Mother's Promise (2 page)

“Suit yourself,” he said as he gunned the motor and sprayed gravel behind him on his way to his parents' farmhouse. Rachel saw Rose's hand waving at her as they sped away.

Perhaps it would have been best to stay in the house even though her mother-in-law, Grace, had smiled when she saw how Rachel kept glancing out the kitchen window watching for James. “Why don't you go on down there? Surprise him.”

“Getting colder,” James's father, Earl, had announced as he entered the house and hung his broad-brimmed black straw hat on its usual hook by the door. Next to it was the hook where James would hang his hat. “Just going to wash up,” he'd added as he passed by his wife's rocker and leaned in to kiss her temple. “Take your shawl, Rachel. That wind is shifting.”

Rachel loved her in-laws dearly. She just wished that she and James could have blessed them with more grandchildren. James's brothers all had large families, but James and Rachel had only one son, ten-year-old Justin.

“Can I come with you?” Justin had asked.

“No, finish your homework. We'll eat as soon as Dad gets home.”

Now as she turned away from the tail lights of Luke's car and took up her vigil for the sound of James's tractor, she frowned. When she had told Justin that she had applied for the school nurse job, her son had asked a surprising question. “Dad will let you work there, right?”

“Of course. He'll be happy for me—for all of us. Why would you ask that?”

“Because Uncle Luke says that good Mennonite women shouldn't work outside the home,” Justin had said. “He says that Aunt Rosie has plenty to keep her busy and then some.”

“Aunt Rosie has four children all under the age of seven,” Rachel had replied before she could censor herself.

But she knew that Luke would disapprove of her taking the job. In his view, if a woman wanted to take on the occasional cleaning job to earn what he called “pocket money,” that was tolerable. But a job like this one, working for the county—outsiders—that would definitely not be to his liking. Even though Luke was the youngest of James's three brothers, he was the most conservative when it came to what he thought Mennonite women should and should not do. He was so strict that Rose always wore solid-colored caped dresses—never the occasional small floral print that other women of their faith wore. And the children—even though they were all well under the age when Mennonite boys and girls would be baptized, join the congregation, and start to follow the dress code and traditions of their elders, Luke insisted they be dressed in the homemade clothing that he and Rose wore.

Just then she heard the familiar sputter of the tractor, and all thoughts of her differences with her brother-in-law flew away on the wind that whipped at her skirt. James was coming. He would be as happy about this as she was. He would pull her up onto the tractor beside him, hold her tight, and kiss her. “That's my girl,” he would say, and then he would kiss her again.

She stepped into the road as he came around the curve, the dim headlight of the battered tractor barely visible in the gathering dark. But she could see him waving, so she knew that he had spotted her, and she knew that he was smiling as he began steering the tractor into the left turn he needed to make to reach their lane.

Suddenly she heard another sound, much louder and far too close. Before she could cry out a warning to her husband, she was blinded by headlights that lit James from behind as if he were on a stage.

He motioned for Rachel to step back as he turned the tractor's steering wheel hard to the right.

In the chaos that followed, the screech of brakes applied too late, of metal hitting metal, the blaring of a car horn, Rachel stood frozen to the spot where she had last seen her husband.

And then she heard feet running toward her.

“Call 911, Grace,” Earl shouted.

“Stay there, Justin,” Luke ordered.

Rachel walked slowly toward the large modern car, its headlights now spotlighting a scene that she could not wholly comprehend. That vehicle showed no signs of damage other than a white airbag lying limply against the driver's seat. A young man was stumbling around next to it, making low keening sounds. On the far side of the car, the tractor lay on its side in the ditch. Pinned underneath it was the very still body of her beloved husband.

“James,” she cried as she scrambled into the ditch, uncaring of the muddy water that soaked her skirt and apron. She knelt next to her husband, touching his cheeks and forehead, covering him with her shawl. “Lie still,” she instructed. “Help is coming.”

But she was a trained nurse. As she searched for a pulse and bent to administer CPR, she knew that the ambulance siren she could hear faintly through the fog of her shock would never arrive in time.

Chapter 1

R
achel stood at the end of the lane waiting for the mail to be delivered. It wasn't that she was expecting anything. Her daily walk to the mailbox had become one way that she could find a few minutes respite from the way her life—and Justin's—had changed over the two years that had passed since that horrible night.

At first, as she had faced the hard grief besetting her following James's death, Rachel had asked God for many things—mostly for the strength to go on and for the wisdom to know how best to care for Justin. Certainly her strength to move forward without James's comforting presence had been tested many times and in many ways.

