Stephanie Mittman (5 page)

Second, his was an orderly life that ran according to the demands of his practice. He needed the calm, the quiet, the serenity of living alone, having to meet no one else’s needs when the day was done. She’d want to see him smile, laugh, engage him in ridiculous conversations. There was no place for that in his life.

Most importantly, he was leaving. As soon as one of the medical colleges or hospitals he had written to could offer him a suitable replacement, he was leaving Eden’s Grove—and medicine—behind him.

“Seth?”

The girl didn’t speak. She sang.

“Yes?” he said, exasperated.

“Something wrong?” she asked, pushing back her bonnet and freeing a riot of curls.

“This is a doctor’s office. Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

“Wrong with me? Don’t be silly. I’m healthy as a horse.”

“Then why are you here?” he asked.

“Well, I had this wonderful idea for the newspaper.
You know how you tease us about ‘Dear Miss Winnie’?”

“You’re dropping that ridiculous column?”

“It’s not ridiculous. ‘Dear Miss Winnie’ appears in hundreds of papers. The lady knows a great deal about … well, feminine things. Anyway, I was thinking about a column you could write—”

“To warn men about women who take Miss Winnie’s advice?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.

“No. You could write a column about health! You could teach people how to take better care of themselves, warn them about what might be going around….”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said, despite the fact that it didn’t seem ridiculous to him at all.

“Now, Seth … I mean, Dr. Hendon. People are not as stupid as you think. And what they don’t know, they are capable of learning. They just haven’t had the schooling you’ve had. Take, for example, this morning’s emergency. Why, nearly everyone would have put Joseph Panner’s feet into hot water to warm them up. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Unless, of course, you know better.”

She was neatening the papers on his desk as she spoke, and she stopped to look up at him with those innocent eyes of hers that refused to see the problems that were at the end of her nose.

“Where are your glasses?” he asked.

“Oh! Did you want to dictate a column?”

He hadn’t thought her eyes could get brighter.

“It’s not that your idea doesn’t have some merit,” he
admitted, thinking that, indeed, there were lots of simple things people could do without medical training. And he could save himself an awful lot of time if patients could at the very least differentiate between what really required his services and what didn’t.

“We could run it weekly, in every issue. We could key it to the seasons—frostbite in the winter, sunburn in the summer. We could tie it in with holidays—stomachaches from too much holiday celebrating, that sort of thing. And what to do in case of an accident. And how to stop bleeding. How to—”

“I spent years in medical college learning the answers to those questions,” he began.

“Well, would it hurt you to share what you learned?” she asked, finding a pad and a pencil and tidying up the piles they were hidden under. She sat poised, ready to take down his words for all of Eden’s Grove to read.

“It’s not that simple,” he started.

“Well, start with what
is
simple,” she said. “Like using cold water to prevent frostbite. That’s vital information that people here need, don’t you think?”

He did think so. He just didn’t think that he wanted to sit in his office with Abidance Merganser’s dazzling smile just across the desk from him.

“Your father get himself dry and warm?” he asked, spreading his papers back out across his desk the way he liked them.

“You could add that in about how if there is no frostbite then the patient can be—”

“I’ll drop a column by the office later in the week,” he said, not admitting that it was a darn good idea. “It certainly couldn’t hurt,” he said grudgingly.

She put the pad and paper down on the desk and leaned forward toward him. “Why do I make you nervous?” she asked.

He humphed, sounding like the old man he thought he was. “It’ll be a fine day in Hades when a girl like you—”

“If I’m just some girl, Seth, then why can’t you seem to breathe when—”

“
Doctor
Hendon! And you’re imagining things because you’ve, well, to be frank, Abidance, you’ve got a schoolgirl crush on me. And while I do admit that it’s flattering, it is wholly inappropriate and—”

“I suppose you’re right,” she said as dreamily as she could. “After all, I am nearly promised to another and you’d probably want someone …”

She tried to look as casual as she could, blinking at him innocently, as she continued. “You’d no doubt want someone with less experience than I.”

She really did think he’d have the common decency not to laugh out loud.

“Abby, any less experience and you’d still be sucking your thumb and playing with dolls.”

Well, that wasn’t the kind of remark she could just let pass, was it? She smiled at him as mysteriously as she could, her mind racing wildly for proof of what wasn’t.

“I’ll give Ansel an article before you go to press on Friday,” he said, rising as if the conversation between them was over, and adding, quite patronizingly, “How’s that?”

“It’s a start,” she said.

“Now go on home, Abidance, where you’ll be safe under your mother’s wing and your father’s eye. Be a good girl, huh?”

“Seth Hendon, I am not a good girl,” she said, feeling herself blush at the implication and backtracking rapidly. “I mean, I’m not the innocent you suppose.”

She’d have stopped there, but he raised his eyebrows with such amusement, such condescending doubt that she couldn’t stop herself.

“I have been kissed, you know.”

A smirk! “So little Frankie Walker finally worked up the nerve to peck you on your cheek, huh?”

“Frank Walker! A peck on the cheek! I’m talking about thoroughly kissed. Not like a brother or uncle.” She knew nothing about kissing, except the innuendos of some of the girls she’d gone to school with, but they’d always hushed at the sight of the Reverend Merganser’s daughter. One, though … She ran her tongue very slowly over her bottom lip. “
Well
kissed,” she said, mimicking Callie Jean Evans, and watching Seth’s eyes widen. Maybe Callie Jean, who already had two little babies and another on the way, wasn’t all talk, after all.

“I don’t believe it,” Seth said, his smirk returning to his face, though at his side, where he thought she couldn’t see, his thumb rubbed fast and hard against his fingers. “Who?”

