AR01 - A Road Unknow by Barbara Cameron

Author:Barbara Cameron
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Amish
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2014-02-04T06:00:00+00:00

Saul watched Elizabeth leave and thought about the conversation they’d had in the back room.

They had so much more in common than she knew. But he could never tell her. Because when his mother had needed him, he’d stayed and Elizabeth had—in her own words—run away.

It wasn’t because he was a better person than her. Someone—something—had made up his mind for him.

Its name was cancer.

From the moment his mother came home with the diagnosis, he’d known he couldn’t leave the area to go to another county to work with a friend on a construction job. Who would run the store?

And so he’d called his friend and shown up at the store bright and early the next day. He’d never looked back. His father spent his days going to chemotherapy appointments with his wife, traveling to a cancer center in a neighboring state when the first round of chemo didn’t work. Cancer sucked the life out of hours, days, weeks, months—years of time, energy, and money.

Saul knew he’d given his father the freedom to concentrate on helping his mother fight the battle of her life—the battle for her life.

He figured it was a small thing to do when the woman had given him life.

She’d won the battle and recent tests had shown she was in remission. Saul waited for his father to say he wanted to come back to the store and told himself he’d be happy to hand the reins over to him even though he’d come to love running it. His father surprised him by saying he wanted to retire.

Saul smiled at the memory.

“Something funny, boss?” Katie asked him.

“Nothing important,” he said. “I think I’ll go eat my lunch if you don’t need me for anything.”

“We can run the store without you,” she said confidently.

“Thanks,” he said.

He strolled into the back room and got his lunch from the refrigerator. His mother insisted on packing his lunch so he reached into the lunch box and spread a feast out on the table: cold sliced roast beef and bread from last night’s dinner, potato salad, dill pickles she’d canned from cucumbers grown in her garden. A handful of peanut butter cookies for his sweet tooth. She’d even included a thermos of lemonade.

While he ate he read through the latest issue of The Budget, the national Amish and Mennonite newspaper and caught up on what was happening in the community. Before long, he was reaching for the batch of invoices he needed to take care of before the end of the day. Working while eating was a bad habit he’d tried to break, but other than talking briefly with his father about Christmas orders he didn’t take his work home with him.

He glanced at the clock and wondered where Elizabeth had gone with Jenny Bontrager. Elizabeth had left her lunch in the refrigerator, so she was either going to return to eat it or they were going to a restaurant and she’d eat it another time.

The holidays were coming up soon and

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