6
The days fell into a pattern very quickly. Thelma and Katrina walked to the top of the hill and back each morning, regardless of foul weather. Some days, Thelma walked more slowly than others, some days she relied more heavily on her cane for balance than on other days. But she rarely missed that morning walk.
As they walked the dirt path that wound up the hill, Thelma would share stories of her life, and usually add a thought-provoking insight or two, something Katrina started to think of as coming across a blooming flower in the midst of a cornfield. “No one grows old by living, only by losing interest in living,” or “Keep the past in the past.”
She couldn’t imagine Thelma Beiler ever being hearty and young the way, of course, she once had. The thought made her very sad. When she died, all this valuable knowledge would be lost.
In the mornings, Katrina worked in the vegetable garden, or cleaned house for Thelma, and also helped Andy out when he brought sacks of moss from the hillside down to the greenhouse. He taught her how to lay the moss on a moist substrate, so that it had all the conditions it wanted to spread. Once she got the hang of it, he would just hand off a sack to her. It allowed him to spend more time on the hill.
Each day, she tried to spend some time on the administrative side of Moss Hill—returning telephone messages, completing orders, coordinating deliveries. To her surprise, she enjoyed the work. Who would have thought? The most thought she’d ever given to moss was that it was soft to walk on in her bare feet.
Today was a sunny morning promising to be hot later in the day, an Indian summer, as Katrina walked through Thelma’s vegetable garden, watching the bees gather pollen and nectar from the last tomato blossoms of the season. Bees were so certain of their place and purpose. Katrina envied them, then felt foolish for feeling envy for a bee.
She stopped by the phone shanty, just to double-check and see if John might—might—have left a message. Lo and behold . . . there was a message waiting and it was from John! She listened to John’s message, then replayed it again and again, stunned.
“Katrina, it’s John. Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t sell my dogs to you. It just wouldn’t be fair to Susie. She thinks you’re trying to finagle a way for us to get back together. I told her that you weren’t that kind of girl, and assured her that it’s completely over between us, but she’s still freaking out. I shouldn’t even be calling you. Look, I gotta go. Sorry about not being able to get you a dog. I’m sure you’ll find one.”
Katrina hunched her shoulders, using an arm to cover her ribs. A hurricane of conflicting emotions sucked the air from her lungs. As she stood there, she couldn’t stop the tears from starting, then streaming down her face. Not noisy. Not dramatic. Just open faucets, pouring over her cheeks, dripping off her chin. She felt tears streaming, streaming, streaming down her face, and it suddenly made her furious. What had she done that was so wrong? Why had John stopped loving her?
Aware that Thelma would be wondering what had happened to her, she hurried up the hill to the house. She slipped in the door as quietly as she could and went straight to the bathroom where she washed her face with cold water—very, very cold water—to ease the red around her eyes and mouth. She looked at herself in the mirror. “What is wrong with you?”
Her sad eyes looked back at her. They’ve deserted you.
John. Your mother.
God.
She squeezed her eyes tight. It all felt like death. It was all a tangle of loss.
She blew out a puff of breath, squared her shoulders, and pulled open the door. Dishes. The sink was still full of breakfast dishes. Glad for the task to do while Thelma was reading, she cleaned up the kitchen. Then she went to find Andy.
She practically bumped into him as he came out of the greenhouse. “I’m sorry, but the breeder doesn’t have any dogs to sell right now. Puppies or trained or anything in between.”
Andy stood with his arms crossed against his narrow waist. His forearms corded with powerful muscle, and his hair gleamed in the sun. She didn’t know what to make of someone like him. And she was having a hard time meeting his eyes, the way he stared at her. She felt he was looking straight through her, that he could see everything, knew everything.
“Then let’s go find one,” he said, in a matter of fact tone. “Is there a shelter in town?”
She tilted her head. “In fact, there is. A new one.”
Twenty minutes later, they were heading toward town in Thelma’s buggy. Andy glanced at her. “So, care to tell me why you run to the phone shanty ten times a day?”
She cringed. Was she that obvious? “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
“Tell me something else, then, why don’t you?” he said, and bumped her arm with his. “I’d like to know a little more about you.”
“Well,” she started, “I . . .” She stopped. What was there to say? And where to even start? The last year of her life had been horrific, filled with pain and loss. It had brought love too, or so she had thought, but that ended up bringing even more confusion and sorrow.
He could see she was struggling. “Okay, let me make this a little easier. Do you like to ice skate?”
