Stephanie Mittman (30 page)

Ansel didn’t seem to think so. His mouth was set in a grim expression. “Well, you take care of yourself,” he said when there seemed nothing else to say.

“And you take care of your sister.” He turned to leave but instead of walking away he finally gave in, and asked, “You know this Armand character she’s marrying?”

Ansel cocked his head. “Armand? No, not very well.”

“Well, will you give him a message from me?” Seth asked. “Will you tell him that if he doesn’t do right by her, if he ever hurts her, or disappoints her, I’ll find him and surgically remove his heart.”

Ansel nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

“And tell Abby that I tucked a wedding gift in here,
as well,” he said, pointing to the carton. “I don’t think her new husband will appreciate it, but I wanted her to have it.”

“I’ll tell her,” Ansel agreed again.

“Just one more thing,” Seth said, still having trouble dragging himself from the
Herald’s
office, from all that had been and all that might have been. “You have, finally, gotten over Sarrie, haven’t you?”

“I’ll love Sarrie until I die,” Ansel said sadly, and then, maybe just to make Seth feel better, he added, “but I do love Emily, too.”

Seth nodded. He was glad for Ansel that the man could move on.

He had no hope that he would do the same.

For him it would be only Abby forever.

Seth went out to the Dentons’ place to tell them he was leaving. He stopped at the Youtts’, the Marshalls’, farm after farm, letting people know that he was leaving them in good hands. And then he headed back to his office, which soon wouldn’t be his anymore, his home, which had been empty since Sarrie died.

With a sigh he opened the door to his office and found Emily Merganser waiting for him. She had a basket of things wrapped for traveling and waited patiently while he admonished her for carrying something so heavy while she was already carrying something so important.

“Ansel carried it over for me,” she said. “But I didn’t want to just leave it. I wanted to see you before you left.”

“Are you having any problems?” Seth asked. Worry was written on her face like danger signs at a mine.

“I’m fine. At least Dr. Bartlett says I am.” Her hand rested gently on the swell of belly that had become obvious overnight, it seemed. “I’m fairly certain this one’s a boy. With all the heartburn that keeps me up at night, he’s sure to have a beard along with a full head of hair!”

“You never struck me as someone who’d believe those old wives’ tales,” he teased her, realizing that she was yet another of the growing number of people he would miss. He wondered what she had really come about, but since he was in no rush to be alone, he waited for her to comment on the fine weather and the Merrimans’ new cow and the lovely fabrics that Frank Walker was carrying in the mercantile now that he was the one making the purchases.

And finally she asked him where he was headed.

“I’m not sure,” he said, trying to sound as if he had too many viable options to choose only one.

“Well, have you worked out some sort of itinerary?” she asked. “Some way that someone could reach you if they needed to?”

“You’re in good hands, Mrs. Merganser. I promise you. Dr. Bartlett is—”

“It’s not that,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “What if something comes up that you’d want to know?”

“About anything in particular?” he asked, wondering if Abby had told Emily about their night together, wondering if Emily thought that he might be leaving something behind.

“No,” she said, but something in her voice told him she was lying. “But wouldn’t it be simply awful if you left and things changed and you didn’t know it?”

What she meant was
What if Abby changes her mind?
and the truth was that he didn’t think he could risk climbing that ladder and being pushed off the top rung again. “I’ll write after I’m settled,” he lied.

“What if that’s too late?” Emily asked.

“If something’s that important, I’m sure I’ll read about it in the newspaper,” he said.

“You aren’t thinking of getting a subscription to
The Weekly Herald
are you?” Emily asked, worrying her lip.

Seth laughed. He’d miss Abby’s articles and her mistakes, but no, when he cut ties, he cut them for good. There would be no suturing of this rupture, no setting of this break.

“What if I need to find you?” she demanded. “What if someone needs you desperately?”

“A matter of life or death?” Seth asked.

“Exactly,” Emily agreed.

