More Than Words: Stories of Courage Read online

  “And now she’s left us.”

  Maybe it’s better this way seemed like the appropriate response, yet it was so far from what Tracy wanted to say, the words wouldn’t form. “I don’t want her to go,” she said softly.

  “If she agrees to come back, it’ll be even harder next time she leaves. Darla will find her another family eventually, or Molly will run away again the next time she panics. Maybe it’s better this way.”

  She didn’t like his tone. He sounded like the financial adviser he was, cool and logical. “No, it’s not!”

  “You’re not thinking straight.”

  “Who cares! I don’t want her to go. I come home in the afternoons now and I look forward to her being here. On the good days, when she shares a little, I feel like somebody’s given me a million dollars. And when the three of us are together, we feel like a family. Not just two people pursuing careers they don’t really care about, but a family. People who are trying to find their way to something better. Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same way.”

  He relaxed visibly. She hadn’t realized until then how tense his posture had been. “Then I won’t,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “Trace, you’re the one who’s resisted falling in love with Molly.

  You’ve refused to recognize it. I wasn’t sure you could see it.”

  She thought about the Friday night after Thanksgiving. She’d stood in his workshop and cautioned him against getting too attached to Molly. And all the time her attachment had been growing and strengthening, until now she felt as if her beloved daughter had been torn from her arms.

  “I didn’t want to be a mother,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “Trace, you’ve been one for months, and you’ve loved every minute of it. Taking Molly was your idea, remember?”

  “We can’t go on the way we have been.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. He kissed her hair.

  “I’m getting your shirt wet,” she said in a muffled voice.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t be needing white shirts much longer.”

  She pulled away just a little to see his face. “Why not?”

  “Honey, come on. Don’t you see where this is going?”

  She sighed and relaxed, hugging him tighter. Because sometimes, when life was taking a one hundred and eighty degree turn, all a person could do was let it happen.

  Tracy decided to enjoy the ride.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Molly hoped that the Wagners would not show up at the Thaeler house, either to yell at her for the broken cedar chest or to talk her into going back home with them. Their home, of course. Never hers, although a few times she’d thought about it that way.

  Those thoughts should have been a clue. Little by little she had slipped into feeling like she was part of something there. But she knew better. She was the Wagners’s charity project, the poor orphan girl who needed a place to live. She’d seen Annie on television. She knew all about Daddy Warbucks.

  Of course, Daddy Warbucks had never crafted a cedar chest for Annie. And there’d been no Mommy Warbucks in the movie who helped her make a new quilt, or took her shopping for better jeans, or understood why she had lied about cheating on a stupid English test.

  She felt sick about the cedar chest, sick that she had let Jennifer break it. Because Molly knew she was the one who’d really screwed up. She’d been so worried that Jennifer would make her life miserable that she had allowed her to kick the chest again and again.

  She didn’t want to see the Wagners…but she wondered a little why they hadn’t tried harder to find out what was wrong.

  “Molly?”

  Mrs. Thaeler was standing in the bedroom doorway. Molly had agreed to sleep in the nursery with Liza on a fold-out bed in the corner. Liza had gone to sleep hours ago, giggling until her eyes finally closed for good, but Molly hadn’t been able to sleep a wink.

  “What?” Molly whispered.

  “I need you in the living room.”

  Molly didn’t know what to say. Was she being kicked out in the middle of the night? Had Darla come to get her tonight instead of waiting until morning, like she’d said when Molly called her?

  “Molly?” Mrs. Thaeler asked in that pleasant tone of voice that still meant Molly had better move quickly.

  “I’ll put on my jeans.”

  Once she was alone with Liza again, Molly got dressed. She supposed this wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt like it. Maybe the group home would be okay after all. At least she wouldn’t have to be perfect all the time, no matter how she felt. Where else could they send her after that?

  She touched her quilt, then picked it up and smoothed one corner along her cheek. It was old and new, past and present. She wondered if it would be safe at the group home. Sighing, she dropped it back on the bed and walked down the hall.

  After too many hours had passed, she’d convinced herself that the Wagners weren’t coming to see her. When she saw them sitting on the Thaelers’s sofa, she nearly fled.

  Mrs. Wagner looked like she wanted to cry. Something clenched inside her. Was Mrs. Wagner upset because of her? That made her uneasy. That made her feel a little sick. She really liked Mrs. Wagner as much as she’d tried not to. She hated to think she could make her cry.

  “Hi, Molly.” Mr. Wagner stood, like she was a grown-up and he wanted to do the polite thing. It seemed so odd, so formal that she wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t look comfortable, either.