She laughed. “Yes. Do you?”
“Nope. I broke my arm in two places when I was ten. Haven’t put on skates since. You ever break any bones?”
“My nose. My brother Jesse threw a baseball that hit me in the face when I was eight.”
“Oooh. Let me see.” He peered down at her, touched her chin to move her face side to side. “Can’t tell at all. That’s a very nice little nose you’ve got.”
She gave him a wry smile. He was flirting with her, but she found she didn’t mind. Not so much.
Katrina directed Andy to the Wild Bird Rescue and Animal Shelter on Main Street, across the street from the Sweet Tooth bakery. Will Stoltz, a vet, had started the Wild Bird Rescue Center a year or so ago. When he married, he and his wife, who was also a vet, expanded the center to include a no-kill animal shelter. Andy and Katrina wandered through the aisle of the animal shelter, holding their hands out to the different dogs. First was a terrier that barked incessantly, then a Shih Tzu, but Andy thought that would be too close to having a cat.
“So what kind of dog do you need?” Katrina asked.
“Wrong question,” Andy said, looking at each kennel. “We’re looking for a dog who needs us.”
And it turned out to be a large yellow mutt with white spreading around its muzzle. It had the kind of sadness in its eyes that Katrina recognized clear to the bottom of her heart. “Andy, look at this one.”
Andy knelt and the dog just looked at him, sighed and hung its head showing that it’d given up all hope.
“He’s a good dog,” Will Stoltz said, opening the kennel latch to let them in.
“We found him waiting patiently on the doorstep one morning. Left behind.”
Katrina’s heart stopped. Left behind? Just like that. Over. Goodbye. Sometimes, she thought, the world seemed so harsh.
“Left behind,” Andy repeated, rubbing the dog’s big head. “Any idea what breed he is?”
“One part Labrador Retriever, lots of parts of something else.”
Andy moved his hands on the dog in the way that told you he was somebody who knew and loved dogs. “Any idea if he has a good bark? Does he have a prey instinct?”
Will grinned. “Excellent bark. As for the prey instinct, he does chase after balls.”
“How old is he, do you know?” He half grinned as the dog stretched his neck up so that he could scratch under the dog’s chin.
“He’s only nine,” Will said, and hurried to add, “but he doesn’t have anything wrong with him.”
“Aside from being abandoned,” Katrina said. Her voice came out a little louder than she meant it to.
Will looked at her in surprise. “I guess that’s true enough.”
Andy sat down and faced the dog. “I think you need us, and we need you.” He glanced up at Katrina and smiled, and she felt her cheeks grow warm. He looked back at the dog and, leaning closer, scratched him behind the ears. “Okay with you?”
The dog looked at him a long time, considering, his brown eyes searching Andy’s face. Andy scratched him under the chin and the dog lifted his head, then put a paw on his forearm. He smiled up at Katrina. “All right, then. He says yes. Let’s go home.”
After they filled out the paperwork, they headed to the buggy with their new old dog. Andy lifted the dog into the buggy. “What do you want to call him?”
“Me?” Katrina said. “You’re the one who should name him. You’re the one who needed a dog.”
“But you’re the one who spotted him. The dog that needed us.”
“How about . . . Keeper?”
“I like that.” He laughed, a soft laugh that turned into a cough. And then he looked surprised, as if he didn’t really laugh all that often. It surprised her, as well, to hear him laugh, so that she blushed and looked away. As he turned onto the road that led to Moss Hill, he said, “Are you feeling better?”
The kindness, the way he looked at her with concern, made her eyes prickle. She ducked her head. “I guess.” She shrugged, tucking some stray hairs behind her ear. “The reason I run to the phone shanty ten times a day is because of someone named John. We’ve been broken up for two months. You’d think I’d be over it by now.”
“Or not,” he said. “It takes as long as it takes.”
She looked down at her hands folded in her lap. “I think this particular situation is going to take a long, long time.”
Rain had left the village of Stoney Ridge rinsed and clean, scented with freshly mown hay. The sky was bright, creamed with thin, swirling clouds. Jesse felt exultant, a song in his heart, until he realized he was late for work. Hank wouldn’t notice but Fern certainly would.
Jesse found his working relationship with Hank to be ideal. Hank left him entirely alone and never followed up on anything. This particular morning had started as usual, with Hank drawling, “You know what needs doing, or at least should,” and disappearing off to somewhere undisclosed—most likely Edith Fisher’s—while Jesse faced tabulating the chaos of his unpaid accounts, which were numerous.
