by Linda Byler
Now together they watched headlights coming down the creek road, holding their breaths as each car swerved around the bend in the road but kept on going past the barn.
“Nope, not him,” Mandy whispered.
Suddenly the bathroom door was yanked open, and Emma said, “Where is the bathroom light?”
“It’s out,” Mandy said.
“We blew it out,” Lizzie said.
“What are you doing?” Emma asked.
“Watching for Joshua.”
“Why in the dark?”
“He’ll see us if we let the light on.”
“Here come lights!” Mandy yelled.
“In the drive?” Emma asked.
“Yep!”
Emma whirled away with a nervous little yelp and ran into her room while Lizzie and Mandy stayed at the window with its bird’s-eye view of the front drive. Headlights turned up the drive, stopping at the sidewalk.
“He’s here,” Lizzie yelled to Emma. “Go down the stairs!”
“Shhh!” Mandy said, smacking Lizzie’s arm hard.
It took forever for the door to open. The interior light went on in the car, but they couldn’t see very much of Joshua as he paid his driver. He climbed out of the car, closed the door, and turned toward the house, pausing at the end of the sidewalk as his driver backed the car down the slope.
“Why doesn’t Emma go out to him?” Lizzie hissed.
“Oh, goody, there she goes.”
Lizzie was silent, her heart thumping in the quiet as she imagined how nervous Emma must be.
“He’s not very tall,” Mandy whispered loudly.
“Taller than Emma,” Lizzie whispered back.
“Emma’s short.”
“I pity him. Now he has to meet Mam and Dat. I bet he wishes he didn’t have a date. Now I bet he feels like running out the driveway and never coming back.”
“Not if he likes Emma enough.”
“He’s supposed to love her.”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, yes, he is.”
“You don’t know.”
They held their breaths as they heard low voices in the living room.
“Should we go down?” Mandy whispered.
“Let’s just sit on the stairs for a while and listen. I feel kind of sorry for Joshua, having to meet the whole family all in one Saturday evening.”
They settled themselves on the lower step, pushing the door open wide enough to allow a bit of light and noise to enter their hiding place.
With Emma slipping away into her new life, Lizzie was glad that Mandy was still nearby. She shivered as she remembered how close they had come to losing Mandy during the auction when Dat bought their Jefferson County house.
“Where’s Mandy?” Mam had suddenly asked in the middle of all of the excitement over their new house.
“Mandy?” Lizzie looked up from the doughnut she was eating. “I don’t know, Mam. Emma and I were walking around looking at everything. I thought she was with you or Dat.”
“Go look for her,” Mam said. “I need to sit down.”
Mam sat down weakly on a porch chair, holding Jason. She looked drained and tired after all the suspense of the sale, Lizzie remembered. Emma and Lizzie had pushed through the crowd of men standing in the big open doorway of the barn. She had followed Emma back to the house, and they had looked in every room, calling Mandy’s name, more frantic by the minute.
“Mand-dee! Mand-dee!”
They burst back out through the screen door.
“We looked everywhere,” Emma told Mam. Lizzie was trying hard not to panic because kidnappers were one of her worst fears. In a crowd this size, and with Mandy being so little and skinny, Lizzie could not bear to think about what might have happened.
Mam got up from her chair.
“Lizzie, we have to find her! Please go get Dat!”
They looked for what felt like hours, but Mandy was nowhere around. Lizzie and Emma were walking slowly back to the house when suddenly Emma stopped.
“I think I see her,” Emma said, still looking across the lawn. Lizzie looked, and, sure enough, a small brown head was barely visible out at the end of the lawn. It might be Mandy! They both hurried out across the flat yard, and there she was, her thin little arms wrapped around her knees.
“Mandy!” Lizzie said breathlessly.
“She’s here!” Emma called to Mam who started to run towards them.
“What?” Mandy had asked.
“Where were you, Mandy? We couldn’t find you,” Lizzie said.
