The Divine Secrets of the Whoopie Pie Sisters: The Complete Trilogy

by Sarah Price

  “Do you have your doctor’s referral ?” the pleasantly plump lady asked from behind the glass window in the outer office of the testing center. She looked over the black rimmed glasses that sat upon her nose as she waited for Leah to respond.

  “Referral?” Leah repeated, uncertain what the woman was requesting. Behind her, she could hear Jacob shuffling his feet and grumbling underneath his breath. Lydia was sighing heavily as she leaned against the wall. Thankfully, Susie and Sadie were waiting patiently, neither one fussing or adding to Leah’s increasing blood pressure.

  “The office should have given you papers to bring with you.”

  “Oh, ja, I have them,” she mumbled as she began to shuffle through her gray bag. This whole process felt foreign to Leah: appointments, referrals, hurrying to arrive, only to wait. The last thing she wanted was to miss out on this important test because she had misplaced a piece of paper. “Is this what you are looking for?” Leah asked as she handed the paper through the opening in the window.

  The woman nodded her head as she took the papers, her eyes briefly scanning them. Satisfied, she gestured toward the sitting area. “Just have a seat over there in the waiting area and we’ll call each of you individually for the blood test.”

  Her siblings were already seated, Jacob leafing through a day old newspaper while Sadie and Susie chatted nervously about cleaning the house, later on that day. Lydia fidgeted in her seat before rising up, crossing the room, and getting a cup of water from the cooler in the corner. A few other patients were waiting and their eyes followed Lydia’s movement. Leah tried to push back her irritation at their curious gaze. Didn’t they realize that Amish people needed medical care, too?

  “Jenny Yoder was kind enough to help arrange the food preparation for fellowship after worship on Sunday,” Susie mentioned. “One less thing for me to worry about. She’s a right gut woman, that Jenny.”

  Leah watched as Sadie flushed at the mention of her special friend’s mother. Indeed, Leah thought, Jenny would be a good mother to Sadie, should she marry Manny Yoder.

  “Miller?” A woman dressed in green scrubs yelled from the doorway. She glanced around the waiting room but immediately honed in on Leah. “Miller Family?” she asked again.

  Getting to her feet, Leah held up her hand and walked toward the woman. “Ja, that’s us,” she said, a tremor in her voice. Please God, she prayed, let one of us be a match for our Tobias.

  The woman glanced down at her clipboard and read something. “Come with me please.”

  “All of us?” Leah asked, looking at the lady and then glancing at her family and back to the lady again. Hadn’t the other woman mentioned they would be called individually? She wondered if she should mention that but the woman did not appear to be concerned.

  “All who are going to be tested,” the woman replied dryly, turning and walking back down the hallway. Disappearing into a room, the woman did not seem to care whether or not anyone followed her.

  Gathering their purses and hats, the Miller siblings quickly filed down the hallway trying to catch up with the lady in scrubs.

  “Just lay your stuff over here.” The lady said pointing to a particular area of the room. “I need to ask each of you some questions and fill out some forms. Since there are so many of you, we’ll do this all at the same time.” Gathering her clipboard and pen she began.

  “I am going to assume you are Jacob since you are the only male here. The others names are…?” She looked pointedly at Sadie, a look of recognition in her eyes that Leah saw right away.

  “This is Sadie,” Leah jumped in protectively before Sadie could answer the question. She didn’t like the way the nurse was studying her schwester nor did she care for the cold manner in which she was addressing all of them. “These two here are Lydia and Susie,” she said before adding a quick, “And I am Leah.”

  “Everyone over the age of 18?”

  “Ja,” Leah answered for the group.

  The woman checked something on her clipboard before moving onto the next question. “Do any of you have heart disease, cancer, hepatitis, AIDS or an autoimmune disorder? Any one pregnant?” she asked in an emotionless, robotic manner as if ticking off items from a list.

  “Nee,” Leah responded, taking on the role of family spokesperson. “We have none of those things.” As the words slipped from her lips, she noticed Lydia start to speak but Susie elbowed her into silence. Sadie, however, paled and averted her eyes. Oh help, Leah thought, not liking the reckless thought that popped into her head.

