The Virgin of Small Plains (17 page)

It was attractive, in a rural, struggling kind of way.

The house and barn could have used a coat of paint. A black truck parked at the side of the house looked the worse for wear, though there was a shinier, bigger, newer red truck parked beside it. It looked like the kind of place where the owners had to work their tails off to keep it going.

He had slowed down as he approached it, and now he stopped.

Just as he was about to speed up and move on past quickly so that he could turn around and leave, the door of the side porch flew open and a man came barreling out of it, and let the screen door slam behind him. He had the look of a cowboy, down to the boots in his hands. He was a good-looking guy, tall and muscular. He looked like he had some miles on him, as Mitch remembered his father used to say of men who drank too hard and traveled too fast. He was walking in his stocking feet over the gravel in the driveway as if he was too pissed off to feel the rocks. Suddenly, Mitch recognized him. Jesus Christ, it was Patrick Shellenberger, Rex’s asshole of an older brother.

Abby had married
Patrick?

Before Mitch could even consider what that might mean, the screen door opened again and there she was. The sun had come up just enough to illuminate her face.

Mitch’s heart stopped in his chest.

It was Abby, almost exactly as he remembered her.

She yelled something after the departing Patrick, who raised an arm in reply.

Mitch saw her grin behind Patrick’s back, and pain shot through him.

She was still as pretty as she had ever been. And judging from the way his heart was pounding, it seemed to think it still belonged to her.

Damned, stupid, foolish heart,
he thought.

Quickly, he stepped on the gas so he could glide as unobtrusively as possible past the entrance to their property, before Patrick had time to steer the red truck down the drive.

Mitch drove for several miles, not paying attention to where he was going, or how long it took him to get there. As his wheels bumped over the rough roads, all he could think of as they turned was what he had
lost, lost, lost.
Everything, he had lost it all. His dreams, his expectations, his hopes, his illusions. He had lost his home and family, his friends, his high school, his college, his girl. He had lost his innocence and his childhood. He had lost faith. He had lost trust. He had lost hope. Over time, through the years, he had regrouped, tried to rebuild a life, to make it all up to himself by gathering around himself the things and people who might do, instead. But here he was, after all of that, and the only thing he felt was the bitter loss of it all. Maybe he would never have married Abby. Maybe he wouldn’t have stayed in Small Plains anyway. Maybe he and his parents would have ended up estranged from each other over something else. But he would have had some choice in those possibilities, he would have had some power over them.

Finally, he stopped, turned around, and drove back the way he had come.

When he passed the green-and-white house again, there was nobody in sight.

Mitch drove through the dust that Patrick’s truck had raised.

Back at the highway, he looked northeast toward Kansas City and then south toward Small Plains. Again, he thought about turning back. What difference would it make for him to see his mother’s grave? What was a five-minute visit going to satisfy in him that still needed satisfying?

“You can’t know until you get there,” he reminded himself.

He had not grown up to be the man he had thought he would be. Events had changed him, or he had allowed them to change him. It hadn’t even occurred to him before this morning that the same thing might have happened to Abby. She, too, must have hardened and coarsened over the years. The girl he had loved could never have grown up to marry someone like Patrick Shellenberger. It just couldn’t have happened, not the way their lives had been going back then, not as the people they were growing up to be, back then.
The old Abby might not even like the present me,
Mitch realized, as his hand hovered over his turn signal. The Abby he remembered might not want anything to do with the ambitious, driven man he had become. But then, she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with Patrick, either, and yet there he was.
So, okay, she wouldn’t like me now…but why would I want anything to do with that disappointing woman in the doorway?

Mitch signaled a right turn, toward the Small Plains Memorial Cemetery.

Chapter Thirteen

At the Stagecoach Inn on the east side of Small Plains, the day manager stared helplessly at a young woman in a wheelchair, and apologized for having no room for her.

“I’m real sorry,” he said, and meant it, because he hated losing any chance at a $37-a-night room rate. “I just don’t have any more handicap-accessible rooms left. I swear, we can go months without needing a one of them, and here all of a sudden, it seems like that’s all anybody wants. It’s because of Memorial Day. Some family reunions going on. I do have a few rooms left, but there’s no elevator, and somebody would have to carry you up there, and I don’t know who’d do that. I can’t, not with my back, although I sure would, if I could,” he said, sincerely. “I’m awful sorry. Last I heard, the Econo Lodge was all full up, too, and I mean, completely full up, but I could call there for you, if you’d like.”

“Would you please?” she asked him.

She was really sick. He could tell that by how gray she looked, and bent over, like it was all she could do to sit upright, even with the help of the chair. Plus, the dead giveaway to him was the scarf she wore all around her head, which probably meant she was bald underneath there, and most likely on chemo for cancer, or something. She was traveling alone, which the other people who’d come in this week needing handicapped rooms had not been. They had relatives or friends with them. This poor young thing had driven up in a brown van and had to honk to get somebody to finally come and help her out of it. She must be really desperate, he thought. He imagined he smelled something medicinal. He thought she looked at death’s door, so while he would have liked to help her, and would have really liked to get the room rate, he was just as glad to send her elsewhere. He didn’t want to have to worry about what his maids might find when they walked into her room in the morning. Not meaning to be offensive, he assured himself, but he hadn’t gotten into the motel business to run a morgue.

