Mother's Promise (4 page)

Rachel's heart sank. There was no way they were going to hire someone from over a thousand miles away for the position if they had two other qualified candidates right there. “That would be fine,” Rachel said. “Is there anything else you need to know about me?” Now she just sounded desperate.

“As my brother might say, Mrs. Kaufmann,” Malcolm Shepherd said in a tone that Rachel could only describe as kind, “no worries. We have already received electronic letters of reference from the superintendent of schools in your district there in Ohio as well as letters from three teachers that worked with you. Hester Steiner has given a verbal recommendation.” He chuckled. “She's certainly been persistent in making sure we consider your application.”

Rachel smiled. “Hester can be—”

“We'll call you,” the hospital administrator interrupted. Rachel couldn't help wondering if the woman was perpetually impatient or maybe she just had a lot on her schedule and was anxious to get this meeting over with.

“Thank you again for considering me at all,” Rachel said. “I'll look forward to your call.”

“Three or four days,” Pastor Cox promised. “We'll call either way. You enjoy your weekend now,” he added, and after murmured good-byes all around the line went dead.

But the very next day—Friday—she had once again been called to the telephone.

“Mrs. Kaufmann? Pastor Cox here.”

Her heart sank with disappointment. If they had made their choice so quickly then there was no chance that …

“How soon can you get here?”

Rachel was speechless. But that didn't seem to faze the chaplain, who continued talking as if the question had been purely rhetorical.

“Assuming you still want the job, we'd like you to get started as soon as possible. Now let me just put Mark from Human Resources on the line and he can give you the details of the offer, okay?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The man from Human Resources took the phone and gave her information about salary, hours, benefits such as vacation and personal time, and insurance. “The search committee has approved a certification program for you so you'll work and attend classes, but they're available online so you fit it into your schedule however you like. All right?”

Her mind raced with the logistics of working and going to school even if it was online. And certainly there was the issue of being available for Justin as he got acclimated to his new surroundings. “Yes.”

“There will be a probationary period of four months,” Mark continued in a voice that told her this was hardly the first time he had delivered this information. “During that time others will be observing and assessing your work. If for any reason at the end of the probationary period, the members of the search committee—or you—decide this isn't working, the appointment can be terminated. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“So how soon can you get here?” Mark's tone changed from official to casual.

Rachel couldn't help it. She laughed. This was the best news she'd had in months. For the first time since James's death she could actually see the possibility that God had a new plan for her life, one where she and Justin could start again and perhaps recover a measure of the joy they had known before. “I need two weeks if that's all right,” she said.

“Suits me,” Mark said. “Here's Pastor Cox.”

“Let's make that Paul, okay?” the minister said as he took back the phone. “And may I call you Rachel?”

“That's fine. Oh, thank you so very much. You have no idea what this means to me. Please thank the others for me.”

Paul laughed. “Happy to have you, Rachel. Now Mark will be sending you some materials about the hospital, the certification program, and the general area to look over. It'll give you a head start before we see you in a couple of weeks. Until then, as Mark so aptly put it, welcome aboard.”

Chapter 2

J
ust two days after the Kaufmann family celebrated Justin's twelfth birthday his mom gave him the news. Somehow he knew that what he would remember most about this birthday wouldn't be Gramma's spice cake with its caramel frosting—his favorite. Or the new clothes his aunts and uncles and cousins had given him. No, this was the birthday he would remember most because his world had just been turned upside down—again.

“Justin, I've been offered a job,” she told him as the two of them sat on the wooden swing that hung from a large horizontal branch of the willow tree just outside the farmhouse kitchen.

He couldn't help but think about another day almost two years before when his mom had made a similar announcement just after Dad's funeral.

“The thing is,” she continued as she pushed the swing into motion with her bare foot, “the job is in Florida.”

Florida?
Justin's mind raced as he tried to take in the idea of moving not just off the farm where his dad had grown up and he'd been born, but halfway across the whole country.

He didn't know a single person in Florida. Mom kept going on about her good friend, Hester. But Hester wasn't family. How could Mom even think of leaving Gramma and Gramps?

“We can start fresh there,” he heard her say.

I don't want to start fresh,
he thought, feeling a wave of the anger that was pretty much the way he felt most of the time these days.
I want our old life. The one where I helped Dad with the chores. The one where Dad and I fished in the pond in summer and went ice-skating in winter.

“What do you think?” his mom asked him.

Justin mentally ran down the list of things that he'd learned about Florida from the books he'd read and stuff he'd learned at school.

“I know it's a big change,” she continued when he didn't answer right away. She brought the swing to a halt so she could lean forward, her elbows resting on her knees as she stared out at the fields surrounding the farmhouse and its outbuildings. “But just think,” Mom said, her voice high and nervous, “you can go swimming in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“They have alligators,” Justin said, as if that alone illustrated the scope of the change she was asking him to make.

