“You need Amish clothes,” Elizabeth said.
“Yah.” He looked down at his own Englisher clothing and shrugged. “I’ll get to it.”
“It was nice not to have to do the stables,” she said. Very nice. That had been one of her jobs because Bridget couldn’t possibly lift bales of hay or shovel out stalls at her age.
“You and Mammi have been alone for a while?” Solomon asked.
“A few weeks,” she said.
He rubbed a thumb over his palm. “It feels strange to be back. Like a dream, almost. Like I’m going to wake up.”
“Should I pinch you?” she asked, the humor coming out before she could think better of it.
“No.” He chuckled, and he put his attention into rubbing that spot on his palm again.
He was different than the Solomon Lantz of her youth, but she could still see the boy deep down under the layers of muscle.
“Did you dream of home?” she asked. “When you were . . . away?”
“In prison, you mean,” he said. He caught her eye. “You don’t want to say it, do you?”
Her cheeks heated. No, she didn’t want to say it. Prison and crime were things that she and her brother avoided talking about at all costs. It hit too close to home for their family, and they had their father’s shame to shed.
“Yah, I did dream of home,” he said when she didn’t answer. “Everyone does in that place. They talk about it a lot—what they’ll do when they get out. Most of them have food they want to eat, or wives or girlfriends they want to see again. I had a cellmate, and he wasn’t ever getting out. He’d done some bad stuff, and a parole hearing came up once while I was there, and he got denied. He didn’t expect anything different—it wasn’t the first time. Anyway, even he talked about this little town he lived in when he was a kid. I think he made up most of it, truthfully. But he’d ask me about where I’d go back to, and I told him about the Amish life.”
“You told him where to find you?” she asked, squinting.
“I’m not stupid,” he replied with a bitter laugh. “I never used names of places. I even hinted that I was from Indiana originally, just to throw him off. But I told him about morning chores, and about the horses, and the sunsets, and my mother’s baking . . .” He dropped his gaze. “I used to dream about brown buttered noodles. I didn’t even like them that much. I mean, they were okay and I liked them fine, but they weren’t my favorite. But for some reason I kept dreaming of my mamm serving this massive dish of brown buttered noodles.”
“You miss her,” Elizabeth said.
“She’s my mamm.” His dark gaze raised to meet hers, and the intensity in his gaze made her breath catch.
“What did you dream of last night?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” he asked warily.
“I heard you shout,” she said.
“Oh . . .” He shrugged uncomfortably, but didn’t seem inclined to answer more.
“What did you dream of?” she repeated. “Not brown buttered noodles this time.”
“No. I dreamed of prison.” Then his gaze softened and he shrugged. “I think I liked the dreams I had in prison better.”
“Bridget is afraid you’ll leave again,” Elizabeth said.
“I have nowhere to go at the moment,” he replied.
“But if you dreamed of coming home—” Wouldn’t he stay? He’d achieved his deepest longing.
“I also dreamed of acceptance and somehow becoming a different man, and everyone being okay with that,” he said. “It isn’t going to happen.”
“And with the Englishers?” she asked. “Will it happen there?”
Solomon didn’t answer, but she suspected that it wouldn’t. Once a man had been to prison, English or Amish, he wasn’t going to be trusted anywhere.
Elizabeth moved farther down the garden row and started parting leaves again, looking for cucumbers. She spotted two smaller ones and left them to continue growing, then picked another large cucumber.
“Do you want help?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “I have to get all the cucumbers and squash that are ready.”
Solomon stepped over the rows of green beans that separated them and squatted down on the other side of the row of cucumbers. He parted some leaves and she reached in for the vegetables. For a few minutes they worked in silence, moving up the row until they’d half-filled the bin and gotten to the end.
“You never did like me much,” Solomon said as he stood up.
Elizabeth rose, too, putting a hand to the small of her back. “That isn’t true, Solomon.”
“Come on . . .” He gave her a tired look. “You didn’t.”
It seemed cruel now to point it out, but he was right. “You were cocky,” she said with a shrug.
“I still am.” He shot her a grin, but there was something in his smile that made her stomach flutter just a little. She looked away.
“And you teased me a lot,” she said. Her mind went back to those years when the boys used to pester her. They’d make up rhymes to go with Lizzie, they’d drop grasshoppers in her lap, they’d ask her stupid questions until she was filled with fury.
“It was fun,” Solomon said.
“Not for me,” she said. “I hated it. You’d do anything to make me angry.”
“I was young and stupid. I would have done anything to make you blush,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
“I don’t believe that. You picked on me,” she said. “You never teased the other girls like you did with me.”
“They weren’t half as pretty as you were.” A smile quirked up one side of his mouth.
“As if that’s how you get a girl’s attention,” she said, refusing to be charmed. “Pestering a girl isn’t okay, you know. We don’t like boys who drive us crazy.”
“I’m sorry.” He sobered. “I’m not going to do it again. Believe it or not, I’m wiser now. I’m no longer a teenager.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re prettier now,” he said, but there wasn’t flirtation in his voice this time. Just quiet honesty. She looked over at him and found his gaze locked on her—no bashfulness on his part. He was just looking at her, his eyes roving over her face, down her dress. “Do you have a boyfriend? A fiancé?”
