by Anne Beiler
“Hi, my name is Anne Beiler. Are you the ones selling the stand in the Downingtown Farmers’ Market?”
“Yes, we are.”
“I’m interested in buying your stand. How much are you asking for it?”
A moment of quiet deliberation on the other end of the line. I nearly said, “Okay, thank you,” before they even spoke, so sure was I that the price would be unthinkable for Jonas and me.
“$6,000,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
After asking a few more questions, I hung up the phone and just stared into space for a few moments. $6,000. That was hardly anything at all compared to what I expected the price to be. The sum just kept running through my mind. $6,000 . . . $6,000 . . . $6,000 . . . Jonas stood there with me in the kitchen and I turned toward him.
“They want $6,000. That’s all they want for the stand.”
Jonas waited there beside me while I thought some more. Even though the price came in much lower than I expected, $6,000 was still $6,000. It might as well have been $100,000, since we didn’t have either amount saved up. Still, an incredibly strong feeling began welling up inside of me, the feeling that I should buy the stand, and I blurted out my feelings to Jonas.
“I just think I need to call them back and tell them I want it. I mean, $6,000. I thought it would be at least $100,000.”
Jonas didn’t even hesitate.
“Well, honey, if you feel like you should do it, just do it. Pop will give you the money.” By Pop he meant his dad.
“Do you think he would?”
“Well, you know he’s been telling us if we want to buy a house he would loan us the money. If he has the money to do that, why wouldn’t he loan you just $6,000?”
I turned back to the phone, almost shaking. I called the stand owners back, only a few minutes after we first spoke.
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is Anne Beiler calling back. I would like to buy your market stand for $6,000.” Even then I thought perhaps I heard the price wrong during the first call, or maybe they sold the stand in those precious few minutes while Jonas and I spoke.
We agreed on the price, and I told her I would drop a check off at her house the following week. I still hadn’t seen the market stand or even secured the money to buy it! But I felt as though I was doing the right thing. Immediately after the phone call, Jonas and I hopped in our car and drove over to Jonas’s parents’ house.
We told Pop the story, and then Jonas asked him for the money.
“Well, sure I’ll give you the money,” he said without even a moment’s hesitation.
He wrote out the check at the kitchen table and handed it to me. It felt heavy in my hands, simply because of the amount. No one had ever handed money to me like that. The feeling of physically taking that check from him laid such a feeling of gratefulness and responsibility over me that I hardly knew what to say.
“Pop,” I said, my voice shaking. “I don’t know when I’ll ever be able to pay this back, but I promise you, I will.”
He just looked at me with a loving, steady gaze and said three words.
“I trust you.”
Jonas and I walked back to the car. I was stunned, could feel the check bulging in my pocket like a heavy rock. By the way I acted, you might have thought I had just been given $1 million. The following week I dropped the check off while Jonas traveled to Downingtown to check out the market stand we’d bought. In only a few short days I went from managing someone else’s stand to purchasing my own. The only thing left to do was tell my boss about my plans.
My heart raced. It was a Monday, and I sat across the table from him at a local restaurant and ordered my breakfast. He probably thought we were having one of our usual meetings to discuss the business, the staff, and how things were going at the market stand in Burtonsville. He had no idea I was about to give him my resignation. He also had no idea I couldn’t even work for him that very weekend, only five days away.
But I planned everything to the tee. My sister Becky would take over as manager until he could find someone, and I even hired a few extra workers just to make sure he wouldn’t be short of help. I would give the van to Becky for her to use, and she would provide transport for the Amish girls who needed rides. Finally I blurted it out, told him I bought a market stand and needed to be there that weekend. I told him all the plans I’d put in place to ease the transition and apologized again and again for the short notice.
Once again, he proved to be a man full of understanding. He appreciated that I arranged for everything, even though I had to leave on such short notice. I couldn’t be more thankful to him for the opportunity he gave me at Burtonsville, and I still feel so thankful to him for believing in me—his confidence that I could make his little market stand work instilled in me such drive and self-belief that I can’t picture my life today without his positive influence. But he still had an important role to play over the coming months as I transitioned into my new store.
I sat quietly at the kitchen table. The cold winter air tried to push its way in through the door or the cracks around the window, but we sat snug in our little burrow. A small light-bulb lit up the room; behind me stood two closed doors, one led to my and Jonas’s bedroom, where Jonas slept quietly, and the other to LaWonna and LaVale’s bedroom. LaVale lay quietly in her bed, but I could tell by the creaking that she was still awake. The early hours of the morning came, and still LaWonna didn’t return.
I wanted to go look for her but, without the first idea of where to begin searching, decided to just wait. A few weeks earlier LaWonna had stayed out late, and Jonas went looking, driving the endless back roads and scouting a few of her friends’ houses, to no avail. While he drove those country lanes, he experienced a revelation—he would never find her driving around like that, and by chasing her into the wee hours of the morning, he allowed her decisions to shape his life, deprive him of sleep, and cause him to worry. No more, he thought to himself as he turned the car toward home. No more. And somehow he wiped his hands clean of the situation, still confronting her when necessary, still helping me raise the girls, but managing to separate himself from the things over which he had no control. I, on the other hand, was not nearly that strong.
