As Nanci stood next to her car looking around for Amber, the girl appeared from around the corner of a barn, where she’d apparently been watching the buffalo again. She walked a little shyly up to the car and said, “Can I still ride back to town with you?”

“I said I would take you and I will,” Nanci smiled, trying to sound as friendly as possible. “Why don’t you get in and we’ll get out of here.”

“Thank you,” the girl said, heading toward the passenger door. “Mr. Westbrook said he would take me back with the tables and chairs, but I don’t want to ride with him.”

“Won’t Keith be taking them back?” Nanci asked as she opened the driver’s side door and got into the Camry,

“From what he said in the few minutes I got to talk to him, it sounded like he’s not going to be allowed off the ranch for a while, except to go to school,” Amber replied as she settled into the passenger seat. “I didn’t want to get him into trouble, but it looks like I did it anyway. At least I got to tell him I was sorry.”

“That’s too bad. He seems like a nice kid.”

“Yeah, he is,” Amber replied as Nanci started the car and started to pull away. “He’s been the only friend I’ve had the past few months.”

“Your only friend?”

“Reverend, I don’t know how much anyone told you, but my mother is the town drunk. She didn’t used to be that bad, but it’s just gotten worse the last couple of years. What’s more, she’s worse than that, especially around some men, if you know what I mean.”

“I can’t speak about your mother, but in general I know what you mean more than you could believe, and more than I sometimes believe, too.”

“Yeah, well, a lot of that washes down on me, and while I don’t like it I have to live with it. Keith has been the only person who hasn’t put me down over it and who has tried to help out, not that he can do much. For months, he’s been giving me his school lunches, and they’re the best food I usually see, at least until today.”

“He said something about you having to eat cattle feed.”

“It’s not all that bad once I got used to it, when I’m hungry enough and it’s the only thing I have to eat anyway,” Amber shrugged. “Sometimes it’s kind of dirty, but it’s all I had.”

“Doesn’t your mom come up with anything better?” Nanci asked, knowing the answer to the question already but using it to get more out of the girl. By now they were out to the road; Nanci wasn’t going very fast, as the road was rough and had a lot of potholes that made the car bump uncomfortably.

“Not really. She was the one who thought of scraping up cattle feed over at the mill, but I’m usually the one who does it. Now she’s been gone for a week, and I don’t know where she is or if something has happened to her.”

“You’re worried about her, huh?” Again, it was a stupid question for Nanci to ask, but it was what she could think of at the moment to keep the girl talking.

“Yeah, she’s been gone for two or three days at times before this. I think usually she’s been with some guy, but she never tells me much about it. At least maybe she gets to eat something, but she’s more interested in getting someone to give her booze than she is in food. It’s no wonder that no one wants to do anything for me except for Keith. I don’t even know why he does it.”

“What does your mother do?”

“Besides drink and look for something to drink, you mean?” Amber replied, sounding a little sarcastic. “Not much of anything. She had a job cleaning a house, but she showed up drunk one time too many and got fired. Occasionally on better days she helps me cut wood for the stove or something, but not very often.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“It’s just slowly gotten worse. We didn’t have much before she lost her job last summer, but it’s been really bad since then. She couldn’t pay for rent or electricity after that, so we moved to this old shack that was sitting empty. Nobody seems to care or we probably would have been run out of there by now.”

“No heat, no lights, no water?” Nanci asked.

“There’s a pitcher pump out back and an old stove that we can warm up with a little if we can find wood to burn in it.”

Nanci was dismayed. She had the impression that things weren’t good for the kid, but nothing said back at the gathering had indicated that they were this bad. To hear her tell it, Amber and her mother were doing slightly better than living under a bridge somewhere, not that she’d seen any bridges anywhere in Walke County big enough to live under. But, to give the kid credit, she was doing her best to survive. But still … “How are you doing in school?” It was more than just changing the subject; the kid had been remarkably well spoken for someone her age, so that seemed to indicate something.

“Not as good as I’d like. It’s hard to do homework, and I’m Linda Wallace’s daughter so nobody expects much of me,” Amber snorted. “I really want to graduate from high school. I have another two years left, and maybe when I get out of school I can join the army or something so I don’t have to live like a bum. I really want to get out of here, but I know I can’t do it just yet. I’ve heard stories about girls who run away and have to live on the streets. As bad as things are, at least I have a place to get out of the weather and something to eat as long as I can find stuff spilled on the ground at the mill.”

Interesting, Nanci thought. She really does have some spine, along with some reasonable goals and an idea of what she has to do to reach them. She may have been down, but she was not defeated like Nanci had been at the lowest point of her life.

