Stephanie Mittman (2 page)

“Dr. Hendon,”
he corrected yet again, as if there were any hope of getting through to the girl.

Huge hazel eyes searched his face. “I miss her. I miss telling her how I feel and having her laugh at me. I miss planning and plotting with her. I think a hundred times a day that I should tell her this, or tell her that. I worry about her and then realize there’s nothing to worry about anymore.” She sat down in the chair beside his desk and played with the soup she’d ladled into her bowl. “I miss her so much that it hurts, and I don’t know what to do with the pain.”

You swallow it
, he thought.
You bury it under a hundred layers of dispassion
. But this was Abby, incapable of either, and so he merely nodded, afraid that if he spoke there was a chance she’d hear the tears that were lodged in his own throat.

“Please let me hold on just a little longer. Let me come for lunch and we can talk about her until I’m ready to let her go. Please, Seth. I’ll never call you Seth in front of anyone else, I promise. But here, please, let it be like it was when Sarrie was still with us.”

He’d learned a lot in all those years of medical college—to set broken bones, to suture torn skin, to let a fever run its course. But they never taught him a thing
about grieving, about losing a patient, about moving on.

He didn’t know if her way was the right one—maybe a clean break was what was called for. Maybe they were both supposed to close the door on their memories of his sister and lock it forever.

“Of course, my father says that praying will see me through this,” she said, twisting the napkin in her lap. “But then he says that about everything. And Ansel refuses to let me talk about her. But I’m terrified that if I don’t, I’ll forget her, forget the way her eyes saw right to my soul, forget the way her smile held the darkness at bay.”

“You know, you and she were quite a pair of hellions once upon a time,” he said, remembering the time they’d been left in his care when he was seventeen and both his parents and Abby’s had gone to see a traveling troupe performing Shakespeare. He settled into his desk chair and spread a napkin across his lap. “Not that you’ve changed much. But once, when you were maybe three and Sarrie was close to six, I got stuck watching you two, and you convinced me that it was a good idea to play hide-and-seek. Do you remember that?”

Abby shook her head. A tear slipped from the corner of her eye and he caught it with his thumb, studying it for a moment.

“You two hid and I couldn’t find you anywhere. I called and called and told you that the game was over, but neither of you answered. I was afraid you were dead.”

It was a word he almost never said. He had a thousand others in his bag of tricks, all meant to soothe the people left behind. Funny that a doctor, a man of medicine, who was supposedly an expert in matters of life and death, should have such an aversion to a word composed of four little letters. Dead. Sarrie, his beloved little sister, was dead. Despite the years of schooling he had gone through to change the outcome of her illness, despite the trips to hot springs and the steady diet of liver, despite his fervent prayers, Sarrie was dead.

“Eat your soup,” Abby told him. “It’s getting cold.”

“So tell me,” he said, fighting the surge of misery that threatened to pull him under. “Which instrument do you see Sarrie playing?”

“What?”

“Which instrument?” He sipped his soup as he watched her mind working—saw it on her face when the pieces fell into place.

“Not in Sarah’s obituary!” she begged him, holding the palm of her hand against her forehead. “Tell me I didn’t print an error in Sarah’s story.”

“You commended her into God’s ‘bands.’ I just wondered if she was playing the oboe or—”

“Hands! Hands. It was God’s
hands
. Ansel promised me he corrected all the mistakes this time. I wanted Sarrie’s story to be as perfect as she was.”

He lifted her chin with the same fingers that had dug out bullets from a couple of shoulders, sewn together a good score of wounds, and laid cool cloths upon a thousand brows. “It was perfect,” he said softly. “Sarrie
would have gotten a good laugh out of it. Like it was a private gift from you to her.”

“Thank you, Seth,” she said softly. “I’ll try to think of it that way.”

“And will you try, too, to wear your glasses?” he chided. “You’re less likely to make so many embarrassing mistakes that way.”

“I
was
wearing my glasses when I set Sarah’s type. I do admit that when I wrote that Mrs. Binder’s new hut was the latest style, I had pulled off the glasses because, well …”

Abidance Merganser felt herself blush. She could hardly tell him it was because he’d come into the shop and she’d wanted to look her best. Not while he was chastising her to grow up. “There was something in my eye.”