“Then they should see Dr. Bartlett,” he said, taking his diploma down from the wall and throwing it into one of the still-open boxes that Ephraim had agreed to send on to him once he’d gotten settled.

“Is where you’re going a secret?” Emily asked, clearly exasperated.

“Dr. Bartlett will know how to reach me once I’ve settled in. Does that help you any, Emily?”

“That helps me a great deal,” she said. “How soon do you expect to be settled?”

T
HE FOLLOWING
S
UNDAY WAS GLORIOUS, IF THE
weather was what mattered to a body. Abby tried to care, but the effort was too great. Rising, getting out of bed, getting dressed—all of it with her head splitting and her stomach rebelling—was as much as she could manage.

“What’s the matter, Abby? Are you sick?” Patience asked, standing at the foot of her bed in her newest dress, all pink and pretty and ready to go. “I’d better tell Mama. Papa’s already left for church.”

“I’ll be up in a minute,” Abby said. “You go on down to breakfast and I’ll—”

“You know you aren’t fooling anyone.”

Abby turned her head so that she could see Prudence, standing in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest.

“She isn’t?” Patience asked. Apparently Abby had managed to fool her, but then Patience had been conned into inviting the new neighbors to dinner with her father. And they were Baptists!

“She’s scared to death to get married,” Prudence
said. “Cold feet right up to her nose! Touch her hands,” she egged Patience on. “I bet they’re icicles!”

“They are!” Patience agreed after touching Abby’s hand.

“It’s no wonder,” Prudence said, coming in and sitting at the end of Abby’s bed. “You hardly know the man.”

“
You
hardly know him,” Abby corrected. “I’ve known him for years—”

“Oh, but you never mentioned him before?” Prudence asked skeptically. “Suddenly out of thin air, Mr. Right sends you a proposal through the mail, and you, on a whim, accept?”

“Something like that,” Abby agreed, throwing back the covers and sitting up on the edge of the bed. She could feel the dry heaves working their way up her chest.

Today was not going to be a good day.

“It wasn’t that different for you and Boone,” Patience said. “He was just traveling through town and you took a fancy to him and two weeks later you two were camped out in the shed like it was the honeymoon suite at the Grand Hotel.”

“Is that it, Abby? Are you afraid that you’ll marry him and then he’ll bolt, like Boone did?”

It was the first time there had been any sign that Prudence knew that Boone wasn’t coming back, that he’d left her and Gwendolyn and Michael for good.

“Because this is different, Abby. Papa didn’t find you and Armand—” Her face was crimson, and Abby wanted to spare her sister from having to relate the details that she hadn’t known until now. So Boone had
had to marry Pru, and he’d made the best of it for as long as he could. It was harder to hate him for leaving when his reason for staying hadn’t been true love to begin with.

“Girrrls! We’re running laaate!” Her mother’s song, the Sunday morning song that was as familiar to them as any hymn they sang in church, wended its way up the stairwell and into the room Abby shared with Patience.

Slowly she got up from the bed. Keeping her balance got trickier every day. Her vision got narrower and her hands shook more. But it was Sunday, and God and church offered a good deal more comfort than bed.

“Pick me out something cheerful,” she told Patience, who had a wonderful sense of fashion—a blessing, since without that she would have no sense at all. “I’ll be back.”

And then she moved unsteadily down the hallway, lost whatever morsels were left in her stomach after last night’s heaves, relieved herself, washed, and recovered.

With her sisters dressing her and getting her ready, the three were downstairs and at the table after only two more choruses of “We’re going to be late and your father will be fuming.” Her father didn’t take his own family’s tardiness well, and Abby much preferred hearing “Hosanna in the highest” over her mother’s “late-late-late” hymn.

“Don’t you all look so pretty?” her mother exclaimed just as Emily and Ansel and Suellen appeared at the back door with Emily’s wonderful loaves of bread with the red eggs baked into them. “And look who’s here!”

Her mother opened the door and Suellen came skipping in, greeted by Gwendolyn and Michael, who pulled her away to see the palm leaves that their grandpa had gotten for next Sunday’s services.

