Stephanie Mittman (18 page)

“Doesn’t Abby look lovely?” Abby heard Emily whispering to Ansel as they took their places behind her in the second row of the grange hall and waited for Sunday services to begin.

She kept her head back as they got settled, pretending to adjust her shawl as she eavesdropped. “Pru told me she was out with Frank Walker until well past dark,” Ansel said loudly enough for her to hear easily. “And very quiet when she came in.”

Abby turned in her seat and smiled tentatively at him and at Emily and the baby, but her eyes were really searching for Seth. Ansel looked around, too, no doubt looking for Frank Walker. Abby didn’t see him either, and they exchanged shrugs before she turned back and smiled at her father as he stood up in the pulpit.

“Well, she’s not interested in Frank,” Emily whispered as Abby’s father nodded at several latecomers and waited for them to get settled.

“What do you call dinner and a buggy ride all in the same week?” Ansel asked her.

“A poor substitute,” she answered loudly enough for Abby to be sure that Emily wanted her to hear. “I just pray she isn’t desperate enough to marry him.”

“He could make her a fine husband,” Ansel said in Frank’s defense, while Abby prayed her father would get started with the day’s service. “And she’d never want for anything.”

“Anything that can be bought or sold in the mercantile, anyway,” Emily agreed, as if that were a terrible thing, as if Abby were even considering that anyway.

“She could make him a good wife,” Ansel said, and
Abby sat all the straighter for her brother’s defense. “She’d be an asset to the store, and—”

“Welcome to the fourth from last service we will hold in this building,” her father finally said, raising his hands to his congregation. “Of course, not counting our Wednesday night services, since not all of you attend them. And then of course there’s Maundy Thursday coming up, and Good Friday the next day, which too many of you also skip, and well, anyways, Mr. Youtt has purchased a money order for the plans for the new church, which are being mailed to us. Isn’t that right, Mr. Youtt?”

Mr. Youtt stood and agreed that a money order had been cut for pre-drawn plans and sent to Peabody and Sterns in St. Louis.

“And Mr. Waitte has offered to go to Des Moines for any wood we need, and I expect that we’ll be raising the rafters and frame in less than two weeks or even before that time. Right, Walt?”

“If I don’t have what we need, I’ll get it,” Walter Waitte agreed.

“The steeple will be built from California redwoods, which reach as close to heaven as a tree can go, and the bell is going to be cast in Philadelphia and shipped here by rail. Then Frank Walker’s going to arrange to get it here, right, Frank?”

There was silence in the grange hall, as heads turned this way and that, looking for Frank Walker. Most heads turned. But not Abby’s.

“Frank’s sleeping in this morning,” Frank Walker, Sr., said, after rising and clearing his throat. “He wasn’t feeling too good.”

Abby sank a bit in her seat and put her hand to her head.

“Nothing serious, I hope,” the reverend asked.

“McGinty’s influenza,” the elder Mr. Walker said with a grimace on his face.

“Maybe the doc’s with him,” someone said. “Don’t see him here, neither.”

Abby slid farther down in her seat.

“Well, he was with him last night in McGinty’s,” someone else hollered. “They just mighta given each other that flu!”

“Something else to pray for, then,” Abby’s father said. “Let us bow our heads and pray that McGinty’s closes early on Saturdays so that we can have a full congregation on Sundays.”

Abby joined the other women in loud prayer. The men had apparently elected for the silent variety, if they were praying at all.

When the service was finally over, Abby stood and took a deep breath before facing the congregation. There was always the chance that Seth had come in late. Turning around, she saw that she had clearly wasted a
Please God!
on Seth’s being there, but it didn’t stop her from casting a second silent prayer that he be waiting for her outside the grange hall in his buggy.

“Morning, Miss Abby,” Emmet Sommers said, tipping his hat to her politely, the way Seth never did. Seth never treated her like a lady. In fact, last night Seth had treated her like the hussy she was. And there was no sign of him this morning.

