Stranger's Gift (28 page)

“Thank you.” Grady squeezed Amy's hand. “See, honey? It's all going to be fine.” In the quiet that followed, they could hear the siren of the arriving ambulance. In seconds the room was a beehive of activity as Amy was checked, then placed on a gurney and rolled away with Grady clinging to her hand and running alongside.

“You coming?” he shouted to Hester.

“Sure.”

Grady dug into his pocket and tossed his car keys in the air. John caught them with one hand, then passed them to Hester.

“I could have caught them,” she said.

“No doubt.”

When he started walking with her toward the exit, Hester hesitated.

“Lead the way,” he said, holding the door open for her. “It's not like I know what Grady's car looks like.”

I
t took Hester a minute to familiarize herself with the mechanics of Grady's hybrid car. John seemed to instinctively know that it would be best to remain silent and let her work things out for herself. Still, she could practically feel him wanting to offer his ideas about how to start the thing. Finally, she got it started, and they were on their way to the hospital.

“You don't have to do this,” she repeated. “Come to the hospital, I mean.”

“I'd do pretty much anything not to have to stay another minute at that party,” he said and grinned.

“Reception,” she corrected. “And I don't know why you were there, but I was there for Grady.”

“Sure you were.”

Was that a smile?
Hester clamped her mouth shut and concentrated on driving. “I take it your sarcasm means you think I was there for other reasons?”

“I think you like being where the action is. I think you really struggle when it comes to being in the background.”

“I …” She absolutely could not find the words to refute that, but he was wrong. Wasn't he? “And you know this because…?”

“An observation. Nothing more. And it's not like it's a bad thing.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him study her for a long moment, but she refused to take her eyes from the road. “Anyway, let's talk about something else.”

“Such as?”

“I don't know. We're on our way to the hospital, where in a few hours Grady and Amy will bring a new life into this world. Did you ever wonder what it might be like to be a parent?” he asked as they stopped for a light that was notorious for taking forever to change.

She felt herself relax as she thought about Amy and Grady and all the ways this night was going to change their lives forever. “Sure. I think everyone must wonder about that.”

“Maybe you and Samuel—”

“What about you?” she interrupted before he could pursue that thought, a thought that she had not really wanted to consider in all the time she'd spent imagining a future with Samuel.

The light changed to green, and a car behind them honked impatiently. Hester eased the car forward much as she might have coaxed a horse and buggy into motion, deliberately taking her time. “You never married?”

“I came close, I guess,” he said as the impatient driver passed them on the right, horn blasting.

“You guess? How do you guess at a thing like that?”

“Same way you think maybe you and Samuel might marry one day,” he shot back. “It seemed like it was going to happen and it didn't, in my case.”

“Fair enough,” she murmured as she turned onto a side street.

“The sign says the entrance to the emergency room is that way.” He pointed.

“But the parking lot is down this side street.”

She pulled into the first available space and had barely turned off the engine before she was out of the car and walking quickly toward the hospital entrance.
“It seemed like it was going to happen.”
His words beat a cadence that matched her steps as together they hurried along long deserted corridors to the main lobby.

“Mrs. Forrest has been taken to our obstetrics unit,” the person at the desk told them. “Take these elevators to three, and the waiting room is on your left as you exit.”

As soon as they stepped off the elevator, a nurse whom Hester knew assured them that Amy was doing fine and Grady was with her. “The contractions have stopped for now,” she said. “It could be a while.” She turned her attention to John. “Are you the family?”

“We're friends,” John replied before Hester could.

“I'll let Mr. Forrest know you're out here. There's coffee and tea,” she said, motioning toward a machine in the corner, “and our vintage selection of three- to five-year-old magazines.” She offered an apologetic smile, and then continued on her way through a pair of swinging doors that whooshed shut behind her.

“You don't need to stay,” Hester said.

“If you keep saying that every time we end up in the same place, I'm going to think you don't like my company,” John said and sat down on a chair facing away from the television that was on but muted. He picked up a magazine and started flipping through it. The cover featured a colorful summer fruit salad and a bold headline about weight loss. The picture of the fruit salad reminded Hester of rainbows.

“Do you think there's any chance your aunt and her group will help get Rainbow House reopened?” she asked.

“I doubt it. It's not what they do.”

“I've been checking up on some of the people who were so sick. They seem to be okay physically, but it's hard for them and the others…all the others….” Her voice trailed off.

“How's the guy we left here that day? Dan?”

“Danny. His brother came and took him back to his home in Georgia. That's pretty much all I know about him, but at least he had family.”

“Margery tells me that Zeke also has family, locally.”

Hester nodded. “Zeke comes from a fairly prominent family in this area. They give him money regularly, but he just gives it away, takes care of the others, especially his fellow veterans. Some of them take advantage.” She paced the room, ending up finally in front of the coffee machine. “Do you want something?”

John shook his head and continued paging through the magazine, stopping now and then to skim an article.

“If we could just find a place,” Hester continued as if there had been no pause in the conversation. She pushed the button for tea and, once it was ready, cradled the Styrofoam cup between her palms instead of drinking from it.

“Isn't finding homes for homeless people a little out of your jurisdiction?”

“I don't have a jurisdiction. When people are in need, then it's our mission to try to help them.”

