The Preacher's Daughter (16 page)

Lorabeth absorbed that information and tried to process it. “Prostitutes are in the Bible. I just didn’t know any lived around here.”

“Yeah, well, it’s an age-old profession for sure,” he said.

“I’m sorry to be dense,” she told him, feeling completely ignorant. “I can’t even imagine what you’re saying.”

“You’re not dense, Lorabeth. Decent young ladies don’t know about things like that, and that’s good.”

“Does my father know?”

“I told him.”

“I see. Well, what your mother did can’t be held against you, Benjamin.”

“What my mother did made me who I am today,” he argued.

“No.” She reached to take his chin in her hand and turn his face so she could look him straight in the eye. “What you did with your life, going to school, attending college, coming to church, becoming a veterinarian—those are the things that made you who you are today.”

“Hold those kind thoughts until you hear the rest,” he said.

Lorabeth rested her arm on the table and leaned toward him. “There’s more?”

Benjamin got up and strode across the kitchen and back, displaying his agitation. “There’s so much more, it would make your head hurt hearing it all. And you don’t need to hear it all. But you need to hear this.” He walked back to where she sat and stood beside her.

Lorabeth had to look up.

“The man who fathered me approached me a few weeks ago. His wife had seen me and suspected I was his son.” He went on to explain the events of the past several weeks.

Lorabeth’s heart broke at the pain in the words he chose so carefully so as to disguise the hurt. She couldn’t even imagine the life of poverty and shame that was his childhood, but he had lived every moment of it. And now he knew that all the while he’d been struggling for existence, there had been a man out there—a father living a comfortable life. A father with a respectable wife and legitimate children he loved and for whom he provided while Benjamin and his siblings had gone hungry and cold. That knowledge had to be eating a hole in his heart.

“It wasn’t fair to keep it from you,” he told her. “You should know what kind of man you’re marryin’.”

“I know what kind of man I’m marrying.” She reached and took his hand. “You’re nothing like the woman who gave birth to you, Benjamin. You’re a good kind man. You take your responsibilities seriously.”

She got up and moved to place her hand over his heart and looked up into his eyes. “More important, you have a pure heart and a lot of love to give.” They stood like that while the coffee perked on the stove, the aroma filling the warming room.

Benjamin’s eyes closed and he dropped his forehead against hers. A moment later he hugged her close. Finally Lorabeth leaned away and asked, “Why did Wes come to see you? What did he say?”

Ben released her and took a seat. “Didn’t really say anything.”

“He came to see you, but didn’t have anything to say?”

“I—well, I didn’t give ’im much of a chance.”

She sat and covered his hand with hers. “What do you mean?”

“I ordered him off my property. Said I didn’t want to talk.”

“Maybe you should have listened, Benjamin. Maybe he wanted to apologize.”

“He can’t make amends for my life.”

“No, but he can ask your forgiveness. And even if he doesn’t ask, you can forgive him.”

Benjamin pulled his hand away. “You don’t know what you’re askin’.”

Lorabeth paused, unsure of how much to say or if she had the right, but his misery was so complete that anger and resentment had to be eating him up. She stayed seated while he poured coffee and set mugs on the table, then placed a sugar bowl between them and sat. She calmly spooned sugar and milk into her cup and stirred.

“You’ve asked more than once about what the Bible says on different subjects,” she said.

He sighed and pursed his lips as though he didn’t want to hear what was coming.

“So I know you think it’s good advice.”

He said nothing.

“I wouldn’t presume to tell you what to do, Benjamin, but I will tell you what the Bible says about forgiveness.”

“Turn the other cheek?”

“That if we want to be forgiven, we have to forgive.”

He met her eyes then. She didn’t see any resentment, for which she was relieved. “You think I should talk to him.”

“You didn’t let him talk, did you?” she answered.

He raised a palm in a supplicating gesture. “He can’t explain away my childhood.”

“No, he can’t. But you learned how the truth eats away inside and needs to come out. Maybe it’s the same for him.”

“I don’t owe him anything.”

“Forgiveness is a gift, Benjamin.”

He studied her, his expressive blue eyes taking in her face and hair before softening. “I asked for this, didn’t I? Marryin’ a woman so kind and wise?”

Their hands met on top of the table, his large and warm around hers.

“Will you come with me?” Ben asked. “To talk to him?”

