Stephanie Mittman Read online

  “That sounds remarkably like my father’s philosophy,” Abby said, pointing out to Seth that there definitely was a pinkness to Panner’s big toe. “Only he calls it blind faith.”

  Panner laughed, his laughter even louder than the reverend’s. “Maybe there is some similarity there. But I’ve always thought your father really did believe he was holding the winning hand, and I was just pretending. Till now, that is.”

  “Did you practice that bluffing face in the mirror?” Abby asked him. “Can anybody develop one? Do you think I could?” She made one of the million faces that used to amuse Sarrie so, and aimed it right at Seth.

  “Abidance Merganser,” he said, adding a bit of warmer water to the wrappings around Panner’s feet. “You couldn’t lie if your life depended on it. Everything you think is on that face of yours like you inked it and printed it at the Herald.”

  Abby batted her eyelids at him as if she were capable of keeping even the smallest of secrets, which he knew darned well she wasn’t, and smiled what he supposed she imagined to be a mysterious smile.

  “Looks to me like you’ll be all right, Mr. Panner,” Seth said, gently bending and flexing each toe. “It’ll take a while, and I ought to see you in my office in a day or two to make sure that the damage isn’t permanent. Sometimes things look just fine and then gangrene sets in ‘cause the tissue’s dead.”

  “I could lose my toes?” Panner asked, looking from Seth to the reverend as if somehow Merganser could stop that from happening.

  “Would the Lord stand you on your feet without your toes?” Merganser asked, laying a hand on Panner’s arm.

  “Well,” Abby said, adjusting the covers like a little Florence Nightingale. “If you don’t lose your toes, sir, it’ll be Dr. Hendon who saved them, and if you don’t see him in his office in a couple of days, it’ll be your fault if you do.”

  Seth heard the words and tried to make sense of them. How could it be that he could take the credit and not the blame? If Panner lost his toes, it would be because Seth hadn’t done exactly the right things—hadn’t used cold enough water, or hadn’t rubbed gently enough, or hadn’t tried some new remedy that had just been discovered.

  “I’ll be back to check on you tomorrow,” he said with a sigh, knowing that once Joseph Panner was feeling better he wouldn’t bother to have the toes checked until it was too late.

  Abby simply didn’t understand the burden of being a doctor, especially here in Eden’s Grove, where a second opinion was a two-day ride away, where an emergency on this end of town meant he couldn’t check on Mrs. Denton’s baby at the other. Where a small room on the bottom floor of his home was his office, and he’d had to go without new shoes for a whole winter just to get a used autoclave so that his instruments would be sterile.

  Well, of course Abby didn’t understand. She was a child—a sprite—in a family that danced in the rain and made angels in the snow and relied on the Lord to provide whatever they needed. Her brother, Ansel, hadn’t been able to wait to get away from them, to find order in his life.

  Seth had liked Ansel, once upon a time. The man should have been his brother-in-law. He’d seen it all spelled out in Sarrie’s eyes and he’d seen it in Ansel’s. But it had all come to nothing when Sarrie pushed Ansel away, out of her life and right into Emily Cotter’s arms, just weeks before she’d become bedridden. She’d wanted to see Ansel have children, and she had. The closest thing to nieces she would ever see.

  “Mr. Youtt is coming with the papers,” the reverend told Panner.

  “Well, just be sure to leave Mr. Panner enough so he can pay Dr. Hendon,” Abby said. “I’ll have his bill brought by with your newspaper in the morning.”

  Seth didn’t know what to say. What a patient paid his doctor was a matter of conscience, not a number on a bill most folks couldn’t afford to pay anyway. They did the best they could, the richer folks giving what was fair, the poorer bringing him chickens and eggs and slabs of bacon when there was no money in their till. Abby was all business, still rubbing Panner’s foot as if she were Seth’s assistant, talking about his bills as though she were his bookkeeper.

  The sooner he could find a doctor to take over his practice, the sooner he could get out of Eden’s Grove, the better for all of them.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Panner said. “I ought to be able to make a nice donation to the reverend’s new church and still sit pretty comfortable. I ain’t gonna lose those toes, Doc, am I?”