I wept. I prayed. I read my Bible. Still she didn’t come back. These nights happened time and time again, and still I would wait up for her. At first when she came back, she would completely ignore me, and I would give her the silent treatment in return as she went into her room and slammed the door behind her. At other times we would have discussions that left both of us feeling angry and wronged.
One night I followed her into her room.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” I asked.
Her eyes looked very sad.
“I don’t know what’s wrong, Mom. I just don’t think I can live here anymore.”
Should you decide to look for the first Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzel stand, you would need to go down Route 30 in eastern Pennsylvania just west of Philadelphia and take the Downingtown exit. After driving through a small town that reminds you of just about every other small town in America, you would need to go through a few intersections. Then you would need to go back in time to the late 1990s, to the years before they bulldozed the market and turned it into one of these large box-store strip malls.
Don’t get me wrong: When we first visited our new stand, the one we’d just bought for $6,000, the last words to spring to mind would have been “life” or “energy.” The market was old and tired, the tenants dissatisfied, and the customers disenchanted. My previous market stand had always felt alive and exciting. The first day I worked there had been the market’s first day of business, and everyone could feel the energy. Customers loved what we offered, stand owners were motivated by the potential to turn the market into something successful, and all of this transferred to more lively employees. Downingtown, on the other hand, was old and in decline.
Jonas and I still felt optimistic about our stand, but the atmosp
here of the place dampened our enthusiasm. All of the stand owners seemed to have so much to complain about: there weren’t enough customers, the rent was too high, the parking lot was too dirty. The employees just kind of sat there and stared at you. As we walked down to our end of the market, things seemed a bit more lively. It was a newer section with mostly Amish stand holders. But I must admit worry began creeping into my mind when I compared the chemistry of that market with the one I’d worked at just the weekend before.
During the first weekend, the previous owners of our stand helped us learn the operational ropes, taught us how they did things, and gave us their recipes—all of the normal handover stuff. They were eager to leave, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
The first thing we did that week was clean and renovate the store to make it more functional. The stand was one of the larger locations in the market—we had seating and sold pizza, strombolis, soft pretzels, and ice cream. We cleaned the equipment, and Jonas added some touches of his own to make the operations flow more smoothly. My youngest brother, Carl, even showed up one day to help us with the changes. When I tried to pay him for his work, he just shrugged it off.
“We’re just glad you guys are back,” he said. “This is what family is for.” He couldn’t possibly have known how touched I was—after all we went through during our years in Texas, after feeling so nervous that my own family wouldn’t accept me because of all the mistakes I’d made, here they were helping me out so much. With their help we finally got the store just right: everything was sparkling clean, the equipment was ready to go, and we were fully stocked for our first week of sales. I could hardly sleep at night.
When I did sleep, my nights filled up with strange dreams and premonitions. Whether stressed about making the business work or lying in bed waiting for LaWonna to come home, I found my nights becoming more and more restless. I remember one dream in particular.
Cruising down the road in our old ’73 Cadillac, the blue one we moved to Texas in, suddenly I saw Angie in the car with me. I couldn’t believe it, and I remember feeling very excited to see her. She looked just like LaWonna, only taller and with long dark hair, and she was probably around fourteen years old. Absolutely beautiful. I don’t remember how she got there in the car with me, but immediately I said, “Oh, Angie, let’s go see Aunt Vern!” Vern is my brother Merrill’s wife, and she became a close friend to me during those first years back from Texas.
I went in the front door of Vern’s house and walked up the steps. I stood at the top and yelled down the hallway, “Vern, someone is here to see you.”
She came out of her bedroom, and Angie was standing beside me.
“And who is this?” Vern asked, smiling.
I said, “Vern, you don’t know who this is?” I couldn’t believe she didn’t recognize her immediately.
Suddenly Vern’s face nearly exploded with excitement and joy. “Oh my, this is Angie! You look just like LaWonna! Anne, you must be so happy!”
They hugged and cried and laughed, and I remember feeling so grateful that Vern could see her too.
The three of us left the house and got in the car.
Vern sat in the front seat with me and said, “Let’s go see Aunt Beck. She would love to see Angie.” So we headed off down those wonderful country lanes, driving between fields of high corn, a blue sky above us. With Angie and Vern with me in the car, the three of us off to show Angie to my sister Becky, I couldn’t have felt happier or more carefree.
Vern and I sat in the front seat talking, and when I looked in the rearview mirror, Angie had turned into a little three-year-old girl. I kept looking back then quickly talking to Vern, trying to distract her so she wouldn’t see what was happening—for some reason I was embarrassed by Angie, afraid Vern would see her acting like a baby and slobbering all over everything.
Finally we arrived at my sister Becky’s house and we went up to the kitchen. When we walked in, she looked over at us and said hello.
Excitement choked my voice as I said, “Becky, I brought someone to see you.”
“Should I know who this is?” she asked.
