Summer Promise

by Marianne Ellis

  If you hadn’t gone, I might never have married Daniel, she thought. But she knew she could never say such a thing aloud.

  “I don’t know very much about your life,” she went on slowly. “You’ve only been home twice in six years, until now. And you don’t really talk about life among the Englischers much when you’re here, not to me anyhow. I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it—at least not to me.”

  “That’s not true. What do you want to know? Just ask,” Sarah said.

  “Everything. Nothing. How should I know?” Miriam exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “Sarah, I don’t want us to quarrel. I’m not even sure how we got into this conversation in the first place.”

  “Neither am I,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry.” She huffed out a breath that was not quite a laugh. “I seem to be saying that a lot today . . . And if you tell me an apology never hurts, I’ll think you’ve actually turned into Daed, so just don’t.”

  “Well, it doesn’t,” Miriam said. She bit down on her bottom lip to hold back a smile.

  “I know,” Sarah replied. “I probably know it better than you do, in fact. I was the one who did most of the apologizing when we were growing up, as I recall.”

  “What was it Berthe Meyer always used to call you?” Miriam asked.

  “High-spirited,” Sarah answered with a snort of laughter. She gave a theatrical shudder. “Berthe Meyer. Don’t remind me.”

  “Sorry,” Miriam said, then clapped a hand across her mouth as Sarah’s laughter rang out, full-blown. “I did not do that on purpose,” Miriam said, as she felt her own laughter bubble up. “It just popped out!”

  “Guess Berthe still brings out the worst in both of us.”

  “Sarah,” Miriam protested, but she was laughing herself now.

  Berthe Meyer was the most outspoken woman in the district. She’d been known to try even Bishop John’s patience. She had not approved of Jacob Lapp raising two young girls on his own. As a result, she had seldom approved of Miriam and Sarah and hadn’t hesitated to say so.

  “Enough of this nonsense!” Sarah said, with a stamp of one foot. “It makes me giddy. Give me something to do so I can settle down.”

  “There’s not much left,” Miriam admitted. She put her hands on her hips and turned in a slow circle, gazing at the farm stand’s interior. “We could take stock of the jams and canned goods, I suppose. Those are always big sellers among the Englischers and I don’t want to run out.”

  “Counting canned goods,” Sarah repeated. “Sounds perfect for me.”

  “Take this,” Miriam said. She reached beneath the cash register, opened a drawer, and brought out a notebook. “It should tell you who brought in what and how many of each kind. If we’re down to two jars of anything, write it down. Then I can speak with whoever it is on Sunday to see if she has more that she’d like to bring us.”

  “Pen? Pencil?” Sarah asked.

  “Here,” Miriam said, fetching a pen from the same drawer. “Sometimes we keep extra preserves on the top shelves,” she added. “You should check there, too. You’ll probably need the stepladder for that.”

  “Okay.” Sarah nodded and got to work. Miriam stood for a moment, uncertain of what she should do herself. As Miriam stood hesitating, Sarah picked up a jar of strawberry jam and lifted it up toward the sunlight. “These look so good!” she said. “I’m not surprised the Englischers buy so many.”

  “Don’t they ever make any of their own?”

  This was a question Miriam had always wanted to ask, but it seemed rude to ask any of her Englisch customers.

  “Some do.” Sarah nodded. “It used to be considered kind of old-fashioned, but lately it’s sort of—I don’t know—come back into style.”

  “Style?” Miriam echoed.

  Sarah laughed. “You expect the Englischers to make the same sense you do,” she observed. “That’s not going to get you very far.”

  “How did you ever get used to living among them?” Miriam asked. “Wasn’t it hard?”

  “It was, at first,” Sarah acknowledged. “Actually, it still is, sometimes.” She set the jar back on the shelf and turned to face Miriam more fully. “There are so many people in San Francisco, Miriam! I’d never seen so many before. And all so different from one another, not like the people here at all.”

  “We’re not all the same,” Miriam protested.