  “Not if you do as the doc says,” Abby said before Seth could properly answer the man.

  “Abidance Merganser, will you be so kind as to not take over my practice until you’ve gotten a medical degree? I’ll gladly hand you the keys to my office when you show me your diploma. Until then, I’ll answer for myself.” Rather than looking the least bit chastised, Abby shrugged and indicated that by all means, he should certainly answer Panner’s question. Like a fool, he parroted her words. “Not if you do as I say,” he added, and Abby smiled brightly at him as if he’d learned a lesson.

  Well, he had: never bring Abidance Merganser on another house call.

  And then he remembered. He hadn’t brought her. Like a stray puppy, she’d followed him.

  But he had no intention of keeping her.

  None.

  Her papa was pouting, sulking like a little boy who couldn’t understand why Christmas couldn’t be every day.

  “How could he not ‘be sure’?” he asked, shaking his head, while Abby’s mother wrapped a colorful afghan she’d crocheted around his shoulders, and Patience, one of Abby’s sisters, poured more hot water into the basin in which he was soaking his feet. “Imagine that! God all but spoke directly to him, and he says he’s just not sure. Why, if I had felt that way, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” He looked around him and sneezed.

  “Well, I think you’ve just done the bravest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Patience said. “I can’t wait to put it in my journal so that my great-great-grandchildren will know how brave their great-great … wait, I lost count. My great-great—”

  “You had two greats and a grand,” Jedediah the sibling closest in age to Abby said. Poor Jed, he was fine with numbers and tools, but the train of life didn’t seem to stop at his station. Sense just seemed to pass him by. “Was he dead when you saved him, Papa?”

  “Well, almost,” her father said. “If he’d been dead, then I couldn’t have—oh, Jedediah! Make yourself useful, son, and find me my slippers like a good boy.”

  “I’d have been useful,” Jed said. “I’d have saved him myself if I’d been there.”

  “Oh, sure you would have! You’d have invented some way of getting him out of the pond without getting yourself wet, using winches and ropes, and by the time you got it all together, the man would have been dead a week!” Prudence, the older of Abby’s sisters corrected, scooping up one of her children who was trying to sail a toy boat in the basin their father was soaking his feet in. “So, Jed, are you having any luck with that silly flying machine?” she teased.

  Nobody waited for Jed’s answer. It was always the same anyway—You’ll see. You’ll all see.

  “The fact remains that he promised the Lord that money, and now, thanks to Abidance, he’s reconsidering his promise.” Her father glared at her.

  “I never told him not to give his money to you for the church,” she defended, feeling disloyal despite herself. “I just said that he should pay Seth—I mean Dr. Hendon.”

  “And you made the poor man think God would take his toes if he didn’t,” her father said.

  “Now, Papa, I hardly think that paying Dr. Hendon a dollar or two will prevent your church from being built, do you?” she asked, handing him a clean hankie and lifting Disciple, the little furball of a kitten, into her arms before he began drinking the water in her father’s footbath. “That poor man is overworked and underappreciated as it is. I’m worried about him,” she admitted.

  “I like Seth Hendon,” her mother said. She too
k the kitten from Abby and appeared to be thinking deep thoughts before she handed Disciple over to Prudence, and announced, “I think we ought to have him for Sunday dinner.”

  “The cat?” Prudence asked, and immediately little Gwendolyn began to cry, grabbing the cat and throwing herself over the furry body.

  “Oh, no, dear!” Mother said, shaking her head at Gwendolyn, and Prudence, and for that matter at Jedediah and Patience, too. “Dr. Hendon. Why, I would think he must be the loneliest man on earth, now that Sarah’s gone. He needs a family.”

  “Oh, but not ours,” Patience said. “I mean, lately he’s so surly. I think a smile would break his face.”

  “The man has a right to grieve, don’t you think? And actually his smile is quite dazzling,” Abby said, a smile of her own turning her lips. When Patience just shook her head, she added, “And it’s all the more precious because it isn’t bestowed on just anyone.”

