A Stranger's Wish
Authors: Gayle Roper
Tags: #Love Stories, #Lancaster County (Pa.), #General, #Adventure stories, #Amish, #Romance, #Art Teachers - Pennsylvania - Lancaster County, #Fiction, #Religious, #Pennsylvania, #Action & Adventure, #Christian, #Art Teachers, #Christian Fiction, #Lancaster County
A
Stranger’s
Wish
GAYLE ROPER
HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS
EUGENE, OREGON
Verses marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Verses marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Published in association with the Books & Such Literary Agency, 52 Mission Circle, Suite 122, PMB 170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409-5370,
www.booksandsuch.biz
.
Cover by Dugan Design Group, Bloomington, Minnesota
Cover photos © Ekaterina Hashbarger / iStockphoto; Jorge Moro / Fotolia
Backcover author photo by Ken Rada Photography
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
A STRANGER’S WISH
Copyright © 1998 by Gayle Roper
Published by Harvest House Publishers
Eugene, Oregon 97402
www.harvesthousepublishers.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roper, Gayle G.
[Key]
A stranger’s wish / Gayle Roper.
p. cm.
Originally published as: The Key. Sisters, Or.: Palisades, 1998.
ISBN 978-0-7369-2586-0 (pbk.)
1. Art teachers—Pennsylvania—Lancaster County—Fiction. 2. Lancaster County (Pa.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.O68K48 2010
813’.54—dc22
2009017196
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 / DP-SK / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In loving memory of
SHIRLEY A. EABY
sister in the Lord
writing buddy
special friend
Table of Contents
Many thanks to watercolor artist and sister-in-love Pamela Pike Gordinier, of Stonington, Connecticut, for her guidance in painting Kristie’s pictures. Pam, your instructions were wonderful, and if I had any artistic abilities or sensibilities whatsoever, I wouldn’t have to say, “Any mistakes are mine.” But I don’t, and so they are.
Thanks too to Amish artist Susie Riehl and her business partner and friend Shirley Wenger for sharing a delightful lunch with me. Susie, you’re an amazing lady, and Shirley, you’re an enabler of the very best kind. Thanks for sharing with me and letting me use your names.
B
y the time Jon Clarke What’s-his-name drove me to the hospital, my terrible inner trembling had stopped. My hands were still cold, and the towel pressed to my cheek was still sopping up blood, but I was almost in control again. If I could only stop shaking, I’d be fine.
I’d been so sure I’d lost my face. My stomach still curdled at the memory. All I’d done was bend down to pet Hawk, the sable-and-tan German shepherd sleeping contentedly in the mid-August sun. How was I to know he had a nasty cut hiding under that sleek hot fur?
I was horrified when he lashed out, startled by the pain I had inadvertently caused him. He got me in the cheek with a fang, but despite the blood, the wound was mostly superficial. The thought of what would have happened if he’d closed his mouth made me break out in a fine sweat.
How dumb to touch a sleeping dog. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I knew better. Everyone knew better.
As we entered the emergency room, I rearranged my towel to find an area not stained with blood. I went to the desk and signed in with a woman whose jet black hair stuck out in spikes to rival a hedgehog. When she had my life’s history, she patted my paperwork with a proprietary air that made me wonder if she was willing to share the information with the people I’d come to see.
“Have a seat.” She gave me a warm smile. “They’ll be with you shortly.”
Hoping shortly really meant shortly, I took my seat.
“You don’t have to wait,” I told Jon Clarke as he took the bright orange plastic chair beside me in the otherwise empty emergency room. He smiled slightly and stretched his long legs out before him, the picture of long-suffering and quiet accommodation. His posture said it didn’t matter how long things took. He was prepared to be gallant and wait it out.
“Really,” I said. “I’ll be all right. You can go.”
I was embarrassed to have inflicted myself upon this man I didn’t know, this man whose last name I couldn’t even remember. He’d pulled into the drive at the Zooks’ Amish farm just as I bent over Hawk. While Mary Zook plied me with towels and bemoaned my possible disfigurement when she wasn’t yelling at the innocent Hawk, John Clarke Whoever climbed out of his car, took me by the elbow, put me in his passenger seat, and drove me here.
What would I have done if he hadn’t come along at just the right moment? Gone to the hospital in a buggy? Certainly that wouldn’t have worked if I’d had a life-threatening injury. I guess if that were the case, someone would run to the phone down on the road and dial 911 or run to a neighbor with a car. Hmm. Peace and serenity of the Amish variety had a definite downside.
Jon Clarke smiled at me now, looking comfortable in his very uncomfortable chair. “Of course I’ll wait for you. I’d never run out on a lady in distress. Besides, you need a way home.”
“I could call a cab.”
“Bird-in-Hand is too far from Lancaster for that. It would cost a fortune.” He smiled at me again, politely patient.
“It’s only fifteen minutes max.”
“That’s a lot when the fare indicator goes
ca-ching, ca-ching
. It’s better if I just wait.”
I gritted my teeth. Just what I needed, a shining knight when I was in no condition to play the lady. I smiled ungraciously and winced.
“Hurt much?”
Of course it hurt. What did he think? “The strange thing is that my tongue can push into the wound from the inside of my mouth. Only a thin piece of skin on my inner cheek keeps the puncture from going all the way through.” I pushed against my cheek with my tongue. It was a creepy sensation to feel the hole, but I couldn’t resist the need to fiddle.
He looked suitably impressed and apparently decided to keep talking to distract me from my pain and injury. I must say he shouldered the burden with stoic determination and great charm.
“Have you lived in the Lancaster area long?” he asked, and I could have sworn he actually cared.
“Three years. I love it here.”
“Were you at the Zooks’ to visit Jake too?”
Too. So he had come to see Jake. I shook my head. “I live there.”
That stopped him. “Really? On the farm?” He raised an eyebrow at me, an improbably dark eyebrow considering the light brown of his hair. “Have you been living there long?”
I glanced at the clock on the wall. “About four hours.”
The eyebrow rose once again. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Great beginning, isn’t it? Todd spent the morning and early afternoon helping me move, and he’d just left. I was on my way into the house when I stopped to pet Hawk.” I sighed. “They’ll probably decide I’m too much trouble to have around.”
I pulled the towel from my cheek and studied the bloody patterns on the white terry cloth. They looked like abstract art. I was an artist myself, but I never painted compositions like these. I liked more realism—which meant my work would probably never hang in important galleries.
Uptight and unimaginative, according to certain professors and fellow students from my college days. “Flex,” they said. “Soar! Paint where your spirit leads.”
I flexed and soared with the best of them, but the finished work still looked like what it was.
I refolded the towel, burying the modern art, reapplied a clean area, and pressed.
“Who’s Todd?” Jon Clarke asked.
I shrugged. Good question. “Todd Reasoner. A friend.”
“Ah.”
Would that Todd were as easily explained as the conclusion Jon Clarke had apparently leaped to.
“Don’t do that,” Jon Clarke said.
I blinked. “Do what?”
“Don’t push against your cheek like that.”
I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.
“What if that thin piece of skin ruptures? Scarring. Infection. MRSA. Who knows?”
I frowned. Talk about Worst Case Scenario Man. I wanted to tell him I’d play with the inside of my cheek if I felt like it, but he was probably right about all the dire possibilities. I didn’t want to rupture that thin membrane so delicately protecting the inside of my mouth. And I certainly didn’t want to do anything to encourage the possibility of scarring. I looked in the mirror enough to know my face didn’t need that kind of help.