Stephanie Mittman (27 page)

“Just your mama? I’d think Prudence and Patience and Abidance would all be spinning, too.”

“Well, Pru’s not really speaking to Abby. Not singing at her, either. I think she’s kinda jealous that Abby asked Emily Merganser—you know Emily?—and not Pru to help her with the wedding.”

“I see,” Seth said.

“And Patience? I think she’s mad at Abby too, ‘cause she wants to be the first to be married in the new church.”

“And Abby?” Seth asked, warming up some water to make the plaster for the casts. “She excited?”

“Do women cry a lot when they are excited?” Jed asked. “It’d be amazing if that wedding dress she’s sewing dries in time for the wedding with all the crying she’s done over it.”

Seth put out the splints and plaster and gauze next to Jed. He warned him that it was going to hurt, had him lie down, and asked Paul Ivers to hold Jed’s shoulders against the table. “How come she’s crying? Does she
say?” he asked, then pulled on Jed’s middle finger until the bones were back where they belonged, and wrapped the finger against the splint while he told Jed he was sorry he’d had to hurt him.

“I think she’s worried.”

“About what?” Seth asked. Not that he cared. She’d made her bed and—well, he wasn’t going down that road.

“About my flying machine. I told her not to worry, that I’d get it going for Easter, but she keeps crying just the same. Mama says that women always cry when they’re happy.”

Sarrie had told him the same thing, but he hadn’t believed it then and he didn’t believe it now.

“They got the meringue crosses figured out. Now I just gotta find a way to power my flying machine.”

“Might a bicycle help?” Seth asked. “I’ve one in the shed out back and—”

“Really?” Jed could hardly sit still while Seth set his other finger, and when he told Jed that the broken fingers would keep him from helping with the church building, Jed did not seem to be heartbroken at the news.

Seth considered trying to talk to Abby again and decided against it. She knew where he was, knew how he felt. And she’d caused him enough pain. He didn’t think it wise to go looking for more.

“Eat something,” Abby’s mother said, and Abby dutifully put a forkful of something green in her mouth.
She didn’t know what it was, didn’t really care. Everything tasted the same and a good deal of it came back up later.

“I still haven’t gotten a guest list from your Mr. Whitiny,” her mother said, tapping her toe on the floor. “In fact, I haven’t heard a word from him. Young people have no respect for the proprieties these days. Didn’t even ask your father for your hand. No, just getting married with no by-your-leave!”

“He’s away for a few weeks in Europe,” Abby explained. “Family business, you know. Wine. So even if he’s writing it’ll take weeks to get here. And it’s not as if we’ve set a date. There really isn’t any rush with all this stuff, Mother. It might be best if we just waited until Armand got back.”

“Wine?” her mother said. “Oh, my goodness. They won’t want to serve wine at the wedding, will they? You know your father—”

“That’s why he had to go to France,” Abby said, pulling ideas from the air. “He’s selling that business and getting into something else. Perfume, I think.”

“Abidance Merganser, you are surely the luckiest girl on the face of the earth!” her mother exclaimed.

“Are you happy for me, Mama?” she asked.

“A man who loves you so much he’ll give up his life’s work for you? Change what he does just so that you can be proud of him? It’s all I ever wished for you, Abidance. Not that I hoped for someone unsuitable who would reform, but—”

“I suppose I am the luckiest girl on the face of the earth,” she said. “To have someone to love me.”

“You know, this probably sounds just like your father, but while I surely do love all my children equally, I do have a special soft spot for you. Which isn’t to say I love you more, which wouldn’t be fair to your sisters, bless their hearts. The truth is that your sisters are simply not the brightest apples in the orchard. And anyone with two eyes can see that Ansel takes delight in hurting your father and that Jed … well, you know Jed. The boy can invent a butter churn that works on the new Victrola but he can’t tie his bootlaces without an instruction manual.

“But you! You have always been my pride and joy. And to see you about to start a new life, well …” She sniffed and reached into her apron pocket for her hankie.

Abby sniffed, too.

And then Clarice Merganser bawled.

And Abby bawled, too.

And when it was over, her mother said that she had a terrible headache from all the crying and needed to take a lie-down.

And Abby did, too.

“I’d have met you at the station,” Seth told Ephraim Bartlett when the man lumbered into his office unannounced and identified himself. “Had I known you were arriving today.”

“No need,” Dr. Bartlett said.

No need indeed, Seth thought. It was a wonder the man was able to carry his own suitcase from the train to
Seth’s office. The man was seventy if he was a day. And used to city living. He probably wouldn’t last a week.

“I’m older than you figured, I suppose,” the doctor said.

“A bit,” Seth admitted.

“My father practiced until he was ninety-seven,” he said. “His father was an accountant until the day he died at a hundred and one. Try telling that to a hospital board when they’re set to put you out to pasture.”

Seth offered the man a chair, but tried to make it seem simply good manners and not that he thought the doctor was likely to fall down if he didn’t sit down.

“Maybe I can’t perform surgery anymore,” he said, holding out a hand that shook so badly Seth had to wonder who had written the letters he’d received. “But there isn’t a better diagnostician alive. I figured when you wrote me that there were no facilities here to operate, this was the place for me. Your folks can go to Sioux City or somewhere better if they need surgery, and to me for all the little things that poor diet, bad ventilation, and crowded quarters inflict upon them.”

“The people in Eden’s Grove eat well—most of them are farmers. They get plenty of good fresh air, and you’re standing in the most crowded quarters in town,” Seth said.

The doctor appeared unfazed. “Coughs, colds, the influenza. I’ve seen them all, I’ve cured them all,” he said.

Seth couldn’t resist. “You ever treat a child with marasmus?”

“Failure to thrive? Heartbreaker, isn’t it?” he
replied, leaning forward across the desk. “You try changing the diet?”

