A Stranger's Gift (Women of Pinecraft)

by Anna Schmidt

  She went to sleep and awakened the next morning thinking about him. It had come to her that she and John shared many of the same personality quirks. They were both stubborn and determined. They both looked at difficult situations as challenges to be overcome. They both wanted something more than the normal that seemed to satisfy others. And in the predawn as she finally gave up on getting any more sleep, she realized that the reason she and John Steiner had so often knocked heads was because they were missing the obvious. Working together instead of alone or against one another, they could accomplish a great deal. The problem, of course, was going to be convincing John of that.

  Chapter 21

  Samuel might have a point,” Zeke said as he stood up from repairing a gutter at one end of the packinghouse and stretched the muscles of his back. “We’re going to finish this up by the weekend, and then the only thing not restored is the top floor of the house. You know, if you had a whole crew working on the place …”

  John continued to roll paint onto the cinder block wall without comment. It had been ten days since Samuel had suggested the same thing. It had been only yesterday that John’s aunt Liz had gone home to Washington after she’d stopped by his place one last time.

  “John,” she’d said, “I’m only going to say this once, and then I am off to the airport and out of your hair, for a while anyway.”

  John had steeled himself for the lecture he knew was coming, but instead Liz had cupped his cheek, forcing him to meet her gaze. “I know that you loved your parents deeply, John, but is this suppressed rage at the world any way for you to honor their memory?”

  “This has nothing to do with them.”

  “It has everything to do with them. Look, I have tried and tried to understand this crusade you seem to be on, this life of absolute isolation. But then ask yourself why you chose this place? Why would you buy property near the heart of a bustling community where avoiding others is next to impossible? Why would you tolerate Margery Barker and that homeless man and, for that matter, Hester Detlef and her father and Samuel?”

  He started to answer, but she just squeezed his jaw a little tighter the way his mother had when he was a boy. “Wake up,” she whispered. “Life is short, and even if you think life on this planet is only a stopping-off place, God expects you to make the best of it, and so would my sister.” She released him. “You have allowed your pride to get the better of you, John. Rachel would be disappointed. Frankly, I am disappointed. You are better than this.” She waved her hand around the room with its tarp roof and a stairway that led nowhere.

  Outside, a car horn honked.

  “That’s my ride to the airport.” She held out her arms to him, and he accepted her embrace. “I just want you to be happy.”

  “I know.”

  The horn sounded again, and together they walked out to where the sleek steel-gray town car was waiting. The driver took Liz’s suitcase and put it in the trunk while John opened the back door for her.

  “Get a life,” she advised John from the backseat as the driver got behind the wheel. “I’m serious,” she shouted as the car moved slowly back down the lane.

  John had stood watching it go, his hand raised in a wave until the car was out of sight, and then he had walked slowly back up the steps to his unfinished house, knowing that his aunt was right.

  “Hey”—Zeke called him back from his revelry—”did you hear what I said?”

  “Sorry.” John shook off the memory of his aunt’s farewell words.

  “I said that October will bring the snowbirds. Some retiree who is looking for a place to call home just might be interested. Or barring that, some developer. It’s prime land, and you know what they say in the real estate business.”

  John glanced over at him and waited for the answer.

  “Location, location, location.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Zeke shrugged and went back to work. “I hear things. I read. It’s a sound byte like pretty much everything else people say that makes the world turn these days.”

  A west wind carried the sound of reconstruction at the south end of Siesta Key across the bay. That area had been even more devastated than John’s property had been when Hurricane Hester roared through, but property owners and developers over there had insurance to rebuild without having to rely on Zeke scrounging for materials.

  Or on the charity of others.

  “You could repay Arlen’s crew out of the money you make selling the place,” Zeke said as if John had spoken aloud.

  “They wouldn’t accept payment,” John said. “It’s not their way.”

  “Then you make a donation to one of those committees Hester and the others are on—MDS or MCC or whatever the alphabet soup of the hour might be.”

  “With the economy the way it is, it could take years to sell this place,” John said.

  “Or it might sell in a week.”

  John fought the grin that threatened to ruin his foul mood. Zeke was a glass-half-full guy. Hester was like that, too, he thought, and then he wondered for maybe the hundredth time why he hadn’t seen or heard from her.

  “Margery tells me that Samuel and Hester are no longer…together,” he said, unable to keep himself from probing to see what Zeke might know. “Do you think that Samuel will go back to Pennsylvania?”

  “Not likely, unless he can persuade Rosalyn to go along with him. Why would he leave a partnership that could secure his future?”