“I’ll always be here for you,” she assured him.

He believed her. He didn’t know what he’d ever done to deserve someone so wholeheartedly good and kind and generous, but he was grateful. And he vowed he would never take her devotion lightly. He was going to be the man she deserved.

B
enjamin visited the town hall to read the directory of Newton residents and businesses and discovered Wesley Evans’s home address.

He told Ellie what he was going to do and gathered Lorabeth to accompany him the next evening. He drew the buggy before a modest home in the Third Ward.

“Accordin’ to the dates recorded in the city directory,” he told Lorabeth, “he bought this place less than a year ago.”

He helped her down and she took his hand as they approached the front door. Ben raised and lowered a brass knocker several times. Lorabeth squeezed his fingers. Her reaction to the truth about his mother still took him by surprise when he thought about it. Could she care for him so much that it didn’t matter? Or was it her nature to be forgiving of all?

The door opened. One of the young girls he’d seen with Wes and Suzanne stood in the opening. Two platinum-blond braids hung over her shoulders. Her eyes were startling blue—like his own. “Can I help you?”

“I’ve come to see your father.”

“Come on in.” She opened the door wide and ushered them into a small hallway. “Have a seat in the parlor and I’ll go get Daddy.”

Ben and Lorabeth entered the room she’d indicated. The furnishings were not new, but had been well cared for. Needlepoint pillows rested in every sofa and chair, and delicate lacy antimacassars were pinned to the backs.

Solid footsteps along the wooden boards of the hallway alerted Ben to someone’s arrival.

Wes Evans halted in the doorway, surprise evident on his face. He composed his expression. “Benjamin?”

“Hope it’s okay I came like this.”

“Of course.” Wes entered the room. “I’ll take your coats.”

Ben helped Lorabeth out of hers and shrugged off his own. Wes left momentarily and returned. “Oh. Sorry. Sit down. I’m a little flustered.”

Ben gestured for Lorabeth to be seated on the sofa and he perched beside her.

“Is this your sister?” Wes asked.

“No. This is Lorabeth Holdridge, my…fiancée.”

Lorabeth offered her hand and Wes shook it before sitting down across from them. “Congratulations. To both of you.”

“Thank you,” Lorabeth replied.

“This is awkward for all of us,” Wes said.

Ben nodded.

Suzanne entered the room then. “I came to see if you and your guests would like—” She halted when she recognized Ben.

“Join us,” Ben said, and she took a chair. He introduced Lorabeth. “Lorabeth thought I needed to come hear you out,” he began. “I was just madder’n all get-out that day you came to my place. Not in much of a mood to listen, I reckon.”

“I’m glad you came,” Wes said. “I understand.”

They looked at each other.

“Your sister is a touchy subject apparently,” Wes said. “I appreciate that you’re protective of her.”

Ben bristled. “She raised me. We took care of each other.”

Wes nodded. “I don’t know your situation or anything about what happened to your mother or Ellianna.”

At the word
mother
Ben clenched his jaw.

“Ellianna was just a tiny little thing when I met her. No more than three or four.”

“Where did you meet her?” Ben asked. “My…mother.”

“In Florence at an Independence Day celebration. I thought she was a widow at first. Until I found out where she worked and learned she’d never been married.”

Ben couldn’t imagine his mother at a celebration in town. He’d never known her to drag herself farther than the saloon or the outhouse.

“I cared for your mother, Benjamin,” Wes said.

Ben’s body tensed. “Why feed me this
bullshit?
”

“Benjamin!” Lorabeth said from beside him and clenched his hand tightly. “Let the man talk.”

He looked at her, at the encouragement and confidence in her eyes and took a deep breath. “Go on.”

“Why would I lie to you? Why would I come find you at all if this wasn’t so? I was just as shocked as you when Suzanne came back from your place that day and told me her suspicions. I didn’t believe it until I saw you. After meeting you, I’m convinced I’m your father. I don’t want anything from you except a chance to talk.” His expression showed his earnestness. “Maybe a chance to know you.”

With disbelief Ben asked, “And it took
twenty-four years?
”

“Please. Let me explain.”