Earl had suffered a mild stroke, and the family had known that there was no way the elderly man could continue to manage the large farm with only some occasional help from his remaining sons. A week after that her brother-in-law Luke and his family had moved into the farmhouse.

Wanting to make them feel as welcome as possible, Rachel had immediately offered them the large upstairs bedroom that she and James had shared. Their boys had moved in with Justin while their girls took over the room once occupied by James's parents. Grace and Earl moved out to the smaller cottage behind the main house.

Rachel had tried blaming their mutual grief for the tenseness that permeated the house. She told herself that everyone was feeling the loss of James in different ways. But as time passed she realized that the discord arose not because everyone was missing James so much but because Luke did not approve of her working.

“Your son needs you,” he would tell her.

“Justin is in school during the hours I am at work,” she pointed out. “When he is at home so am I.”

“And leaving Rose to manage everything,” he had continued as if Rachel hadn't spoken. “It's a large house.”

Rachel did not point out that whenever she came to the kitchen and offered to help prepare their supper or feed the youngest children, Rose would shoo her away. “You go and rest now,” she would chide. “You've been working all day.”

Rachel had made the best of the situation and tried to encourage Justin to do so as well, promising that it would just take some time for them to all settle in. But after a year of Luke ordering Justin around and openly criticizing her failure to be the Mennonite woman he thought she should be, Rachel knew that there would be no
settling in.
This was their life.

A life without James.

And then one snowy afternoon just before Christmas break she had been called to her supervisor's office and told that her position as the school nurse was being eliminated due to budget cuts.

Without her job to fill her days, Rachel found herself spending more and more of her time out in the smaller cottage that James had built for his parents. She would sit at the kitchen table with her mother-in-law, rolling out dough or peeling apples for the pies that Grace made and sold at the local store. But after several weeks, she had to admit that there was little room for Justin and her in either house—physically there was, but they didn't fit in other ways. She considered moving down the road to the farm where she'd grown up, but her parents had died and the running of the farm was now shared by her two brothers, both of whom had large families of their own.

As the seasons passed, she watched helplessly as Justin became more withdrawn and somber. Now with no school in the summer he was even more at the mercy of his uncle's demands and criticisms.

“I can't do anything right,” he'd muttered one evening as he stormed into the house and up to his room.

“Get back down here, Justin,” Luke ordered.

“Let him be,” Rachel said. “He's doing the best he can, Luke.”

“No he is not and neither are you, Rachel. James was too soft on both of you—taken in by that pretty face and sweet smile of yours from the day you two met. Well, I'm not James, and I expect you and your son to do your part around here.”

Rachel had walked away from him without another word. She'd gone up to Justin's room and tried to console him. But her attempts at comfort and reassurance fell on deaf ears—Justin's and her own.

Now as she waited for the mail to come she paced the side of the narrow country road as she tried to think of anything she could do to make things easier for Justin.

“Here you go,” the postal worker called out as he leaned out the side of his vehicle and handed her a small stack of envelopes. “Have a good one, now,” he added as he pulled away.

“And you,” she called after him.

As she slowly walked back up the lane toward the house, she shuffled through the mail and paused when she reached a letter addressed to her—a letter from Florida.

She stopped walking and slid her thumbnail under the flap of the blue envelope. Inside she found a sympathy card and letter from her college friend Hester Steiner—a voice from her past that she found far more comforting than any of the voices surrounding her at the farm.

She wrote of her marriage and her work helping to manage a nonprofit co-operative that employed homeless people to distribute fresh fruit and homemade jams to food pantries. Hester sounded so very happy that Rachel could not help but feel a twinge of envy.

It took Rachel more than a week to write back. In her letter she talked of the troubling aspects of her life in the same lighthearted way the two friends had shared when they were roommates. She made jokes about being banned from the kitchen, and rightly so, since Hester would recall that Rachel was not much of a cook.

Hester's reply came within days. She had seen through Rachel's poor attempts at humor and addressed the deep-seated unhappiness that lay beneath. And true to form she had a solution.

Come to Florida,
she wrote as if it were as simple as that. Rachel snorted a wry laugh, remembering Hester always seemed to think everything was possible.

This too, was so like Hester, dishing out orders, expecting Rachel would do her bidding simply because to her it was the perfect solution to the problem at hand. Never mind that Rachel's training was in nursing, not counseling.

Rachel put Hester's letter including the application in a drawer of her bureau, and for the next three nights just before she knelt next to her single bed for her nightly prayers, she read through the form, mentally filling in each blank. Each night she prayed for guidance, and on the fourth night she sat down and completed the application. The following morning she waited by the mailbox and personally handed the completed form to the mail carrier.