Ten Thousand Truths by Susan White Page A

said as Zac passed Rachel a mug of hot chocolate.
    â€œNo, I’m okay,” Rachel answered between bites of her sandwich.
    â€œIf we keep taking this road we’ll come out behind the lake,” Zac said, pointing to a clearing through the thick stand of trees. “I haven’t had the tractor down there since our last big snowfall, so it should be good snowshoeing. It is quite a ways, but we could come out and end up at Amelia’s instead of backtracking and finishing up at my house.”
    Jodie passed out cinnamon-sugared donuts. “I think I’ll head back to your place to get my car. I told the twins that I would take them for pizza and bowling tonight. My vacation is going so fast and I want to get everything I planned done. Rachel and I are going for a spa day tomorrow, aren’t we?”
    â€œYup,” Rachel said with a smile.
    Zac finished his donut and bent down to put his snowshoes back on. “Ah, a spa day. I’m taking Raymond to his first guitar lesson tomorrow, or I might ask to come with you. I could sure use a pedicure,” he laughed. “Too bad we couldn’t get Amelia to go. Wouldn’t it be nice to see her pampered after all the work she did getting ready for Christmas?”
    â€œI know,” Jodie replied. “I would ask her but I know she wouldn’t come. I’ll bring her back that shampoo she really likes. It amazes me how she can keep so content when she never leaves home. She’s harder on herself than anyone else would ever be.”
    Rachel drank the last bit of hot chocolate from her cup and set it in Jodie’s backpack. As she strapped on her snowshoes she thought about Jodie’s words: She’s harder on herself than anyone else would ever be.
    â€œThe thing about my Macaroni Delight is that it’s never exactly the same two times in a row. I throw whatever I can find in it,” Zac explained as he shook a spice bottle over the ground beef he was cooking. Zac had met the kids at the bus and brought them to his house for supper because Amelia wasn’t feeling well.
    Rachel was chopping red and green peppers and onions. Raymond and the twins had gone out to the sheep pen hoping to find a ewe giving birth, even though Zac had told them it would be a month or so before the ewes began lambing.
    â€œWhat if Amelia has to go to the doctor?” Rachel asked. She had noticed Amelia’s cold getting worse and had heard her coughing a lot last night.
    â€œDoctor Hollway will come to the house if we need him to,” Zac answered. “A couple of years ago she had pneumonia and he came and wrote her a prescription. She doesn’t get sick very often but I told her today that if she wasn’t better by tomorrow I would call him to come again. She wasn’t too keen on that.”
    â€œAmelia doesn’t like anyone making a fuss over her, does she? But she’s always thinking of other people. When Mrs. Fullerton was sick last week, Amelia sent her meals for four days. She is probably the most unselfish person I have ever met.”
    â€œI certainly agree with that. I had to force her to stop what she was doing this afternoon and go to bed. It made me think of the first few weeks after I came to live with her. She had to change the dressings on my burns and I would scream and fight her.”
    â€œYour burns?” Rachel asked as she put the paring knife down and turned toward where Zac was standing. All Zac had ever told her about coming to Amelia’s was that he was eleven when he came. She didn’t know anything about why he was put in foster care.
    Zac kept cooking. He didn’t look at Rachel as he reached over for the pile of chopped peppers and onions and added them to the frying pan.
    â€œI was burned on my back and left arm. I had been in the hospital for a few weeks and when I was to be released I had nowhere to go so they brought me to Amelia. There had just been my dad and me.