  She wondered what they were going to say to her. She thought of the chest that he’d worked on so hard, just for her, and she felt even sicker. She looked away.

  “I’m sorry about the cedar chest,” she mumbled, eyes focused on a plastic dump truck in the corner. “It was an accident. Sort of.”

  “Jennifer Carvelli already apologized.”

  That surprised her. She glanced up briefly, then turned back to the truck. She heard a noise behind her and realized that Mrs. Thaeler had brushed past on her way out of the room. Molly was alone with the Wagners.

  “I shouldn’t have let her come over,” Molly said.

  “Probably not,” Graham agreed. “But that’s not why we’re here.”

  She knew better, but she glanced up because now she was curious.

  “Molly, come here.” Tracy patted the sofa. Graham sat down again, but he left a place between the two of them.

  She didn’t like this. Emotions churned through her, and she didn’t even know what they were. She did not want to sit between them like the filling in a sandwich.

  “Please?” Tracy asked.

  Molly heard the wobble in her voice and knew that she had to go, whether she wanted to or not. She walked the last mile to the sofa and sat between them, perching forward so she could jump up the moment it became necessary.

  “We brought you something,” Graham said. “Will you open it?” He lifted a rectangular package off the table, wrapped in flowered lavender paper. The paper reminded her of her quilt. She was suspicious immediately, but still, regretfully, intrigued.

  “Go ahead,” Tracy said.

  “It’s not my birthday. Christmas is over.”

  “I know when your birthday is,” Tracy said. “August 18. I’m looking forward to it. But sometimes when people care about each other, they give gifts for no good reason.”

  Molly considered bolting. Cared about each other? But the present was too mysterious. If she didn’t open it, she was afraid she’d wonder the rest of her life what it was.

  “I can cut the ribbons,” Graham said.

  “Just like a man,” Tracy said. “He’s in a hurry, Molly. Can you untie it quickly?”

  Molly relaxed just an ounce at the glimmer of humor in Tracy’s voice. She began to pick at the ribbons. It took her a moment, but at last both ribbons and paper fell away to reveal a white box. She lifted the top to see a scrapbook with a photo of her with the Wagners on the front cov
er.

  She frowned. “What’s this?”

  “It’s your baby book,” Tracy said. “Or, I guess we have to say it’s your teenage book.”

  Molly continued to frown. “What’s inside?”

  “Look and see,” Graham said.

  Molly was suspicious, but it was hard to say no. The scrapbook was covered in some sort of shiny blue fabric that changed colors, like the water at Alsea Falls. She liked the photo, too. Mr. Wagner had taken it. He always took these crazy timed photos everywhere they went. He put the camera on a rock or a tree limb and ran back to stand with them before the camera clicked. He’d taken this one on the front porch of the farmhouse with the camera on the railing. They were all making faces.

  She looked happy.

  She had been happy.

  She took a deep breath and turned the page.

  “What’s this?” She leaned closer.

  “The prologue to the Canterbury Tales—in Middle English,” Tracy said. “Remember? You were learning it the day I found out you needed a new family.”

  Molly thought that was a little weird, but nice. She was surprised Mrs. Wagner had remembered something so silly.

  She turned the page and stared. “What’s this?”

  “A menu from the first restaurant we took you to. Remember? You ordered the Portobello mushroom sandwich?” Tracy pointed. “There it is.”

  “How can you remember what I ordered?”

  “I paid attention,” Tracy said simply.

  Molly looked at the next page. “A shoe?”

  “I traced around yours. That’s from the first new shoes we bought you. You left them behind.”

  Before she’d left that day, Molly had carefully put everything the Wagners had bought her in the bottom drawer of her dresser. She was surprised they’d found out so quickly.

  “There’s a pocket from those old ratty jeans you used to love, too. I discovered them in the trash a couple of weeks ago.” She made a little choking noise, then recovered. “I have to confess, I’ve been saving stuff of yours ever since you came to live with us. I have a shoebox in my closet. I’ve been filling it with your stuff. My mother did that. I guess I inherited more from her than I thought.”

  Molly thought that was getting weirder by the moment, but she didn’t feel weird. She felt warm and softer inside, and she thought she might start crying if this got any stranger.

  “What’s this?” But the question was stupid. The next six pages were packed with photographs Mr. Wagner had taken of her. Thanksgiving photos, photos at the falls, photos on the hill behind the farmhouse, photos from their Christmas trip to meet Mrs. Wagner’s family.

  Mrs. Wagner’s family had treated her like she belonged. The memory gave her a brand-new pang.