“Lizzie, look!” she said, pointing to the yard across the road. Two pure white cats emerged from beneath a flowering bush. They were long-haired, and even their tails were long, thick, and glossy, every strand combed and flowing with the delicate movement of the cats’ dainty feet.
“What kind of cat are they?” asked Mandy.
“I don’t know. All I ever saw were ordinary barn cats and Snowball. But Snowball looked common compared to those cats,” Lizzie said.
On the way home, Mandy would talk of nothing else but the Persian cats which had so dazzled her.
Lizzie reached over and squeezed Mandy’s hand. Mandy slapped Lizzie’s arm and hissed, “Here they come!” But it was only Emma on her way up the stairs for her coat.
“Wha… Wha… Watch it!” she stammered as she hurriedly yanked open the stair door to find her two sisters huddled directly inside. “What are you two up to?” she asked.
“N…nothing,” Lizzie said, trying hard to appear nonchalant.
Emma bent low and said menacingly, “Get up. You act like you’re three years old. Go out there and say hello to Joshua and talk to him while I get my coat. Go!”
So Mandy and Lizzie went.
Joshua was standing at the sink, leaning back, his arms crossed, and looking at ease in his strange surroundings. He was of medium height with wavy brown hair and deep-set, blue-green eyes. He was quite good-looking, and when he smiled, he had a wide grin which made Lizzie feel a bit less self-conscious.
“You must be Lizzie and Mandy,” he said in a deep voice.
“Mmm-hmm,” Lizzie said, lowering her eyes as she bit her lip.
“You must be Joshua,” Mandy said, smiling.
Tonight Emma was planning to take Bess the horse and Dat’s buggy. She and Joshua would spend the evening with Emma’s best friend, Sara, who was dating a young man who had recently moved to Cameron County. He had purchased his own farm and lived there all by himself, so Dat said he must have lots of money for such a young person, as prosperous and well kept as that farm was. Sara was a tall, light-haired girl with large blue eyes, whom Emma was grateful to have as a best friend.
Then there was nothing else to say. The water faucet dripped steadily. Joshua cleared his throat and looked out the kitchen window. Mandy slipped behind the table and sat on the bench. They listened to Emma opening and closing her closet doors upstairs.
Lizzie searched frantically for something to say. Should she ask him how many brothers and sisters he had? Definitely not. That would be too personal. The weather! That was it. If Dat needed something to talk about, it was always the weather. Oh, why didn’t that Emma hurry back down from her room? She was probably just checking her covering and her hair again.
“Is it still as cold outside as it was today?” Lizzie blurted out.
“It probably is. It usually turns colder at night,” Joshua answered with just a hint of a twinkle in his eye.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” Lizzie said.
Much to Lizzie’s great relief, she heard Emma close her room door and then her light steps raced down the stairs.
She came through the door, her coat slung across her arm, her green eyes sparkling as she crossed the room. Joshua watched Emma, never taking his eyes from her face with such a soft expression in his deep-set eyes that Lizzie felt like an intruder. Emma smiled at him as she stopped to put on her coat, and Joshua stepped forward to hold it for her.
Lizzie
was mesmerized. Her very own sister seemed like a sparkling Cinderella and Joshua was her prince. So this was how it was to have your very first date.
“Ready?” Joshua asked.
“Yes. Oh, we need a flashlight to get Bess hitched up,” Emma said as she opened the cupboard door.
And then they were gone. Lizzie and Mandy looked at each other for a very long time, saying nothing at all. Mandy pleated the tablecloth with her fingers, and Lizzie sighed as she looked at the kitchen door.
“I’m surprised they didn’t leave a solid trail of stardust as they walked out the door,” she said.
“They like each other so much it isn’t even funny,” Mandy said.
But Lizzie couldn’t put another thought out of her mind. Sometimes being married seemed like a lot of trouble. Take Mam, for instance, and the fact that she had to move far away from her family when she and Dat got married. Lizzie decided that she was going to be very careful about whom she married, and then they were going to talk a lot before they moved from one settlement to another.
