The Christmas Courtship

by Emma Miller

  “It’s not always easy. Mornings when we have to get out of the house for church can be tense.” He shrugged. “But we’re working on it. Once a week we sit down together and eat a bunch of desserts and talk about whatever’s bugging us.” He shrugged. “Whether it’s my brother Jacob not taking his turn cleaning horse stalls or our stepsister Ginger hogging the upstairs bathroom.”

  He turned down the baking aisle, still pulling the cart along. Phoebe followed.

  “But my father and Rosemary are so happy together,” he told her over his broad shoulder. “They love each other. So we’re all determined to make it work. All of us,” he said with conviction.

  Phoebe smiled at him again, this time making no attempt to hide it.

  He knitted his brows. “What?”

  She felt her cheeks grow warm. She was tempted not to tell him why she was smiling, but it wasn’t really in her nature not to answer an honest question with an honest answer. “You said your father and Rosemary love each other. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man say such a thing.”

  “Say what thing?”

  “Speak of love,” she responded quietly. “It’s not very Amish, is it?”

  He thought for a moment. “My father’s a man who doesn’t hide how he feels and he doesn’t mind telling you, good or bad. I guess I take after him.”

  Phoebe looked up to see an Amish girl of about twenty with a woman who was likely her mother approaching them. They were each pushing a grocery cart overflowing with boxes of cereal, flour and sugar, and bags and bags of cookies, snack cakes and potato chips.

  The younger of the two women caught sight of Joshua, giggled and looked away.

  “Joshua?” The older woman acknowledged him and stopped her cart, blocking other customers, Amish, English and Mennonite, from continuing down the aisle. She was a small, round woman with rectangular wire-frame glasses who fluttered her hands, reminding Phoebe a little bit of a bumblebee. “How’s Rosemary doing with the foot? Staying off it, I hope?” She was speaking to Joshua, but she was staring Phoebe down.

  “Doing well, Eunice. Had an appointment yesterday with the doctor.” He reached for a ten-pound bag of whole wheat flour. He didn’t seem to notice that Eunice was gawking at Phoebe. “Doctor says surgery went well. Healing fine. Back on her feet in no time, as good as ever.”

  Phoebe watched him add another bag of whole wheat flour to the cart. She didn’t recall flour being on the grocery list he’d shared with her on the way from the bus station to the store.

  “Who does she see? Dr. Gallagher, is it, or Dr. Parker?”

  Joshua shook his head. “I wouldn’t know.” He added yet another ten-pound bag of flour to the cart.

  “It’s no wonder she needed that surgery.” Eunice glanced at Joshua and then returned her attention to Phoebe.

  The young woman was staring at a box of cereal but stealing glances at Joshua. She obviously found him attractive.

  Phoebe was beginning to feel uncomfortable now. It wasn’t that she wasn’t used to people staring at her. She was even used to whispers behind her back. But she hadn’t expected this here. Or at least she had hoped it wouldn’t happen. And at once she wondered how much Eunice knew about her and her circumstances, as her mother liked to put it.

  “Chasing after two toddlers at her age.” Eunice made a clicking sound of disapproval between her teeth. “How old will she be come next year?”

  Joshua smiled sweetly at Eunice. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Rosemary.” He leaned around Eunice. “Good to see you, Martha. Visiting your aunt again, are you?”

  Martha giggled and pushed her glasses up farther on her nose. “Ya.”

  “What are you doing here at Byler’s?” Eunice asked. “None of your stepsisters could make it today?”

  “They could.” Joshua added a huge bag of chocolate chips to the cart.

  Also not on the list, Phoebe noted.

  “But I like grocery shopping,” Joshua said.

  Eunice drew back with a harrumph.

  Joshua leaned around Eunice again to speak to Martha. “Rosemary’s cousin is visiting, too,” he told the younger woman. “This is Phoebe.”

  Martha gave a quick nod, giggled and gave her glasses another push at the bridge of her nose.

  Phoebe glanced behind Martha. There was a long line of customers behind her in the aisle now, waiting to get by or move forward.