  “So you’ve seen it, then?” her mother asked, and Abby watched her exchange a glance with her father that all but shouted Didn’t I tell you so?

  “Everyone’s seen Seth smile,” she said, trying to pretend it was nothing so that her mother wouldn’t start taking measurements for her wedding gown.

  “I suppose I’d better ask Seth his intentions,” her father said with a resigned sigh, making sure his lap was well covered with the blanket her mother had given him when she’d unceremoniously demanded that he remove his pants. “Since Abby’s so sweet on him.”

  “Whose intentions?” Jedediah asked, looking up from the clock he was fiddling with. “Dr. Hendon’s? Oh, wait. I see. Abby and … No. I don’t see. Isn’t Dr. Hendon nearly old enough to be—”

  “I am not a child!” Abby cried, stomping her foot so that even she could see that she was belying her words. She calmed herself, improved her posture, and said as demurely as she could, considering that Michael, Prudence’s little boy, was crawling under her skirts as she spoke. “There is nothing to see, Jed. He has no intentions, Father. He is not surly, Patience. And Mother, I do not think he would like to join us for Sunday dinner.”

  Everyone just stared at her for a moment.

  “And Michael, you come out from there,” she added, lifting her skirts to gently boot out her nephew.

  “I’ll make ham,” her mother said. “Or turkey. I bet he’s a whiz at carving a turkey, wouldn’t you think?”

  “No,” Abby said, but no one seemed to be listening to her.

  “I suppose I could make my quince tarts. Boone always loved my quince tarts,” Prudence said.

  “No,” Abby said again.

  “Couldn’t I pick up three cigars, Papa, and we could all discuss the world situation?” Jedediah asked.

  “Make that four,” her father said, shrugging her mother’s afghan off his shoulders. “I’d like Ansel here too. He’s friends with the doctor and it’ll help put him at ease when I ask him when he’d like to—”

  “No!” Abby said, this time stamping for emphasis. “He has no intentions. Not yet. At least none toward me. In fact, he’s thinking of leaving Eden’s Grove altogether.”

  “Oh, but that’s awful,” her mother said, sitting down at the table with a pencil and paper. “How I would miss you! Just like when you go to Anna Lisa’s in St. Louis—only longer.”

  “Michael and Gwendolyn would hardly know their cousins,” Prudence complained.

  “Please,” Abby begged them all. “Listen to me. Dr. Hendon has just lost his sister. He’s hurting and he’s confused. A dinner here with all of you would push him out of Eden’s Grove so fast that we’d choke on his buggy dust.”

  “It’s so sweet that she’s worried about him, don’t you think?” her mother asked her father, as she got up from the table and placed the iron on the stove and her father’s pants on the pad on the kitchen table.

  “Wouldn’t it just beat the Dutch to have that new church built before they took their vows?” her father said.

  Abby looked around the kitchen of the home she’d grown up in. It had fallen into terrible disrepair during her father’s drinking days and never quite recovered. Now it bore the scars of Jed’s inventions, the latest being an attempt to make a clock that would somehow turn on the kettle so that they could wake up to the smell of fresh coffee. He had promised to repaint the kitchen wall as soon as he perfected the clock.

  He had promised to replace the window he’d broken when demonstrating how his boomerang would turn before it reached the glass. He had made lots of promises, but in the Merganser house it was the promising and not the doing, the intent and not the execution, that mattered, and so the wall remained unpainted, the window broken, and the table wobbly. She didn’t even want to remember that particular invention.

  Despite the chaos around him, her father, his legs sticking out from under the blanket, was contemplatively drawing crosses on the wooden floor with his wet toes. Her mother was furiously writing and crossing things off what Abby hoped was a grocery list, not a wedding list. Jedediah was turning last week’s Weekly Herald into an airship with Michael sitting on his shoulders, covering first one of Jed’s eyes and then the other. Prudence, for reasons beyond Abby’s understanding, had decided it was the perfect time to sing one of her favorite arias (no doubt what had driven her husband, Boone, to go hunting for gold almost a year ago, with only one letter home in all that time, asking if Pru might send him a few extra dollars for a new pan and boots). Patience, an apron tied around her head, was dancing with Gwendolyn in her arms, humming a waltz that sounded suspiciously like the wedding march.

