Page 37 of His Wounded Heart

“You’re looking good, Girly. I like seeing you smiling like you are.” She releases me and looks over my shoulder at Simon. “See that you keep making her smile, you hear?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

I don’t bother protesting; it will just result in a verbal knot of confusion and take up more time that we really don’t have. “We brought supplies.” I say.

“Who chopped the wood for you?” Simon asks.

“A nice boy named Renzo,” Bertha answers Simon.

I turn in time to see Simon nodding. “I thought it might have been him.”

“Yeah, he’s been helping me and a couple of the others with chores around our places. It’s kind of nice to have some young blood up here on the mountain.”

I was going to jab him in the stomach if he made some snarky remark about this not being a mountain. He glances over at me, his eyes gleaming. I know he’s read my mind.

“How’s Renzo doing?” Simon asks.

“He’s doing a lot better than when he first arrived. Whatever it was that was ailing him has lifted. I suspect that he’ll be leaving the mountain in the next few weeks. Don’t know where he’ll end up, but he’ll pack up his tent and go.”

“You’re due for a nasty ice storm, high winds and icy rain,” Simon tells her.

She grins. “So, are you going to tell me something that I don’t know? I can tell something like that is coming by looking in the sky. Then checking up on NOAA with my satellite phone tells me the rest.”

“Shoot, Bertha, I should take Bella out of school and just have you teach her from now on. I just learned about NOAA today.”

“You should bring that little darlin’ up here. I’ve only met her three times, and I fell in love with the little sprite. Reminded me of you when you were little. How God seen fit to bless Wanda and Norville with such beautiful children that they did nothing but berate and neglect when Brian and I couldn’t have any is beyond me.”

I take a deep breath. “You would have made a great mama.”

“Darn tootin’ I would have.” She turns her attention back to Simon. “Now what kind of goodies do you have for me?”

“She’s something else. I swear to God, we left with more than we came with.” I shake my head in wonder.

“Let’s not go overboard,” Trenda says as she fiddles with her handheld satellite GPS. “I’m just thankful she made us promise to take some of the strawberry preserves for ourselves. I think I would have cried if I had to give them all away today.”

“Are they really that good?”

“She puts rhubarb in them. So yeah, they’re that good.”

“There’s a fork in the road coming up. Which way?” We’re moving at a snail’s pace, but I didn’t want to miss any of the dirt tracks that they call roads.

“The one on the left. I’m not sure I’m reading this right, but it looks like two kilometers and we’ll get to Azariah’s place. He’s a Vietnam vet, and he doesn’t like visitors. To tell you the truth, I think he has PTSD. I tried to talk to Bernie about that, but he shut me down. Said it was all mumbo jumbo, and that I just needed to take Azariah as he was, and not try to put a label on him.”

I hear the hurt in Trenda’s voice.

“You weren’t trying to do that. You were trying to understand him, and knowing you, trying to find a way to help him.”

She’s silent. I take just a second to look over at her. Her head is bowed.

“What is it?” I ask.

“In a way, Azariah scares me a bit. Our father, he was rattlesnake mean. I try not to let the years I lived with him color the way I see and interact with men, but it does sometimes,” she admits softly.

I ponder what she says. “Did it make it easier to deal with Azariah’s temperament when you could put it down to PTSD?”

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “At least then there was a reason. There never was one for my father or his brother.”

“Why not?” I let my question drift off into silence, seeing whether she would answer.