took the first bite of the warm chocolate and soft vanilla ice cream. All those textures and flavors combined reminded her of the few good times she’d had since she had left Birthright. In among all the disappointments and regrets, she had her hot fudge sundaes.
Noah nudged her with his shoulder. “What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking that the little things in life are pretty precious,” she answered.
“You learn that real quick when you hit rock bottom,” Kayla agreed.
“Oh, yeah,” Noah said. “You sure do.”
Miss Janie and Sam were on the back porch when they got home that afternoon. She’d been up more than three hours, but she didn’t want to go to bed. She seemed agitated and kept leaning over in her wheelchair so she could see the dark clouds approaching from the southwest.
“We’re going to have a storm,” she declared.
The smell of rain was heavy in the air, and the sun had gone behind a layer of clouds so thick that the sky looked like a rolling bank of dark fog coming right at them.
Sam sucked in a lungful of air. “I love the smell of fresh summer rain, but I sure don’t like a storm.”
“Is it March?” Miss Janie asked.
Normally, after the first of June, folks in Birthright usually couldn’t beg, buy, or borrow a drop of moisture—not until fall, and then it was iffy until after Christmas.
Kayla understood how difficult it would be for someone who could hardly keep a time frame in her head to keep the months straight. “No, it’s the twenty-fourth day of August,” she gently reminded Miss Janie.
Miss Janie pointed toward the sky. “The only thing in the whole world that scared Aunt Ruthie was storms. She wasn’t afraid of the devil himself, and I always figured she could put out the flames of hell with a cup of water and maybe back old Lucifer down with a few well-placed cusswords. But a cloud like that would send her gathering up a picnic basket full of food for us to take to the cellar.”
Kayla giggled at the image that popped in her head. She’d never met Aunt Ruthie, but she’d seen pictures of the lady. She was a short woman, and Kayla imagined her looking like an elf dashing around the house getting food ready to take to a storm shelter. Kayla remembered being afraid of the pictures of the old lady when she first came to live here because Ruthie’s eyes looked like they could see right into her very soul. That scared her far worse than a storm or even a tornado.
“Were you afraid of anything, Miss Janie?” she asked.
The older woman toyed with the arms of her wheelchair for a while before she answered. Kayla thought maybe she’d jumped time frames again, but then she said, “I was afraid of my mama when I was a little girl, and I was afraid that no one would ever love me. I wasn’t pretty like some of my classmates. Mama dressed me funny. Wearing bright colors or pants was considered a sin in our family, and makeup was a no-no. I was plain in every way. Then, when I was fifteen, Jesus came to work for my grandpa on his little farm. He told me I was pretty, and he flirted with me. He even came to church just so he could see me. For the first time in my life, I felt special. If he’d asked me to run away with him to Mexico, I wouldn’t have even looked back as I left.”
“Did you have a sad goodbye when he left?” Kayla asked.
“We both cried until our eyes were swollen, and we promised that we wouldn’t love anyone else, and when we got old enough, we’d get married and be together forever.” Miss Janie wiped a tear away with the back of her hand.
“Do you ever wish that you hadn’t gotten pregnant?” Kayla asked.
“No sense in wishin’ for what can’t be undone. Aunt Ruthie said that he and his father didn’t come back to work for my grandpa again. She never lied to me about anything, so I believed her,” Miss Janie answered.
“I’m going to go home right now so I don’t get caught in the rain.” Sam got up and headed out the back door. “See y’all later.”
Kayla had dropped her bank papers on the bottom step of the staircase, but Teresa kept the papers in her lap when she sat down in one of the chairs around