Free A Mother at Heart by Carolyne Aarsen Page B

better.
    Saturday dawned warm and bright and Miriam headed outside to clean the yard. She went through the old shop on the place, a fresh wave of nostalgia washing over her at the still strong scent of diesel and oil that seemed to have soaked into the very timbers of her father’s shop.
    She remembered happier times when her father had helped her put the chain back on her bike, helped her with a science fair project that her mother didn’t want done in the house. She remembered “helping” her father by handing him tools from the chest-high toolbox that still stood in one dark corner.
    Miriam looked around her with a measure of anxiety. Yesterday, when she had signed the sales agreement, she hadn’t realized the magnitude of her actions. She would have to have a farm sale to get rid of all these things.
    The thought depressed her. She had been to enough farm sales as a young girl. She remembered how uncomfortable she had felt, poking and prying through other people’s things, listening to disparaging comments made about some of the items offered for sale.
    But imagining the contents of the house going up for sale bothered her less than the idea of seeing her father’s tools lined up and auctioned off.
    She wandered through the shop, surprised to see so many tools still here. The lawn mower and garden tiller stood in their usual corner. Her father’s table saw and drill press stood opposite, coated with a layer of greasy dust. Buckets and pails of bolts and nuts were lined up on shelves above the workbench. Mouse droppings were thick on the floor and an old leather carpenter pouch that had fallen off its hook had been fair game for them: it was full of holes.
    For the rest, it was all intact.
    With a mental shake, Miriam walked over to the lawn mower and pulled it away from the wall. She opened the gas tank and frowned. Empty, of course. And she knew there was no gas in the gas tank in the yard.
    So much for mowing the lawn, she thought.
    She could ride over to the Prins’s farm and borrow some gas; her father had enough jerry cans she could carry it in.
    But after meeting Jake in town, she was reluctant to go over there when he was around.
    Monday, she could. Jake would probably be working in the fields then.
    She pushed the lawn mower into its spot and walked back to the house, wondering how she was going to fill the rest of the empty evening.

Chapter Five
    M iriam flipped down the visor in her car and checked her lipstick. She unconsciously ran her hand over her hair and glanced down at her clothes—black blazer over dark, narrow fitted pants. Conservative enough for church, she figured.
    Yesterday she had spent half the day trying to talk herself out of coming, but when she woke up this morning, she knew she didn’t feel right staying home.
    She pulled the key out of the ignition and took a deep breath. Taking a walk down the country roads might have been a better idea. Standing here in the shadow of the church—the shadow of seventeen years of sermons, obligations and Sunday School lessons—she felt as if she were looking at her life with new eyes.
    The parties, the late nights, the friends she had spent time with, the endless traveling from one exotic location to another, the many, many times she hadthought she should visit her mother, and hadn’t—all seemed so shallow. She had stopped attending church when her co-workers teased her about it.
    I was just young, she appealed to a distant God who was tied up with this church and her past. I was finally free from obligations and a mother who never approved of anything I did. She clutched the keys tighter, their sharp ridges cutting into her palm, as if the pain would serve as penance for what she had done.
    â€œI don’t need this,” she said to no one in particular, leaning back against the seat. “I didn’t have to come today.”
    But she had.
    She had come seeking peace, but instead she was