Maybe Mam should have stayed in Ohio to begin with, Lizzie thought. Then she wouldn’t have to be so homesick for her relatives. How had Mam and Dat met, and why had they never lived in Ohio where Mam’s people were from? How could you love someone enough to move 300 miles away from your parents? Lizzie snorted, thinking that a man would have to be either extremely good-looking or wonderfully kindhearted to get her to move that far away from Mam and Dat. It was just safer not to get married at all.
Suppose you did get married and your husband decided he wanted to move? If you were Amish, you had to go with him wherever he went; it didn’t matter if you wanted to or not. If you were English, and you really, really did not want to go, you could get a divorce.
Amish people didn’t believe in divorce, Mam said. Lizzie wondered why not. Once she had asked Emma what she thought about all of this while they were in the pea patch.
“Emma, would you move to Alaska if your husband wanted you to?” Lizzie asked, opening a pea pod and scraping out the tender green peas.
“I’m not thinking about Alaska!”
“But, Emma, how did Mam and Dat get married?”
“By a preacher! Now come on and pick peas!” Emma wanted to be finished as soon as possible.
Lizzie picked another pea and ate it. “No, I mean, how did they meet?”
“Didn’t Mam ever tell you? Of course you know, Lizzie,” Emma said.
“How?”
“Mam’s brother Eli and his wife lived in Jefferson County and needed a maud. So Mam came to work for them, and Doddy Glicks lived there, too, so Dat used to go to the singings and Mam did, too, so they started dating.”
“That sounds boring,” Lizzie said indignantly.
Whack! A pea hit the back of Lizzie’s head.
“Stop your talking and pick peas, or I’m telling Mam,” Mandy said.
So Lizzie bent her back and picked, her thoughts wandering back to Mam and Dat and moving so far away from your family to live with your husband. It’s not like Dat was astonishingly tall or handsome. He was short, actually, although he had very blue eyes and nice, wavy brown hair with a neat beard. He could sing any song you could possibly think of and was very talkative, always entertaining company when they came to visit. Lizzie bet he was fun to have a date with.
She wondered if Mam had been very pretty and slender. Hardly. She had told the girls she was never thin. That was comforting.
Suddenly Mam came bustling out to the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, excitement making her eyes snap. Dat followed her, a big silly grin on his face as he sat at the table. Jason slid in beside Mandy, looking at Lizzie and back again to Mandy.
“Bet you wish you had a boyfriend,” he teased.
Dat laughed, slapping the table with his open palm. “Now, Jase!” he said.
Mam opened the refrigerator door, checking to see if her seven-minute frosting had cooled properly. She tasted it, nodded her head, and got the bowl out of the refrigerator so she could ice the big round chocolate cupcakes.
“They might be hungry when they come home,” Mam said softly.
“What did you think of Joshua, girls?” Dat asked, as he poured coffee from the pot on the stove.
“He’s nice,” Mandy answered.
The wind whistled softly around the eaves of the farmhouse as Mam frosted cupcakes and Dat sipped his coffee. It was a cozy, secure feeling, being there in the kitchen with Dat and Mam, both of them smiling contentedly.
Somewhere out in that dark night, Emma and Joshua were traveling steadily down the road, away from them, to spend the evening with Sara and her boyfriend. It was a good feeling to know Emma and Mam and Dat were so happy, but it also stirred up Lizzie’s old worries.
Why did changes have to happen? Couldn’t Emma just wait awhile before she started dating and stay home with her family on weekends? Lizzie already missed her, mostly because she seemed too grown-up now, too preoccupied whenever Lizzie tried to talk to her. It seemed as if Emma’s thoughts were a million miles away, and half the time she didn’t even hear Lizzie when she said something.
Lizzie sighed, suddenly feeling very tired and a bit old. “Guess I’ll go to bed,” she said, getting up and stretching. As she went up the stairs, she heard Dat ask Mam what was wrong with Lizzie, and Jason said that Lizzie wished she had a boyfriend herself.
Not really, Jase, not really, Lizzie thought. Too many changes too fast made Lizzie feel as if she needed Mam for a very long time.
