The Letters (34 page)

It was Delia who said just the right thing to convince him to set aside his worries and go to the hospital. “I think Rose might need to have a special friend like you by her side.”

Galen looked at her sharply but didn’t answer right away. He had never so much as mentioned Rose’s name to anyone—how could Delia know Rose was on his mind? It was disturbing to him to have one’s thoughts suddenly plucked out of the air. Women could smell feelings as a dog could smell a fox.

Would Rose be glad to see him? He wasn’t really sure. But he knew he needed to do this.

A full day of waiting stretched out in front of Rose. To wait and wait. She hadn’t eaten breakfast and was starting to feel a little weak, close to tears, as the what-ifs crept into her mind. What if Vera’s brain was damaged in the surgery? What if the tumor was cancerous? What if she didn’t survive the surgery? Vera may not be the easiest person to live with, but she was family. She was loved.

Sitting on that uncomfortable chair in the sterile room, Rose felt so alone. Tears welled in her eyes, and her throat ached. A deep sense of loss rose up in her, so forceful, woven of so many memories. Vera had a saying: Oh, das hahmelt mir ahn.
Calling to mind poignant memories with such vividness that they brought pain.

Such scenes rolled through her mind: Dean’s happiness on the day he brought Rose home to meet Vera, Tobe, and Bethany. The children’s small faces, so hopeful as they looked at her, eager to have a new mother. Luke and Sammy as toddlers, wrestling like two bear cubs. Serious Mim with her arms filled with books. The children’s shocked faces as they stood by their father’s graveside, newly turned earth, the raw wind cutting through their coats—Mim hated wind from that day on. Bethany’s stoic face—she never shed a tear for her father. Not that day, not since. Someday, Rose knew those tears of hers would need to spill.

But after the funeral . . . they all buried their grief and carried on. Got back to the business of living. That was the way of things.

Too much. Sometimes, it was just too much.

The whoosh of the automatic doors startled her and she raised her head. She hadn’t known she was crying until she felt the air from the outside cool the wetness on her cheeks.
In strode Galen King with his black hat on, coming through the doors as if he walked through that hospital door every day of his life. In one hand was a cup of coffee, in the other was a brown bag.

“Are you all right?” he asked, peering at her with concern. “Are you okay, Rose?”

She nodded, still not quite trusting herself to speak. The truth was that she had never felt so glad to see anyone. All her nervousness and sadness squeezed right out of her. “Galen!” she said at last, whispering the words. “How did you get here?”

“Delia Stoltz drove me in. She dropped me at the door and went to park. She’s going to go see if she can find out how the surgery is going.” He handed her the coffee. “We thought you might need a little moral support.”

She took a sip of the coffee. A dollop of cream, just the way she liked it. “I’m glad you’re here, Galen. I have to admit I’m scared of today’s outcome.”

He looked at her with one of those quiet smiles that touched only his eyes and said, “You always seem as calm as a dove.”

“That’s on the outside,” Rose said. “On the inside, I’m a bundle of raw nerves.”

He sat in the chair next to her and stretched out his legs, crossing one ankle over the other. “There’s no outrunning fear. It comes on you and you have to face it.”

She just looked at him, then, taking her time and thinking. He held her eyes, then looked away, as if embarrassed. He lifted the brown bag. “Delia stopped by a store and bought a package of one-bite doughnuts.”

He opened up the bag of cinnamon sugar one-bite doughnuts and offered one to Rose. She found them amusing.
Delicious too. As Galen filled her in on the news from Stoney Ridge, she found herself feeling weepy again. She knew what it had taken for him to give up a day of work just to sit here with her. He was not a man who sat and kept vigil.

She wasn’t sure what the end of the day would bring, but she decided that from now on, she would savor sweet moments, like this one, as much as she could. Like one-bite doughnuts.

Galen and Rose had gone for a walk outside to get some fresh air. Delia stayed in the waiting area, flipping through an old copy of
People
magazine. They had invited her to walk with them but she said no. It was an ideal opportunity to give them time alone. There was precious little of that in their lives.

Delia had a sense about matchmaking and she could just see that there was more to Galen and Rose’s relationship than friendship. She didn’t think they realized it yet—certainly not Rose—but Delia could see it clearly. Galen and Rose spoke the same language, thought the same thoughts. True, he was younger than Rose, but in all the important ways, he seemed older.