  “Visiting, are you?” Eunice said to Phoebe, her face lighting up with interest. “From where? Rosemary didn’t say she had a cousin visiting. I was just there two days ago at her sickbed. She never mentioned a word.”

  “We need to go, Eunice,” Joshua said, intervening in the conversation. “Have to get these things home and we’re holding other folks up.” He nodded in the direction of the customers lined up behind Eunice and Martha and their grocery carts. Then, for good measure, he reached out and gave Eunice’s cart a little push.

  Phoebe didn’t know why, but that struck her as funny, and she had to look away so Eunice wouldn’t catch her smiling.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Eunice huffed with obvious disappointment. She grabbed the handle of the cart with both hands and gave it a shove. “Tell Rosemary I said hello and for her to stay off that foot. Tell her I’ll be by at the end of the week.”

  “Will do,” Joshua said as Eunice passed them, discernibly reluctant to move on. When Martha passed, he nodded to her.

  The minute they were gone, Joshua leaned on the end of his cart, drawing closer to Phoebe. “Sorry about that,” he murmured, meeting her gaze.

  She placed her hands on the handle and leaned forward, her words meant only for him. “Town gossip?”

  “Editor of the Amish telegraph.” Joshua’s eyes twinkled.

  He had nice eyes, brown with thick lashes. Expressive eyes.

  “No news she doesn’t know and readily share,” he told her. “True or otherwise.”

  Phoebe couldn’t help herself. She laughed and then felt self-conscious. People were pushing past them with their shopping carts, some looking with interest at her and Joshua leaning across the cart whispering to each other.

  “How’d you know?” he asked.

  “Ours is Lettice Litwiller. I think they look alike,” she teased. “She and Eunice.”

  He laughed and slapped his hand on the edge of the cart. Then he grabbed a bag of flour from the cart and lifted it out with ease.

  “What are you doing?” Phoebe asked, watching him return the bag to the shelf.

  “Putting it back. We don’t need flour.” He reached for another bag.

  Phoebe picked up the third and pushed it onto the shelf. “Why did you put it in the cart, then?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He returned the bag of chocolate chips, too. “Just because I know it annoys Eunice to no end that Rosemary has no problem getting us boys to sweep a porch or pick up some milk on the way home from town and she can’t get her own sons to pick up their dirty clothes from the floor.” He grabbed the cart and started forward, then halted again. He curled his finger to draw her closer again.

  Phoebe knew their behavior bordered on inappropriate. Amish men and women were not generally so friendly with each other and certainly not in public. They didn’t laugh and whisper to each other. And a woman like her, a woman who’d nearly been shunned, definitely had no business carrying on with a man this way.

  “That,” Joshua said, his tone conspiratorial, “and I want to see how long it takes to get around the neighborhood that Rosemary had one of her stepsons buy thirty pounds of whole wheat flour and a huge bag of chocolate chips.” He laughed. “Bet she’ll have Rosemary baking cookies for the whole county.” He raised his eyebrows. “Something new for the Amish telegraph.”

  Phoebe met Joshua’s gaze over the grocery cart and smiled, not just because she liked his silliness,
but because she was pretty certain she’d made her first friend in a very long time.

  Chapter Two

  Her cousin Rosemary’s home looked just like Phoebe thought it would. It was a rambling white clapboard farmhouse, two stories with multiple additions, rooflines running in several directions and two red chimneys to anchor the proportions. The land was flat, no hills and valleys like home, but beautiful in its own way even in the dry bareness of autumn. There were barns, sheds and small outbuildings galore, painted red, all dwarfed by the enormous old dairy barn that Joshua explained housed Benjamin’s harness shop. There, the family not only made and repaired leather goods like bridles and harnesses, but also sold items like axle grease, horse liniments and other items Amish and English customers were in need of.

  “We sell eggs, too,” Joshua said as they drove up the crushed oyster shell driveway, past the parking lot, where there were two black buggies tied to a hitching post, an old pickup and a little blue sedan parked. “My sister Bay—” He glanced at Phoebe, the reins in his gloved hands. “I’m just going to tell you now, we dropped the step part ages ago. So, when you hear one of us say brother or sister or daughter or son, we might mean that we’re not actually related by blood, but we’re all family now.”