“No,” she replied, and she instinctively crossed her arms.
“How come?”
There were several rather good reasons, the chief of which was her father’s criminal history, but she had no desire to discuss that.
“That’s my business,” she replied.
He smiled at that, then laughed softly. “All right. Fair enough.”
She turned to pick up the plastic bin of cucumbers and Solomon beat her to it. He hoisted the bin easily, his muscles flexing in that way that drew her eye in spite of her best efforts to ignore them.
“Squash, you say?” he said.
She nodded and went to retrieve a knife from the grass where she’d left it. “There are a few that are ready. They were popular last year, your grandmother said.”
Solomon slipped the knife out of her fingers and tested the blade against his thumb. Then he squatted down next to a section of acorn squash and reached into the leaves with the knife, biting his bottom lip as he sawed at the vine. Then he passed her a nice, fat squash in the palm of his hand. She took it and headed back down the row to grab another plastic bin. When she looked back at him, she saw his strong back and narrow waist, those Englisher jeans fitting snugger than was proper for their people. He reached into the wide leaves of the squash plant, his muscular physique on display.
Solomon was back, for a while at least. And he was even less of a romantic option now that he’d been to prison, but there was something about him that made her take notice—something almost feral and definitely masculine. He seemed to have more swagger about him than usual Amish men had, and the memory of the way his eyes had moved over her made her pulse speed up.
And he’d said she was pretty . . .
Her face warmed at the memory. Amish men didn’t flirt like that. They had some reserve. They were more careful.
Did he really think she was pretty?
Elizabeth grabbed the tub and headed back up the dirt row to where Solomon had three squashes waiting. He looked up as she bent to pick them up and passed another squash into her hands, his fingers, blackened by dirt, brushing over hers.
“I have to find some proper clothes,” he said, looking down at himself. “The ladies in there will be scandalized to see me in blue jeans.”
“They’re more scandalized by your time in prison,” she said. When the words came out, she heard how barbed they sounded, but Solomon only shrugged.
“Probably,” he said.
She’d been too blunt and she knew it. It wasn’t as if she had much right to lecture anyone anymore.
“They’ll probably survive the shock,” she added with a conciliatory smile. She settled back down to look through the squash leaves for any that might be ripe.
Maybe it had been a long time since she’d been flirted with . . . or maybe she was just missing being treated as if she was worthy of any attention at all. Because anyone who knew what had happened to her daet had long since stopped.
* * *
Solomon cut the vine of another gourd and pulled it out of the leaves. It felt good to be useful after a year of sitting in a cell. It felt good to clean out a stall, brush down a horse, harvest some vegetables . . . It felt good to breathe fresh air.
“I missed this,” he said, and his knife made it through another vine.
“Work?” she asked.
“It’s more of a luxury than people realize,” he replied. “Prison is far from boring, but it’s also far from useful.”
All he’d had to do in prison was read his Bible, work out at the gym, and attend pretty much any religious service they offered. It was calmer in the chapel—no fighting, at least. It was a safer space, and he’d been anxious to find anywhere that let him just breathe for a little while. Prison was full of social obligations to other inmates—loyalties, feuds, demands. A church service, a Bible study, a talk with a reverend or a priest—it was a respite from the other pressures. There, a man was allowed to acknowledge his own soul.
He’d dreamed of regular Amish men’s work again—hard work that required his muscles and his brain, that let him stand outside in clean air and not have his shoulder blades tickle, wondering who might be coming up behind him. When he was locked up, he was so certain that here he would feel safe again.
But even kneeling outside, harvesting squash, he still felt as if he should be watching his back. It was like his body had learned that response over the last year and it didn’t know how to stop, even back home with a bright summer sky, a grass-scented breeze, and the nicker of horses grazing in the field. His shoulder blades still tickled.
“Was it hard in prison?” she asked, and that drilling gaze of hers swung back to his face.
“Yah. Of course it was hard. It was punishment.”
“Is there a way to be safe there?” she asked. “If you were honest and good, would it make it easier? Maybe you could just sit quietly in your cell and it would be . . . okay?”
“Not really,” he replied.
She pressed her lips together, and he saw tears mist her eyes. Sympathy for him? That surprised him.
“Did you feel Gott with you at least?” she asked hopefully. “Did Gott give you some special comfort?”
He thought back to the hours of darkness when he’d lay in bed, tears filling him up but not daring to let them fall. He remembered listening in the night to the other inmates’ snores, coughs and muttering in their sleep.
“Yah,” he said. “Gott did bring comfort. You hear Him better when you’ve got nothing else. Maybe you listen harder.”
“That’s good.” She nodded quickly. “I’m glad.”
Had she spared him a thought while he was in prison? Was it dumb of him to hope she had? He’d figured that the girls back in Bountiful would have forgotten him by now, and he eyed her uncertainly as she took the squash from his hand and put it into the bin without meeting his gaze.
Solomon had been working outside since breakfast with the sun warming his back. Sweat trickled down his spine, and he squinted against the glare. He missed a proper hat. Amish clothing not only set them apart, but it was practical.
