and picked out the rocks and dried weeds before sliding the beans into a pot on her lap.

"That pamphlet changed my life. Not long after Grandpa read that paper, he started asking questions at church, questions about Joseph Smith's original teachings and why polygamy was no longer a part of the Mormon way of life. Not long after Grandpa started asking those questions, he was excommunicated from the Church. That's when we moved to LeBaron.

"When the bishop made your grandpa leave the Church, Grandpa took it as a sign from God that your dad was right, that the LDS Church had lost its way. He bought property in LeBaron and moved us down here."

"Did you like moving to LeBaron?" I asked, trying to imagine a time before my mom lived on the colony.

"Well, Sis, it was a real shock for me. I really missed my friends in Utah. I had always been shy, so it was hard for me to move to a new place." Mom looked down at her pile of beans with a somber expression. "But our time here didn't last long. It was too hard for Grandpa to support us in Mexico, just like it is hard here for a lot of people even now. So Grandma and Grandpa eventually moved us to Vegas. A lot of your dad's followers were livin' and workin' as builders and painters in Vegas. Grandpa and Grandma bought a diner there and called it the Supersonic Drive-In. I worked there as a waitress—a waitress on roller skates."

"And that's where you met my dad?"

"Well, I knew about your dad before he first saw me at the diner. Grandpa had been going to your dad's church for about four years by then. I had a dream about marrying your dad and I told your grandpa about it, so he said yes when your dad asked to court me. Our wedding was just a few months later. I became your dad's fifth wife in a small ceremony right here in a living room in LeBaron."

In our dark, bare-walled kitchen far from the lights of Las Vegas, I watched Mom's lightly freckled arm slide another clean pile of beans off the edge of the table into the pot and thought about how different her life was now. Mom had five kids—my older sister, Audrey, my older brothers, Matt and Luke, and the baby, Aaron. Mom always seemed worried and exhausted. I liked imagining her skating around a diner, serving hamburgers to my dad.

"But, Mom, didn't you like Las Vegas? Why did you want to leave?"

The sound of the hard beans hitting the metal pan echoed through the kitchen. "Of course I loved parts of our life in Vegas, Ruthie. I made lots of friends there and I loved music and dancing, but I felt like I wanted more. That's when I started to like your dad. I was only seventeen, but he inspired me to live a life for our Heavenly Father's purpose. I wanted to be a part of his big family and help with his work in the church."

Mom stopped cleaning the beans for a moment, sat back in her chair, and rested her thick brown hair against its back. She always cut her hair herself, and always just above her shoulders, in short, feathered layers. She smiled as a faint whiff of fresh cow's milk drifted through the kitchen window. It mingled with the scent of the green alfalfa fields outside and the cheese curds we kept in a pan on the stove. Except for when it rained, when all we smelled was wet dirt from the adobe bricks and stucco that made up our small, five-room house, the kitchen always smelled like the little mice that scampered along the walls, the cows in the fields outside, and the Mexican sagebrush on the nearby mountains.

Excerpted from The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner. Copyright © 2016 by Ruth Wariner. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.