  “No,” Sarah agreed. “Of course not. But you all agree to abide by the Ordnung, or at least you agree to try. That’s part of what becoming Plain means, isn’t it? It’s part of what keeps you separate from everyone else. Right?”

  “Yes.” Miriam nodded. “I can see your point.”

  You, she thought. She says you, not we. Not anymore.

  “Take the clothing, for example,” Sarah went on. “All the women here wear similar dresses—different colors maybe, but very similar. And all the women and girls wear kapps. But the Englischers, most of them anyhow, don’t want that at all. They want to be unique individuals, not part of a crowd. You’ve seen the fashions on the tourists. The women might wear skirts or dresses or jeans or shorts. They use their clothing to distinguish themselves, to make themselves different and attractive.”

  “But—” Miriam said, then stopped.

  “No, go on,” Sarah said.

  “How can anyone live like that? How do you know who you are?”

  “Those are good questions,” Sarah admitted. “And they’re ones a lot of people struggle with. Not just people like me. Lots of Englischers struggle with them as well. But do you want to know something funny?” Sarah went on with a smile. “The things I struggled with the most, at first anyhow, weren’t anything so profound. There were just so many things to do, Miriam! Wonderful things like museums and libraries, even just walking around. Some days, I got dizzy just thinking about them. Others, I ended up doing nothing at all because I couldn’t decide what to do first! And then there was the noise.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’m still not used to that, to tell you the truth. It still catches me off guard sometimes. Cars honking and buses roaring up and down the streets, radios blaring, people walking down the street talking on their cell phones. It’s like you can almost see the sound. When I first started school, I used to lie in bed in my dorm room at night, trying to re-create in my mind the silence of my old room at home.”

  “And could you?” Miriam asked, fascinated in spite of herself.

  “I could,” Sarah said. “Right up until the moment my roommate started snoring.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes,” Sarah said with a grin. “The first night it happened, I almost cried. But I’d promised myself I would never do that, so . . .”

  A sharp trilling sound, like the ring of an old-fashioned phone, cut through the air of the farm stand. Both sisters jumped.

  “What on earth?” Miriam exclaimed.

  But Sarah was busy digging her fingers into the back pocket of her jeans and pulling out a slim, brightly colored phone. She glanced at the front.

  “It’s work; I have to take this,” she said, as she checked the number. She set the pen and notebook on the counter beside the cash register. “I’ll be right back. Sorry.”

  She put an index finger to the front of the phone, then swiftly moved the phone to her ear.

  “Hello, this is Sarah Lapp,” she said as she stepped outside.

  Miriam shook her head with an inward smile. There was Sarah complaining about the city’s noise, and her own cell phone went off, as if she were importing the din to Lancaster. Miriam found herself grateful that she and Daniel didn’t have cell phones and the only nearby pay phone was in Daniel’s father’s barn.

  She picked up the pen and notebook Sarah had abandoned, determined to finish the job herself. Abruptly a wave of weariness swept over her.

  It can wait until tomorrow, she tho
ught. Taking stock would be a good task for Leah, a good way to introduce her to some of the inner workings of the farm stand.

  Miriam leaned her arms on the counter, gazing out the front doors. Why am I so tired? she wondered. The day was only just half done, and she had hardly done anything, not by her usual standards.

  I guess I’m still getting used to life without Daed, she thought.

  She straightened up. I’ll spend some time in the garden, she decided. Tending the kitchen garden had always been one of her favorite activities. She didn’t even mind pulling the weeds, not that she allowed many to take hold. She tended garden too well for that.

  Feeling better now that she had a definite purpose, Miriam closed up the farm stand and locked the back door behind her. She could see Sarah, a ways down the drive. She was pacing back and forth, speaking animatedly into the cell phone.

  That looks serious, Miriam thought. Could there be trouble at Sarah’s job? I don’t even really know what it is she does, Miriam realized.

  Sarah was right. She did seem like a stranger.

  Is that what we feel like to her? Miriam wondered. But what she really wanted to know was . . . did Daniel feel that way about Sarah?