If Abby felt awful, it was nothing compared to the way Emily looked to her,
at
her. It was, of course, to be expected. That was why, wasn’t it, she was keeping her awful secret to herself? So that she didn’t have to see the pain in everyone’s eyes, the sadness that she could do nothing to erase?

So maybe the truth was that she wasn’t being noble after all. Maybe she was just sparing herself that extra burden of guilt, and if that was really what it was about, well, she figured it wasn’t so awful to indulge herself in this one tiny cushion against a whole sea of hopelessness.

“Dr. Hendon left Eden’s Grove today,” Emily announced, pretending that her news wasn’t meant just for Abby’s ears, for Abby’s heart.

“Didn’t look easy for him to go,” Ansel added, and in a heartbeat Abby knew that Emily had told her husband. Just as well, she told herself. Emily was in no condition to bear the burden of Abby’s secret alone. “I think he left a good chunk of his heart here,” he added.

“Is he off to search for gold, then?” Abby asked in as light a voice as she could muster. Seth was gone. All the relief she had expected to flood over her—and nothing happened. All the joy for him, for his escape, that she had expected to feel—and she felt none of it.

“If he knew where he was going, he wouldn’t say yesterday,” Emily answered.

“Ella Welsh was headed for Kansas City, from what I
heard,” Ansel said, while the family bustled around Abby, all getting ready to head over to the grange hall for one of the last Sunday services that would be held there, if her father was right about how soon the church would be finished.

“But he wasn’t going there with her,” Emily added quickly.

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to say he was,” Ansel was quick to say, so Abby was pretty sure they were on the same train. Well, the man had a right to seek comfort where he could find it, she supposed.

Of course—un-Christian though it was, especially on a Sunday—she did hope and pray that all of Ella Welsh’s teeth fell out while that floozy was on that train with Dr. Seth Hendon.

One teeny, tiny piece of her even wished that Seth found out—right in the midst of his flirtation with Miss Welsh—that Abby was dying. Oh, she didn’t mean that! Not for a second. Not when she thought of the pain in his eyes when he’d offered to stay in Eden’s Grove for her.

“Time we got over to the church,” she said, watching her mother frantically finish taking one more cross off the baking sheet before they left. “Leave them, Mama. We’ve got to get going.”

“What if we starched them?” her mother asked, holding up one of the small crosses she’d been crocheting since last Easter so that there would be plenty to give out at services. “There are already the palm leaves for next Sunday’s services … what if we starched all these for Easter and then Jed could—”

“Could what?” Ansel asked sarcastically. “Throw
them from the sky when he gets that ridiculous contraption to fly? You don’t actually believe he’s going to—”

“Miracles can happen,” Emily said. “That’s what Easter is all about, isn’t it?”

“If I were praying for a miracle,” Ansel said, taking his wife’s arm, but staring hard at Abby, “that wouldn’t be what I was praying for.”

“I brought some biscuits,” Ella Welsh said, reaching into the basket on her lap and offering a shortcake to Seth.

“No, thank you,” he said, shaking his head and looking out at the landscape, the rolling hills coming to life before his eyes.

“Why’d you leave, then?” Ella asked him as if he’d actually uttered what was inside his head and his heart.

“No reason to stay.” He folded his arms over his chest and threw his head back against the seat, as if he might nap despite the early hour and the presence of a traveling companion.

“Men are idiots,” Ella said, pulling her biscuit apart and popping a piece into her mouth. “Present company very definitely included.”

“People in general are idiots,” Seth said, checking his watch to find that they hadn’t been out of Eden’s Grove an hour and he was already worrying about Johnnie Youtt and Annesta Spencer, the church choir leader who seemed to be coming down with more than a cold when he’d seen her two days ago. And Emily Merganser too, who should have been the picture of
health, glowing the way she had when she’d been carrying Suellen, but who’d instead looked pale and drawn. And the fact that Ephraim had had to see her twice worried Seth considerably.