  “Who will be first?” the nurse asked looking at them all.

  “I will,” replied Jacob gruffly. “The sooner we’re finished, the sooner I can get back to my chores.”

  “Come with me then,” she asked, snapping her pen shut and slipping it into a pocket on her shirt.

  It took less than an hour for everyone to have their turn getting their blood drawn. Jacob grumbled the entire time, pacing in the small private waiting room while his schwesters each had their turn.

  Lydia, however, had fought with the nurse, begging to be excused until the results for the others had been analyzed. This had further irritated Jacob, causing him to snap at Lydia that he needed to get back to the farm. Just as Leah was about to step between the two, she noticed Jacob stiffen as a woman walked by. For a moment, the two seemed to recognize each other and he stopped complaining.

  “Is there something wrong, Jacob?” Leah asked when Lydia had finally been convinced to leave the room with the nurse.

  “Nee,” he mumbled. “Just in a hurry to get home. Too much to do, is all”

  “Shall we go see Tobias, then?” Leah asked when they finally left the testing center. “Michelle won’t be here for another twenty minutes. She’ll drop you off first, Jacob, before taking us to Susie’s for cleaning.” She added the last part to thwart any resistance on his behalf.

  Reluctantly, Lydia and Jacob followed the rest of the group down the corridors of the hospital as Leah led them to the elevator. She felt a sense of relief that, despite the headaches of the day and the complaints of her two siblings, she had managed to get everyone tested. Surely one of them would be a match! She couldn’t wait to tell Tobias the good news and certainly he would be excited to have the company, no matter how short a time for visiting they had!

  Susie

  “How thankful I am to have you all here to help me clean for Sunday church,” Susie said. “With only a few days to go, I couldn’t get it all done by myself, that’s for sure and certain.”

  Leah responded with a light deflection of the praise by saying, “That’s what family is for, ain’t so?”

  Susie couldn’t help but wonder about another of her sisters: Jacob’s Esther. With Lydia pulling her “woe is me” antics for the umpteenth time in recent days and Esther nowhere to be found, it was up to just the three sisters and Leah’s two daughters to clean the house. It would have been right gut if Esther had come along to help. With younger kinner, Esther had volunteered to stay at home to watch Leah’s younger ones, too, rather than come to help with the cleaning. While the offer was a kind one, her help at Susie’s house would have been greatly appreciated.

  “Where’s Merv?” Leah asked, a hint of hesitancy in her voice.

  Susie had dreaded that question. After her discovery of her husband passed out in their bed the other evening, the last thing she wanted was to deal with Merv and her sisters. Please ask no questions, she prayed as she quickly answered with a simple, “He’s out somewhere working.”

  “A job, then?”

  “Ja, ja,” Susie quickly agreed, hoping to change the subject. “Not as big as our job ahead of us, though,” she added lightly, starting to move to the back closet where she kept her cleaning supplies. “I managed to move some of the smaller furniture out of the gathering room last night,” she said. “Mayhaps Sadie could start in there while we move the rest, ja?”

  When she emerged from the closet, her arms laden with cleaning supplie
s, Leah and Sadie laughed. Susie carried four buckets, filled with Murphy’s Oil and vinegar. Under her arms, she had three new mops, which rattled as she walked. Setting the items down on the kitchen table, Susie took a deep breath. “Here are the cleaning supplies. I bought extra at the store the other day to make sure we’d had enough.”

  “Did you leave any cleaning supplies at the store for others, then, Susie?” Leah kept laughing, as she looked over the inventory of cleaning supplies on the table. “Let’s start in the gathering room, Sadie.” Leah spoke as she carried some of the supplies into the area of the house that would have the most visitors on Sunday.

  Susie and Merv’s house was a sparse one. As was true of most Amish farmhouses, the kitchen and gathering room were the largest rooms. In their district, simple blue curtains adorn their many windows. Windows are important in their homes for light and air. The floors were made of wide plank hardwood. The grey boxy church wagon, which held the benches and crates of songbooks, had been delivered the previous week. On Saturday evening, the church wagon would be pulled closer and the benches would be set up in the house in preparation for the church service. In the meantime, it was time to clean and that, in itself, would take several days.