“Cow’s milk, wet nurse, supplements,” Seth said.

“Once I saw it beaten,” the doctor said. “But between you and me and not to be repeated to any patients, I’m quite sure it was God and not the doctor that cured that child.”

“Well, I could have used Him for this one,” Seth said. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t prayed his heart out.

“Too late, then?” Bartlett said.

Seth nodded.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, son. Sometimes our boss has plans we just can’t understand. Did you do your best?”

“It wasn’t enough,” Seth admitted.

“Did you worry over him, run out to see him at all hours? Did you try everything you read, and grasp at straws beyond that?”

“I tried sugar water with mashed cooked egg. I thought the protein in that—”

“I never would have thought of that,” Bartlett said. “That was a damn good try.”

“It didn’t work.”

“Well, maybe you should just give up being a doctor and apply for God’s job, seeing as how you’re trying to do it anyway.”

Seth had the sense that Ephraim had walked a good many miles in the same shoes that now pinched Seth’s feet.

Seth extended his hand over the desk to Ephraim Bartlett. “Welcome to Eden’s Grove,” he said, a trifle ashamed at his first reaction to the doctor.

“I’ll be sure to watch out for the apples,” the doctor said with a grin. “Is there a hotel I could check into till I find a place of my own?”

“Stay here,” Seth said, taking himself by surprise. “I’ve an extra room and you might as well get used to the place. The town voted down building anything better.”

“It would give us a chance to go over some things,” Seth added when Bartlett didn’t immediately take him up on it. “There are a few patients I ought to see with you the first time or two. And we’ve got a mama-in-waiting who’s a little nervous about a new doctor delivering her new baby.”

“I think I remember how it’s done.” Bartlett replied wryly.

“Emily’s kind of special,” Seth said. “She’s Abby’s sister-in-law and—” He stopped abruptly, feeling as if he’d given himself away.

“Abby?”

He had.

“I’m sure you’ll meet her,” he said, rather than say
The woman I’m in love with, the woman I expected to grow old with, the woman I will miss until the day I die
. “She works just next door at
The Weekly Herald
.”

“Been in love with her your whole life, or is this a recent revelation?” Bartlett asked.

“She’s just a neighbor,” Seth said. “In fact, she’s engaged to some fellow in St. Louis.”

“Her loss,” Bartlett said with a shrug. “You want to show me where I ought to put my things?”

Abby saw the elderly gentleman walk up the street and go directly to Seth’s office. She had no doubt who he was. All she wondered was how she was going to get to see him without Seth finding out.

It turned out to be easier than she thought when she saw Seth leaving his house and climbing into his buggy alone.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” she told Ansel. “I need to take care of something.”

“I thought I saw Seth leaving,” Ansel said. For some reason he just couldn’t seem to believe that she now had absolutely no interest in a man she had pined after for years. Maybe because he wasn’t stupider than dirt.

“I think the new doctor’s in his office,” she said. “I want to get an interview for the paper.”

“I’ll go with you,” Ansel said. “I’d like to meet him.”

“Don’t you think I can do the job?” she asked, taking off her printer’s apron and throwing it on the counter in a ball. “Suddenly I can’t write? It’s bad enough you don’t let me set type anymore. Now I can’t even write the columns? Do you want my resignation, Ansel, because if you do, I’ll be happy to set it in type and print it out for you myself. Of course, it’s bound to be just riddled with errors.”

Ansel’s cheeks filled with air and he blew it out in a long huff that lifted the edges of the papers on the counter. He stared at her without saying anything.

Well, fine, at least she wouldn’t have to argue with him about interviewing the doctor.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” she said, and she could feel him watch her leave, but she refused to turn around and meet his eyes.

With greater care than usual she navigated the sidewalk, stepping down the two steps that separated the
Herald’s
office from Seth’s, and making sure her foot was solidly up on the doctor’s threshold as she entered his office.

There was a pleasant humming coming from the examining room, and Abby called out the new doctor’s name as she shut the door behind her.

Dr. Bartlett’s face, eyes smiling above his beard, appeared around the doorframe. “That’s me. Can I help you, young lady?” he asked, coming into the front room, wiping his hands on a towel.

“Hello,” she said, suddenly tongue-tied and unsure what she wanted this man to tell her, what it was she needed to ask.

“I’m afraid you have the advantage,” he said, extending his hand. “You’re right that I am Dr. Bartlett. Who, pray tell, are you?”

“Abidance Merganser,” she said, recovering herself and extending her hand, not as a woman would, but like a man, prepared to shake the doctor’s hand. “I’m a reporter with the
Herald
.”

“Ah,” he said knowingly, as if she’d told him a great deal more than she had. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Abby. They do call you Abby, don’t they?”

“They do indeed,” she agreed.

“Is there something I can help you with?” he asked, showing her to the chair that she always helped herself to, across from Seth’s desk. She let go of a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding when, instead of sitting
in Seth’s seat, the doctor perched on the edge of the desk.

“I’d like to interview you for the paper,” she started, but then began to worry that Seth might come back before she’d gotten to ask the new doctor what she needed so desperately to know.

“Fire away,” the doctor said amiably.

“Do you believe that what a patient tells a doctor is confidential?” she asked.

He looked surprised.

“You don’t?”

“I certainly do. It’s an odd first question, that’s all. Do many of Dr. Hendon’s patients have secret lives?”

“Just one,” she said, rubbing at the printer’s ink on her fingers. “And she needs to know, if she asked you something, that you would keep it to yourself.”

“Of course I would, just as Dr. Hendon would,” he said, folding his arms and looking at her as if he could see right through to her back collar buttons.

“And you wouldn’t tell Dr. Hendon?” she asked, trying to appear calm, realizing that she should be writing this down, making it look like an interview.