Jesse’s apprenticeship was now concentrated on learning the ins and outs of the buggy shop’s finances. Trying to untangle Hank’s curious methods, if you could call anything methodical about Hank Lapp. His style of bookkeeping had been what one might call casual, if in a generous mood. If not, sloppy and careless.
In many ways, this sort of apprenticeship fit Jesse from head to toe. Each afternoon, when he knew farmers would be in the field and their wives near the house—a safer situation for the loathsome task of bill collecting—Jesse hit the road with his scooter and made his collection calls. So far, he had collected six outstanding bills without fuss or fanfare. Women were far more sensitive to the need to keep straight accounts than their husbands, he had quickly discovered.
And Jesse had some spare coinage jingling in his pockets. The bill collection division of the buggy repair shop was turning a tidy profit. True to his word, Hank gave him a percentage of what he brought in, but the wage, while steady enough, did not seem to be a swift path to riches. The buggy shop ledger was always going to be tipped in Hank’s favor, not Jesse’s. Besides, money did not stick to Jesse, which was why a more substantial supply seemed such a good idea. How he would get that large supply continued to elude him. A plan. He needed to make a plan.
Three mornings later, while in town, he rounded the corner and a boy, running at full speed, nearly slammed into him but swerved around him at the last second and bounded away.
Temptation knew how to find him, Jesse had to admit. The gambling spirit took another leap in him. As he watched the swiftest boy he’d ever seen, the buggy business looked a little less appealing.
David made a point to get to Windmill Farm extra early on Sunday, hoping he might snag time alone with Hank Lapp to hear firsthand how Jesse’s apprenticeship was going. His son was not forthcoming with information. Unfortunately, Hank was nowhere in sight. David looked around the buggy shop, impressed. It was spotless, clean, and organized.
Not much later, David was delighted to see Jesse drive the buggy up the hill and went out to meet him. The buggy dipped and rocked as his daughters scrambled out of it, one by one. He noticed that they all looked exceedingly tidy, almost . . . starched. The credit, no doubt, went to Ruthie. As she climbed out of the buggy, he high-fived her. “Great job getting your sisters ready for church, Ruthie.”
Jesse handed the reins of the buggy to his father. “Dad, Ruthie is turning into an absolute tyrant.” He smiled his naughty-boy smile. “I’d never admit it to her, but she does a much better job at bossing the family around than Katrina did.”
And it was true. Ever since Katrina moved to Thelma’s, it seemed as if Ruthie had found the space to become . . . her best self. Home life ran remarkably smoothly after she stepped into Katrina’s role. She had created schedules for everyone to take turns with chores, and for the first time in a year, David could actually count on a freshly cleaned and pressed shirt in his closet on Sunday morning.
He drove the buggy out to the field where the horse could graze during the service, unhooked the horse from the large harness, and pulled it forward, out of the traces, leading it through the fence and into the field. He patted the mare on her rump and turned to close the fence behind him. As he walked toward the house, he passed right by Birdy Glick. She was shielding her eyes from the bright morning sunshine to stare at something in the sky. It was a peregrine falcon diving down into the field, then swooping up again, whirring off to the top of the precipice at the far side of the stream. He watched the flight in some admiration. The nesting falcon, an endangered species, was a well-known fixture on Windmill Farm. For a moment they stood, an island of silence in the midst of a busy, bustling farm.
“The first great book,” she said softly to herself.
“The falcon?”
Birdy startled. “David! I didn’t know you were here.” Her cheeks reddened. “I meant . . . the book of nature. I always like to start Sunday worship by noticing something about creation around me. God’s first great book.”
Intentionally preparing one’s heart for worship was something David tried to practice at home. He did all he could on Saturday to make Sunday morning an easy, stress-free time. The buggy was washed and cleaned, clothes were laid out on beds, breakfast was simple, dirty dishes would wait. But he knew there was more to be mined in preparing one’s heart for worship than merely checking off chores. He watched the falcon soar high in the sky, then dip down to catch an unfortunate field mouse, then up again and off to its nest.
“Listen now,” Birdy said in a hushed voice. “As soon as the falcon is gone, the other birds will start to sing.” The chorus began with one bird, igniting the morning chirping. Little by little, an entire choir of birds joined in. “They know it’s safe now, to sing with all their hearts. Declaring that the world is bathed in the joy and love of God.” She steepled her hands together, as if in a prayer. “Evidence of God is everywhere if only we take the time to find it.”