  Floors needed to be scrubbed and oiled. Walls would be washed down. Even the windows would be cleaned until they sparkled. If there was chipped paint on the floor molding, they would touch it up with white paint. Nothing was left to chance that someone…anyone…could point out that the room was dirty or ill-prepared for the church service.

  Sadie began tackling the cobwebs, of which there were far too many for Susie to avoid flushing in embarrassment; meanwhile, Leah removed all the rugs and put them on the clothesline outside, to be beaten and cleaned later. Returning back to the house, Leah asked Susie: “Can you help me move this furniture to one side so I can wipe the walls down? Then we can wash the floors.”

  After moving the chairs and tables to one side, Susie and Leah tackled the task of attempting to push the lone sofa out of the room. They’d have to store it, most likely in one of the outbuildings but they’d need Sadie’s help for that task.

  “Gut thing Lydia isn’t here, ain’t so? This sofa would be too heavy for us, Ja?” Mocking Lydia, Susie lifted her hand to place the back of her wrist on her forehead and flopped onto the sofa as she mockingly exclaimed, “Oh mercy, I feel faint. Everyone please, look: I am ill!”

  Sadie looked up and laughed, the first time she had done so since Tobias had been admitted to the hospital. The soft sound of her laughing caused Susie to join her. Their laughter rang through the silence of the almost empty room. But, as always, Leah was quick to become somber and give a disapproving look at her sister.

  “Susie. That’s not nice!” exclaimed Leah, trying to look serious.

  Susie sighed and dropped her hand so that her fingers brushed the linoleum floor. She was about to respond when she looked behind Leah, her eyes focusing on something at floor level. Out of the corner of her eye, she knew that Leah was frowning, probably wondering what had caused her to stop her gleeful impersonation of Lydia and suddenly become so distracted.

  But Susie couldn’t speak. She glanced over at Sadie and saw her youngest sister standing at the window, staring at the very spot Susie had just focused on. Only Sadie stood there with her hand over her mouth.

  Susie flushed and jumped up from the sofa, hurrying over to the empty alcohol bottles that had been hidden under the sofa. They clicked and clanked in her arms, each noise sounding sharp in the silent room. She dropped one on the floor and it rolled in a wobbly line until it rested at Leah’s foot.

  Merv, Merv, Merv, Susie chanted angrily to herself, wishing that she could just disappear from the sight of her two sisters. The humiliation of her sisters having seen the empty bottles was almost more than she could bear.

  “Susie,” Leah asked as she bent down to pick up the bottle. For a few seconds, Leah seemed to stare at the bottle and try to make sense of it. Susie’s eyes stayed trained on Leah’s face, her arms still cradling the other bottles. “What are these?”

  Susie averted her eyes, unable to meet her sister’s gaze.

  “Whose are these?” she asked again, flipping the bottle in her hand as she looked back at the label. While the answer to the first question was more than obvious, Susie didn’t want to respond to the second question. With only two adults living in the house, there were only two answers to that question. “Susie,” Leah said in a much stronger voice. “I asked you who these bottles belong to.”

  Feeling trapped, Susie glanced at both of her sisters, feeling the heat of their stare. It was too much and she couldn’t hold it back any longer. Without warning, dropping the empty bottles on the sofa, she burst into tears, tears that, she now realized, had been building up for years. Her shoulders shook with each uncontrollable sob and she lifted her hands to cover her face, ashamed at such an out-pouring of emotion. Immediately, both Leah and Sadie had their arms around her.

  Leah quickly moved Susie to a kitchen chair while Sadie went in search of tissues. “Susie, what’s going on? Is it Merv?”

  “Ja,” Susie admitted, still sobbing. “I found him the other day spread out in our bed with an empty bottle next to him. When I tried to talk to him, later on that evening, he said he didn’t have a problem but I know he does. I can feel it!” Her shoulders sagged as the tears streamed down her face. “Oh Leah, what am I going to do? What if the Bishop finds out? What if the rest of the family finds out? What if he gets worse? I…I just don’t know what to do anymore!”

