Stephanie Mittman Read Online Free PDF Page A

gotten a medical degree? I’ll gladly hand you the keys to my office when you show me your diploma. Until then, I’ll answer for myself.” Rather than looking the least bit chastised, Abby shrugged and indicated that by all means, he should certainly answer Panner’s question. Like a fool,he parroted her words. “Not if you do as I say,” he added, and Abby smiled brightly at him as if he’d learned a lesson.
    Well, he had: never bring Abidance Merganser on another house call.
    And then he remembered. He hadn’t brought her. Like a stray puppy, she’d followed him.
    But he had no intention of keeping her.
    None.
    Her papa was pouting, sulking like a little boy who couldn’t understand why Christmas couldn’t be every day.
    “How could he not ‘be sure’?” he asked, shaking his head, while Abby’s mother wrapped a colorful afghan she’d crocheted around his shoulders, and Patience, one of Abby’s sisters, poured more hot water into the basin in which he was soaking his feet. “Imagine that! God all but spoke directly to him, and he says he’s just not sure. Why, if I had felt that way, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” He looked around him and sneezed.
    “Well, I think you’ve just done the bravest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Patience said. “I can’t wait to put it in my journal so that my great-great-grandchildren will know how brave their great-great … wait, I lost count. My great-great—”
    “You had two greats and a grand,” Jedediah the sibling closest in age to Abby said. Poor Jed, he was fine with numbers and tools, but the train of life didn’tseem to stop at his station. Sense just seemed to pass him by. “Was he dead when you saved him, Papa?”
    “Well, almost,” her father said. “If he’d been dead, then I couldn’t have—oh, Jedediah! Make yourself useful, son, and find me my slippers like a good boy.”
    “I’d have been useful,” Jed said. “I’d have saved him myself if I’d been there.”
    “Oh, sure you would have! You’d have invented some way of getting him out of the pond without getting yourself wet, using winches and ropes, and by the time you got it all together, the man would have been dead a week!” Prudence, the older of Abby’s sisters corrected, scooping up one of her children who was trying to sail a toy boat in the basin their father was soaking his feet in. “So, Jed, are you having any luck with that silly flying machine?” she teased.
    Nobody waited for Jed’s answer. It was always the same anyway—
You’ll see. You’ll all see
.
    “The fact remains that he promised the Lord that money, and now, thanks to Abidance, he’s reconsidering his promise.” Her father glared at her.
    “I never told him not to give his money to you for the church,” she defended, feeling disloyal despite herself. “I just said that he should pay Seth—I mean Dr. Hendon.”
    “And you made the poor man think God would take his toes if he didn’t,” her father said.
    “Now, Papa, I hardly think that paying Dr. Hendon a dollar or two will prevent your church from being built, do you?” she asked, handing him a clean hankie and lifting Disciple, the little furball of a kitten, into her arms before he began drinking the water in herfather’s footbath. “That poor man is overworked and underappreciated as it is. I’m worried about him,” she admitted.
    “I like Seth Hendon,” her mother said. She took the kitten from Abby and appeared to be thinking deep thoughts before she handed Disciple over to Prudence, and announced, “I think we ought to have him for Sunday dinner.”
    “The cat?” Prudence asked, and immediately little Gwendolyn began to cry, grabbing the cat and throwing herself over the furry body.
    “Oh, no, dear!” Mother said, shaking her head at Gwendolyn, and Prudence, and for that matter at Jedediah and Patience, too. “Dr. Hendon. Why, I would think he must be the loneliest man on earth, now that Sarah’s gone. He needs a