  This was a possibility that Miriam had never considered before. The Sarah who was here, today, no longer matched the Sarah of Miriam’s memory, the one she conjured up in her mind’s eye. Did Daniel feel this way as well? If he did, would it bring him closer to Miriam, who was so close and so familiar? Or would the new Sarah seem even more interesting? Next to Sarah, would Miriam seem drab and dull?

  Suddenly, the sky seemed to darken as Miriam walked to her empty house alone.

  Six

  Miriam was halfway to her house when she saw a small figure dashing toward her.

  “Miriam! Miriam!” an exuberant voice called.

  It was Daniel’s youngest brother, ten-year-old Matthew, pelting down the drive as fast as his bare feet could carry him. Unless Miriam missed her guess, he had run all the way from the Brennemann farm. Though both the Lapp and Brennemann farms had many acres to their names, the farmhouses had been set so as to be reasonably close together, the country equivalent of side by side. Family members could get from one farmhouse to the other by cutting across a great open meadow. There was no need to go all the way to the main road. But, like the farm stand and the Lapp farmhouse, the Lapp and Brennemann farmhouses were hidden from each other by the gently rolling hills that dominated the countryside.

  Miriam didn’t think she had ever met a boy who loved to run as much as Matthew Brennemann did. His mother, Amelia, always claimed it was because he was doing his best to catch up to his four older brothers. Considering that the twins, Jonas and Joshua, the next closest in age, were seventeen, Miriam didn’t think Matthew was going to slow down anytime soon.

  “Hello, Matthew,” she said with a smile. She stopped walking, standing still in the center of the drive while Matthew ran a great circle around her. “Are you well?” she asked. “Is everything all right at the farm?”

  “Ja,” Matthew panted.

  He completed one more circuit then skidded to a stop in front of Miriam, his chest rising and falling with his quick breaths in and out. He looked like he belonged on one of the postcards the Englischers were always asking to buy, Miriam thought. Matthew’s hair was as pale as corn silk. A smattering of freckles raced across his nose and cheekbones. In his dark pants, sky blue shirt, and dark suspenders, he was the perfect image of a Plain child.

  “Mamm asks, will you and your sister please come to supper,” Matthew went on. “She’s making chicken and dumplings. They’re Daniel’s favorite, and mine, too, so you should say yes.”

  “Of course I will say yes,” Miriam replied with a smile. “And I’ll tell you a secret: Chicken and dumplings are my favorites, too.”

  “Hooray!” Matthew shouted. As if her acceptance had been the secret signal for the start of the next race, Matthew began to run once more. He shot past Miriam, arms outstretched like airplane wings. He made a wide, banking turn before heading back across the fields toward home. “I will tell Mamm,” he called over his shoulder as he went by. “Don’t be late or all the dumplings will be gone!”

  “I will not be late,” Miriam called back.

  She turned and began to walk home briskly, all her earlier weariness gone. Next to her own home, the farm where Daniel had grown up was Miriam’s favorite place on earth, always filled with the joy and laughter of family life. And the seriousness, too, Miriam acknowledged. Nobody could raise seven children without encountering life’s ups and downs.

  What was the phrase the Englischer man who had stopped at the farm stand a couple of weeks ago had used? She could still see him in her mind’s eye, red faced and perspiring. His car had broken down several miles down the road and, for some reason Miriam could not now recall, he’d been without a cell phone. He had stopped at the farm stand, assuming he could call from there, and had been taken aback when Jacob explained that the closest phone was a pay phone in the Brennemanns’ barn.

  A walk in the park. That was it, Miriam thought. He said life’s not always a walk in the park. She remembered how the pronouncement had made her father smile. “Nope, not always a walk in the park,” the man had said, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop to smell the roses.” When Miriam had protested that they had no roses, the man had given Daed a wink. “So I see,” he’d replied. “Guess I’ll just have to settle for that basket of tomatoes instead.”

  She had felt foolish at the time. But now she thought she could see what the Englisch man had meant. You could not always predict what life would bring, but you could always try to make the best of it.