“I’ll just call over to the Econo right now,” he assured her. “If they can’t take you, there’s a bed-and-breakfast that might be able to, but I got to warn you, it’s more expensive, although why it should be, since all the furniture’s so old it creaks, I don’t know—”

“I’ll take anything,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

“They only serve breakfast.”

“That’s okay.”

He guessed that meant she didn’t eat much and probably couldn’t taste it anyway.

As he waited for a desk clerk to pick up the phone at the other motel, he asked conversationally, “So, do you have family around here?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know anybody.”

That surprised him. Usually, they knew somebody.

“Well, then, what brings you out here in the middle of nowhere?”

He was pretty sure he knew what she was going to say, if she was honest enough to say it. When strangers showed up out of nowhere…sick strangers…it could only mean one thing, which was they’d somehow heard about the Virgin and they were here to see if they could get healed. It was amazing, he thought, how word could spread until his own little hometown got a reputation like it was some kind of one-stop shop for miracles.

“I’m going to the cemetery,” she said in her faint voice.

“To see the Virgin?” he asked, with a sympathetic and knowing glance.

She looked embarrassed and even turned a little pink, but she nodded.

“How’d you hear about her?”

“The Internet.”

“Really!” This was a new one to him.

Again, she nodded. “There are chat rooms about…miracles.”

“I’ll be darned.”

“Is it true…about the miracles?”

“Well, I’ve heard some stories, that’s for sure.”

He was careful to be vague. On the one hand, he didn’t want to make any promises and get sued. But on the other hand, the Virgin, in her small way, was good for business. And in a small town in the heart of Kansas, they could use any commerce that came their way.

When the Econo Lodge reported full, he called the bed-and-breakfast.

“They’ve got a first-floor room for you!” He beamed down at her, happy to be of service to the suffering. “What’s your name?”

“Caitlin Washington.”

He was so busy giving that information to the owner of the B&B that he didn’t hear her whisper, “Or, Catie. My friends call me Catie.”

“They’ll fix you up just fine,” the manager told her when he got off the phone. “Want some help getting back out to your van?”

She nodded, tears of gratitude appearing in her blue eyes.

As he pushed her chair from behind, she turned her head so she could ask him, “Can you please tell me how to find her grave?”

Chapter Fourteen

Mid-morning, Abby walked into her parents’ house and yelled, “Dad?”

“I’m in the kitchen,” her father yelled back.

She walked into the cheerful, spacious room where her mother had once ruled with a magic spatula and a frying pan, and found him seated at the table in his bathrobe, staring at the screen of the laptop computer he had set up there.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked him.

It being a holiday, this was one of the few times in the year when he wasn’t working. Unless an emergency called, of course, in which case his holiday would be over.

“Reading
The New York Times
online,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” she teased him. “You can’t fool me. I know what you’re really reading.
TV Guide.
Checkin’ up on your soaps.”

Her father never watched TV. She would have been willing to bet that he hadn’t had any of their sets on for anything but the weather since her mother died. Before computers, he had amused himself by reading books and medical journals. Now he was as addicted to the Internet as any teenager could be.

“Aren’t we having dinner at your sister’s tonight?” he asked her, with a brief glance up.

“Yeah, but I thought I’d stop by.” She walked over to his coffeepot and touched the side of it. “Is this coffee old enough to vote yet?”

“It was fresh yesterday.”

Abby poured a bit of it into a cup, looked at it, sniffed it, and said, “Yes, it was.”

She turned her back on the coffee, leaned against the counter, and said, “Dad? Remember the night the Virgin died?”

“Mm,” he said, through closed lips, and without looking up from his screen.

“You know Mitch was here that night, right?”

“Mm. Your mother told me.”

Abby looked at him, feeling irritated that he wasn’t looking at her. “Dad? Do you mind? Could you pay attention to me for a minute?”

It had come out sounding harsher…and more full of latent meaning…than she had meant it to, but her dad didn’t appear to have heard anything amiss in it. He merely responded by finally looking directly at her.

“Yes, Abby,” he said. “What is it?”

She stared at her stout, gray-haired father, her very smart, very hardworking, very respected doctor-father, and felt so much love for him in that instant that she nearly burst into tears. However remote he had become over the years, it didn’t erase the sixteen years of love that had come before, when he had been a funny, affectionate dad to both of his girls, and perhaps especially to his younger one. The words, “I miss you, Dad,” almost burst out of her mouth at that moment, but she clamped down on them, not yet ready to deal with whatever might come after them.

“Why are you asking me about that girl, Abby?”

She shrugged a little. “Because I never have before?”

He smiled a little. “Are you asking me?”

“No.” Abby smiled a little, too. “That’s why I’m bringing it up, I guess. Because we’ve never talked about it, and now I want to.”