What was wrong with everyone? Why didn’t they see what was going on? Why didn’t they recognize Angie?
“Don’t you know who this is?” I asked Becky, my voice changing to a whine. By now Angie had returned to her fourteen-year-old body.
“You are Angie!” Becky exclaimed, her eyes glowing. “You look just like LaWonna!”
Suddenly I woke up.
Immediately upon waking, I felt a realization stir up from deep inside of me. Perhaps it was a mother’s intuition, or perhaps God told me. Whatever the case, the strangest feeling overwhelmed me, a feeling that something had happened to LaWonna when she was only three or four years old. I knew that LaWonna was that little girl in my dream whom I felt embarrassed about. But what could have happened to her? From that point on I never stopped wondering, but nothing I imagined came close to the reality of the past she was hiding.
A few weeks or months later, my fears were confirmed when I went to pray with a friend of mine. LaWonna dated her son, and we would meet from time to time to pray for our children, asking God to keep them safe.
During this particular prayer time, my friend and I talked for a while before I left. I could tell something bothered her, so I asked her about it. She said that during the week she came home earlier than expected and heard her son and LaWonna upstairs—LaWonna sounded very upset.
My friend didn’t know what to do. Should she go upstairs? Were they fighting? She waited until LaWonna left, then asked her son what all the noise had been about. He told her that LaWonna had told him a terrible secret, something he couldn’t tell anyone else.
“Something horrible happened to her when she was a little girl, Mom,” he said. “But we can’t tell anyone about it.”
I remember that first day in my market stand, the relief that only comes with the serving of a first customer, the elation you feel when the register begins filling with money and you know you can at least pay the rent, pay the employees, and have enough left over to buy the ingredients for next week. We flew around that stand like greased lightning, yelling playfully back and forth to each other, making customers smile, serving only the best. But what I’ll remember most is how nervous I felt, how happy to be doing something on my own, and how love overwhelmed me when a deliveryman walked up the aisle, stopped in front of my stand, and dropped off a bouquet of flowers with a note:
You can do this, honey.
Love, Jonas
At the end of those first few weeks, I felt two things very strongly, the first being that we could definitely make this thing work. Sales went up each week, customers seemed happier than ever, and people loved the life and energy my family and I brought to the stand. By now both of my sisters, my daughters, a few in-laws, and even nieces and nephews worked for me at the stand, and we had tremendous fun working together. The market was only a thirty-minute drive from my house, so even though I was busier with work, I wasn’t away from home any more than when I ran Burtonsville. I felt positive about the new venture and knew we would make a success of it.
The second main thought in my mind at the end of those first few weeks almost makes me laugh when I think about it, considering the fact that I ended up building the largest soft pretzel chain in the United States: the pretzels we made during those first few weeks tasted horrible, and I couldn’t wait to stop selling them.
CHAPTER FIVE
From a Store to a Business
The secret of business is knowing something nobody else knows.
—ARISTOTLE ONASSIS
I often wonder if anyone could hear the six of us singing on those short winter afternoons when I was a little girl. Perhaps someone driving through central Pennsylvania stopped on one of the old country roads to get their bearings, or perhaps one of our neighbors walking from field to hard brown field paused, listened, and heard our voices carried by the wind, singing. Often Daddy would
ask us to sing or Mom would take the lead and start a song. Singing and working seemed a natural combination: working hard was as necessary as breathing, and when I sang I felt myself rising up and out of those hard times, floating on a cloud of happiness.
I’m thinking of sometime around 1958 when we lived on the farm, in the dark hours of winter when the afternoons were cut short and the fields looked as though they would never support life again. Daddy would round up those of us old enough to work and, along with Mom, lead us out to the tobacco barn. Tobacco was Daddy’s winter crop, and we knew how important it was to box the leaves and get them ready to sell.
The wind whipped around that old barn, howling through the cracks, and our fingers grew numb as we worked. Quickly we fell into a rhythm: Daddy, Jake, and Sam (my two older brothers) stripped the tobacco from the stalk while Becky, Mom, and I gingerly placed the dried leaves in sizer boxes, a long leaf in a long box, a short leaf in a short box. Working together we could keep store-bought food on the table until the spring came with its garden vegetables to eat and sell.
Soon the light coming through the cracks in the barn walls became barely enough to see by, and Mom would rise without a word and go inside to prepare supper. Then Daddy would take my place and send me inside to help. I ran out the barn door and gasped as the cold dashed through my thin work dress (the only one I owned)—behind me I heard Daddy’s voice admonishing the boys to move faster now; they had to keep up with the tobacco stripping on their own while Daddy boxed the long leaves.
Arriving inside, I felt as though I had died and gone to heaven—the warmth, the smell of good food cooking, the chatter and commotion of my four younger siblings: Fi, Dale, Merrill, and Carl. They were playing, learning to crawl or walk. I stood by the stove and warmed my hands, feeling the tingle rising through my arms, flushing my cheeks and nose. Then I helped Mom get the food together and fill the clear plastic cups with fresh water. We depended entirely on each other in those days.