Showers in Season Read Online Free Page A

she thought. Joseph was alive. Her other children were safe and healthy. David, though an unbeliever, was a wonderful father and an attentive husband. And now she had a job.
    Yes, she told herself as she headed up the mountain to Cedar Circle. She was blessed, indeed.

C HAPTER Four
    The secondhand car that Harry had insisted on buying for Sylvia in León, Nicaragua, was a 1975 Fiat Berlina that sounded like a lawn mower and drove in fits and starts. The morning they had bought it, the back window had fallen out and shattered on the backseat. They had not been able to get the glass to replace it, so they had taped plastic across the hole with duct tape to keep out the rain.
    She wished it wasn’t the rainy season in Nicaragua. If it weren’t, she might not have had so much trouble getting around. Her windshield wipers didn’t work, and despite all the duct tape, there was a leak somewhere that caused a puddle to form in the backseat every time she took the car out in the rain.
    She found the university, which was her main landmark in her directions to the restaurant, since the Nicaraguans weren’t big on addresses. The restaurant where she was meeting another American missionary couple was a half block north. She found it with little trouble, located a place to park the car, and got out.
    A child about the age of Joseph Dodd, her little nine-year-old neighbor back home, approached the car, soaking wet from the rain and carrying a dead chicken. In Spanish, he asked her if she wanted to buy it, but she shook her head and thanked him. She wished she spoke more Spanish. She missed talking to children, hearing their funny little thoughts, laughing at their antics. The children here were no different than they were in Tennessee. Except they were much more conscious about money, because they had to help their families make a living.
    The child spouted out some more Spanish, then in broken English, asked, “Watch your car?”
    She had been through this every time she had parked the car, so she knew what he wanted. “ Si ,” she said. “You watch my car.” Clutching the dead chicken, which she knew he would sell before she returned, the child leaned possessively against her car.
    It was a ritual that had taken some getting used to. She had learned the hard way to allow someone to “watch her car,” when her side mirror and all four hubcaps had been stolen off the car the first time she’d parked it. She learned quickly that, if someone offered to car sit, you had to let them, or they would rob you blind. Then when you returned, you had to pay them something before getting in. Sometimes the person watching the car when she returned wasn’t the same person she’d started with. But she had to pay them nonetheless.
    She hurried up to the La Cueva del León and saw that the young couple was already there waiting. She rushed in, and the Andersons got to their feet. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said. “I still get so lost here. And my windshield wipers don’t work.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Julie Anderson said as they sat back down. She was a slight woman with short blonde hair and big brown eyes. Her husband, Jeb, was about five-eight and round, but had a jolly face that was always lit up in a smile. Sylvia had heard that children loved him.
    She ordered puntas de filete a la jalapena , then settled back, trying to get comfortable with the couple she had been praying for. They had come here strictly on faith with hardly any support atall, and seemed to lack any clear direction for their ministry. Yet they had resisted joining with her and Harry, as if they were certain that God wanted them working elsewhere in the city.
    “I’m sorry Harry couldn’t be here. He’s so busy with the clinic. You wouldn’t believe the number of people he sees each day. I’ve been staying real busy myself, just checking up on his sickest patients. You know, if you wanted to come help out, there’s tremendous ministry