“Morning, Emmet,” Abby said, but Emmet had already moved on and was helping Abby’s sister Patience into her spring cloak and offering to see her home. Her nephew Michael was climbing Abby’s leg, and she lifted him up into her arms, hugging him so tightly that he pushed at her chest and complained.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sitting back down in the chair with Michael on her lap. “I guess I needed a squeeze more than you did, huh?”

“Grandpa says we can love you again,” Michael told her. Then he pushed the hair away from her ear and whispered so close to her that it was hard to understand, “Don’t tell him, but I never stopped, Aunt Abby.”

Again she hugged him, this time not so tightly that he would object. “Grandpa was mad at me, but he never stopped loving me.”

“How did you know, Aunt Abby?” Michael asked her.

“How do you know that when you turn on the faucet in the bathroom, water is going to come out of the spout? It isn’t there until you turn it on, but you know it’s just waiting, don’t you?”

“Why didn’t you just turn it on?” he asked her. “Didn’t you want to get loved?”

“Yes, I surely did,” she answered him, ruffling his sandy hair. He looked a lot like her brother-in-law, Boone, and Abby couldn’t help but wonder if someday he’d break a woman’s heart just the way Boone had done when he’d run off and left Pru and the children. “But with love, it takes two to turn the faucets on,” she
said, floundering with her explanation as she looked around for Seth.

“Otherwise someone might get burned,” Michael said wisely.

“Exactly,” she told Michael. Despite the words of encouragement she’d repeated to herself over and over again in the night, there was no sign of a loving, sober Seth Hendon. “You’re a very wise little boy.”

And then Gwendolyn took one of her hands and Michael took the other and they pulled her out of her chair and led her down the aisle to the back of the grange hall.

Outside there were plenty of buggies and the day was glorious.

But Seth wasn’t there, and it was raining in her heart.

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING
S
ETH STOOD IN
Walker’s Mercantile with two oranges, a box of candy, some pink writing paper with little flowers down the edge, and two leeks. He dropped one of the oranges and it rolled several feet, coming to rest by Frank Walker’s big toe.

“Need some help there, Dr. Hendon?” Frank asked. He seemed to have recovered more fully than Seth had, but then, at twenty-two, the body was more resilient. That was why the Lord made man wiser as he got older, to compensate for the body’s shortcomings. Of course, it hadn’t helped in Seth’s case—he might have been wise enough to know that Saturday’s drinking would lead to Sunday’s puking, but it hadn’t stopped him.

“You have any fresh flowers?” Seth asked, handing what he could to Frank and lifting up a bottle of perfume to take a whiff.

“You doing some courting, Doc?” Frank asked, pulling a bunch of half-dead tulips out of a tall tin can and rolling them in paper.

“Think I’m too old for that sort of thing?” Seth asked. Frank probably thought anyone over thirty had one foot in the grave. Still wet behind the ears, he’d probably lose his breakfast if he knew that his mother had come to see Seth yesterday afraid she was carrying again. No doubt he thought his mother and father had ceased to carry on as soon as his younger sister was conceived.

“Not at all,” Frank said politely. “I’m sure the widow Draper will appreciate—”

“Helen Draper? What’s Helen—” and then he realized what Frank meant. “I’m not seeing Mrs. Draper,” he said softly. It had been months since he’d seen Helen. At least in that way. She’d come to see him with a cough in February and he’d prescribed a tonic for her. In March she’d had a splinter in her foot he’d had to remove. She’d offered to make him a home-cooked meal and he’d put her off.

“Really? She must be disappointed about that. Who’s the lucky lady?” Frank asked, as if it were any of his business.

“These things look like they’re for an
old
lady?” he asked, pointing at the array of things he’d collected as they lay on the counter. Helen Draper would like all of them. “Maybe you’ve a point there. You happen to have a prospector’s pick?” he asked. “And a small shovel?”

Frank’s eyes widened.

“And that two-seater you’ve got in the window—that tandem bicycle? I’ll take that, too.”

Frank’s jaw dropped.

“Problem?” he asked the shopkeeper.