Sheriff Shoemaker’s map proved to be all Gerald needed to find his grandfather’s place, at least partly because there was no other ranch for a couple of miles along that road. The name on the mailbox out front proved it. “Well,” he told Leah, “This is it. Now that we’re here, I remember what it looked like from when I visited before.”

Even from the road the old single-story ranch house looked shabby, not like the place he remembered. It seemed especially empty with no horses or cows in the corral or the fields near the barn; he could remember when there had been some there, and wanting to ride a horse but not being allowed to. Even though he knew the house had been occupied up to a week before, the place seemed abandoned, and perhaps in a sense it was. He couldn’t help but wonder if it would be worth the effort to try to live here, but then, at least for now, he didn’t have any better ideas.

“This is where great-grandpa lived?” the little girl asked.

“It was. I remember him here, a long time ago. We’ll just go in and see how bad it is.” He parked the minivan close to the back door, which the sheriff said was unlocked, then got out to help Leah out of the car seat.

The back door proved to be snugly latched, if not locked; while the house was obviously old, it appeared to be sound, better than it looked from the road. That offered a little bit of hope. Feeling a little like he was poking his nose in where he didn’t belong, Gerald opened the door and stepped inside.

At first glance Gerald agreed with the sheriff’s assessment: the place was a mess. But, on closer inspection, it didn’t seem quite that bad, but it was certainly unkempt. A myriad of things lay all around, on the kitchen counters, the table, the floor; it appeared that things had been put down and not put away, probably because Elmer just hadn’t had the energy to do it. It did not look like someone had come in and vandalized the place as there was at least some order and pathways to walk through everything.

“Eeeww, Daddy!” Leah piped up. “It smells in here.”

Gerald had noticed that, but it hadn’t really hit him just how bad it was. But yes, it smelled; mostly it smelled of old man, mixed with other smells, garbage perhaps. It smelled of clothes that had been too long worn and unwashed, and other things he couldn’t identify, maybe something to do with Elmer’s sickness, directly or indirectly. “Yeah, it does,” he told his daughter. “But I don’t think it’s anything that can’t be cleaned up and aired out.”

A closer look revealed that there were cans and boxes of food sitting on the kitchen counter, as if Elmer hadn’t had the energy to put them away. Most of it seemed to be simple food that wouldn’t take much to cook. There was a sink full of dirty dishes, now dried out from a week or a month of sitting there, and that probably contributed to the smell. A quick look in the refrigerator revealed that it was running, and though not full of perishables, there were a few plates and dishes of half-eaten meals that perhaps had been saved for the future and never reheated. In any case, while it was nothing great, he could see enough food just on the counters that he and Leah could eat for the next several days, and that by itself was something positive; the kitchen, while disorganized and dirty, was at least salvageable in his eyes.

With that much going for them, Gerald worked his way slowly into the living room, with Leah following along behind. Once again, the room was unkempt, with things scattered around, set down at some point and never moved again, probably again due to lack of energy. But the mess only reached up so high; there were pictures on the wall, like one of a much younger Elmer and Gladys, probably not much older than Gerald was now. While most of the furniture was piled with things, there was one armchair that was empty, though it clearly had seen a lot of use; there were cups and glasses on the floor and a nearby table, things that had been set down and never taken to be washed.

Further investigation revealed two small bedrooms, one largely filled with boxes of who knew what; the other with a made-up bed and surprisingly neat, though it was dusty and smelled like the door hadn’t been opened in a long time. Gerald remembered it as the bedroom that he and his dad had slept in when they visited there years before, and he would have not been surprised to discover that the bed had been made up after they left and never used since.

The main bedroom, the one that Elmer had used back in those days, was like much of the rest of the house – messy and unkempt, though it had clearly been used. The covers of the bed had been thrown back and no attempt had been made to make the bed; even a quick glance revealed that the sheets were worn and hadn’t been washed in a long time. Curious, Gerald glanced in the closet, to find his grandfather’s hanging clothes filling a part of it – and a woman’s clothes, filling more than half the closet, way out of style. He guessed that they were his grandmother’s clothes and had hung there for at least twenty years, and somehow Elmer must have never been quite able to throw them out.

Gerald knew better than to mention it to Leah, but the house seemed a little haunted to him – haunted not by ghosts, but by the aura of a man who had lived there for many, many years, and by the aura of his long-lost wife. It was definitely a strange feeling, maybe a little on the creepy side, and somehow he felt like he was intruding where he didn’t really belong.

