Free Hopeful by Shelley Shepard Gray Page A

promise. I am just so sad.”
    Holding her hand between both of hers, her mother’s gaze softened. “Judith, dear, listen to me good. Ben is not upset with you. He does not blame you. He does not want you to leave him. He is merely concerned about you being home alone. He doesn’t think all this time by yourself is helping you heal.”
    Little by little, the words started to make sense. “Are you sure Ben isn’t mad?”
    “ Jah . I am mighty sure! Judith, asking you to come home for a bit was only a suggestion. It wasn’t because I think you should cook and clean more. It wasn’t because I think you should already be over this news. It’s because we are all worried.” Her voice lowered. “But I think coming home for a bit is a gut idea. Then you could rest and not try to keep up with everything that doesn’t really matter.”
    “Like housework?” Judith asked dryly. With their big family, her mother had taken a clean and organized house very seriously.
    “Like a lot of things.” After squeezing Judith’s hand once more, her mother walked over to the kitchen sink. There, dishes had piled up and had spilled onto the countertop. Across from the sink, the stove looked just as forlorn. A film of dust and grime coated the range.
    As Judith looked at it all through her mother’s eyes, she finally understood why Ben had been so worried.
    Nothing was the way Judith usually kept things. From the time she’d been a little girl, she’d liked order. She’d always been the one to keep things in the kitchen and bathrooms clean and neat. She’d nagged everyone else in the house to be neater, too.
    For her to have let everything go the way she had meant that something was truly wrong. “I know I haven’t been taking care of things. I know I’m not acting like myself. But . . . I’ve had other things on my mind.”
    “I know, dear.”
    As if she hadn’t heard her mother, Judith’s voice grew stronger. “The things that I’ve been dealing with? They are important.”
    “I realize that,” her mother said simply. But her voice was lilted, like she wanted to add so much more, but was holding her tongue instead.
    Though her feet felt like they were full of lead, she joined her mother in the kitchen and halfheartedly picked up a dishrag. “Are you sure Ben isn’t mad about the haus ? Did he ask you to come over to make me fix everything?”
    “There is nothing to fix, dear.”
    “There’s me.”
    “Child, for whatever reason, Got has made a decision. It was out of your hands. It is out of Ben’s hands, too. Now all he wants is for you to feel better. He is worried about you. We all are.”
    Her mother pulled the dishrag from her hands, and guided her to a chair. “No one is complaining about your housekeeping, daughter. Especially not your Ben. You know how smitten he is with you! Why, if you never mopped the floor again he wouldn’t care. But I don’t think it’s good for you to be alone all day.”
    “Being around the kids and the rest of the family isn’t going to make me happier.”
    “Are you sure about that?”
    “I am mighty sure that being around Anson is not going to improve my mood, Muddah.”
    Her mother tried to frown, Judith could see that she really did. But after several seconds of trying, her frown eased into a lovely smile. “You might have a point about that. But, dear, I also think that dwelling on your loss isn’t healthy for you.”
    “Mamm, it’s not just that I lost my baby. That would be hard, and I would mourn, but I’m old enough to realize that sometimes the Lord has a reason for a baby not being born. It’s the fact that I’m never going to have any kinner that has made me so terribly sad. I can hardly stand the thought of it.” She lowered her voice. “And worse, I simply don’t know what I’m going to do the rest of my life.”
    “Ben said you were going to visit another doctah .”
    “We are.”
    “Then, there might be hope.”
    “Yes, but I don’t