  “You’re saying that Samuel and Rosalyn …”

  “…are an item, and it’s about time, from what Jeannie tells me. According to her, the two of them have been making moon eyes at each other practically since the day they met.” He tipped a bucket of water up and over his face and neck. Then he shook himself off like a dog coming out of the surf and grinned. “Arlen took him into his furniture business as a full partner. My guess is that there will be wedding bells before Christmas.”

  “Arlen made him a partner?”

  Zeke sighed. “You really need to get out more, my friend. This is week-old news.”

  John ignored that. “How’s Hester taking all of this?”

  “Haven’t talked to her personally, but from what Jeannie tells me, she’s taking it with a huge sigh of relief. She never loved Samuel, not that you need love to make a good marriage, but it helps. Besides, that whole arranged marriage thing…That ship sailed a long time ago, especially for someone as independent as Hester. Don’t know what Arlen was thinking.”

  “He’s okay with all of this? Arlen?”

  “Yeah. I expect he just wants Hester to be happy, and he finally figured out that he couldn’t make that happen. She’ll find her way—a survivor, that one. Of course, I expect she’s a little surprised.” He shrugged. “She might be relieved, but her future just got a little murky, if you ask me.”

  “How so?”

  “Think about it. You have this life all laid out for you; marry this guy, start a family, set up a household. Then—poof—all of that’s gone.”

  “Samuel’s not the only man available.”

  Zeke glanced at him and grinned. “You offering to step up?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” John growled.

  Undaunted, Zeke continued to talk. “On the other hand, Samuel sure came out of it all right. He’s in love with Rosalyn, and now he’s got a solid future with Arlen’s business.”

  Still, John couldn’t help feeling sympathy for Hester. After all, she might not have wanted to marry Samuel, but now she was back at square one—starting over—and he knew how that felt.

  “She’s working on some new project,” Zeke continued as he climbed back up the ladder to paint the trim. “Got most of Pinecraft all excited about it, from what I hear.”

  “What’s the project?”

  “She’s set up a meeting with a bunch of us to work out the details. She’s pretty determined to get a program like Rainbow House back up and running.”

  “But that’s not part of a Menn
onite agency, is it?”

  “Nope. The county ran it and then, once it was destroyed in the hurricane, decided to shut it down. Hester has this idea about getting it going again as some kind of nonprofit community thing.”

  John frowned. It seemed to him that Hester was moving way too fast in reacting to her breakup with Samuel. She was casting off pieces of her life like the years of work she’d devoted to MCC, as if they were of no importance. He’d done that once. Back in Indiana when the elders of his community had opposed his ideas, he’d been so determined to prove them wrong, to show them that he could make a life for himself without them. That had been a mistake, and he couldn’t help but think that Hester was making a similar mistake now. “A nonprofit still needs funding,” he muttered.

  “Yep. That’s one stumbling block. If she does raise the cash, the trick is going to be to find a place to do all that work, and trust me, there are very few people who want a bunch of homeless people hanging out anywhere near them or their businesses, so good luck to her on that one.”

  They worked for another hour before Zeke put away his tools in the restored shed and left, promising to return the following day. “Weather permitting and the creek don’t rise,” he called as he gunned the motor of Margery’s boat and took off. John had finally understood that the translation of that last statement was really “If nothing comes up that’s higher priority.” He had learned never to directly ask anything of Zeke, and for accepting the man the way he was, John had been repaid a hundred times over in friendship and free labor.

  Under threat of showing up to watch over him herself, Margery had gotten John to promise that unless either Zeke or Samuel were around, he would not try any work that involved climbing or hauling or lifting. “I don’t want to be responsible for coming out here one day to find you lying flat on your back after falling off a ladder,” she’d groused.

  “I wouldn’t hold you responsible,” he said.

  “Well, I would, so don’t do it.”

  Having gotten used to Margery’s unique style of mothering, he’d stuck to her rule. Once Zeke left, he used up the rest of the paint in the tray, then cleaned up the roller and brushes and left them ready to start again the following day, assuming Zeke returned. With at least three hours of daylight left, he turned his attention to working on the planting beds. He’d found a stretch of his property that ran along the main road where the soil had been left undamaged by the surge that came with the hurricane. It was decent growing soil probably hauled in years earlier by Tucker, and having been left to its own devices for a decade or more, it was rich enough to form a solid base for planting vegetables once he separated it from the grass and wildflowers that had taken root. Every day since he’d made the discovery, John had taken a shovel, pickax, and wheelbarrow out there and worked at gathering the usable soil and hauling it back to fill in the planting beds.

  The discovery had been a double blessing, because in digging out the soil, he had begun to create a drainage ditch where the water would run away from the house and outbuildings instead of turning the yard into a swamp. On top of that he now had enough of a soil base to fill the beds without having to spend a fortune on topsoil from a nursery. Now that the weather had started to cool off some, he could try planting some seeds. Surely the place would have a better chance of selling if he could show that the land was viable for growing things. Besides, it might be months before he could find a buyer for the place. If he could raise a few vegetables, he could save himself some money and not have to rely so much on Margery stopping by with food.