Chapter 20
LIZZIE’S HEART SKIPPED A beat when she read the postcard from Sara Ruth inviting Mandy and her to attend a skating party.
“Oh, my!” Lizzie breathed as she leaned against the mailbox, reading the postcard. “Oh, my,” she repeated, her eyes narrowing as she contemplated the message on the postcard. Mandy would be thrilled to see Joe’s brother, John, again. Some of Sara Ruth’s cousins from Lamton, a huge Amish settlement 50 miles away, would be there. Joe would be there, and Viola, who was not Amish, would be nowhere around. Sorry, Viola, Lizzie thought.
A grin spread across her face as she tucked a strand of hair nervously behind her ear. She yanked her scarf tightly under her chin, then she burst into a run, racing up the driveway, her breath coming in short hard puffs. The frigid air hurt her lungs, but she didn’t care one bit. She was going skating!
“Guess what!” she yelled as she clattered through the kitchen door.
“Shut the door!” Mam said, as she bent to open the oven door. “I declare it hasn’t gone one degree over zero today!”
“Guess what, Mam! Sara Ruth wrote a card saying she’s having a skating party! Can we go? Huh? Can we?”
Lizzie bent down beside her mother, peering into her face as Mam squinted, testing a shoofly pie with a toothpick.
“Better not,” she muttered to herself as she closed the oven door, straightening her back to look at Lizzie.
“Better not what?” Lizzie asked. What if Mam wouldn’t let them go? She wouldn’t be so cruel, would she?
Mam threw her pot holders on the countertop and sat down at the kitchen table. She sighed as she gave Lizzie her full attention. “I meant better not take those shooflies out quite yet,” she said. “Now what are you so excited about?”
“Sara Ruth wrote and said she’s having a skating party,” Lizzie said patiently.
“Where?” Mam frowned.
“I guess at her house,” Lizzie answered.
“Is the ice thick enough? And how would you go?”
“I bet the ice is a foot thick!”
“I wonder.”
Mandy came clattering down the stairs. Lizzie jumped up and grabbed Mandy’s shoulders. “Sara Ruth is having a skating party!”
They squealed and hopped and danced across the kitchen until Mam said they had to calm down because the whole house was shaking.
And so, the following Friday evening, Lizzie and Mandy took their baths earlier than usual. Lizzie carefully combed her
hair and chose a pale blue dress to wear. She couldn’t wait to see her friends from vocational school again.
Dat hitched up Bess and made sure the battery in the buggy was charged so their lights would stay bright on the way home. He also double-checked that the turning signals and the orange blinking rear lights worked as well. He complained a bit about letting the girls drive so far by themselves in the dark, but he was smiling as he told them to be careful.
It was almost six miles to their destination, but it didn’t seem far. Bess clopped steadily through the star-strewn evening. The heavy, warm buggy blanket covered their knees, and the steel wheels rattled gently on the macadam. Lizzie and Mandy chattered on about lots of subjects as Bess pulled the buggy up hills and around bends, through little tree-filled hollows and across different roads.
“They have a beautiful farm,” Mandy said as they approached the well-lit house.
“I know,” Lizzie said. “That’s because their house is bigger and better than ours, and it has classy white shutters on it.”
“They have more money than we do, don’t they?”
“Probably. Yeah, I’m sure they do.”
The Kings’ red brick house stood like a sturdy sentinel in the night with warm yellow light radiating from the windows. Isaac King, Sara Ruth’s Dat, finished up his evening milking in the glowing barn. He helped Lizzie unhitch Bess beside the big new cow stable with a rounded roof and the two new silos which towered over the other buildings.
Through the darkness, Lizzie could see a bonfire burning down by the pond next to a line of willow trees. On the pond, dark figures dashed across the ice, while others huddled around the bonfire. Lizzie shivered with cold and something almost like fear. For one wild instant, she felt like hitching Bess back up again and heading home as fast as she could.
“M…Mandy!”
“What?”
“Aren’t you…I mean…don’t you feel afraid, or…shy or anything?”