The sick feeling in his belly right now couldn’t even compare to the nights of hunger and cold that had been his wretched life. Ben raked shaky fingers through his hair and surveyed the room without seeing anything except that filthy shack. He looked at Wes, and by this time his body was almost twitching with anger. “Tell me how that can fix all those years of me and my little brother and older sister goin’ to bed with a belly so hungry it hurt. Tell me how talkin’ can change Flynn and me havin’ no one except a scared sister who cared if we lived or died.”

All his resentment poured out in the words he couldn’t stop now. “Flynn was so little. He should’ve had better. Some of the babies she had just—” Unable to sit any longer, he jumped to his feet and gestured. “
Disappeared.
Ellie knows what happened to them, but she won’t tell me.”

He was shaking now.

Lorabeth gasped. He couldn’t stop. He wanted this man to know exactly what his lack of concern had caused.

“Ellie stole for us to eat. When our mother died, Flynn and I were sent to a foster home. We were starved and worked like animals. I nearly lost all my toes from sores and blisters.” He looked at his shoes as though the pain was in the present.

Wes’s eyes filled with tears and they ran down his cheeks uninhibited.

Suzanne sat with a stunned expression.

Lorabeth looked up at him, and she was trembling. He couldn’t look at her any longer so he faced Wes.

“So go ahead,” Ben ground out. “Explain all that so I can understand.”

“I can’t,” Wes said in a ragged voice. “But, Ben, all those years aren’t my fault, either. I didn’t know about you. I can’t change what happened, but you have to understand that I’d have taken care of you if I’d known.”

Ben looked at Wes and felt as though a chunk of his heart was hanging out raw and bleeding. “No one ever cared about us.”

“I care now,” Wes said. “I cared about your mother, too, but she wouldn’t let me help her. I tried.”

Ben waited for something more. Something to make a difference in how he felt.

“I was twenty when I met her. I’d been riding herd with a drive and we shipped cows from there. She was working at the Junction Saloon in Florence. Just serving drinks and dancing, but she drank as many as she served. She was living in a room over one of the storefronts and she had a little girl. I started calling on her.

“She always drank, even during the day and no matter the occasion. I tried to get her to leave the saloon and I offered to take her east when I went. She refused.

“I asked her to marry me, but she just laughed. I suspected I wasn’t the only man keeping company with her. The drinking had such a hold on her that I got concerned for the girl. I suggested she give Ellianna to someone to care for until she was better able. That just made her furious. She told me to never come back.

“I left on another drive and when I came back through this way, I couldn’t find her. Nobody knew where she’d gone.”

Ben looked him over with a critical eye. What would it benefit Wes to tell a story with no basis? He didn’t have to expose himself as Ben’s father. If he was telling the truth and really had cared about his mother and Ellie, he wasn’t the selfish man Ben had imagined all those years. Ben would be forced to change his thinking.

“I know it doesn’t change the past,” Wes said, “but I’m sorry for how you came into the world and were treated. She was sick. I’d never seen a person who was controlled by a need for alcohol. Scared me so much I quit drinkin’ myself.”

Ben understood that. “Scares me so much I’m afraid to have my own kids for fear of bein’ like her.”

“You’re nothing like her,” Lorabeth insisted. “You can’t even bear to see animals suffer, let alone children. You adore your nieces and nephews.”

“Your childhood breaks my heart,” Wes said as though he hadn’t heard her. He sat head down, face in his hands. “If only I’d known.”

Suzanne leaned toward her husband and placed her hand on his back. She rubbed it in a circle consolingly. “You had no way to know,” she told him.

“I’m not the one who needs comforting,” Wes said with a break in his voice.

Suzanne drew her hand back, but Wes caught it and held it. He raised his gaze to Ben’s. “If only I’d found you back then, I’d have taken you both and made a family for you.”

Ben read a thousand useless regrets. And he believed him.

Wes was a good man who’d had the misfortune to love a bad woman. Ben had no right blaming him for circumstances out of his control. He took a few steps away and stared at his reflection in the windowpane.

Ellie had told Ben that he couldn’t live in the past, and she was right. Moving forward had worked for her. Lorabeth had told him he needed to forgive to be forgiven. “Really can’t think of a reason why you’d lie about this,” he said at last and turned back to the room. “Wouldn’t profit you.”

“It’s the God’s honest truth,” Wes answered. After a minute he said, “Last year we moved from California to Kansas so I could work with the cattlemen. I’m an investor now. Suzanne and I have three children.”

