by Sarah Price
ALSO BY SARAH PRICE
An Empty Cup
An Amish Buggy Ride
Secret Sister: An Amish Christmas Tale
The Plain Fame Series
Plain Fame
Plain Change
Plain Again
Plain Return
Plain Choice
Plain Christmas
The Amish of Lancaster Series
Fields of Corn
Hills of Wheat
Pastures of Faith
Valley of Hope
The Amish of Ephrata Series
The Tomato Patch
The Quilting Bee
The Hope Chest
The Clothes Line
The Amish Classics Series
First Impressions: An Amish Tale of Pride and Prejudice
The Matchmaker: An Amish Retelling of Jane Austen’s “Emma”
Second Chances: An Amish Retelling of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”
Sense and Sensibility: An Amish Retelling of Jane Austen’s Classic
For a complete listing of books, please visit the author’s website at www.sarahpriceauthor.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 Price Publishing, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Waterfall Press, Grand Haven, MI
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Waterfall Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503938670
ISBN-10: 1503938670
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
CONTENTS
START READING
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For the living know that they will die,
And the dead know nothing:
they have no further reward,
and even the memory of them is forgotten.
—Ecclesiastes 9:5
PROLOGUE
The fresh layer of snow—something that usually excited Frances more than anything—did nothing to cover up the fact that she would have to sit in an old-fashioned red sleigh next to a dying woman.
“Why me?” Frances turned from the window as her mother hovered over her, about to brush her brown hair. “No one else has to go!”
“Never ask ‘why me.’ You know I don’t like that. Sometimes in life you just have to do what you have to do. Besides, you don’t know the plans God has for you. Or for others, for that matter.” Her mother jerked the brush a little too roughly through a knot at the nape of Frances’s neck. “And what is with all of these questions? Why didn’t you wear your Mary Janes? I specifically told you to put them on.”
Frances winced as another knot was attacked by her mother’s swift hand. “I hate Mary Janes. They’re stupid-looking and too big anyway.”
Her mother took a step backward and glared at her in the mirror. “You’ll grow into them, Frances. Now, enough complaining out of you.” Her mother leaned forward and turned on the water faucet, dampening the brush, which made it smell bad.
Wrinkling her nose, Frances leaned away from her mother. “I just don’t understand why I have to go!”
“She’s dying, Frances, and you know how much she loves you!” Her mother tried to slick down the cowlick at Frances’s crown. “It’s just one photo, probably the last one we’ll have of her.”
“I don’t want to be in a photo with a dead person!” The thought had terrified Frances from the moment her mother had come up with the idea the previous week.
“Oh, stop it! She’s dying, not dead. How would it appear to other people if you denied her this last wish? You know she has no children of her own.” Tossing the damp, smelly hairbrush into the sink, her mother stood back and assessed the finished product with a half-pleased expression. “You look well enough, I suppose.”
Frances made a face that did not go unnoticed.
“Honestly, have some compassion, Frances Lynn! Imagine how scared she must feel, poor Mrs. Bentley!”
But Frances didn’t want to imagine how their neighbor felt. All Frances could imagine was having to stand in the freezing cold—something she hated more than anything!—for a photographer to take what might be the last photo of Mrs. Bentley for a Christmas card. And why, Frances wondered, would Mrs. Bentley want a photo with me, anyway?
The battle with her mother ended even before it began. At nine years of age, Frances couldn’t possibly win, not against an adult, let alone her mother, who, it seemed, always won, regardless of the opponent.
Her mother glanced at the clock and made a noise of exasperation. “Let’s hurry it up, Frances. I have a lot to do this afternoon. You know how your father likes his Saturday night pot roast promptly at five o’clock.”
As soon as her mother invoked the father card, Frances knew better than to dawdle any longer. If her mother lived for social appearances, her other focus in life was catering to her husband.
And so, at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, Frances found herself sitting in the red wooden sleigh, her stuffed elephant tucked under her arm, trying to smile as she inched away from Mrs. Bentley, just in case whatever the woman was dying of was something that she could catch.
It was cold out, and the ground was now covered with at least two inches of snow. Even though she wore her blue coat and tan knit hat, Frances was freezing from all of the sitting around while everything was made “just right.”
“Closer, dear,” the photographer said, gesturing with his hand for Frances to move into Mrs. Bentley’s arm that was wrapped around her. The elephant fell out of the sleigh, and as Frances moved to retrieve it, the photographer stopped her. “Perhaps you should stand next to her.”
Glancing at her stuffed animal that lay in the snow, Frances sighed and stood up, hoping that her mother wouldn’t step on it.
The photographer smiled. “Much better.”
But Frances did not feel much better. In fact, she felt much worse.
