"Maybe we should think about moving you to the downstairs bedroom."
Phoebe gave her a look.
Hannah threw up her hands. "Never mind! Forget I suggested it! Me? Did I say something?"
"Say goodnight, Hannah."
"'Goodnight, Hannah.'"
Laughing and shaking her head, Phoebe started for the stairs. "See you in the morning."
Hannah put the cream in the refrigerator, made certain the propane stove had been turned off, and extinguished the kerosene lamp.
Just as she was about to turn away, she saw that Chris was no longer sitting in the chair but was pacing back and forth, back and forth, on the porch next door.
Was no one sleeping tonight?
Her gaze traveled upstairs, to the window that was Matthew and Jenny's room, and saw that it was dark. So, too, were the rooms where the kinner slept.
Chris's movement on the back porch drew her gaze again.There was something agitated about his form. She wondered if he were in pain or distressed for some reason. It was none of her business, but she worried about him. What if he was having one of his spells, his PSDT—no, that wasn't it. His PDST . . . whatever. The stress thing he had.
She gathered her robe more closely around her and slipped out the back door.
It felt a little like his days in the barracks to be lying in a bed, reading by the light of a battery-powered lantern, but Chris had to admit the glow was a pleasant one at the end of the day.
Reaching for the book Hannah had checked out for him at the library, he opened it to the place he'd marked with the due date slip. He fingered the slip and found himself remembering how he hadn't been able to check out the book himself. The librarian hadn't been able to give him his own card because he wasn't a local resident.
Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, he supposed.But while he had a physical address back in Kansas, it hadn't felt like home. And here, in Paradise, a place that increasingly felt like home, well, he didn't have roots here. He was staying in a part of someone else's home, their dawdi haus, a place that was designed to shelter family when they could no longer take care of themselves.
He remembered the counseling session he had to endure before he left the hospital. It was a rough transition for some veterans to move back into civilian life, the counselor had said.Sometimes they found it hard to reconnect with family, deal with the reality of the lasting effects of an injury, or find a job.
The counselor said about a quarter of the people sleeping on the streets in America had once worn a military uniform— and they weren't all from the Vietnam era. Many of those in attendance at the counseling session had been sobered by that fact, but only for a few minutes. It couldn't—wouldn't—happen to them.
Technically, Chris supposed, he could be labeled as not having a home right now. The librarian had implied that, and he didn't fault her for that.
But it had made him think.
He read a page of his book and the due date slip fell from his fingers and landed on the quilt covering him. Without taking his eyes from the page he was reading, he felt around on the quilt for the slip. His fingers traced the pattern of the sunburst on the quilt and he took his eyes from the page and studied it.He wondered how much time Hannah had spent on the quilt and whether she had sewn it alone or with the quilting circle ladies he'd seen visit her.
There was such closeness here. It wasn't just that so many people were related to each other—there were large families here and they stayed in the same area. They didn't spread out all over the country the way those he knew did—he hadn't even met some of his cousins. Families had church together in their homes, helped each other harvest crops, raised barns, and funded medical care and prayed during times of illness and death.
Lives were stitched together here, like the fabric pieces on the quilt. Family was bigger, community-sized. Paradise had been in existence for generations and generations. Maybe the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" had originated because of places like this.
He'd had the same closeness with his men. A band of brothers was what he'd had in the military; it wasn't just the title of a PBS television series. They shared good times and bad—talked about births, deaths, and loves back home; loaned each other money; drunk the occasional beer together; and covered each other's backs. Well, until the end, they'd covered each other's backs. At the end, Chris felt they'd deserted him.
Troubled by the direction his thoughts had taken, he closed the book he'd started reading and reached for the Bible he kept beside his bed.
He was tempted to read Job again. When he'd first read through it he'd felt a kinship to the poor man. But then he'd felt he had to move on, that he had to see he couldn't go around feeling like he was walking around with a big cloud over his head.