Abby ran her tongue over her lip again. Seth opened and closed his fist several times. “You don’t know him,” she said, rising and reaching for her bonnet.

Seth took her coat from the peg, but held it to his
chest, rather than helping her into it. She wasn’t even sure he was aware of what he was doing. “I know everyone you know,” he said gruffly. “I probably delivered half of them.”

“Not this one,” she said coyly. “He’s not from around here.” She could just hear her mother warning of tangled webs, but words of love and wedding bells rang a good deal louder in her head, drowning out any warnings.

“Abidance,” he warned, as if now was the time for her to come clean and admit that she was … well …
fabricating
. After all, a reverend’s daughter never lied.

“St. Louis,” she said, the words coming out in a rush of relief. She went to St. Louis every summer. Surely she could have met someone there—a handsome, charming, insistent gentleman who was so taken with her that—

Seth seemed to be considering whether or not this was a real possibility. Abby sensed the vital importance of this moment to the rest of her life.

Well, her mother always did say she had a flare for the dramatic.

“What’s his name?” Seth demanded, that darned eyebrow of his raised in his usual disbelief.

She said the first name that came to mind. “Armand,” and then added, “I’ve probably mentioned him before.”

“It sounds familiar,” Seth admitted. Fortunately he’d apparently paid little attention to her prattling all these years.

“Yes, well,” she said, taking her coat from his hands
and putting one arm through the sleeve. “Oh, and maybe you could do an article on the dangers of social diseases.”

Turning to smile at him, she caught sight of the blood draining from Seth’s face. “I mean, women might need to know—”

“Not here in Eden’s Grove, they don’t,” Seth said as if his words could make it so. He was no doubt right, but she’d surely captured his attention, and she wasn’t about to let go.

“As I pointed out, women do travel, Seth. Why, I wouldn’t miss my yearly trip to St. Louis”—she paused to concentrate on buttoning her coat—“for anything.”

“And are you trying to tell me that you do wild and woolly things there?” he asked her, pushing her hands away as she fumbled with her top button and fastening it himself.

Clearly she had aged years in his eyes. She ran her tongue over her top lip this time and watched Seth’s eyes follow the movement intently.

“Better put some pomade on those lips,” he said.

“They’re plenty soft,” she said, offering them up to him.

“Then why is it you need to keep licking them?” he asked, the smirk back in place.

“You are just so full of yourself, Dr. Hendon,” she said, opening the door to the early March winds and not bothering to close it behind her before she started storming down the sidewalk.

“And you, Miss Merganser, are full of hogwash!” he shouted after her.

She’d have been sure the whole episode was a total failure if she hadn’t stolen a glimpse back as she turned the corner.

Seth Hendon was standing outside his office door in the dead of winter in his shirtsleeves, watching her go.

S
ETH COULDN’T IMAGINE WHAT POSSESSED HIM TO
accept Clarice Merganser’s invitation to have dinner with the “loons” after church, except that to say no would have been rude, and he was not a rude man. Except maybe around Abby, who seemed to bring out his sarcastic, impatient side.

Ansel, taking pity on him, had offered to stop by on his way so that Seth could at least arrive in the company of sanity, even if it was a soon-to-be-vanquished illusion. Ansel’s wife, Emily, walked ahead with their daughter, Suellen, shepherding her along on the sidewalk, while Ansel and Seth dragged behind because each of them was more reluctant than the other to get to their destination.

“Abby seems to be taking Sarah’s death pretty hard,” Ansel said as he put up the collar to his coat against the same damn wind that had been at Seth’s back for months, urging him forward, urging him to move on already before it was too late.

“Really? I thought she was bouncing back rather well,” Seth said truthfully. It seemed to him that she
was as cheerful as ever, as full of life and plans as she had always been.

“That smile of hers could fool the devil himself,” Ansel said. “But it’s phonier than invisible ink, and fades as fast when no one is looking.”

Seth felt Ansel’s gaze, but didn’t meet it. It wasn’t his job to make Abidance Merganser happy, was it? Just because she imagined herself fond of him didn’t make it incumbent upon him to be the willing object of her affections, did it? Why, if everyone was obliged to return all feelings, what would women like Lily Lang-tree do? Split themselves in a million pieces for everyone who thought they were in love—that was the key word—they
thought
they were in love.

After all, what could Abby know of love? She was just a baby, an innocent.
Social diseases!
She probably thought shyness was a social disease. Ineptitude. Gracelessness. Surely she had no more idea what a social disease was than she had of what she was implying with that tongue of hers tracing that soft, luscious lip. At least he didn’t think so.

“You ever go with her to St. Louis?” he asked casually, “To see that cousin of hers?”

“Not since we were kids,” Ansel said.

“You mean since
you
were a kid. As far as I can see, Abby still is.”

Ansel stopped walking and waited for Seth to look at him.

“What?” Seth asked him.

“I don’t know where you’re looking, but Abby’s no kid. She’s a lovely young woman, and if you aren’t
careful, someone else will come along and snatch her out from under your nose.”

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” he said irreverently.

“Far be it from me to tell anyone what to do about their love life, but I’ll tell you this, Seth Hendon, and I hope you’ll give me more than the half an ear you usually do. True love doesn’t—”

“Save it, Ansel,” Seth said. “When I want your advice on love, I’ll—”

“—disappear. That’s all I want to warn you about, Dr. Hendon. True love doesn’t disappear. No matter how hard you try, no matter how you go on with your life. No matter even if she dies. The love goes on.”

Seth was quiet out of respect. Ansel had never admitted aloud that he loved Sarrie. At least not to him. Not ten feet ahead of them, Ansel’s wife and child waddled up the street like a mother hen and her chick. From the looks of it, Seth supposed that Emily might be carrying once again.