An Uncommon Grace Read Online Free

tomato of the season.
    “What’s going on, Levi?” Elizabeth said. “Is Claire okay?”
    “Someone shot her and she is going into labor.”
    “Oh, my goodness!” Elizabeth’s hand flew to her mouth.
    Grace emerged with a large black leather bag slung over one shoulder. In her hand she clutched keys. “Go inside, Grandma, and lock the door. Call Becky at school and tell her to come home until I get back.”
    “I’ll be fine,” Elizabeth said. “You concentrate on helping that poor woman.” She made a shooing motion with her hand. “Go!”
    The granddaughter jumped into a small red car. “Do you want to ride with me?” she asked.
    “No. I will be right behind you.”
    She spun gravel as she took off toward Levi’s home.
    There had been few times in his life when Levi had been as grateful to another human being as he was at this moment. He had hoped only for the use of a telephone and a quick response from the ambulance people. Having a trained nurse already speeding toward his mother was a gift from God.
    His strong horse was fast, but the car was faster. As he urged Angel Dancer on, his broad-brimmed straw hat blew off and landed somewhere in the field beside him. He barely noticed. A summer hat was nothing. It could be replaced with a few dollars and a quick visit to the home of the Swartzentruber woman down the road who wove them. The value of his mother’s life was incalculable.
    Sometimes the Englisch could try his patience—like when loud rock music tumbled out of their open car windows and frightened his horse, or when they insisted on taking pictures of a people who hated being photographed. Not now, though. He was grateful that Elizabeth’s granddaughter with the too-short hair and the immodest clothing lived so close.
    He rounded the curve and saw Grace’s car slide to a stop directly in front of the porch, crushing a portion of the mint garden his mother raised each year for tea. As she mounted the porch steps, he flung himself off Angel Dancer and ran into the house behind her.
    Grace was already bent over his stepfather, checking for a pulse. She glanced up at him, her expression grim. “He’s gone.”
    “I know.”
    “Where’s your mom?”
    “Up there.” He nodded toward the stairwell. Grace ran for the stairs and bolted them in front of him, taking them two at a time, as he had done earlier. He had never seen a woman dothat before. Of course, she was not wearing long skirts. Even under the circumstances, he was a little embarrassed by her shorts and skimpy top.
    All thoughts about the woman’s clothing were erased by the sight of his mother, still crumpled on the hallway floor. Her breathing was shallower than when he had left, and the labor pains that wracked her body seemed to have grown weaker. She appeared barely conscious.
    “Claire, what have they done to you?” Grace knelt and placed two fingers against the side of his mother’s throat. She scanned Maam ’s body with narrowed eyes. “How far along is she?” Grace grabbed latex gloves out of her black bag and snapped them on.
    “Not yet eight months.”
    Grace gently rolled his mother onto her side. “There is an exit wound. Good. It looks like the bullet passed straight through the fleshy part above her hip. If the shooter was trying to kill her, he was a bad shot. I don’t think the uterus was compromised, but there’s too much blood on the floor to be coming from this one wound.”
    She pulled Claire’s skirt above her knees and made a clucking noise in the back of her throat as she found and inspected a second wound high on her right leg. “I’m afraid this bullet must have hit the bone. It’s still in there.” She grabbed a length of rubber tubing from her black bag and wrapped it around his mother’s upper thigh, pulling it tight, creating a tourniquet.
    His mother would be mortified if she knew he had seen her like this, and yet modesty mattered little when the life of someone so precious hung in the