“Oh, no, sir!” Frank responded. “I’ve got the shovel out front and the pick down in the storage cellar,” he said, his voice trailing behind him as he raced hither and yon collecting everything that Seth wanted.

And then Seth spotted it. He grabbed the flowers in one hand and the little bauble in the other and hurried past Frank on his way out.

“Charge this, too,” he said, showing him the trinket as he nearly raced down the steps. “And send everything over to my office when you’ve got it all together. Put the food in the kitchen, would you? If you don’t mind?”

Seth was out of breath when he barged into the
Herald’s
office shouting Abby’s name as if he’d just discovered a cure for some rare and awful disease.

She was resting in the back room when she heard him call.

“She here, Ansel?” she heard him ask. “Abby? You here?”

Ansel must have gestured toward the back room because suddenly he was there, crouching beside her, holding out to her a glass ball with the world afloat in it. He shook it in front of her face. Inside the sphere, the globe spun slowly and little flakes of snow danced around it.

“The world upside down,” he said, handing the globe to her. “Just the way you see it.”

“Do you never get tired of making fun of me?” she asked.

“I’m not making fun of you,” he said, putting a bouquet on the desk in front of her. “I’m showing you that I see what you see—the world the way you want me to see it.”

She fingered the dying tulips.

“And I wanted to say I’m sorry about yesterday. I had a medical emergency.”

She looked up at him, wanting to believe that was what had kept him away.

“My patient spent the day heaving,” he said. “By the time the idiot could sit and hold his head up it was after three. By the time he ran to the grange hall everyone was gone.”

“Why did he run to the grange hall?”

“There was someone very important he wanted to meet. Someone he didn’t want to disappoint, ever again.”

“I see,” she said, a flicker of hope licking at her heart. “And he didn’t know where this person lived?”

“Worse! The fool was too chicken to go there! You see, he’d have to apologize for missing their appointment, and for missing church, as well, and the reverend—did I mention the reverend was her father? Well, the reverend isn’t too partial to this patient, and the patient didn’t think he’d get the chance to apologize correctly, the way she—did I mention this was the woman of his dreams? Well, he thought she deserved better than the possibility of having her boots decorated with the remnants of his stomach.”

“The woman of his dreams?” she asked, her toes curling, her insides jumping. “Has this fool of a patient ever told her that?”

“Didn’t I tell you he was a fool?”

“Hey, Doc,” Ansel said, coming to stand in the doorway. There’s someone leaving a note on your office door.”

“Let ‘im,” Seth said, but Abby shook her head.

“Better go see who needs you,” she said softly.

“Will you come at lunchtime?” he asked, taking her hand in his, his blue eyes pleading with her to say yes. “So I can tell you all about how this fool patient expects to make it up to this girl? And maybe you can advise me about what to tell him. What it would take for a girl like, say you, for example, to forgive the idiot?”

“I think it’s Mr. Denton,” Ansel came back to the doorway to announce.

“Go,” she told him.

“Will you come at lunchtime?” he asked again, rising to his full height. “And dinner, too? He has a lot to apologize for.”

She smiled and he hurried past Ansel. She heard the bell over the door jingle as he left.

So it was true what they said about love … you did hear bells!

Life was beautiful, Seth thought as he got ready for Abby to show up. In the kitchen, where he and Abby and Sarrie had often shared meals when Sarrie was up to it, he set a fancy table, complete with a freshly laundered cloth he borrowed from his examining room.

Meticulously he arranged the plates so that every stain was hidden, a slight tear was under his water glass. He would have to remember to drink in only
Abby’s beauty so she wouldn’t know he hadn’t had a tablecloth cleaned since Sarrie had passed away.

He almost set the table for three, he felt so strongly as if Sarrie was a part of his relationship with Abby. Memories flooded back of two giggling girls, of furtive glances, of whispers as he’d pass Sarrie’s room in just his pajama bottoms. He remembered once just before Sarrie had taken to her bed for the last time, putting his arms around both of them, and the strange feeling that coursed through him at the feel of Abby’s body pressed against his side.