  “Got it.” She nodded and smiled to herself, happy for them, a little sad for herself. In the home where she’d grown up, her stepfather had never let her forget that she was a stepchild, which had somehow translated to mean she was something less than his own children. Phoebe’s father had taken ill when she was just a baby and died. Her mother had remarried a year later and Phoebe had become the stepdaughter of Edom Wickey, an authoritarian, dogmatic man who easily saw all of the ills of the world but never the good.

  “So, anyway,” Joshua went on, pulling Phoebe back into the conversation. “My sister Bay Laurel, we call her Bay, sells eggs and sometimes frying chickens out of the shop. I think they’re adding jams and such. Oh, and she sells our sister Nettie’s quilts, too. Only Nettie doesn’t just do quilts. She makes these hanging things.” He gestured in the air with one gloved hand. “I guess Englishers put them on their walls? Like for—” He seemed to search for the right word in Pennsylvania Deutsch, then switched to English. “Decoration?” He clamped the reins with both hands again. “Don’t get me wrong. They’re beautiful, but I don’t get having something that just hangs there and serves no purpose. They can be beautiful on a bed and more useful, right? She does all kinds of patterns—the old ones like Garden of Eden, Jacob’s ladder, Joseph’s coat. But she’s made some of her own patterns, too. She made this one that looked like a nest but was made of tree limbs that—” He went quiet and lowered his head. “I’m talking too much again.”

  “You’re not. Ne, you’re not,” Phoebe insisted, reaching over and touching his arm. The moment she felt his warmth through the thick denim of his homemade coat, she snatched her hand back and gazed out the side window of the buggy.

  Amish men and women didn’t whisper and laugh together in grocery stores, and they certainly didn’t touch casually. She could almost hear her stepfather’s angry scolding ringing in her ears.

  Suddenly tears welled in her eyes. Hoping Joshua didn’t see them, she blinked them away. She didn’t know why she was suddenly so emotional. She was here in Hickory Grove because she wanted to be. She was here because she knew it was the right thing for her. And for John-John.

  “Here we are,” Joshua announced as he reined in the bay and the buggy rolled to a halt. If he noticed she had touched him, or her response, he didn’t show it.

  Phoebe glanced up to see two half-grown puppies that were a rich chestnut color bounding down the front porch steps, barking excitedly.

  “That would be Silas and Adah. Chesapeake Bay retrievers. My brother Jacob raises and sells them,” Joshua explained.

  As the dogs ran around the front of the buggy, Phoebe realized each was missing one rear leg. They appeared to have been born that way. She took in her breath sharply, not because she had never seen an animal with a disability, but because it didn’t seem to hinder their speed or frivolity one bit.

  “Ya, only three legs apiece. That’s why Jacob couldn’t sell them. Or wouldn’t.” He wrapped the reins around the brake lever, and the bay danced in its traces. “And he couldn’t stand the idea of seeing them put down, even though our vet said he wouldn’t be unwarranted to do it.” He glanced at her. “My brother named them after these neighbors we had in New York. Silas and Adah Snitzer. They were brother and sister. One was blind, the other deaf. They took care of each other. Led a full, good, Godly life.”

  Phoebe knitted her brow. “You don’t think your neighbors would mind having dogs named after them?”

  “They passed away a few years ago. Were in their nineties. Died within a day of each other.” He smiled, seeming lost in the memory of them. “But I think they would have liked the idea that Jacob named his dogs after them.” He chuckled and then slammed his thigh. “Well, guess we best go inside and get you settled. That’s my brother Jesse there on the porch. Rosemary’s boy.” He pointed. “Waiting for us, I suspect.”

  Phoebe looked over to see a boy of ten or so with neatly trimmed brown hair and a sweet, lopsided smile hurrying across the covered porch toward them.

  “I’m warning you now,” Joshua said as he opened the buggy door and climbed down. “He’ll talk your ear off if you let him.” He chuckled. “Not unlike me, I guess.”

  Phoebe smiled but didn’t say anything as she opened her door.

  “Want to take Toby up to the barn?” Joshua called to his little brother.

