Stephanie Mittman (16 page)

She hadn’t seen Seth since he’d taken out her stitches. He’d acted as if she were just another person who’d voted against his stupid clinic, instead of the one who’d stood up and laid her heart on the table in front of the whole darn town.

She’d heard the snickers. Well, let them look at her now, out to dinner at the Eden’s Grove Grand Hotel dining room with the very eligible Frank Walker.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Frank asked, frowning at the barely picked-at food on her plate. “I could have them bring you something else if you don’t like your lamb.”

“It’s wonderful,” she said, though in truth it could have been sawdust she was eating. She supposed her heart just wasn’t in it. Wasn’t in anything. She barely had an appetite anymore. Nothing smelled good, tasted good, seemed appealing. It was just as Ansel had said. Loving Seth was making her physically ill.

But that was behind her. It was just taking a great deal of effort to let go.

“So tell me how things are going at the store. Are you carrying anything newsworthy I could write about?” She’d been pouring her heart into her writing, be it her work or her letters to Armand and Anna Lisa. Writing to them had become her release and she poured out her heart to them, telling them how hard it was to love someone who didn’t love her back.

“Well, we’ve put in our order for the most wonderful new camera that anyone can afford. It’s called a Brownie box camera and it’ll sell for only a dollar when we can get them in. They’re promising them in just a
few months time.” He took a pause and looked at her. “I surely would like to fill a whole album with pictures of you, Miss Abby. And the film will only cost ten or fifteen cents a roll.”

“At that price why stop at just one roll?” Abby teased. Frank was a nice man. There was nothing wrong with Frank.

“Miss Abby, are you done? The waiter is—” Frank said, pointing toward her side.

“Oh, certainly,” she said, smiling at the waiter she hadn’t even seen.

“Weather sure is getting milder,” Frank said. He put his hand over hers and patted it gently. “I thought maybe Saturday when I was finished with the inventory, if you weren’t otherwise occupied, I could take you for a ride out east. There’s a piece of land that my father’s thinking of selling, and I was thinking of maybe buying it, building me a house out there and …”

She knew what he was asking. “I’d like that,” she forced herself to say.

His eyes widened and instead of feeling flattered and wanted, she just felt empty and deceitful.

“Frank, you know that there is someone else, don’t you?” she asked.

“I heard about the man in St. Louis,” he said, nodding. “But I figure that being here I’ve got the inside track. I mean, he ain’t taking you to see a pretty piece of land with the sweetest little brook running through it on Saturday, now, is he?”

“No,” Abby agreed. “He isn’t.”

“I know it might take you a while to come to care for
me the way I care for you, but I’m a patient man, Miss Abby, and all I ask is that you do give it a try.”

“That isn’t asking very much,” Abby agreed. It was no more than she’d asked of Seth, and he’d refused. “A babbling brook, did you say?”

Frank’s eyes sparkled when he smiled, and it was easy to overlook his missing tooth. He had deep lines by the corners of his eyes despite the fact that he wasn’t much older than Abby. Apparently he smiled a lot. “And oaks that touch the sky.”

“I like oak trees,” Abby said. “They bend for no one. My mother likes willows—every time there’s a storm she looks out the window and says ‘A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall.’ I’d rather stand proud and tall for as long as I can than bend at every breath of hot air that comes my way.”

“I do love to hear you talk,” Frank said. “I always feel like I’m reading a book with lots of levels of meaning. I only wish sometimes that Mrs. Kearney was sitting at the next table so she could tell me what the author means.”

It means that I have trouble compromising
, she thought,
that I can’t bow to someone else’s wishes
…. “It means I’m too proud, according to my mama. And not very practical.”

“There ain’t nothing wrong with dreaming and wanting things to be perfect,” Frank said, and took the little dessert menus from the waiter, handing her one. “What’ll it be?”

There were seven offerings, each one more tempting than the one above it. There was
suedoise
of peaches, three kinds of pie, two types of gingerbreads, and plum
duff with custard. Why was it that the sweetest things in life suddenly had no appeal?

“Maybe you’d just like me to take you home. You look kind of tired, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Frank said, closing the menu as if she were infinitely more interesting.

“I am awfully tired,” she admitted.

Trying to fall in love was very hard work.

“I do believe your boat has sailed,” Ansel told Seth when he stopped by the
Herald
on Saturday afternoon. “Abby is over at the mercantile picking up some things for the picnic lunch she’s preparing for Frank tomorrow.”

“Good,” he said, an admirable response to having been kicked in the gut.

“He wants to show her some land he’s thinking of buying,” Ansel continued.

“Land,” Seth said, nodding as if this was the natural course of events. “Frank seems a good man.”

Now it was Ansel’s turn to nod.

“Whatever happened to Mr. St. Louis?” he asked, expecting to hear that Abby had simply made up the man to make him jealous, just as she was making him jealous with Frank Walker, a man so far beneath her that he’d need binoculars to see the bottoms of her shoes.

“Heard from him again yesterday,” Ansel said, fishing in the wastebasket and producing a letter from Mr. A. Whitiny of St. Louis.

“She doesn’t save them?” he asked, getting some satisfaction at least from that.

“Only the insides,” Ansel said, showing him the envelope was empty.

“Well, two suitors,” Seth said, trying to sound impressed rather than judgmental.