As they drove in this morning, she had expected it to be a silent drive, but Galen was surprisingly talkative. Granted, she peppered him with questions, but he didn’t freeze up like she thought he would. He answered her questions about his horse training business, Naomi’s headaches, his other sisters and brothers who had married and moved away. The very fact that he steered any and all conversation away from Rose only led Delia to believe that he was in love with her.

Time passed in an instant. The last thing Vera remembered, she was fighting back tears as her hair was getting shaved off. She had never had her hair cut. Not once in her entire long life. And this morning, it was all shaved off.

An instant later, she woke up in a recovery room, feeling like a hen caught in the middle of a killing neck twist. What had happened? Her head was bandaged in gauze like a foreigner’s head wraps. She saw such a thing once on a bus trip she took to Sarasota, Florida, to visit her cousin. What was the word for it? And underneath the gauze that was wrapped around her head were staples and glue. Staples!

There was one bright spot she hadn’t expected: brain surgery was relatively painless. The nurse explained that even though there were many nerves in the brain, they were nerves that thought, not nerves that felt. “You’ll be off those pain meds by tomorrow,” she told Vera. “And I think you’ll like the effects of the steroids the doctor will give you to control swelling. They’ll make you happy and hungry. You might even like our hospital food.”

Vera opened one eye to peer at the tray she had brought. “Doubt it,” she mumbled. “That would take more than drugs.” Who ate blue Jell-O? Before she left this hospital for home, she might try to get into the hospital kitchen and show the cook a thing or two about how the Amish managed to cook for big crowds.

Then that fine-looking doctor came in and asked her to count backward from one hundred. She couldn’t. Each moment of silence that passed caused Vera’s fears to grow. She had never been good at arithmetic. He asked her what day it was and who the president of the United States was right now. How should she know? She never voted. Rose did, but she never did.

Tears started to fill her eyes. The doctor’s hand clasped hers and squeezed. “Right now there’s tissue swollen from the surgery,” he explained. “As the swelling goes down, everything will improve. It’s too soon to worry, but I’m not expecting significant implications from the surgery.”

It was never too soon to worry, Vera thought bitterly. How infuriating to have this invasive, frightening surgery, only to have it do nothing for her! She was in worse shape than she was before she had it. She should have never agreed to it.

The doctor wrote down a few things on her chart and told her he would be back later in the day to check on her. Then he sailed out of the room and left her alone with beeping machines.

A turban.
A turban.
That’s what the gauze on her head felt like.

She remembered!

After the surgery, Rose was allowed into Vera’s intensive care room for ten minutes. No longer. Vera looked peaked and drawn, but there was some fire in her too. “Get me out of here,” she whispered to Rose.

“Not quite yet. As soon as Dr. Stoltz says you can go home.”

Amazingly, that could be as soon as a few days, he had said, when he came into the waiting room to tell Rose that the surgery had been successful. He had walked through those swinging doors in his blue scrubs, a big grin on his face, and stopped abruptly. In the waiting room was not just Rose, but seven Amish people from Stoney Ridge, a crowd, peering at him with concerned faces under their black hats and bonnets. “Everything went very well, better than expected,” Dr. Stoltz
told the group, sounding satisfied. “We won’t know more until she wakes up. I’m hopeful for a complete recovery as the swelling recedes, but, of course, I’m not the ultimate healer.”

“I believe that position is already taken,” said a woman’s voice from the back of the Amish crowd. It came from Fern Lapp.

Fern had organized a Mennonite driver to take a few church members into Philadelphia and stay with Rose during the surgery. At the sound of her voice, Dr. Stoltz’s dark eyebrows shot up and his entire countenance changed. That serious, extremely confident man suddenly seemed like a small boy who’d met up with a stern librarian with an overdue book in his hand.

But then, Fern Lapp—thin as a butter knife, wiry and active—had that effect on nearly everyone, with one exception: Vera. Those two women tried to outdo each other in everything: quilting, cooking, baking, gardening.

Fern offered to stay the night at the hospital so Rose could return home and rest. The driver was waiting in the parking lot for Galen and the others. “I’ll stay the night so you can go on home,” Fern said, after Dr. Stoltz made a hasty exit. “You look terrible. Awful. Like something the cat dragged in.”

Rose hadn’t slept a wink—partly because of that awful padded bench, but mostly because Vera kept hollering out things through the night she wanted Rose to know about . . . just in case. In case she died, she meant.

“Write this down: The farm goes to Tobe. I promised him!”

“Yes, Vera.”

“Make sure Bethany gets
A Young Woman’s Guide to Virtue
. She loves that book.”

“Yes, Vera.”

“My mother gave me that book. It was her book. Did I ever tell you that?”