Rufus watched three cycles of the lights before the red pickup maneuvered into the parking lot and rattled Rufus to attention. Tom was back.
Tom opened the cab door, got out, and raised an eyebrow at Rufus. “Ready?”
“I guess I was daydreaming.” Rufus stood up and glanced around the parking lot again, wondering if he should say something to Tom.
“Then let’s get going,” Tom said. “There’s a parents’ meeting at Carter’s school. I promised Tricia I would be home for dinner so we could go together.”
“Of course.” The last thing Rufus wanted to do was inconvenience Tom or cause distress in his family.
The clock in Tom’s truck said 3:17. They probably were not coming anyway, he decided. Annalise would not have waited until the last minute. Ruth must have backed out.
“I got lucky,” Tom said, “and just missed a big accident on my way up. I heard it hit behind me. The southbound lanes should be fine, but I think I’ll find another way out of town just in case.”
“Whatever you think best.” Rufus pulled the seat belt over his shoulder and snapped it into place. God’s will.
They had moved barely twenty feet in ten minutes, but Annie had her eye on the entrance to a shopping center. If she could just make that turn, they could snake through connecting parking lots and come out north of the jam.
By the time they reached the entrance and Annie made the turn, Ruth burst into tears. The Prius was nimble and responded well to the frequent turns as Annie drilled through back alleys behind restaurants and box stores at a speed for which she deserved to be stopped by flashing lights.
They pulled into the furniture store parking lot at 3:24. Ruth jumped out of the car and ran inside without waiting for a full stop.
Annie parked properly and wondered if she should go in. She did not want to intrude on the moment of reunion between brother and sister, but her own pulse was rapid with the expectation of seeing Rufus. Just as Annie decided it was too hot to wait in the car, Ruth yanked open the passenger door and tumbled in.
“We’re too late.” She used the backs of both hands to wipe tears. “He didn’t wait.”
“He said three thirty!”
“Five more minutes?” Ruth said. “What difference could that make on a two-hour trip back to Westcliffe? He didn’t want to see me.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Annie said. But she banged a hand against the steering wheel nevertheless. “We’ll try again in two weeks. He comes every two weeks.”
“Is this God’s will?” Ruth swallowed hard and wiped tears from both eyes. “Maybe I’m not meant to see him.”
“I don’t know.” What else could Annie say?
Ruth fished for a tissue in her purse and blew her nose. “Can you take me back to my room? I have a lot of studying to do.”
Annie nodded and started the car.
Two weeks might as well have been eternity.
Thirty-Five
Annie’s instinct was to call Rufus’s cell phone. If it had been anyone else, she would have. Find out what happened. Make a new plan. That was why everyone had phones. The rules were different with Rufus, though. If Ruth wouldn’t call, then Annie shouldn’t.
She sat on her frustration for a week.
Then came the date for closing on the house in Westcliffe. Annie boxed up a few kitchen items, packed several changes of clothes, grabbed a blanket, and stopped by a housewares store on the way out of town for a decent inflatable mattress so she would have a place to sleep that night. The closing was scheduled at the bank at the edge of Westcliffe.
Annie knew the way now. She had been back and forth in daylight and remembered the changes from one state highway to another. She recognized the sequence of small towns—each clinging to its moment of history—that culminated in Silver Cliff and released into Westcliffe at the foot of the mountains. She would sleep that night in a house she owned outright in a town she had not known existed a few weeks ago.
She did the final walk-through with the real estate agent. Happily, the house was no more dilapidated than the day she bought it. Next came the closing, where she signed her name until her fingers cramped. At last the agent dropped the keys to the front door in Annie’s hands. The key to the back door had been lost years ago, the owner claimed. If Annie wanted to lock that door, the locksmith in Silver Cliff would be happy to help.
Annie drove the few blocks from the bank to the house. She parked in the driveway and carried her suitcase in through the back door.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the empty living room, she opened her laptop and used her phone to give herself an Internet connection. With a few keyboard strokes, she was logged into her company’s server and looking at everything she would have seen if she had been in her office in Colorado Springs. She could ensure no funny business happened before the business deal closed. Her cell phone signal was strong. Annie turned on the speaker, pressed Jamie’s speed dial number, and set the phone on the floor.
“Did you really do it?” Jamie asked.
“I did.” Even with no one there to see her, Annie could not help smiling.
“It sounds empty.”
“I’ve got some serious shopping to do.” Annie looked around, visualizing furniture.
“How long are you going to stay?”
“Just a night or two. Or three. I’m not sure.”
“Mr. Solano called three times.”
“I’ll call him,” Annie said.
“He sounded agitated. Is everything all right?”
“I’m doing my best to make sure it is.” Annie looked around the room in satisfaction. “I’ll check in again tomorrow.”
She called Lee next.
“The papers are almost to the final draft stage,” he said. “Are you ready to review them?”
“Anytime.” Annie untangled herself to stand up and begin pacing through the house. “Are they pressing back on anything?”
“They’re asking questions about why Barrett left, considering the nature of the offer you want them to extend.”