  “It’s going to be fine, Susie” Sadie spoke, her voice soothing and gentle as she handed Susie a tissue.”

  “Sweet Sadie, you always see the good side of every situation,” Susie retorted, an edge to her voice. “But you ain’t living this life, my schwester. You don’t know what it’s like to live with a diseased person. It don’t matter none if it’s a disease of the body or disease of the mind. It’s just plain awful, I tell you!”

  “Why haven’t you told me Susie? Why have you hidden it?” Leah asked, knowing in her heart why Susie had kept such a secret.

  “How could I not hide it? It’s against everything that is right! It’s against our faith, our family ways and against God. I’ve prayed so hard for him to stop, but it just keeps getting worse and worse.”

  Sadie handed her schwester another tissue. “How long has this been going on?”

  Susie waved her hand at Sadie but took the tissue anyway, dabbing at her eyes before blowing her nose. “The drinking? Mayhaps I had suspected in the past but I only just found out the other day. He’s just been so ill tempered and angry all the time. When he comes home, he either ignores us completely or berates me in front of the kinner.”

  A gasp escaped Sadie’s lips and Leah shot her an angry look.

  “I guess I kept telling myself that he was tired from working so hard,” Susie continued, a half-hearted laugh in her voice. “But that was a lie, too. He hardly works at all anyway. We’re all but living on my earnings from Whoopie Pie Place.”

  “Susie, has Merv ever gotten out of control when he drinks? Leah asked gently. “Does he hit you, Susie? Or the kinner?”

  “Nee,” she replied firmly, shaking her head adamantly. “He’s never laid a hand on us in violence. But words hurt. I try my best to keep the children from seeing him when he’s in one of those moods. And Dora practically raises my kinner because he’s just not reliable anymore. Just last week, he drank so much that he was passed out for two days!”

  “That explains why you’ve been so tired recently,” Leah said aloud, although she was mostly speaking to herself.

  “I’ve had to do his chores as well as mine,” Susie admitted.

  A noise interrupted their conversation and all three women jumped, startled. They hadn’t heard Merv walk through the door to the gathering room and into the kitchen. He seemed surprised to see anyone there, although his eyes were red and narrow. He glanced behind him at the empty ro
om and frowned.

  Immediately, Susie knew what he was looking for: the sofa. No one spoke as he stood there in the doorway, swaying slightly as he tried to catch his balance. But it was too late. He lost his footing and bumped against the doorframe, which caused him to stumble and fall, hitting his head against the floor.

  The three sisters looked at each other for a moment before turning their attention to the inanimate form of Merv, passed out on the floor. With a deep breath, Susie was the first to stand and walk toward him. She bent down and grabbed one of his arms, starting to drag him across the floor toward the bedroom she shared with him. To her surprise, both of her sisters came to her side, Sadie pulling at his other arm and Leah lifting his legs. Together, they carried him out of the kitchen and through the bedroom door.

  After laying him on top of the quilt, they retreated back to the kitchen, Leah pausing to shut the door behind them as they left the bedroom. In silence, they stood in the kitchen, at a complete loss for words. Finally, it was Leah who took the lead and motioned toward the kitchen chairs.

  “I reckon we all should pray on this, ja?” she said and, without waiting for an answer, she pushed out a chair and dropped to her knees, folding her hands on the seat and lowering her forehead gently against them.

  Sadie and Susie followed her example, the only noise in the kitchen the gentle ticking of the clock on the wall, a wedding present from Merv to Susie, and one that reminded all of them that it was time to address Merv’s issue and help Susie free herself from a future that was heading down a dark path; one that was not filled with God and light but darkness and evil. Through prayer, they would find the strength to face the journey that lay ahead for both their schwester Susie and her husband Merv.

  Lydia

  Abe hadn’t even asked how she was feeling. It infuriated her that he was so unconcerned about her health. If he had little compassion for the fact that she had not yet conceived a boppli, he had even less for her recurring aches and pains. Indeed, he had gone too far this time.