Perhaps Leah felt it too; at least she hadn’t said much of anything for the last few minutes. Finally, she asked quietly, “Daddy, are we going to stay here?”

It was a good question. Gerald didn’t really want to stay there, at least not the way the place was now, but his cash was getting low, and he hadn’t noticed if there was a motel or hotel in Tyler when they had been there. They were here where there was food to eat and a roof over their heads. It wouldn’t cost them much, at least not for a few days. In that time maybe he could work out some of the questions and make some of the arrangements the sheriff had been talking about. “It’s not the best, honey,” he told his daughter. “It’ll do for a while, and maybe it won’t be so bad once we get it cleaned up.”

“But it smells bad,” the little girl protested.

“Yes, it does,” Gerald agreed. “But if we open the windows it won’t smell as bad. We’ve got a lot of work to do to make it a nice place to live, but most of it will be work we can do.”

Once Nanci and Amber got out to the highway the trip back to Tyler went a little more quickly. They kept talking, with Nanci mostly trying to find out a little more about the girl without pushing too hard. It had been made clear before that things were hard for the kid and that she was living very rough – but she was rather stalwart in the face of her adversities. Nanci realized that it would have been very easy for her to give up and wind up even worse off.

The two were talking, but they weren’t talking all the time. There were some awkward silences, and Nanci soon realized she’d pushed hard enough for now. Finally Amber said that she’d overheard people at the gathering talking about her having run rafts in the Grand Canyon, and asked if it was really true. Of course it was, so Nanci told a few of the simpler stories about what she had done there. It would have been tempting to tell Amber about some of the tough times she’d endured in her own life, but it didn’t seem like this was the time for it. That didn’t preclude it happening sometime in the future.

They were getting into the edge of Tyler when Nanci thought to ask, “You know, there’s a lot of food in the back seat. I’m going to be a long time eating it all. You’re welcome to any of it, or all of it. You need it more than I do.”

“Well, maybe a little,” Amber replied shyly. “I can’t keep very much of it since I don’t have a refrigerator. Well, there is one, but with no electricity it doesn’t work, so the food wouldn’t stay good for very long.”

“Tell you what,” Nanci replied. “Take a couple things for tonight and tomorrow. I’ll take the rest back to my place and put it in the refrigerator there. When you want something, you could just come by and get it.”

“I really don’t want to have to put you to the trouble.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” Nanci smiled. “It’s much better than cattle feed, and I would like to have some company once in a while.”

“OK, if you’re sure it’s all right.”

It took Nanci a little more talking to convince Amber, but not very much. Nanci drove by the parsonage so she could be sure Amber knew where it was, and then let the girl direct her to the shack where she lived, only a couple of blocks away. It was tattered and tumbledown, and didn’t look very habitable to Nanci, at least from what she could see from the car. “I sure hope Mom is back,” Amber said as she grabbed a couple of boxes from the collection piled in the back seat. “I’m really getting worried about her.”

“What are you going to do if she isn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Amber sighed. “Like I’ve been doing, just get along.”

Nanci didn’t have to think about it very much. “Look, if you don’t want to stay here alone, you know where I live. You’re welcome to drop by.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Nanci hated to watch the girl walk up to the battered old shack she called home. She’d thought about making a more direct offer to Amber to stay with her for a while, but something told her the girl still had enough pride that she wasn’t going to accept charity easily. But Nanci had left the door open; whether the girl would walk through it was another question.

Nanci stayed in front of the shack for a bit, thinking there was a chance Amber might come back, but she didn’t. Maybe that mean her mother had made it back home, if that was any solution to the problem. It didn’t sound as if Amber would be any better off if her mother was back, since Nanci had gathered that the girl was supporting her mother more than the mother was supporting her daughter. However Nanci looked at it, it did not seem like a good situation all the way around.

After a couple minutes Nanci drove the short distance to the parsonage. It took only a few minutes to haul the containers into the house and put things away. There was plenty of room in the refrigerator; she hadn’t been there long enough for things to collect. She had eaten heavily at the gathering, and she wasn’t sure if she would want much more than a snack that evening. For lack of anything better, she settled down in Mrs. Johnson’s worn but comfortable old recliner and began to read a Bible commentary. She wasn’t particularly interested in it at the moment, but it was something to do.

Perhaps only twenty minutes had passed before Nanci heard a knocking at the front door. She went to the door, and was not terribly surprised to discover Amber standing there. “Did your Mom get back?” she asked, suspecting she already knew the answer.