  As he worked, he thought about the news Zeke had told him. So Hester and Samuel would not marry. The idea gave him unexpected pleasure. Most of all he was happy for Samuel. The man had talked a lot about Rosalyn whenever he stopped by, and it had been pretty clear that he was falling for her. He liked thinking that Samuel and Rosalyn would end up together.

  He thought about Alice, the woman he’d come so close to marrying, and tried to imagine what their life might have been like had she stood by him instead of siding with the rest of the community. He’d been drawn to her physical beauty. She was seven years younger than he was, and maybe that had accounted for her reaction when he’d begun talking to her about his fascination with the Walden experiment. Alice had listened politely but shown no enthusiasm for the idea. Indeed, she had seemed mystified by his interest in the book. Why, she had asked, would he even bother to think of trying anything other than what others in their community had done for generations?

  His mother had counseled patience, but he’d seen in the reserve with which she treated Alice that she thought he was making a mistake. “Just because you’ve waited this long before settling down doesn’t mean you can’t take some time to find the perfect partner. It’s for life, you know,” she’d told him once.

  Instinctively, he knew that she would not have reacted that way to Hester. No, something told him that she would have loved Hester’s independent streak and her can-do personality. Like his mother, Hester was a person who looked for ways to help others, whether they wanted her assistance or not, he thought wryly and smiled at the thought. Between Zeke and thoughts of Hester, his earlier bad mood had completely disappeared.

  He leaned on his shovel after spreading the last load of dirt for the day and looked out toward the bay. The waters were calm and clear. They had long since receded to normal levels. Nothing like that day when she and her father and Samuel had come wading ashore. And certainly nothing like they must have been the night before the hurricane hit when she and Margery had come to get him to leave.

  “She gave up pretty easy,” he muttered aloud. But he could not ignore the fact that she had come back the following day. And over the weeks that had passed since that day, she had stayed in touch in some way or another—or he had. In spite of his best efforts to annoy her into leaving him alone in those early days, not to mention that she clearly wanted nothing to do with him, the two of them had found themselves cast together time and again. He missed her, even her sometimes-irascible personality.

  Was it possible that having some kind of relationship with Hester Detlef was part of God’s plan for him? Perhaps he should take some time to examine that more closely. Why would God bring this feisty, my-way-or-the-highway woman into his life and keep bringing her back even when John was certain that they were on two very different paths and there was no reason for them to see each other again?

  And yet, it was to Hester that he had spoken the single thing that he had carried with him all the way from Indiana to Florida. The guilt that he had buried so deep under long days of work and endless nights of loneliness and isolation that he had thought he finally had overcome it. It was to her that he had spoken the words he had never said aloud. “I killed her.”

  Hester could not seem to stop thinking about John. She was so sure that he was going to regret selling his place, and she couldn’t see such a proud and independent man going back to Indiana and begging forgiveness from the very elders he had opposed. She itched to talk to him, but she had promised her father that she would not initiate contact, and she had never gone back on a promise. Still, it certainly seemed as if God was guiding her down a new path, given the way the silliest thing seemed to bring John to mind.

  For instance, she was having ice cream with Emma one day, and it struck her that every time she had ice cream she thought about the time she and John had sat in that same spot. It occurred to her that sitting outside Big Olaf’s that day, they had formed a kind of truce, fragile as it was. Of course, it hadn’t been anything so formal as all that, but looking back on it now, she realized that on that day she and John had changed from being natural adversaries to…what?

  “Okay, you are a thousand miles away,” Emma said.

  “I was just thinking about another time I was here recently.”

  “With Samuel?” Emma guessed and gave Hester a sympathetic smile.

  The date she’d shared with Samuel had not even entered her mind. “Okay,
stop looking at me as if you think I might burst into tears at any moment. I am fine, really. And so is Samuel.”

  Emma raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Still …”

  “It’s the best for everyone. Samuel and Rosalyn were meant for each other, and Dad still gets a gifted partner for his furniture business.”

  “Everyone just wants you to be happy,” Emma told her.

  “I am happy. The Rainbow House project—”

  “Not with work or projects, Hester.”

  “My work and new projects give me a great deal of pleasure.”

  “Not the same thing as having that special person to share it all with. You deserve that kind of happiness, Hester. Don’t surrender yourself to a life of service to the exclusion of everything else.” Emma stood up. “I’m not finished with probing what this all means for you and your future, Hester, but I really have to go. Jeannie and her family are coming over for supper.”