squish you.” She forced a smile, tried to look normal.
The midday sun beat down on them, penetrating her starched white kapp. Sweat beaded on her upper lip. The wrecked scooter had to be somewhere close by.
She grabbed Benuel’s wrist and urged him out of harm’s way, to the side of the road where a ragged palm tree’s fronds rustled in the breeze.
A few feet away, a row of blossoming bushes nestled against sturdy privacy fencing. She scanned under them, and then along the curb where several cars and adult tricycles were parked. The silver scooter had to be nearby. I know what I heard.
But there was nothing. No scooter. No rider.
“Look at that man, Mamm,” Benuel said. “He’s sleeping on the ground.”
Lizbeth glanced in the direction her son pointed. “Oh, no.” Hidden behind a parked car, a ginger-haired man dressed in traditional Amish clothes and black boots lay sprawled across the sidewalk a few yards away. The silver scooter teetered on its side a foot from him, its back wheel still spinning.
Benuel’s hand clasped firmly in hers, she hurried over, pausing long enough to instruct her son in a trembling voice, “You stay right here.”
His bottom lip puckered. “But I want to see.”
Releasing his hand, she said, “I know you do, but stay put, please.” Dreading what she might see, she fell to her knees in front of the man’s prostrate body and gave him a quick once-over, searching for twisted limbs and blood. He groaned and then stirred, his single status clearly stated by his clean-shaven chin that scraped the rough sidewalk as his head turned in her direction. Dirt and grit smudged his face and neck.
Why is there no one left on the street? I need help, Gott.
“Lie still. You may have broken something,” she instructed.
His hand moved and then his arm. Blue eyes—so like her son’s—opened to slits. He blinked at her. A shaggy brow arched in question. Full, well-shaped lips moved, but no words came out.
She leaned back in surprise. She knew this face as well as she knew her own. The man on the ground was Fredrik Lapp, her brother’s childhood friend. The last man in Pinecraft she wanted to see. “Are you all right?” she asked, bending close.
His coloring looked normal enough, but she knew nothing about broken bones or head trauma. She looked down the length of his body. His clothes were dirty, but seemed intact.
The last time she’d seen him she’d been a skinny girl of nineteen, and he’d been a wiry young man of twenty-three, with shaggy auburn hair and blue eyes the color of a summer sky. Unbaptized and not yet a member of the church, he’d had an unruliness about him, a restlessness that kept his mamm and daed worried for his future, and the rumor mill turning with tales of his latest wild escapades.
Now he was a fully matured man, with a thick neck and neatly trimmed hair, cut in a traditional Amish style to his ears. A man who could rip her life apart if he learned about the secret she’d kept all these years.
She leaned in and eyed his clean-shaven chin. Why is he still unwed and living in Pinecraft? There were no significant scrapes on his face, with the exception of a small cut above his left eyebrow.
The sidewalk under him had to be uncomfortably hot. She jerked a length of attached quilt squares from her bag and squatted, carefully slipping the soft folds under his head.
He coughed several times and scowled as he drew in a deep breath.
“Do you hurt anywhere?” Lizbeth used her clean handkerchief to wipe away the blood slowly oozing from the small cut above his left eye.
“Ouch!” He twisted his head out of her reach.
She jerked her hand away and rose. “I thought the blood might blur your vision.”
“Is the kinner all right?” Fredrik’s voice sounded deeper and raspier than it had years ago. He coughed, and with a grunt braced himself with his arms and struggled into a sitting position.
Lizbeth glanced Benuel’s way. He was looking at them, his young face pinched with concern. Her heart ached for the intense, worried child.
“Ya, he’s fine,” she assured him, and tried to hold Fredrik down as he started to move about. “Please don’t get up. Let me get some help first. You might have really hurt yourself.” He had no family left in the area. Why had he come back?
He ignored her direction and rose to his feet, dusting the long legs of his dark trousers down, and then bent to pick her fabric off the ground. He handed her the bundle after doing his best to refold the length of colorful cotton squares. “I got the wind knocked out of me, that’s all.” He laughed.
He peered at his bleeding arm, shrugged his broad shoulders and rotated his neck as she’d seen him do a hundred times as a boy.
“That was a foolish thing you did,” he muttered, his brow arched.
“What was?” she asked, mesmerized by the way his muscles bulged along his freckled arm. It had to be wonderful to be strong and afraid of nothing.
He gestured toward the boy. “Letting your soh run wild like that? He could have been killed. Why didn’t you hold his hand while you crossed the road?”
She took exception to Fredrik’s sharp tone, the disapproving expression on his face. The knot in her stomach tightened and grew. She pushed the ribbon of her prayer kapp away and then wiped sweat from her top lip, her frustration growing. She may not know how to properly raise an energetic, belligerent boy, but she was learning and doing the best she could. How dare he chastise her like Jonah and his family had done so many times? “I know we could all have been killed.”
Her face grew warm. If only she had been more careful, grabbed Benuel’s hand as soon as she’d handed over the ticket to the bus driver. She knew what the boy was like lately. Acting out, not listening to anyone. She looked toward the curb. Benuel’s head was turned away, no doubt watching the birds peck away at bugs in the short tufts of grass a few feet away.
With a grunt of frustration, she stuffed the bloodied handkerchief back into her apron pocket and dusted down her skirt. She hadn’t been back in Pinecraft a full hour and already was involved in a situation with Fredrik. She had plans for the money she had on her, like paying for somewhere to live. If Fredrik blamed Benuel for the crash, repairing the scooter could leave her totally dependent on her father, and she could not allow that to happen.
“You’ll need someone to come get you.” She pointed at the crumpled machine on the ground. “It looks like that Englischer contraption of yours is ruined.” Fredrik had always been a risk taker, never considering the cost to himself or those around him. She knew Benuel was equally to blame for the accident, but it would be just like Fredrik to blame someone else for his share of the mishap.
Fredrik’s brows furrowed as he shoved his hand though his disheveled hair. He dropped his arm with a grimace. “That Englischer contraption, as you call it, was an expensive scooter. I saved for a year. Bought it less than an hour ago.”
Lizbeth swallowed hard. She ran her hands down her arms, her nerves sending tremors through her body, no doubt her reaction to their near miss.
She twisted back toward the scooter. She knew all about men’s “big boy” toys, thanks to her Amish daed, who prized all things with wheels and gears. This man was cut from similar cloth, but he lacked her father’s love of familye and commitment to this small community. No doubt he had once again set aside his Amish beliefs to fulfill some foolhardy need for speed.
“I was on my way to the insurance company,” he grunted. He turned his broad back on her.
She watched him glance down the empty road shimmering with watery mirages.
He spoke to the sultry air around him. “I thought...what can happen? The insurance office is only a few blocks down the road. What a bensel I am.”
“It’s