  Jesse bounded down the porch steps and across the driveway, pulling a black wool watch cap down over his head.

  On Phoebe’s side of the buggy, Joshua offered his hand to help her out of the buggy, but instead of taking it, she handed him her canvas bag. “If you could take this? Danke,” she said, feeling as if she needed to avoid making physical contact with him.

  “Sure.” Joshua caught the bag as she practically tossed it down. “Jesse, this is your cousin, Phoebe.”

  Phoebe climbed down quickly. “Nice to meet you, Jesse.” A gust of wind caught the edge of her cloak and whipped it open. Dry brown and gold and orange leaves blew around her. “Goodness.” She grasped the edges of the heavy wool and pulled her outer garment tightly around her. “I didn’t expect it to be so cold here. I was thinking that because it’s farther south...” She let the sentence go unfinished, feeling now like she was the one who talked too much.

  “Cold snap,” Jesse told her. “Nice to have you with us.” His words sounded rehearsed, as if his mother had told him what to say when they met. But his smile was genuine.

  Jesse turned to his big brother. “I should take Phoebe inside? I can take her bag, too. We’re having chicken potpie for dinner.” Beaming, he went on faster. “I hope you like chicken potpie. It’s my mam’s recipe. She puts peas in it. Most people don’t, but my mam does. Only Mam didn’t make it ’cause she’s laid up so my sisters made it.”

  “See what I mean?” Joshua said to Phoebe. He turned to his little brother. “Ne, I thought I’d take her in. Can you manage Toby? He needs a good rubdown and a scoop of oats.” He handed Phoebe her bag and walked around to the back of the buggy to unload the groceries. “I’ll be up directly to help you with her harness.”

  “I got it,” Jesse insisted, grasping the gelding’s bridle. Bags in hand, Joshua closed the back of the buggy and his little brother began to lead the horse away, walking backward so he could still see Joshua and Phoebe. “I’ll be in shortly. I can show you around if you want, Phoebe. Show you where you’ll be sleeping and where the towels are and such.”

  “Thank you. I’d like that,” she called to him as he made his way up the driveway.

  “I think he likes you,” Joshua said. He led Phoebe up the front steps to the wide porch, the puppies nipping at his heels.

>   “Some say I have a way with children,” she answered absently, glancing at the door that led into the house.

  She was suddenly nervous to see her cousin Rosemary again, to meet the rest of the family. They had to all know why she was there. Know what she had done. Her mother had said that Rosemary Stutzman Miller was as nonjudgmental as a soul could be, but it had been years since the cousins had seen each other. What if Rosemary had changed? That sometimes happened as folks aged. They became more rigid in their beliefs and ways. It had been like that with her stepfather. He hadn’t softened with age. He’d grown more rigid.

  Joshua shifted the sacks of groceries in his arms, opened the door and stepped back. “Ne! Get back, you two,” he said, laughing as he caught the pups with his booted foot, blocking their entry into the house. He looked up at Phoebe. “Go on in. If I let these two in again today, Rosemary will have me washing dishes for a week. I already accidentally let them in this morning. They made it through the kitchen, down the hall before Jesse caught them.”

  “Really?” Phoebe asked, unable to hide her surprise. “You and your brothers do dishes?” She’d suspected the Miller household was less conservative than her stepfather’s, but the Amish stuck to the old ways, and male and female tasks were laid out very explicitly.

  “Ne, not usually.” He laughed again. “We stick mostly to outside chores, but there’s no telling what Rosemary will say if I let these two drag mud through her house again.”

  Phoebe nodded, then walked into the mudroom that looked like so many others she’d passed through. It even looked a lot like her mother’s, with rows of denim jackets on hooks, wool cloaks and an assortment of scarves and hats and bonnets on pegboards on the wall. On the floor were piles of boots and shoes in a great array of sizes, some set down neatly, others dropped carelessly. But the moment she stepped into the house, something had immediately felt different about it. Maybe it was her imagination, or maybe it was just the smell of baking apple pie, but Phoebe immediately felt herself relax. Because, somehow, she knew that in this house with its three-legged puppies and chatty little brothers, she would find the acceptance she had never found in her own home.