Summer of Joy by Ann H. Gabhart Read Free Book Online

she’d never thought would happen ever. She still wasn’t sure he wasn’t a fugitive from the law, even if she didn’t have any proof except that the man had obviously been hiding out in Hollyhill for years now.
    Hollyhill would be a good place for somebody to hide out. Randy Simmons, the chief of police, didn’t have a suspicious bone in his body. Hollyhill could be full of fugitives, and as long as they kept nickels in the parking meters and didn’t disturb the man’s morning coffee at the Hollyhill Grill, he could care less.
    Zella plopped one shoe down on a sheet of newspaper to dry and picked up the other one. She wondered if every Mt. Pleasant Church member was having to do the same shoe cleaning job before church. She sniffed a little and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. The people out there were country. They probably didn’t think twice about scraping mud off their good shoes or finding clumps of mud on the church floor.
    But it had been nice how the people at Mt. Pleasant had welcomed Wesley into their church. Zella wasn’t sure he’d have found that kind of welcome at First Baptist. Of course she’d have welcomed him into the church. She believed everybody should go to church no matter how odd they might happen to be. The Bible was plain about that. Nobody was supposed to be left out. Love your neighbor didn’t just mean the person who happened to live next door. Else you could just move to some other, nicer neighborhood when one of your neighbors started getting on your nerves.
    She supposed that was why she’d gone out to the river. To prove that to herself and to Wesley. After all, they were all members of the same family of God even if they didn’t sit in the same pews under the same roof.
    It didn’t have the first thing to do with the letter that had come in the mail on Friday. She’d recognized the writing on the envelope right away, even though it had been months since she’d gotten the first letter. So long in fact that she’d about decided the Greens in Pelphrey, Ohio, had forgotten about it all, and she wouldn’t have to worry about how she was going to tell Wesley she’d poked around in his apartment to find out where he was really from, while he was laid up with his broken leg.
    Certainly not from the planet Jupiter the way he was always telling Jocelyn. That silly girl had believed Wesley’s outlandish stories for years. Some of these days she was going to have to get her head out of the clouds and grow up. Zella had told David that very thing just the other day, and he’d looked as if she’d smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper or something.
    “Oh, I hope not for a few more years at least,” he’d said. “I like Jocie just the way she is.”
    “A bit more respectful and responsible couldn’t hurt,” Zella said. David had just gotten a call from one of Jocelyn’s teachers about her speaking out of turn and contradicting what the teacher said.
    “Well, tact might not be her strong suit, but how much more responsible could a fourteen-year-old be? She’s here helping us every day or home helping Aunt Love. Sometimes I wish she were less responsible. I’m afraid I’ve stolen her little girl times by having her work so much with us here at the Banner ,” David said. “Besides, she was right and Mr. Hammond was wrong. ‘God helps those who help themselves’ isn’t in the Bible. It was Benjamin Franklin who wrote something like that. A teacher should be open to the truth, don’t you think?”
    The truth. That was something David had never wanted to examine too closely when it came to Jocelyn. Some truths were just too hard to face. Or to tell to others.
    Zella put down her other shoe and took another look at the clock on the stove. She had time to let them dry a couple of minutes before she put them on to walk to church. She supposed she could drive, but she wanted to walk. She needed to think about what to do about the letter.
    She went across the room and