Mrs. Bentley, however, did not seem to notice. At forty-two, she was still pretty. Frances liked her short black hair that framed her face. With her dark winter coat and red hat that sat just so on the back of her head, Mrs. Bentley did not look sick and, therefore, did not look like she was dying.
And that’s when Frances did the unimaginable: she spoke without thinking.
“Mom says you are dying.”
The second she heard her mother gasp, Frances knew that she was in trouble. But the words were out there; she couldn’t take them back. Besides, she argued with herself, Mom did say that!
Mrs. Bentley, however, didn’t seem to mind. She merely hugged Frances closer against her side and kissed the
top of her head. “Aw, sweet Frances! How I love your honesty. It’s so refreshing to have someone say what they are truly thinking! It’s so much better than all of the whispers, side looks, and pity. I’d much rather people ask me what’s on their mind than tiptoe around the subject. It’s better than being seen as a pity case.”
In Frances’s mind, Mrs. Bentley’s words vindicated her. To her further satisfaction, her mother had been unknowingly implicated by Mrs. Bentley.
“I have cancer, Frances.”
“Cancer?” It was an unfamiliar word to her, and once again, she wondered if that was anything like a bad cold. She leaned away, just a little, and hoped that her mother didn’t notice.
“It’s a bad disease when your body starts fighting against itself. No one really knows how it starts. And the cure for it depends on the type of cancer and how long a person has had it before discovering it.”
“What type do you have?”
“Breast. It started in my breasts,” Mrs. Bentley said, gently placing her hand on her chest. “But now it has spread to other places in my body.”
“So cancer is going to make you die?” Frances asked.
Her mother gave her a stern look. “Frances!”
But Mrs. Bentley didn’t seem to mind. “It is, Frances.”
“Are you scared?”
“Frances!” her mother said in a sharp tone. “That’s enough!”
But Mrs. Bentley ignored her mother’s reprimand. Instead, a smile spread across her face as she responded to Frances. “Am I scared? No. Not in the least. Crying about it or being sad will not change the fact that God wants me home, my dear child. My time on earth is finished. I have a much greater future ahead of me.”
Frances did not know how to respond. If she had cancer, she knew she would be scared. And she certainly would not be taking photographs in a sleigh while it was snowing with a child that lived down the street! But Mrs. Bentley didn’t have any children of her own, a fact that had made Frances’s mother even more adamant that the photo shoot take place.
As she stood beside Mrs. Bentley, smiling for the photographer, she couldn’t help but think that life without having children was even sadder than the fact that Mrs. Bentley was dying. After all, what was the purpose of life if you didn’t have a family? Mrs. Bentley would die and be put into the ground without anyone to remember her years later. The memory of her life would fade away, probably by the time the first snow fell next winter. And by then, just as no one talked about Grammy or Grandpa anymore, no one would remember Mrs. Bentley or the silly photograph that she was posing for at the current moment.
“Smile now!” the photographer said.
Frances did as she was told, not just smiling but grinning for the photographer as she stood next to the dying woman in the old-fashioned red cutter sleigh for a Christmas card that no one would remember in years to come. The only thing Frances would remember about that day was that the ground was covered by snow and that she hoped, later, her father might take her sleigh riding.
CHAPTER 1
Please stop ringing. Frances navigated the narrow staircase while trying to slip on her shoes, no easy feat with three large dogs racing on her heels as if they were trying to beat her to the first-floor landing. The telephone, however, didn’t seem to hear her wish, its shrill ring beckoning to her from the kitchen.
“Can someone get that?” she called out, irritated that, once again, everyone else in the house appeared deaf to the ringing nuisance. It was a bone of contention with her, a constant battle that continued to defeat her. With everyone having cell phones, including her twelve-year-old daughter, answering the house phone had become the sole responsibility of one person: Frances.
She survived the staircase and set down her laptop bag on the floor by the front table. Yesterday’s mail lay heaped in a pile, something else she needed to sort through. She felt a tightening in her chest, a far too familiar feeling that forced her to shut her eyes while taking deep breaths. And then the phone rang, yet again.
Deep breaths are not going to help me today. She grabbed her purse from the floor. Another ring.
“Anyone?” She dug inside the bottom of her bag, looking for the little orange bottle of prescription pills. Dr. Morgan had instructed her to take one every six hours, but Frances had heard that Xanax could be addictive. Long ago, she learned that the only person she could depend on was herself. The last thing she wanted was to rely on something, never mind a tiny magic pill that kept her calm, so she restricted herself to “in an emergency only” mode. When the phone rang again, she knew this was one of those times.
“Fine! I’ll get it!” There was no point in venting further, as she knew no one heard her, and if they did, they certainly didn’t care about answering the phone anyway. Dodging Harry and Neville, both of whom bounded down the hallway toward Dory—all three dogs barking as they headed toward the back door—Frances narrowly escaped being trampled as she hurried into the kitchen to snatch the receiver from the charging station propped on the counter. “What?” she snapped as she reached over to open the back door and let out the dogs.