“Make it work, Lee,” Annie said simply. “It’s a deal breaker.”
“Really? Of everything that’s on the table, hiring the guy who tried to rip you off is a deal breaker?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve only known you a few weeks,” Lee spoke through a sigh. “But I have to say, this is not where I thought we would end up when you first came to me.”
“Things change. People change.”
“You could ask for more money, you know. They would ante up.”
“The offer is fine.” She wasn’t going to use the money anyway. “When everything is final, I want to be the one to talk to Barrett.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“Make it so.”
Annie ended the call and leaned against the living room wall in the silence. Then she bent over to close her laptop and silence her phone. She did not even leave it set to vibrate or alarm. “Silent”—as close as she ever came to “off.” Her eyes scanned the room and found nothing to land on. No electronic green lights glowing with reassurance of the steady flow of power. No cords dredging life from outlets toward convenience. No gizmos beeping urgent summons. No stacks of books and magazines she never got around to reading. Slowly, she lowered herself to sit again on the bare floor. Beneath her, oak planks pushed against her with their stories. Annie spread her hands on the wooden floor on either side of her and closed her eyes, letting her fingers trace slight ridges her feet would not have noticed. A vague coating of dust stuck to the crevices of her palm, and in the mustiness that stirred, she inhaled questions of past and future.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the inch-long weak raised wallpaper seam on one wall. Yellow paint did not quite seal the history behind it. Annie got up and walked toward the spot then scraped at it gently with a fingernail and looked closely. She could discern four—no, five—distinct stubborn layers of wallpaper that had resisted efforts to smooth t
he seam over the decades. Even Annie, with all her domestic challenges, had seen enough home decorating television shows to know the right thing was to remove wallpaper rather than add layers of paint or paper. She had a hazy notion that the process involved steam. But at the moment, she was grateful for the painted wallpaper. The stories of the house were still there, not whitewashed into oblivion. She was strangely curious to know what they were.
The house was nearly a hundred years old—but young compared to the stories rattling around Annie’s brain. Jakob Byler and Elizabeth Kallen were an unlikely pair, as unlikely as Rufus Beiler and Annalise Friesen. Yet somehow they found a life together. Were they happy? she wondered. Were they certain they made the right choice?
In silence, Annie wandered through the rooms. In the kitchen, the stove and refrigerator were at least thirty years old, one mustard yellow and the other avocado green. Make that forty years. The real estate agent said they worked, but it was difficult to believe they were efficient. Annie leaned against the refrigerator and pushed, moving it just far enough from the wall to find the power cord and plug it in. The prompt reward for her effort came in the whir of a motor.
The dining room asked for a narrow table to be settled under the window, leaving space to walk through and access the stairs. Under the stairs, the wall was made of dark paneling, and Annie realized a door opened to storage space.
Over the next hour, Annie carried loads from her car and inflated her mattress. She arranged a few dishes on shelves in the kitchen, swept the wood floors, satisfied herself that the refrigerator was indeed becoming cold, however slowly, and hung towels in the bathroom. Her mind’s eye saw furniture and window coverings and new kitchen cabinets.
She knew just who she would hire to build them. Surely Rufus would be willing. She would be a paying customer, after all, and she could pay him well.
Rufus. Ruth would hang like a curtain between them now. She couldn’t just ask Rufus to build cabinets without first asking, Why didn’t you stay to see your sister?
It was a good thing he did not have Annalise’s phone number, Rufus decided, because he would be tempted to call it. Since the reason was neither business nor an emergency, it would be wrong. He had Ruth’s number, but he never called it. If something happened to Mamm or Daed, he would use it. A mix-up about a meeting time was not an emergency that justified using a phone.
The remodeling work in the motel lobby was finished, including installing the replacement face panels and a new desktop. Rufus was now working on custom cabinetry for two homes in the new subdivision. The deadline was far enough off that he could spend time teaching his employees some of his craft, giving them a chance to create cabinetry and woodwork, not simply install it. He had just sent his crew home for the day and was getting ready to work on the tables for David’s customer in Colorado Springs.
Rufus looked forward to times alone of careful, slow sanding, sensing the exquisite plane of pressure that would break open the beauty in the hardwood. Even a side table could reveal the artistry of the Creator through the grain of the wood. With each passing of sandpaper over the surface, Rufus breathed a prayer of thanksgiving for the blessing of work.
The workshop door opened and Jacob appeared. “Mamm says to ask you a favor.”
“What would that be?” Rufus’s hands hesitated to leave the rectangle of wood that would become the tabletop.
“She promised to take preserves to Mrs. Weichert’s shop. She wants to know if you have time to do it.”
Rufus carefully set aside the tabletop. It was a long way to town just to deliver preserves. But if his mother asked him to do an errand, she had a good reason. “Are the preserves ready to go?”
Jacob nodded. “Two dozen jars of peach preserves. I hope she saved some for us.”
Rufus smiled. “She always does. Go tell Mamm I can do it right now. I need to go to the new job site anyway.”
“I was planning to stay a few nights,” Annie said into her phone. “I already made sure I can access the server from here. I don’t need to come in.”