“I’ve seen ’em.” Ben paused and glanced from husband to wife and back. “Will you tell ’em about me?”

“If it’s all right with you I will. It’s not because I hid you from them that they don’t know. It’s because I didn’t know. Those are two different things. You’d have been part of this family if I’d had a say.”

“You’re not…ashamed of me?”

Wes’s throat worked. “I could ask you the same question.”

Ben thought it over a moment. He’d lived with shame his whole life, but a father who really cared about him wasn’t embarrassing, was he? He glanced at Lorabeth, and she smiled encouragement through glistening tears. He wasn’t ashamed of Wes.

“Guess I upset your life by moving here. It will be all right if you don’t want to explain who I am to people,” Wes told him. “We should probably agree. I’m going to tell my children. But if you don’t want anyone else to know, then…maybe we can just be friends.”

“I’m weary of hidin’ my past,” Ben told him. “I’m not ashamed, and I don’t want to make up a story.”

“Good.” Wes looked relieved. “It’s gonna be awkward for a while. We don’t really know each other. But I want to know you. I don’t even know how you became a veterinarian.”

“Ellie’s husband loaned me the money.”

“The other Dr. Chaney?”

“First decent man I ever met. His father is another.”

Silence enveloped the room.

“I spent a lot of years hating,” Ben said, opening another vein. “Hating all the men who used her. Hating the man I believed was my father.”

“That’s a lot of hate to let go,” Lorabeth said. “You must feel light as a feather.”

Gazing into her eyes, Ben looked inside himself and discovered she was right. A burden he’d carried a lifetime had been eased because he’d learned the truth. He glanced at Wes. “I don’t think you need forgiveness, but I’m lettin’ go of the resentment.”

“Thank you,” Wes answered.

Suzanne left and returned a few minutes later with a tray of tea and served them. Their conversation eased into the easy give-and-take of people getting to know each other. Eventually Ben thanked Suzanne for tea and mentioned it was time for them to go.

The Evanses followed them out the door and stood on their porch. Wes put his arm around his wife.

Ben observed the gesture and realized he was happy for them. Grateful that Wes had found a good woman to be his wife. Waving, he guided Lorabeth to the buggy. She leaned and whispered in Ben’s ear.

He hesitated. Turned back and looked at Wes. Her suggestion made Wes’s warning about this transition more clear. But he didn’t care what people thought. “Lorabeth and I would like you to come to our wedding next week.”

The band played “Cockles and Mussels” for the fourth time, and when Ben raised his eyebrow, Ellie explained that Lillith kept requesting the comic song. He didn’t much care what they played, because he wasn’t listening half the time. He was processing what had taken place that day and thinking about what was yet to come.

“I want you to meet the Evanses now,” he told his sister.

Ellie had been astonished when she’d learned that Ben had asked them to the wedding. Her feelings about Wes Evans were confusing. He was nothing to her.

Ben took hold of her arms. “It’s gonna be all right, Ellie.”

She nodded, digesting the change slowly. She’d seen them at the ceremony earlier, but they hadn’t had an opportunity to meet until now. “I’m glad you’ve found him, Ben,” she said. “I really am. And I’m happy you—and him—and his family are working all this out so amicably.”

“Are you embarrassed about this?” he asked.

“No. We’re not explaining every detail to the wedding guests and all of Newton. Even if we did, Caleb wouldn’t care.”

He leaned to kiss her cheek. Ellie watched her brother cross the room, seeing that skinny boy who was her champion, the boy who had been ready to die for her, who had killed a man to protect her. She was happy for him.

Wes Evans was handsome and pleasant, resembling Benjamin in a startling way, down to the manner in which he spoke and the turn of his lips when he smiled. Suzanne was charming and pretty, complimenting Ellie on her fine-looking children.

Fourteen-year-old Ginny and sixteen-year-old Booth had the same fair hair and blue eyes as Ben and their father. Twelve-year-old Clara was dark-haired and dark-eyed like her mother.

Nate and Simon immediately took Booth into their company, and Nate produced a bag of marbles.

“Is there enough light for them to do that outdoors?” Ellie asked.

“Nate snagged a lantern on his way,” Ben answered.

“You’re the same age as our niece, Lucy,” Ellie told Ginny.

“I don’t know her,” the girl said.

“She goes to school in Florence,” Ellie explained. “But I’m sure you two will have something to talk about.”