David listened, and heard more sounds that shouted of God’s goodness. The distant stream that ran along the road of Windmill Farm, flowing day and night, never taking a holiday. It echoed of God’s faithfulness.
He saw the rock ledge where the falcon had made her nest, and he remembered how steadfast and solid God is. He watched the trees dance in the breeze, and thought of how flexible and adaptive God’s Spirit could be, adjusting to the needs of every generation while still remaining unchanged. He studied the plants, grass, and trees scattered in a chaotic fashion and remembered that in the chaos of life, God remained in the business of making beautiful landscapes out of our messes. His eyes lifted to the sky, the blue, blue sky, and he took a deep breath of crisp morning air, a symbol that every day is a new chance to begin again.
Then he noticed how many faithful church members were heading toward the farmhouse, heads bowed low with worn hope and fresh wounds from the week.
Birdy is right! he wanted to shout to them. All around you, God’s great book of creation is being preached. Lift your heads! See what God has given you on this beautiful September morning. Signs of his glory, his wonder, his ability to make something beautiful out of your life. Lift your heads! You’re not alone in this journey.
David smiled at Birdy, perhaps a beat too long, because her cheeks started to flame with a bright red streak and she spun around, straight into the path of an approaching horse and buggy. The horse shied and reared, throwing his tail, starting a chain of spooked buggy horses, which invited distressed whinnying among the horses in the field, wondering what the excitement was all about. Birdy apologized profusely to the first horse and buggy’s owner and scurried off to join a knot of women, gathered by the porch.
But for David, the worship that had filled his heart remained with him all morning.
The church rustled, bowing their heads. Birdy sat on the hard backless bench next to her identical sisters-in-law and let the quiet roll over her. In this time of waiting, of silence, with her family and friends close around her, she felt safe. She felt loved. She felt hopeful. And she thought of David.
Birdy thought of him so much. When she woke up in the morning he was on her mind, and her first thought was whether she would see him that day. Church Sundays were her happiest days of all. She could sit and watch David all morning, to her heart’s content, and listen to his honeyed baritone voice as he preached. No one had a clue of all that was running through her mind. She did her best to keep her mind on the contents of the sermon—she knew it was a terrible sin to allow her thoughts to wander off in the direction they tended to go whenever David Stoltzfus was near.
Oh, she was so sure they’d had a “moment” this morning. David had looked at her as if he was seeing her for the very first time and Birdy wondered if there might be something blooming between them. But not much after that, she crossed the yard to head toward the barn and nearly walked right into David. He looked at her and smiled, and Birdy didn’t turn away. For once, she didn’t knock anything over or trip over her own big feet. A sense of anticipation had skittered over the top of her skin, brushing the back of her neck, her elbows.
Yes, she had thought, this was something possible. The thought made her feel giddy with joy.
Not two seconds later, Katrina had appeared at her father’s elbow. “Dad, there’s someone here I’d like you to meet.” A beautiful woman stood behind her. “This is Mary Mast. She lives in the next town over. It’s an off-Sunday so she came to worship with us today.”
As David turned to say hello to Mary Mast, Katrina sidled to Birdy’s side and whispered, “She was the most promising candidate of all the Budget letters. She’s a widow with no children. Cross your fingers. I think she could be the one.”
Mary Mast beamed at David. Positively beamed. Birdy didn’t want her to be so pretty and charming. She was green with envy—another terrible sin.
And Birdy’s delight over the brief moment she had shared with David had disappeared. Poof. Gone.
Mary Mast had come as a complete surprise to Katrina. She’d forgotten all about Hank Lapp’s infamous Budget letter, but Mary Mast hadn’t forgotten. She had tracked Hank Lapp down and called him. Hank invited her to church on Sunday, then drove over to Moss Hill to tell Katrina what he had done, and to hand off the task to her. “You said you’d handle it from here,” Hank had said. “In the store, that was the last thing you told me.” He brushed his hands together. “I’ve done all I can to help get your father married off. The rest is up to you.”
Katrina dug out Mary Mast’s letter, read it to look for signs of oddity or mental derangement but was cautiously optimistic about its mild content. Then, after meeting Mary, she felt the first glimmer of encouragement. Mary Mast was a widow who lived in a town nearby, had no children—a big plus, because Katrina’s own siblings were complicated enough, especially Jesse, though Ruthie could be sneaky—and seemed almost too good to be true.