“No,” the girl shook her head sadly. “There’s no sign she’s been there either. Reverend, I hope you don’t mind, but I just don’t want to be there by myself just now. You’ve been … well, you’ve been a friend. Except for Keith I don’t have any friends, and I’m not sure how much of a friend he’ll be allowed to be any longer.”

“Well, sure, come on in,” Nanci smiled, stepping back from the door. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. I was just thinking about making a cup of tea. Would you like some?”

“That would be great,” Amber smiled once she was inside. “It’s … it’s been nice to have someone to talk to. I haven’t even been able to talk to Mom about stuff like I talked about with you today, not that she’s around much to talk to anyway.”

“You know,” Nanci said as she headed for the kitchen, with Amber trailing along behind, “When I first thought about being a minister, I thought it was just about giving sermons and things like that. I didn’t realize then that most of the job is talking to people, and more important, listening to them.”

“I didn’t know that,” Amber replied as Nanci turned on the stove to let it warm up while she put some water in a kettle – another legacy of Mrs. Johnson, but one Nanci appreciated. “I’ve never been to church, so I don’t know what ministers really do.”

“A lot of people never have been, at least these days,” Nanci smiled. “When I was your age, I’d never been in one except for a couple of weddings. In fact, most of it seemed like pure baloney to me.”

“I don’t know much about it, except that it’s about Jesus and stuff. It never seemed all that interesting, or at least anything I wanted to listen to.”

“Again, when I was your age, I felt exactly the same way,” Nanci said as she put the kettle on the stove. “I didn’t want to listen to it. At least I learned from my own experience that if people aren’t ready to hear a message, then they don’t want to hear it and won’t hear it, and pushing it at them just turns them off. I know a lot of ministers who have never learned that.”

Amber seemed relieved to hear that. “Is that why you haven’t talked about it to me?”

“Pretty much. I’m ready to talk about it when you are, and not before.”

“What’s it like? I mean, going to church?”

“It means different things to different people,” Nanci said, leaning back on the kitchen counter next to the stove; it was going to take the water a while to heat, after all. “Some people like a big, formal ritual. Other people like it pretty casual. If you don’t know anything about it, it’s a little hard to describe. If you want to go with me sometime, I’d be glad to take you. That way you would know a little more about it and it would be easier to talk about it.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Amber replied noncommittally. “Is that why you’re being so nice to me? To get me to go to church?”

“Well, maybe a little,” Nanci smiled. “After all, it’s one of the things I’m supposed to be doing, my job, persuading people to hear the Word of God. It isn’t as simple as some people would have you believe. But I don’t want to cram it down your throat, either. Right now, I feel like you just need a friend, and I’m willing to be one.”

The conversation drifted on from there, with Nanci talking more about her time in the Grand Canyon, the sights she’d seen, things she’d done, and some of the friends she had made there, because at that point she really wanted to be a friend to the girl, and that involved putting her at ease. In time the kettle boiled; she made tea, and the two sat down at the kitchen table to drink it and talk some more.

As time went on, Nanci could see that Amber was thinking about something, but didn’t want to push the girl about it. “It’s really good to be able to talk to you,” she said after a while. “Most people don’t want anything to do with me because of who my mother is, but you don’t seem to mind.”

“You know, I don’t think you are your mother,” Nanci smiled. “Maybe most people don’t realize that.”

“I’m pretty sure that most of those people this afternoon thought pretty much the same of me,” Amber said with a hint of anger in her voice. “I’m trying to get away from all that. What would they think if I were to go to church out there with you tomorrow?”

“It’s hard to say,” Nanci replied. “Some people probably have their minds made up no matter what you do or say. But there might be a few who would realize that you’re trying to be different.”

“Could I do it? I mean, I’d like to at least show that I’m trying to be a good person.”

“It can’t hurt and might help,” Nanci smiled. “Especially under the circumstances.”

“There’s a part of me that would like to do it, but I don’t know if I should. I mean, I know you’re supposed to wear nice clothes and stuff, but I don’t have any.”

“That’s not a problem at all, and can be solved. You’re pretty close to my size, just a bit smaller, so I think I can find something around here for you. I’m really not much of a clothes horse, but they seem to collect, and sometimes it’s hard to get rid of clothes even if I know I’m not going to wear them again.”

“You’re sure it’s not going to be any trouble? I mean, I’d at least like to try to show Keith’s parents that I’m not as bad as they think I am.”

“If it’s any trouble it’ll be worth it,” Nanci told her. “If you want, you can stay here tonight. That’ll make it easy for you to get cleaned up, have a good night’s sleep in a warm house, and have breakfast before we have to head out to Conestoga.”

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