“I’ll miss those mistakes of yours,” he said, looking at her with those soft, sky blue eyes, all rimmed with dark lashes that she herself would die for.

“Don’t worry, I’ll never stop making them, I’m afraid,” she said, willing that to be what he meant, knowing in her heart of hearts that it wasn’t.

“Just like you’ll never grow up?”

“Just like you’ll never notice that I already have,” she shot back. She stood, ignoring the pain in her head that seemed to never go away, and began collecting the dishes and plates from their lunch, “I’m not ten anymore, Seth. I’m a grown woman. And it’s time you noticed.”

“Don’t be so quick to wish away your youth, little one. What I wouldn’t give to be your age again. To feel that life still held promise, the way it does for you. To
see the future ahead of me instead of lying crippled in my wake.”

“Sarah would be rolling her eyes at you right about now, you know.”

“I suppose,” Seth agreed. “But it wouldn’t change the way things are.”

Beside the basket, into which she was depositing the remnants of their lunch, was a pile of letters. She was always impressed by the number of doctors Seth corresponded with, asking for advice and giving it. He was keeping up to date on the latest surgical techniques and medical discoveries, he always said.

She, by comparison, wrote only to her cousin Anna Lisa in St. Louis, who she visited every summer for a month, and sometimes to their mutual friend Armand, whom Anna Lisa was sweet on.

The top letter on Seth’s pile was to the Medical College at Philadelphia. The words
to replace me in my practice here
leaped out at her, and, not caring whether she was prying, not caring if Seth saw her reading it, she squinted at the words on the page until he pulled the letter out from under her nose.

“You’re not serious,” she said. “You wouldn’t really leave Eden’s Grove, would you?”

He leaned back in his chair until his long legs were stretched out straight in front of him. “The minute I can find someone to replace me.”

“Because of Sarrie?” she asked.

“Because I’m done,” he said, softly. “Because I don’t want to be the one to tell another mother that the child inside her is dead. Because I don’t want to have to tell
another husband that there isn’t anything more that can be done for his wife.”

“Because despite all you did, Sarrie died.”

Her bluntness shook him. She could see it, but all he said, as softly as he said everything else was, “Because I’m tired of fighting God and losing.”

“And all the times you’ve won? Do they count for nothing?”

He shrugged, as if he couldn’t remember a single victory over death, when there had been so many.

“So you’ve decided to run away? To leave your practice, leave Eden’s Grove, leave me?”

“You’ll be over Sarrie’s death by then, I promise,” he said, coming to his feet and poking about in his cabinet once again.

“Perhaps,” she agreed. “Given long enough. But will I be over you?”

Abby took off her coat and quietly put it on the peg beside the
Herald
‘s door. Seth hadn’t said a word in response to her admission. He’d looked at her as if she were some pathetic little creature—which she supposed she was—and had held her coat up for her to put on. “Button up there, Miss Merganser,” he’d said as she’d stood in his doorway waiting for any sign that he returned just a modicum of the feelings she had for him.

“How’s the doc doing?” Ansel looked up from the freshly printed proof of the week’s
Herald
. “I bet he’s missing Sarah something awful.”

“
Doctor
Hendon,” she said, “is the same as always.”

“Miserable as ever, then,” Ansel said, circling some error. “Mrs. Wilkins is having a public
pee
to raise money for the new church? I wonder how that’ll work. And Abby, despite what our father might think, the Lord is not going to fix those eyes of yours. You’ve got to wear those glasses—”

“Seth is not miserable,” she said, placing her spectacles on her nose and hooking the wire arms around her ears. “He’s merely serious. And it’s
a tea
Mrs. Wilkins is giving.”

“While you were out spitting in the wind, Frank Walker stopped by to place an advertisement for a sale at the mercantile,” Ansel said. “‘Course he said he’d come back when you were here.”

Abby nodded. Frank Walker was always dropping by the
Herald
with one excuse or another when it was as plain as the missing tooth in his smile that he was trying to work up the nerve to court her. She did everything she could to discourage him, but still he came by, week after week, always telling her that her dress was pretty or that he admired her penmanship.