“Are you thirsty?” he asked.
“Hmm?” Elizabeth’s mind seemed to have been elsewhere.
“I’m going in for a drink,” he said. “Do you want water?”
“Yah. Also, there are some more plastic bins I left on the front porch, if you wouldn’t mind grabbing those,” she said.
“Sure.”
Solomon pushed himself up and handed the knife over to her. Her fingers felt soft under his, and he tried not to give it much notice. A girl like her—even if he stayed in Bountiful—would never lower herself to the likes of him. He knew better than to toy with those kinds of disappointments. Teasing her was one thing, but letting himself actually hope for something more . . . that was stupidity.
As Solomon came around the house, he wiped some sweat from his brow. He was thirsty—this being his first actual break since he started cleaning out the stables that morning. He spotted the plastic containers on the porch, pulled open the screen door, and headed into the house. The soft murmur of women’s voices came from the kitchen. They’d been polite enough when he unhitched their buggy for them a couple of hours earlier. One of the women was his friend, Seth’s, grandmother, Edith. He’d never known her well, but he knew who she was. As he headed through the short hallway toward them, their voices became clearer.
“I don’t know why you’d bring her here,” one woman was saying. “You know that family—”
“Her father, not the family,” his grandmother cut in. “Abe Yoder might be a bad one, and he might have done our community wrong, but should his kinner have to pay for that? Elizabeth is not her father. She doesn’t need to pay for her father’s sins.”
Solomon froze. He shouldn’t be eavesdropping, and in a minute, he’d start making some noise to announce his presence, but what was this about Abe Yoder? Abe was a preacher—a very popular one. At least he had been back before Solomon left. How much had changed over the years he’d been away?
“He’ll come back eventually,” the other woman said. “They’ll let him out of prison and he’ll have nowhere else to go.”
Prison? Solomon’s breath caught. Abe Yoder was in jail? He felt like the air was squeezed out of his lungs. It wasn’t just the shock of another man from this community having been locked up—it was the thought of Abe Yoder, the charismatic preacher who could bring the very rafters to salvation, so they said . . . It would seem that Elizabeth’s concern about prison time was less about him than he’d fancied.
“If his kinner are just like him, though, it might be wise to keep some distance from them.” This was another female voice. “He raised them. And he was too permissive with them—I always said. Didn’t I, Lydia? I always said it. He encouraged Elizabeth to be mouthy and rude.”
“She was never rude to me,” Mammi said. “Not once.”
“She didn’t keep her opinions to herself either,” the woman retorted. “And who wants to hear what a girl that age thinks? No one. She needs to be listening and learning, not spouting off about her own views. Youthful ideas might be very pretty, but they change over time—and it’s only when those shiny ideas have gained some balance and wisdom that they’re useful to anyone else.”
Lizzie had been forthright with her views, Solomon would admit to that. She’d been judgmental, too, arching a brow and staring him down when he used language she didn’t approve of, or spouted off about his own changing views . . . but her daet was in prison? His brain was still trying to wrap around that one....
“It was an awkward time,” Mammi said. “I’ll agree to that. But those teenage years generally are.”
“The thing is, you don�
�t have anyone else here to protect you,” the first woman said. “Does she have access to your personal papers or your banking information?”
“No!” Mammi sighed. “Look, I asked her to come and help me, and . . . and . . . I wasn’t going to say this, but she’s the only one who might understand Sol’s situation right now. Or be sympathetic. Or . . . make him feel welcome.”
There was silence, and his heart beat so loudly that he could hear it in his head. If Lizzie was his best chance of being accepted or welcomed, he was in trouble indeed.
“Bridget, you aren’t safe around Sol either,” the first woman said quietly. “You know that. . . .”
Solomon’s chest constricted and anger thrummed up inside of him.
“I’m perfectly safe!” his grandmother said firmly. “He’s home. He needs to find his place again, that’s all.”
“He’s been in jail!” the second woman said. “Even I don’t feel perfectly comfortable visiting you while he’s here. Bridget, it is possible to have a heart that is too big, you know.”
“He’s my grandson!” Mammi said. “Edith, what if this was Seth? What if Seth had gotten into trouble and come home again?”
“This wouldn’t be Seth. He’s married with three kinner of his own right now. And he’s always been responsible—”
“And he couldn’t possibly have gone off?” Mammi demanded. “I remember a time when he was awfully keen on an Englisher girl.”
“We nipped that off,” Edith replied. “We took care of it.”
“We’re just saying,” the other woman interjected, “you’ve got the daughter of a criminal helping you in the house and your grandson who was just released from prison sleeping under this roof. This isn’t safe, Bridget. We’re worried, and you can’t be offended that we care.”
Solomon cleared his throat, and the women went silent. He pasted what he hoped was an easy smile on his face and sauntered the rest of the way down the hallway and into the kitchen. The older women sat around the kitchen table with Mammi. They were both his grandmother’s age, their hair white and their hands gnarled and stained by garden soil. He didn’t know these women well, and they both looked away uncomfortably.
The Preacher's Daughter Page 3