  “Darla—Miss Chinn—says she’ll call every foster parent you’ve had and see if they have any photos they can copy,” Graham said. “We’ll add them later.”

  Molly was skimming now. There was a page with her progress reports from school, photos of the Thaeler children, a copy of a speech about World War II that she’d gotten an A on in history, ticket stubs from a movie they’d gone to, the tag for the new coat she’d gotten at Christmas. It had been in the cedar chest with the quilt.

  And how had they known how badly she wanted that coat?

  She stopped on the next to the last filled page, although there were many blank pages beyond it. This was a drawing. No, it was a blueprint, or sort of. House plans.

  She pulled the scrapbook a little closer. “What’s this?”

  “Those are my plans for remodeling the farmhouse,” Graham said. “If we’re going to live there, we need to modernize the upstairs a little. A new bathroom, a bigger master bedroom—see, we can knock out walls here, add some built-ins in your bedroom. Until we can afford to build a new house on the hillside.”

  She looked up, then hazarded a glance at him. “The farmhouse?”

  Tracy answered. “We’re moving there, Molly. We’re selling the condo and moving to Alsea. Mr. Wagner’s going to build cabinets and furniture, and I’m going to turn the downstairs into a craft gallery. At the very latest we’ll have the new house built by the time you’re in high school, or maybe we’ll build a gallery instead and stay in the farmhouse. You can help us decide. Meantime, you can decorate the room any way you want.”

  Tracy pointed to the fabric and paint samples on the final page. “We can start with these, but you can do anything you like. Black walls, cardboard furniture—I don’t care. It’s yours.” She sounded enthused. But underneath it all she sounded scared, as if she was afraid Molly might refuse.

  Molly took all this in. She hardly knew what to say. Finally she blurted out, “But I’m just your foster kid.”

  Tracy put her arm around Molly’s shoulders. “Not for long.”

  There was no way Molly could misunderstand. She thought about life with the Wagners. A real life. Pets and barbecues and vacations. Fights and misunderstandings, love and laughter, a place to come home to once she was a grown-up herself, relatives and holidays and knowing secrets about each other.

  A family of her own.

  “I’m not as perfect as you think I am,” she said doubtfully. “You might not like me as much as you think you do.”

  “Are you trying to give us a way out?” Graham asked.

  She realized his arm was around her, too. She nodded, and despite all efforts, tears filled her eyes.

  “We’ll take you just the way you are,” Tracy said. “If you’ll take us the same way?”

  What else could she do? What else could she possibly want? She was trapped by what she was very afraid might be love.

  Molly nodded, too.

  Dear Reader,

  Several years ago when I was asked to write a story highlighting the work of Quilts from Caring Hands, I was delighted. As a quilter myself and one who had made and contributed quilts to different organizations that needed them, I thought I might understand what drove the Caring Hands quilters and how they felt about what they were doing.

  That, of course, was before I really knew them. Before I learned that in the years they’ve been together they have donated more than 5000 unique quilts—about 400 a year—to children, usually those at risk. Before I met these wonderful women face-to-face, almost sixty of them now, who not only give so unselfishly, but also take such extraordinary care of each other. I came home from Corvallis and told my husband we were moving to Oregon. We didn’t, but not for lack of trying.

  Kelly Sauls of Trillium Family Services, one of the many organizations that receives these wonderful quilts, says, “I have seen a child’s eyes, swollen and red from crying, light up as a counselor wraps a warm quilt around him. These quilts say ‘you’re safe, you’re loved, nothing can hurt you now.’ For some of our kids, this quilt is the first object they have ever owned.”

  You can see that, like Molly in this story, the real life kids who receive these quilts are deeply affected by this gift.

  As if they weren’t busy enough, Quilts from Caring Hands also makes aprons, tactile quilts and toys for the visually impaired, and continually looks for new ways to use their talents. As an organization, creativity is their colorful pieced quilt top, compassion their batting, love the stitches that bind each quilt together.

  For more information, please visit:

  www.quiltsfromcaringhands.com.

  Learn how you can help support their work. Or find a similar organization in your own community. If you don’t know how to quilt, they’ll soon teach you. You, too, can bestow comfort and hope to children who need it.

  Thank you for all you do,

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-0326-9

  MORE THAN WORDS: STORIES OF COURAGE

  Copyright © 2008 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  Susan Wiggs is acknowledged as the author of Homecoming Season.

  Sharon Sala is acknowledged as the author of The Yellow Ribbon.

  Emilie Richards is acknowledged as the author of Hanging by a Thread.


  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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