“Nice man, Frank,” her brother said. “Uncomplicated. Kind. The kind of man that could make a woman happy.”

“How would you know what kind of man would make a woman happy? How would you know what tugs at a woman’s heart or warms her soul? What would you know about feeling like a piece of yourself is missing and that only one man can fill that place in your heart, whether or not he’s willing?”

“More than you might think, Abby. But what if he’s just not willing? What if it means being alone forever
rather than settling for someone else?” Ansel stood at the press, holding out his hand for Abby to pass him the
t
and the
a
so that he could correct her mistake, and waiting for her to admit that Seth might never love her.

Well, maybe he wouldn’t ever love her, but it couldn’t change her loving him, wanting to be near him—heaven help her, wanting to touch him and have him touch her. Intimately. The way a man touched a woman. The way she thought a husband touched a wife.

She struggled to find the
t
, squinting behind her glasses. There was no question that her eyesight was getting worse all the time. Despite her father’s immutable faith that the Lord would mend her vision, it seemed more likely that she would have to make a trip to Sioux City and have her eyes examined and new spectacles made. For so long she hadn’t wanted to leave Sarah, but now she supposed she should make arrangements to go. Maybe Seth wouldn’t mind taking her….

“You could learn to love someone else,” Ansel was saying. “Okay, maybe not Frank Walker. But what about Emmet Sommers? Emily says that Emmet—”

The thought of Emmet Sommers touching her, even to brush a fly off her arm, turned her stomach. “You know I love your wife like a sister—better than that, actually, but she does have a habit of saying pretty dumb things.” From what Abby could see, Ansel loved Emily the same way she did—like a sister. So if anyone was an expert on settling for someone he didn’t love passionately, it was surely her brother. But at least he’d
gotten Morton Cotter’s newspaper,
The Weekly Herald
, along with Morton Cotter’s daughter, and he did dearly love the newspaper.

“She just wants to see you happy,” Ansel said. “We all want to see you happy.”

She found the
t
and thrust it at him. “I am happy. I love my life and my family and my job, just the way they are. I’m delirious with joy. Or at least, I will be.”

“When, Abby? You sound just like Pa. Like wanting will make it so. It doesn’t work that way, believe me.”

“I’m not just sitting around praying for Seth to love me—I’ve got a plan.”

Ansel looked worried. So maybe a plan or two of hers had gone awry in the past.

But this plan had to work. It had to. Losing Sarrie was painful enough. Losing Seth, too, would be unbearable.

Ansel pulled a hankie from his back pocket and wiped her cheek with it. “Tears of happiness?” he asked, brushing back her hair and trying to get her to look at him.

“I’ve lost my very best friend,” she answered, meeting his gaze and feeling grateful that he cared so much about her and was so tender with her. But she was embarrassed that he could pull the thoughts from her head and the feelings from her heart.

“Both of them,” he said gently, touching the tip of her nose. “But the doc isn’t the man for you, Abby, and now that Sarah is gone, you’ve got to move on.”

“I don’t think I can. I think I’m in love with him,” she whispered.

“Oh, I am so sorry, honey,” Ansel said just as softly,
pulling her against him and letting her find shelter in his arms. Despite the fact that she had two sisters and another brother much closer to her in age, it was always Ansel, the oldest, who took the time to talk with her, who loved her unconditionally. “So sorry.”

“Maybe Seth could be the one who learns to love,” she suggested, her voice muffled against Ansel’s apron.

“Honey, he’s too old for you.”

“Maybe when I first had these feelings it would have made a difference, but I’m grown now, and fourteen years doesn’t seem like so much. Ma’s almost ten years younger than Papa, so I hardly see—”

“Grown, huh?” her brother said. “Honey, it’s not just the years. Doc’s plum old. He’s been old ever since we were children. Ever since he and Sarrie came down with scarlet fever and she never quite recovered.”

“Seth had scarlet fever, too?” And she thought she knew everything there was to know about Seth.

“We were around fifteen, Seth and me. Another year and we might not even have gotten sick, since we’d have been done with school. But we did. Nearly everybody did. At least all the school-age children. Back then the schoolhouse was up on Healy Hill, and the wind ran through it like they’d never put up walls. Becky Chaplain had it first, and then we all came down with it.”