As she watched her father and Mary Mast chat before church started, she thought they made a striking couple. Looks weren’t important, or so everybody said, but her father was a handsome man, and Mary Mast was quite attractive. In fact, if Katrina squinted her eyes and pretended Mary’s hair was red, she even resembled her mother. A tiny bit. Her father had smiled at something Mary Mast said—a good sign. They had seemed to be enjoying each other.
All in all, Katrina was rather pleased with herself about this unexpected turn of events and spun around to say so to Birdy, but she’d gone.
Andy spanked the reins against the horse’s rump, and the buggy harness jingled. The wheels creaked into motion, squelching through the mud in the yard at Windmill Farm. As the buggy rattled over the corduroy bridge that spanned the creek, Katrina looked back to see Thelma lift her hand in a wave. She had decided to stay and visit with Fern, so Andy told her he’d return to pick her up later because it looked like it was going to rain soon. Katrina turned her back to the farm, settling down on the seat. Andy seemed quieter than usual as he flicked the reins. “Anything on your mind?”
Andy’s gaze lifted from the back of the horse to her face and she saw something in his eyes, a sort of wary pride. “Your dad’s sermon. I haven’t heard a sermon like that before.”
Katrina thought back to her father’s sermon, trying to remember if he had said anything significant. In truth, she hadn’t listened. Her mind had been occupied with how to get Mary Mast over for dinner this week on a night her father would definitely, absolutely, positively be home. “What were sermons like where you grew up?”
“A lot of stories about Anabaptist martyrs, with a few Scripture verses thrown in at random. Rules and regulations to keep everybody out of moral potholes. Pretty thin soup.” He glanced at her. “Must’ve been different for you, to have grown up with your father’s way of thinking. You’re pretty lucky—to have grown up with a father like that. He’s the real deal, your dad.”
Katrina looked at the windshield, partly because raindrops had started to fall, but mostly to avoid responding. She had never paid much attention to her father’s preaching. Or to any other preaching, for that matter. “What struck you as memorable?”
“I’d always heard the Bible described as a manual. Do this, don’t do that. Your father talked about it . . . like . . . it was a story. A story to enter into, not a blueprint of rules to follow. And then when he said that we are part of that story today . . .” His voice trailed off.
Oh that. She had heard her father talk about the Bible in that way. “My dad is always telling people to read their Bibles.”
“And then that part about the Bible being a conversation, between a Creator and the ones he created, that it should be a conversation someone has firsthand, not filtered through the hearsay of others.” He tilted his head amazed. “That’s not the kind of sermon that would’ve been preached in my church.”
“How so?”
“The bishop didn’t want people to read their Bible much, or even to pray much. He said that hearing it once a week in church was plenty. When I was a teenager, he caught me reading my Bible.” A sneer came over his face. “He told me that I must be thinking of myself as godlike, to be so proud as to interpret Scripture for myself.”
“Sounds pretty proud himself, that bishop.”
“Oh yeah, he was tough, all right.” He kept his eyes facing forward. “He was my grandfather. He’d made himself a bundle of money, but he didn’t want anybody to know. We didn’t even have indoor plumbing, though most everyone else did in our church. My grandfather would boast to his friends that he didn’t need it because he already had running water. I can hear him like it was yesterday: ‘Andy runs down to the lake with a bucket and runs back up the hill with the water.’ He thought that was hilarious.” He was quiet for a minute. “Funny how we rise and fall to the assumptions of others.”
“What do you mean?”
“We become what others expect us to be.”
She waited to see if he would say more. She thought he probably hadn’t meant to reveal even that much about himself. “Did you grow up on a farm?” She had a funny feeling the past years hadn’t been filled with happy moments for him.
“Yes. And hated it. So when I was eighteen, I ran off and I joined the army.”
He gave her a look as if he dared her to say something, to look shocked, to hop out of the buggy in fear or disgust. Both, maybe. But she wasn’t shocked or disgusted. She might be only nineteen, but she’d had enough experience to know that life takes a turn here and there, and you could find yourself mired in circumstances you’d never believed you could get yourself into. “Did you find what you were looking for in the army?”
“Not hardly. Three tours of duty—two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq.” He glanced at her. “One thing I learned in the army—you can’t undo a thing once it’s done.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Much as I’d like to.”
Katrina nodded. “I do know that.” She felt a nervous quiver in her belly and she unconsciously smoothed her apron. “So now you’re back on a farm. A moss farm.”