Sighing, she listened to the plea from one of her software writers and regretted checking her messages. The project was due to the client in two days, and he was stuck.
“All right,” she finally said. “I’ll drive back tonight and be there first thing in the morning.”
Before she left, she took some measurements of windows and room sizes. When she grew hungry, she reluctantly carried her denim bag out to the car and backed out of her driveway. She could stop somewhere for food on the way back to the condo.
Pulling onto Main Street, she saw Rufus’s horse and buggy outside Mrs. Weichert’s antiques shop. The buggies all looked alike to her, but Annie recognized the horse. When she saw the shadow in the door frame, she almost stopped.
Rufus looked at the passing Prius as it moved away from him. The car was unmistakable. Annalise had come to town and not tried to see him. Disappointment twisted into him.
But why should she see him? It was better that she didn’t. He would write to Ruth and explain what happened. He hefted the box of preserves and took it inside the store.
In the buggy a few minutes later, Rufus nudged Dolly into the street and toward the gleaming mountains that still made him draw a deep breath every day, even after five years of daily greetings. At the edge of town, he turned north and drove past the sign that announced Kramer Construction and into the next cul-de-sac. Rufus had been careful to make sure his new customers were using another builder and not Karl Kramer. It was the end of the day even for the construction crews that labored long into the evening, and he saw workers collecting tools, readying to leave the site for the night.
Rufus tucked Dolly’s reins in a crevice in the midst of a convenient pile of lumber. He crossed the dirt that might one day be a lawn or, given the climate, a Xeriscaped garden of rock and mulch and uncut natural grasses. Inside the front entrance, the stairs were roughed in and the downstairs space portioned by unfinished walls. Rufus had blueprints with specific measurements. Still, he liked to stand in a room and sense the life that might someday exist there.
“Hello, Rufus.” The site foreman emerged from the would-be kitchen. “Is Tom hauling something here for you?”
Rufus shook his head. “No. I just need to get a feel for the place. I’m doing wall-to-walls in the family room and the master bedroom.”
The foreman nodded. “Okay, then. You may be the last one out.”
“I’ll only be a few minutes. I promise.”
Rufus heard the grind of engines outside as the crew started their cars.
He was glad the others were gone. It would be easier to feel the place, to stand where the windows would be and judge the light falling into the room. In the silence, he would hear the rustle of clothes against furniture, the scuff of slippers against the floor. He would see hands reaching for the cabinet knobs he was yet to create, fingers closing around them in a habit of a thousand repetitions. Rufus slowly paced the family room, standing still and silent several times.
Then he moved up the stairs to the master bedroom. One wall opened out to a deck with a view of the mountains. Large windows on the opposite wall would no doubt reflect the vista. His cabinets would fill the far connecting wall. Rufus faced the wall now, his eyes closed.
A second too late, he realized he was not alone. He turned in time to see a pair of black work boots before he slumped into gooey murk.
Thirty-Six
July 1739
Christian Byler loved the fields. The smell of wet earth, the rustle of eager corn in July, the sweeping bow of wheat in the wind—it was as if he felt the farm coming to life as his own bones and ligaments stretched. He was sure he would never forget putting crops in for the first time. His father sometimes fretted over what might go wrong—not enough rain, too much rain, hungry insects—but Christian savored each turn of dirt, every furrow, the mystery of seed covered in darkness springing to light.
Holding his straw hat in pla
ce, he ran now through the shortcut in the cornfield to where he knew his father would be judging whether the plants were of sufficient height for their stage of growth. He found his daed sliding off his horse at the far end of the field.
“How are the vegetables looking?” Jakob squatted and slid his hand under a cornstalk.
“Anna promises fresh beans for supper,” Christian answered, “as much as we want.” He leaned in to look over his father’s shoulder, inspecting for insects boring through.
“Is Maria still sitting in her patch waiting for the beets to grow?”
Christian nodded. “She sings to them. She says it makes them happy.”
“Seems to me they should be happy enough to harvest.”
“Elizabeth knows how to make ink from beet juice. She promised to show us. Even Anna wants to learn.”
Jakob moved to another plant and rubbed a leaf between his thumb and forefinger. “Elizabeth likes to try out everything she reads about. She’s very creative.”
“I wonder if the new baby will be creative.” Christian hunched over to inspect a stalk for himself.
“Lisbetli will have to get used to not being the baby.” Jakob paused to wipe sweat from his forehead.
“As long as Lisbetli can be with Elizabeth, she’s happy,” Christian said. “I still hope that someday Elizabeth will join the church—when we have a bishop.”
“You could be waiting a long time for a bishop to come from Europe.”
They moved another few feet to inspect plants, and Christian knew the conversation was over. His father had less and less to say about the church. The Amish families were cautious around Elizabeth—anyone could see that—but without a bishop to pronounce discipline, no one fully shunned Jakob for his choice to marry an outsider. The families needed each other too much.
Christian heard the flapping steps of someone running through the corn. He abruptly stood up straight.
Accidentally Amish Page 25