“Alligators don't live in the Gulf,” she replied.

“Sharks, then. And snakes—big poisonous ones, and what about how hot it is? Those skinny palm trees I've seen in pictures don't seem like they'd provide much shade.” Justin was desperate to find something that would make his mother listen to reason. She didn't like hot weather all that much.

“They have seasons just like we do in Ohio, just no snow or hardly ever. And there are other trees besides palm trees.”

“We don't know anybody there,” he pointed out.

“I just told you, Justin. When we first get there, we'll stay with my college roommate, Hester, and her husband, John Steiner. When we were in college Hester and I were best friends.”

Then why can't you understand that I'm not excited to leave
my
best friend, Harlan?
Justin wondered, but his dad had taught him not to question his elders, especially his mom and grandparents. And now that his uncle Luke was in charge, Justin knew that he'd be risking a paddling if Luke heard him challenge his mother.

It had been a year, nine months and eight days since Justin's dad had died. Justin had heard people say that the force of the car's speed gave his dad no chance at all for survival. He'd died right there next to a stack of rocks that Justin and his cousins had pulled from the field earlier that year and piled by the roadside ditch. He died even though Mom had tried so hard to save him. The driver of the car had been drunk.

At first Justin had been so mad at that man for being drunk and driving his car, but his gramma had reminded him that as Mennonites they believed in forgiveness. He must not harbor hard feelings against the man. So Justin had tried to forgive—he really had. He and his mom had even gone to a kind of school to help people like them get past being so mad.

In the end Justin went along with the program mostly because it came up about the time his mom lost her job, and she was pretty excited about it. Afterward she even took some training so that she could help other people like them and the drunk man.

“It might lead to a paying job,” she'd told him.

But it hadn't, and his dad was still dead.

He hated the way people at the funeral had kept clutching his shoulder—the men—or touching his cheek—the women—and saying that Justin was now the “man of this family.” He wasn't sure what that meant. Was he supposed to get a job now? Or maybe they were saying that he needed to take on managing the farm like his dad had.

Justin pushed himself off the swing and walked a little ways from his mom, his back to her. He had to think. He had just turned twelve years old, and his world kept getting twisted inside out.

“What about school?” he asked, grasping for anything that might keep this from happening. He stopped short of reminding her that Dad had always talked about how important it was for him to keep up with his studies, especially math. The night his dad died he'd been working on his math assignment and he'd been excited about showing his dad how he'd solved every problem.

“There's a lot you have to figure in running a farm,” Dad was always reminding him. “Not just what things might cost but how to know how many fence posts you need to fence in a certain field. Stuff like that.”

And what about the fact that his dad had liked to read? Not just the scriptures or about farming but other stuff. Justin also liked to read, and he was good at it. And Dad was always real proud that Mom had gone to college even though as Mennonites, being proud about anything was considered a bad thing. But Dad was always teasing Mom about being the brains of the family. She would get all giggly like the girls at his school did and tell him to stop, but Justin could see that she liked it. Yes, school was important to both of his parents.

“Is there a school—one of
our
schools?” he asked again.

“Hester says that there's an entire Amish and Mennonite community right there with churches and a school and shops and everything.” Her voice went all soft and dreamy. He turned around so he could see her face. She looked up at him with a smile and then bit her lower lip before adding, “We'll go to church there and shop and you'll meet people and—”

“Do the Steiners live near there?”

“Well, no. They live some distance away, but they shop there and attend church.”

Justin frowned. Ever since his dad died school was his world—the one place where he could escape his uncle's constant criticism.

His mom sat back again. She wasn't looking directly at him—a sure sign that he wasn't going to like whatever she was about to say. “You see, when we first get there, we're going to need to be closer to everything—my work, your school. We won't have a car. There's public transportation of course—a bus line.”

Justin's suspicions went on high alert. This was sounding like more change than he was ready to face. “But we'll be close to the school—the Mennonite school?” When his mom didn't answer immediately, he began guessing. “A Christian school? A church school?”

“A public school,” she said, and then her words came out in a rush. “It's only for the first semester. Until after the first of the year. By that time we'll know for sure that my job is secure and we'll have had time to explore different neighborhoods and places to live. I'm in hopes that we can rent a little house in Pinecraft near the church and the Mennonite school, but in the beginning—”

“Pinecraft? You said Sarasota.”

“Pinecraft is what people call the Amish and Mennonite community right there in the middle of Sarasota, Justin,” she explained. “From what Hester tells me it's more like a neighborhood than a separate town. But the hospital where I'll be working is some distance from there, and the public school is close to the hospital.”