“And what about the people devastated by the hurricane—property and job loss and such as you must have mentioned to me at least five hundred times….”

“Don't exaggerate.” She fought against a smile. “It wasn't more than two hundred tops. There are systems in place to help them.”

“Systems that don't work much of the time,” John reminded her.

“I know, but when we were helping Zeke and Dan and the others, it struck me that for these folks—people who live on the street and have to rely on public facilities for their basic needs and eat out of trash cans and—”

“Some would say they should get a job.”

“How? Where? Everything's against them—their hygiene or lack thereof, their age in many cases, their mental health. They are invisible and lost, and no one really notices them until they interrupt the tourist season by hanging out down at the bay or get businesses all nervous or in some cases cross paths with the police and…” In spite of her determination not to, Hester started to cry. She'd been repressing her concerns and worries for so long that there seemed to be no place to put anything more. “Don't mind me. It's just been an emotional few weeks, and I'm worried about Grady and Amy and …”

John laid his magazine aside and moved to the chair next to hers. He put his hand on her back and leaned in closer. “Hey, you're doing the best you can, okay? You can't save the world, although Samuel tells me you are stubborn enough to try.”

She glanced up, swiping at tears with the back of her hand. “Samuel said I was stubborn?”

“I said you were stubborn. Samuel seems to think you can do whatever you set your mind to.”

“Takes one to know one—stubborn, I mean,” she said, far too aware of John's face close to hers, his large palm resting on her back. His eyes with their fan of golden lashes held the promise of understanding and acceptance. And in that moment she fully comprehended that she and John Steiner had a lot more in common than she might ever have imagined. For, like her, he was a person who looked at the world and saw possibilities and challenges that required going beyond the norm to solve. She had never talked like this with Samuel, and even when she raised these issues with her father, more often than not he looked mystified and counseled her that there were many in her own community in need of her help.

John leaned in closer and wiped one tear from her cheek with his thumb. She thought for one incredible moment that he might kiss her, but instead he rested his forehead on hers. “Ah, Hester Detlef, we might be a formidable team if we stopped fighting each other,” he said softly.

“You would help me?”

“I would help Zeke,” he corrected. “You don't need help.”

Yes, I do
, she thought, and for the first time since her mother had died, she admitted to herself that she had been running on empty for months now, lost in her desperate need to find some way that she could save
someone
, because she couldn't save her mother.

It was well past midnight when Samuel closed up the workshop and saw Rosalyn walking along Bahia Vista. He cut across a parking lot behind the cabinetry shop to catch up to her and was just about to call out to her when a convertible filled with teenagers roared past her going at least twenty miles over the posted speed limit. One of the occupants shouted at her, and then Samuel saw something fly out of the car and strike Rosalyn in the face. Glass shattered as the object hit the ground, and before he knew it, the car was making an illegal U-turn. Rosalyn was holding her hand to her forehead. As the driver and another young man got out of the car, he started to run toward Rosalyn.

From their unsteady gait, he was pretty sure that the two young men were drunk, and instinct told him they had not come back to help Rosalyn.

“Hey, honey,” he heard one of them croon. “You shouldn't be out walking alone at this hour. How about a ride with me and my friends here?”

The second young man snickered as one of the two who had remained in the car called for his friends to come back so they could be on their way.

“Why, you're bleeding, sweetheart,” the driver continued, a wide smirk of a smile contradicting his words of concern. “We'd better get you to a hospital and get that looked at right away.” He took hold of Rosalyn's arm and started pulling her toward the car, while his friend stumbled back to open the passenger door for her.

“Let her go, man,” the man in the backseat said. “Let's get out of here.”

“Shut up,” the driver growled. “What happened to your face, honey? It's all purple and stuff.”

When he was within a couple of yards of the group, Samuel slowed to a walk and forced his breathing to calm. “Is there a problem?” he asked as he emerged from the shadows, deliberately startling the young man who was holding Rosalyn's arm.

“What do you want, Amish boy?” the guy holding the car door snarled.

Now that he was closer, Samuel saw that all of the men in the car were barely out of their teens, if that, and the car they were driving was an expensive one. Everything about them screamed money and entitlement. Samuel had encountered guys like these before when he was attending public school. They truly seemed to believe that their family money could buy them anything they wanted, or in the case of Rosalyn, anything they decided to take.

He took a few seconds to gauge the situation. He was pretty sure that at least the two guys in the backseat were not a threat. One was nearly passed out, and the other looked like he wished he were anywhere else but on this street corner.

Samuel memorized the license number of the car as he moved closer to the man holding Rosalyn's arm.

“We got this, man,” the one standing by the open car door said.

“Let her go,” Samuel said calmly.

The driver released Rosalyn's arm as he took a step toward Samuel. Rosalyn seized the moment and ran to Samuel's side. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and faced the young man who was swaying unsteadily.

“There are four of us,” he pointed out. “And I've heard that you Amish boys don't believe in fighting.”

Samuel glanced at each of the other three, relieved that the two in the backseat had made no move to join their friend, and the one standing next to the open door of the car would do whatever this guy told him to do. The person he needed to deal with was standing not three feet in front of him, his eyes glazed and his smile cocky.