  Supper with Daniel’s family might be just what Miriam needed to chase away her dark thoughts.

  I must take something to Amelia, she thought. Something that would express Miriam’s appreciation for being asked to supper. Something to celebrate both the sweetness and the hard work of family life. Her mind busy with just what this might be, Miriam continued on toward the house.

  * * *

  “Your blackberry jam,” Amelia Brennemann exclaimed that evening as Miriam handed her a basket with several jars nestled inside. She had tucked a clean white dish towel around them to keep them from being jostled too hard. “Oh, Miriam, you shouldn’t have, but I won’t say no! Do you know, no matter how many jars of jam I make, I never seem to make enough. I don’t know where the boys put it.”

  “Hollow legs,” Miriam suggested with a smile.

  She stepped across the threshold and into the kitchen. As was the case in Miriam’s own home, visitors used the front door only for formal occasions. It was the kitchen that was really the heart of the farmhouse. At the moment, the room was filled with the good smells of the summer supper they were all about to enjoy. Amelia’s oldest daughter, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth, was putting the finishing touches on setting the big kitchen table, which was spread with a fresh oilcloth. Lucas’s wife, Annaliese, was keeping an eye on the stove. Her three-year-old daughter, Jane, was right beside her, clutching at her legs, her dark eyes huge as she regarded the newcomers.

  “Look who is here, Jane,” Annaliese said as she sent Miriam a warm smile. Annaliese had grown up in a nearby district. She and Lucas had met when Annaliese had attended the wedding of a cousin. They had been married the next winter, just a year after Miriam and Daniel. Miriam and Annaliese had liked each other at once. “Miriam has come.”

  “Miriam!” Jane crowed. Miriam knelt and opened her arms. The child catapulted into them. Miriam lifted her up, burying her face in the crook of Jane’s neck. She breathed in the child’s sweet scent.

  “You smell like sunshine, Jane,” she said, trying to ignore the fierce ache of longing that had suddenly reared up to grab her by the throat.

  “Outside!” Jane demanded.

  Miriam gave her nose a tweak. “Not now. Now we
are getting ready for supper. Are those hands clean? Let me see.”

  Obediently, Jane extended her hands, palms facing up. Miriam leaned closer, her face almost in Jane’s hands. The child chortled at this.

  “Well, they look clean,” Miriam admitted. “But I’ll tell you what. I need to wash mine. How would it be if you helped me with that? That way, we can make sure yours are clean, too.”

  Jane gave an enthusiastic nod. “Jane is a good helper,” she informed Miriam.

  “Jane!” Annaliese protested even as Miriam laughed.

  “Now, where did you hear that?” she inquired. With the child still held tightly in her arms, Miriam moved toward the kitchen sink with its small hand pump. Clearly accustomed to the routine, Jane leaned over and held out her hands.

  “But where is Sarah?” Amelia asked.

  “Here I am,” Sarah said. She stood, hesitating, just inside the kitchen door.

  “Don’t just stand there, schatzi. Come inside and let me get a good look at you.”

  “Amelia,” Sarah said.

  Even occupied as she was, Miriam heard the catch in Sarah’s voice. She looked up quickly and thought she caught the bright sheen of tears in her sister’s eyes. Sarah had changed from her jeans to a blue calf-length skirt with the same flowered shirt.

  “Gracious!” Amelia exclaimed. “What are they feeding you out among the Englischers? You’ve grown so tall!”

  “It’s the shoes,” Miriam said.

  “Shoes!” Jane shouted.

  “Jane,” Annaliese said reprovingly, though Miriam heard the thread of laughter in her tone. “Inside voices in the house.”

  “No, no,” Sarah said with a slightly watery laugh. She dashed a quick hand across her eyes. “I hate to admit it, but Miriam is right.” She extended one foot to show Annaliese her shoe.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Amelia said as she got a good look at the platform sandals Sarah wore. “Sarah, have you left your common sense by the side of the road? You’ll break your neck, walking around here in shoes like that.”