From Humbug To Holiday Bride. Zena Valentine
on the back porch.
“I fell off the swing,” Annie said, her straight strawberry blond hair framing a round face and dimpled cheeks, her blue eyes demure and shy, too big for her face, but balanced by a wide mouth. Already she was on her way to becoming a beauty.
“Did it hurt?” he asked.
She nodded in serious warning, then asked, “Where were you?”
“I went to visit a lady in the hospital.”
“Is she going to die?” Emma asked.
“No, she’s getting better, but she’s been badly injured and she may never be able to walk again,” he told them.
Emma’s eyes were wide. “Will she have to stay in bed forever?”
“No,” he said, grinning. “She’ll have a chair with wheels and she can probably walk with crutches. Do you know what crutches are?”
“Jimmy Crowton had crutches. He’s in second grade,” Emma said.
He picked them up, one in each arm, and walked to the house. Annie reached down to open the door, and then he set them down in the big old back porch enclosed by windows, and they walked into the large, square farm kitchen where Mrs. Billings was cooking dinner.
He liked the smell of roasting meat and the slight tang of gas from the old range. He overlooked the worn vinyl on the floor and the chips in the porcelain of the stove, just as he ignored the rusty patterns stained into the bottom of the wall-hung sink and the dulled old faucets that leaked in spite of his efforts to replace worn gaskets and ancient stems.
The kitchen was immaculate and it was home, and he was lucky to have it And Mrs. Billings, who had happily made herself part of his family after her husband died four years ago. “How did it go?” she asked him, and he raised his eyebrows in mock exasperation, wondering how much she actually knew about B. J. Dolliver’s harsh, combative personality.
“I wasn’t welcome,” he said.
Mrs. B pursed her lips and folded her arms defiantly over her ample middle as if he had just threatened one of her own. “Will she be all right?”
“Possibly,” he replied, washing his hands in the sink. “She won’t be able to walk, though.”
“Not ever?” Mrs. Billings blanched and dropped her pot holder on the floor.
“Not ever,” he said as he retrieved the pot holder.
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” Her eyes watered, and she patted them with her apron as she sank onto a kitchen chair. He watched her closely, surprised at the extent of her grief over someone she had never known well and hadn’t seen for several years. “She’s such a lovely young woman, and so very kind. I’ve admired her so very much. Such a tragedy, isn’t it? Such a terrible tragedy.”
“Yes, it is,” he murmured, putting a hand on her shoulder, astonished that he should be offering her comfort because of the Dolliver woman who was hard as nails and angry as a cornered bobcat.
She made a quick swipe over her wrinkled cheeks.
“It seems as if you and I are talking about two different people,” he mused.
“Well, I know she can be very tough and outspoken. After all, she had a very bad childhood,” she snapped, then softened again. “No mother. A father who wanted a son and never had time for her.” Mrs. Billings patted her eyes again. “I remember enjoying how spunky she was, and I wanted my own niece to be like that. You know, able to take care of herself and give back as good as she got. B. J. Dolliver is a heroine for a lot of young women, Pastor, in spite of growing up unwanted. I don’t know whatever she’ll do with herself now. What a terrible tragedy. What a terrible thing to happen.”
“Why are you crying, Mrs. Billings?” Emma questioned, her eyes filled with concern.
“The lady I visited today,” Hamish explained. “Mrs. Billings knows her and is sad.”
Emma turned to the housekeeper. “But Daddy said she’s going to get well,” she assured Mrs. Billings, patting her on the knee. “She’s going to have crutches to help her walk around.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Billings said, sniffing. “Crippled for life, that wonderful, vital young woman.”
Emma looked up at her father for an answer, but he had none to give. He hadn’t quite thought of the young woman in the hospital bed as a heroine. Certainly not a role model. In fact, he wasn’t aware that he had ever heard of her before Mrs. B had asked him to visit. He didn’t even know her first name. All he knew was that people called her by her initials, and she apparently had quite a following, which came as a surprise to him because she seemed so alone in her hospital room, refusing visitors and keeping the truth from her own father.
“She isn’t going to die, is she, Daddy?” Emma quizzed, wanting reassurance, obviously stricken with the sense of doom she heard in Mrs. Billings’s voice.
But Mrs. Billings answered for him. “She might not like living anymore,” she said, returning to the stove.
“Why?” Emma looked to her father, and he put his hand gently on the top of her head.
He dropped to his haunches to explain, although he was having a little trouble with it himself. “This woman, B. J. Dolliver, was very active and traveled around the world taking photographs, running after big stories to be printed in newspapers and magazines. An now, well, she won’t be able to do any of those things when she has to walk with crutches, and Mrs. Billings means that, for B. J. Dolliver, not being able to do all the things she loves to do is very sad. Maybe.”
“But there’s lots of things she can still do, isn’t there?” Emma questioned. “She can still see and hear, can’t she? And read books? And watch television and walk around with crutches? And she could swing on a swing if she wanted to, couldn’t she? And go down a slide and ride on a merry-go-round? If she wanted to?”
“Yes, she could, if she wanted to. But maybe she isn’t interested in those things.”
“But maybe if she tried them, she might like them, and then she would be happy, wouldn’t she?”
He ruffled her hair. “You’re very wise, Emma, and I’m proud of you. Maybe someday you’ll get to meet B. J. Dolliver and you can tell her how great it is to be alive.”
It was a casual statement to appease the curiosity of a child, and he couldn’t begin to think that what he said was in any way applicable to the reality of the situation. It was obvious B. J. Dolliver wasn’t even thinking of dying. She was going to tangle aggressively with fate and challenge providence. She had sounded determined to battle with her own body to force it to do what the medical profession said it would never again be able to do.
Obviously, she was not making it easy for the hospital staff, including her own physician. She had locked herself into a self-imposed capsule, holding everyone else away and struggling with desperate ineffectiveness to make liars of her doctors.
He wondered what B. J. Dolliver was going to do when she discovered that the medical profession knew better than she did, and that she would never walk again without crutches, and that she damned well would never run again or wield a tennis racket or chase down a combat soldier to get his picture. He wondered how she was going to take that, accept defeat and the hopelessness of her future as she envisioned it.
Alone. Facing it alone.
As he sat down to dinner, B. J. Dolliver filled his thoughts, and he discovered with just a minimum of soul-searching that he wanted to be there when she finally fell. He wanted to be there to catch her and hold her and tell her there were still things to live for.
The telephone