  A big dose of this family all at once would probably kill Seth, she thought. He was, after all, used to a quiet life with Sarah.

  But surely Seth would warm to them eventually.

  If he encountered them in small enough doses.

  He had a broken spirit. Just as if he had a broken leg, he needed to rest it a bit. And then, just as he’d do with a broken leg, he needed to exercise it, strengthen it.

  And she could help him.

  If he let her.

  She took a deep breath. If she waited for him to let her, it could be too late.

  “It’s hot,” Patience told her mother, taking the heavy iron from the stove.

  A plan taking shape in her head, Abby came up behind her mother and gave the woman a big hug. “Then it’s time to strike,” she said, kissing her mother’s hair.

  Seth had seen six patients since running out to Joseph Panner’s house. Three were simple accidents that required little more than a bandage and the assurance that all would be well. Two were coughs and colds that he felt pretty sure would not develop into the influenza or pneumonia. The last, Mrs. Denton’s little boy, was the one that was troubling him now, as he read through his latest journal and sipped a cup of the morning’s now-cold tea.

  He recognized the sound of Abidance Merganser’s feet as they climbed the steps and crossed his porch, and what was left of his heart fell into his stomach. What had he ever done to deserve his own little Miss Sunshine? Whatever it was, he was sorry he’d done it. Why she still had faith in him after he’d let Sarrie die, he didn’t know.

  But she did, still looking at him with that cheerful, hopeful face, those big bright eyes that shouted she was his for the taking. It was as if she were taunting him, holding out a life to him that he could never embrace, a hand he had no right to claim.

  First off, she was too young, too innocent, too untouched by the awful things that life could hand a person, to be soiled by the life he led. He imagined trudging home from Mrs. Denton’s and having Abby waiting there, glowing, only to have him tell her that the boy had taken a turn for the worse, that all the tricks he had in that medical bag of his wouldn’t be enough. And where would her smile go then?

  Second, his was an orderly life that ran according to the demands of his practice. He needed the calm, the quiet, the serenity of living alone, having to meet no one else’s needs when the day was done. She’d want to see him smile, laugh, engage h
im in ridiculous conversations. There was no place for that in his life.

  Most importantly, he was leaving. As soon as one of the medical colleges or hospitals he had written to could offer him a suitable replacement, he was leaving Eden’s Grove—and medicine—behind him.

  “Seth?”

  The girl didn’t speak. She sang.

  “Yes?” he said, exasperated.

  “Something wrong?” she asked, pushing back her bonnet and freeing a riot of curls.

  “This is a doctor’s office. Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

  “Wrong with me? Don’t be silly. I’m healthy as a horse.”

  “Then why are you here?” he asked.

  “Well, I had this wonderful idea for the newspaper. You know how you tease us about ‘Dear Miss Winnie’?”

  “You’re dropping that ridiculous column?”

  “It’s not ridiculous. ‘Dear Miss Winnie’ appears in hundreds of papers. The lady knows a great deal about … well, feminine things. Anyway, I was thinking about a column you could write—”

  “To warn men about women who take Miss Winnie’s advice?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.

  “No. You could write a column about health! You could teach people how to take better care of themselves, warn them about what might be going around….”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said, despite the fact that it didn’t seem ridiculous to him at all.

  “Now, Seth … I mean, Dr. Hendon. People are not as stupid as you think. And what they don’t know, they are capable of learning. They just haven’t had the schooling you’ve had. Take, for example, this morning’s emergency. Why, nearly everyone would have put Joseph Panner’s feet into hot water to warm them up. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Unless, of course, you know better.”

  She was neatening the papers on his desk as she spoke, and she stopped to look up at him with those innocent eyes of hers that refused to see the problems that were at the end of her nose.