“It’s better to grow things than to destroy them.”
Something about the slant of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, told her there was much more there than that. She used a trick she’d learned long ago with her sisters—especially effective with Ruthie, who could be tight-lipped—of simply being quiet to let someone talk. After a few more blocks of silence, and as he turned up the hilly driveway that led to Moss Hill, she realized he might be the first who could out-quiet her. “I’m a good listener,” she finally said.
“I don’t talk about it that much.”
She gave him a sideways grin. “Still, I am a good listener.”
He glanced at her, then had to focus on the road. “Yeah? Why is that?”
She shifted, wiggled a foot, crossed her arms. “Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone.”
Andy pulled the horse to a stop at the hitching post by the barn. He turned to face Katrina and said, “You know what I can’t stop thinking about? What really got to me was that last thing your dad said: ‘Awake my soul. That wakefulness is the first thing.’ He was looking right at me when he said that, like he meant it just for me.” He tilted his head. “What do you think he meant by that?”
He propped his elbow on the window ledge and started talking then, telling her about his tours of duty, how he was given specialized training to find deposits of natural gas and petroleum and how, once, he barely escaped death in a flaring accident.
She told him about the accident that took her mother’s life, and very nearly hers. Rain kept falling and they kept talking. When she talked, Andy’s attention was quiet, his face turned toward hers as he listened. It was almost an hour later that Katrina spied the time on the little battery-operated buggy clock. The poor horse! Standing in the rain all that time. “Oh, wow. You’d better get back to Windmill Farm to fetch Thelma before she wonders what happened to you. And I’d better get supper started.”
“Would you let Keeper out to relieve? He’s in my room, curled up on the bed, no doubt.”
She nodded as she closed the buggy door and hurried away, though she couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder as she ran toward the barn to let poor Keeper out. Andy waved, watching her.
She waved back.
Resting an elbow on the dresser top in his daughters’ room that night, David smiled softly, listening to the twins’ rationale about why they needed to keep a light on throughout the night. Lydie said that she needed it on to find the bathroom. Emily said she needed it on in case she woke up and needed to read.
“What’s the real reason?”
Lydie and Emily looked at each other and said, in unison as if they had rehearsed it, “We’re afraid of the dark.”
“Ah, I see.” He decided to leave the light on for now. “Don’t forget that God made the night as well as the day. There is no dark so deep that you can’t still see God, if you try.”
He went downstairs to the living room to read. Ruthie was curled up by the fireplace, her nose in a book. Loving books was one of the things they had in common, and he gave her permission to go to the library as often as she liked. Unlike Anna had done, he never censored anything she read. Ruthie, he’d observed, had enough sense of her own to know what was worth filling her mind with and what wasn’t.
The kitchen door squeaked open, fell shut. Jesse was home from the youth gathering. He popped his head around the corner to say hello and good night, then went straight up to his room. The rain that had let up during supper began again, softly against the roof at first, and then a steady drumming. When the grandfather clock in the hallway struck nine, David put his book away and locked the house. Upstairs, he paused to check on the twins and noticed that the light was still on. He went in to turn it off.
In these moments his love for his children swelled. Emily’s skin was warm and damp; she stirred and opened her eyes, then settled back into her dreams. “Sweet girl,” David whispered, and covered her.
“Dad?” Lydie whispered from across the room. “I tried to see God in the dark but it didn’t work.”
He knelt down beside her bed and looked into her big hazel eyes. “You don’t have to see a visible face. You can feel God’s presence, a feeling that everything is going to be all right.” He stroked Lydie’s hair until her eyes closed and he knew she had drifted off to sleep. He went across the hallway to check on Molly and found her sound asleep with her flashlight still on. He turned it off and set it on her night table. In the hallway, he closed Molly’s door gently.
“Whatcha doing?” Ruthie asked, wandering upstairs from the living room. She had her finger in a book and that sleepy look that came from reading.
“Just listening to the rain.”
Ruthie padded down the hallway to her room and shut the door behind her. David stood for a minute in the rain-echoing hallway, moved by the great responsibility he felt for his children. He searched for a way to express the fullness in his heart but couldn’t find the words for the overwhelming love he felt for these six blessings. Surely for the ten thousandth time, he silently thanked God for the gift of fatherhood.
And on the heels of that prayer came the yearning for things David missed—sharing a moment like this with a partner. A wife.