“Uh . . . Mrs. Snyder?” The woman on the other end of the phone sounded startled at the abruptness of her tone of voice. Immediately, she felt guilty. After all, it wasn’t the woman’s fault that everyone in her house ignored the call, unless, of course, it was another one of those annoying telemarketers.
“I’m sorry,” Frances said, leaning against the counter and lifting her foot onto the nearby stool. She held the phone against her shoulder as she tried to straighten the strap of her black Coach heel. “It’s been one of those mornings.”
On the other end of the phone, the woman hesitated before she cleared her throat. “Dr. Steele asked me to give you a call.”
Frances finished fixing her shoe and stood up straight. She wasn’t really listening to what the woman was saying. Instead, she was going over a mental list of things she had to get done today: return Carrie’s library books, shop for food, stop at the dry cleaner’s, and go to that volunteer luncheon in Hoboken, not necessarily in that order. A routine follow-up call from her gynecologist’s office wasn’t on that list, but she briefly thought about adding it, just so she could cross it off when the receptionist, or whoever this was calling, gave her the all-too-anticipated news that her Pap smear was normal.
“That was nice of him,” Frances said, walking over to the refrigerator. She needed to make sandwiches for Carrie and Andy. Otherwise, she’d be shelling out another ten dollars to cover their school lunches. Again. Most mornings, she felt like a walking ATM. Flinging open the refrigerator door, she quickly pulled out the lunch meat, cheese, and mayonnaise.
“You normally don’t call after my exams,” she mentioned. “Well, except that one time when we were in Jamaica.” She laughed out loud as she began making sandwiches, the phone cradled between her ear and her shoulder as she worked. “That almost gave me a heart attack.”
The woman didn’t laugh with her. “Dr. Steele would like you to meet with Dr. Graham, one of his colleagues, over on James Street at the medical center.”
“Oh?” Frances reached up to adjust her gold earring. “What for?”
Another hesitation.
Immediately Frances stopped fussing over the common everyday things that usually occupied her time. What seemed so important just moments ago was no longer on her mental to-do list. Feeling like a heavy weight in her chest, her heart started to pound as her palms began to sweat. Was it only last week that she had gone for her annual OB-GYN exam and biennial mammogram?
The woman finally responded. “There were some abnormalities on your mammogram,” she said in a far-too-businesslike tone.
“Abnormalities? What kind of abnormalities?” Inwardly, she groaned. She knew far too well that abnormalities could be anything: a cyst, a shadow, a fibrous mass, even a bad reading by an inexperienced radiologist.
The sound of papers shuffling in the background made Frances wonder if the wom
an was looking through her file or merely glancing through a schedule, perhaps through her very own to-do list.
“I really couldn’t say, Mrs. Snyder. I’m just relaying the information from Dr. Steele. Could you come into Dr. Graham’s office this afternoon?” She paused long enough for Frances to picture her, a faceless person who didn’t even have the courtesy of stating her name, looking at a computer screen, searching for an open appointment. “Say, two o’clock?”
“Today?”
“Uh . . . well, both Dr. Steele and Dr. Graham were fairly insistent that you come in today.”
Frances heard the sound of heavy footsteps upstairs and turned her back to the open doorway that led into the hallway. “Why does Dr. Steele want me to see this . . . Dr. Graham?” Another question, and this time she suspected that she already knew the answer. “I have a meeting at noon. Can’t this wait? I’m supposed to leave in a few hours for a luncheon in Hoboken. Traffic can be a killer . . .” The irony of what she just said hit her as soon as the words left her mouth. Lowering her voice, she asked, “If you don’t mind my asking, what kind of doctor is this Dr. Graham?”
“He’s a surgeon, Frances.”
Frances? In almost twenty years of her going there, no one at Dr. Steele’s office had ever called her by her first name with the exception of the doctor himself. Suddenly, she felt cold and began to shiver, her hand rubbing her arm as she stared at the far wall of the kitchen. “Is this something I should be concerned about?”
There was a very long pause. The silence answered her question. If she had answered with something light and airy like It’s probably nothing or Just being extra cautious, Frances might not have felt that vise tightening around her chest for a second time that morning. But the woman didn’t say any such thing, so Frances wasted no time popping off the top to her pill bottle and fishing out not one but two little white magic pills. Only this time, she wondered if two would do the trick.
“It’s cancer, isn’t it?” Frances glanced over her shoulder, hoping that her husband wasn’t on his way downstairs yet. The last thing she needed was for him to overhear this conversation. She lowered her voice, then asked, “He found a tumor, didn’t he?”