“She’s cared a great deal for Armand for a good long time,” Ansel said, “but Frank Walker has been damn persistent and he is here, while Armand is in St. Louis.”

“Well, I just came to drop off my next column,” Seth said. He missed going over them with Abby. He missed seeing her smile. He missed hearing her laugh and he missed knowing that when he was at his lowest she’d turn up and make life worthwhile.

“What’s this one on?” Ansel asked.

“Stomach pains,” Seth said. He’d seen a dozen patients since the Youtt boy had come down with appendicitis, all sure they were in the throes of an attack themselves. Only Mrs. Waitte even had pain localized to the right side, and that turned out to be result of a stay poking through her corset cover.

“Next week chest pains and then on to the head,” he said.

Ansel made no reference to Abby’s headaches, as if they were no longer Seth’s business. “You hear anything more from that doctor in Massachusetts?” Ansel asked him.

Amazingly the doctor had written with several dozen very specific questions, as if he were truly interested in taking over Seth’s practice. What a relief that would be. No more avoiding Caroline Denton’s eyes, no more
worrying about Johnnie Youtt’s appendix bursting. No more sleepless nights waiting for fevers to break, for babies to be born.

He was going to be free, free, free.

Maybe it had to actually happen before he felt good about it.

“So what do you think?” Frank Walker asked Abby as they sat in his very fine buggy looking over tall prairie grass as far as the eye could see. Off to the right was a stand of oaks that, if they didn’t quite reach the sky, made an admirable attempt.

A mild breeze rippled the grass and it swayed and bowed as if it were showing off just for her. “It’s incredibly lovely,” she said, trying to imagine a fine house with a small porch, complete with a freshly painted swing.

“If you say to, I’ll buy it,” Frank said, putting his arm around her.

“Well, it’s a beautiful piece of land,” she said. “You could build a wonderful life here, Frank.”

“Are you telling me to buy it?” he asked.

“I …” she began, but she wasn’t sure what to say. Could she really let her dream go and settle for something much, much less? Ansel had done it. And at least Emily seemed happy. Probably half the women in Iowa had taken the best offer they expected to get. And if they got love, too, well, then they were luckier than most.

“Thought I could hang a rope from that littlest oak,” Frank said, pointing. “For a swing for the children.

“Do you suppose you’d miss working at the
Herald?
I mean if you were to—I know I’d miss seeing you there in the middle of the day, but coming home to you, oh, Miss Abby! That would be—”

“Frank, I—” she began again.

“I know you had strong feelings for that other man, but if he valued you right, he’d have made his intentions known, and not taken no for an answer. The way I see it, someone’s always gotta be the one to care more, and I don’t mind it being me, for now.”

“What if I never—I mean what if it wasn’t just
for now?
What if—”

“What if you stopped worrying so much and let me paint you a picture of what being married to me would be like? What it would be like for us?”

“All right,” she agreed, remembering how Seth had told her, and bluntly too, that there was no “us.” With Frank there would always be an “us.”
Convince me. Please, Frank, convince me
.

“In the morning I’d be looking at you when you woke up. I’d lean over you and kiss that little nose of yours,” he leaned over then, and planted a soft kiss just below the bridge of her nose. “And then I’d demand a real kiss so that I could remember it all the day through while I was over in town and you were here raising a houseful of little hellions who all want to be oak trees and not willows….”

And then he twisted her in her seat, and pulled her gently against him, and pressed his lips to hers.

A
BIDANCE
M
ERGANSER DANCED AROUND
S
ETH’S
head all week, as surely as she always used to dance around his office. The harder he tried to wipe her from his thoughts, the more stubbornly she remained planted there. And things he’d never noticed became things that he couldn’t forget—the worn toe on her new boots, the fancy stitching on her dress coat, the comb that held her hair. Oh, that hair! Dark curls that had felt like silk when he’d threaded his fingers through them.

And all he could think was how he wished he could love her, but she was too young. And he was so old. And how she was so full of the wonder of life and he so resigned to the sadness in it. She was better off with Frank Walker. Certainly he was a simple man, a shopkeeper, and Abby was—he wouldn’t think about what Abby was, not again. He just might love her, but he was old and she … The words danced in his head, coming apart and together in a million different combinations until there was only one version he could hear and feel and own:

He was too old and she was too full of life—
but still he loved her
. He loved her despite it and because of it.

It stunned him how easy it was to look at life the way Abby did. Yes, he was older than she, but many men were older than their wives. Yes he could remember her as just a child, but it was a gift, not a burden, to have had the opportunity to watch her turn into the radiant woman that she had become.

The radiant woman he had pushed into Frank Walker’s waiting arms.

Into Frank Walker’s buggy, which still hadn’t come back though it was dark enough to light the lamps in his office. Seth forced himself to sit down with the newest issue of the
New England Journal of Medicine
. Maybe this time he’d be able to read it without his mind wandering to two people riding around in a buggy until after dark. Of course, Frank might have brought her home and the loon family was holding him against his will and that explained why at nearly eight o’clock the buggy still hadn’t come down the street past his office on the way to the livery.

By nine he figured Abby’s family were toasting the happy couple and taking inventory of her hope chest. Well, it was probably for the best. After all, Frank was perfect for Abby—even if he wasn’t nearly as bright as she was. Even if he had no greater plans than to figure out whether pink soap or yellow was likely to sell better in the spring, while his Abby was planning to save the world.