“I’m getting there,” she said quietly. Although raw gusts of air slapped at their faces, Levi noticed Maria’s skin was more grayish than pink.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“I will be when we get back inside. Kumme see if you like where I set up the cash register counter,” Maria said, motioning him toward the workshop.
The cash register was nothing more than a money box, and the counter was a high table near the door. Serenity Ridge’s Amish business owners didn’t accept credit cards; they only dealt in cash or checks. Levi realized this restriction might result in a loss of some sales, but when he spied the “ornaments” Elizabeth and David had made hanging above the crate of trunk slices, his worries vanished. One of his children had written Joy, on their ornament, and the other had written Peace. Their lopsided penmanship reminded him of how much they were looking forward to Christmas and of the real reason for celebrating.
Pointing, Levi said, “You must have helped them with those.”
“Neh, Sadie did. They’re fascinated by everything she says and does.”
Levi had noticed the same thing, but he stopped short of agreeing aloud. Was Maria steadying herself against the workbench? “Are you sure you feel okay?”
“I’m fine but I need to get back to work if I’m going to meet today’s quota,” Maria replied, picking up her hand shears and clipping a bough down to size.
“There is no quota, just an estimation of how many wreaths we’ll need. I’d rather we have fewer sales than have you getting sick.”
“Don’t worry. I even plan to finish up here early this afternoon so I can skedaddle home and start Thanksgiving preparations. I noticed how much the kinner ate at the hochzich. Probably because Sadie has been running them ragged outside.”
Now that Maria brought up the subject of Thanksgiving, Levi vacillated as to whether he should tell her of Sadie’s change in plans. Neh, that’s Sadie’s responsibility, not mine, he ultimately decided. And there’s always a chance she might change her mind again.
* * *
After the twins woke from their naps they took a jaunt with Sadie to the workshop, but at the door she told them she needed to speak to Maria alone. She instructed them to play in the side yard, where she could watch them from the window on the door.
Maria smiled wanly, as if she already knew what Sadie was about to say. “Hi, Sadie. I had to put away the kinner’s little workbench so it won’t be in the way when the customers arrive, but now that you’re here, I can pull it back out for them.”
“The twins aren’t coming in today. I wanted a moment to talk to you alone.”
As Maria wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, Sadie noticed how peaked she looked. She was probably worn-out from socializing with Levi and getting ready to host him for Thanksgiving. “Oh, gut. I’ve been curious about last night. How did you and Jonathan get along?”
Sadie snapped, “We didn’t! Other than the fact we both kumme from Pennsylvania, I have absolutely nothing in common with him.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Maria frowned.
“Neh, what’s too bad is how thoughtless you were to force me to sit with him just so you could get what you wanted. You knew I wasn’t interested in courting. After how honest and vulnerable I’ve been, I expected a little more candor from you. If you had just told me, we could have worked something else out.”
“I was being thoughtless to get what I wanted? What are you talking about?” Maria set down the hand shears and gripped the edge of the workbench. “I offered to take care of the kinner so you could meet a young man and maybe have a little schpass instead of babysitting all night. I was making a sacrifice.”
“Ha! We both know it wasn’t about me. You volunteered to take care of the kinner because you wanted to be with Levi and you know it,” Sadie accused. “You like him a lot—you said as much.”
“He was the husband of one of my closest friends! Jah, I like him, but not in a romantic way. The very thought of him as my suitor makes me—”
Maria abruptly covered her hand with her mouth and pushed past Sadie toward the door. She didn’t have time to shut it behind her before she began retching. Sadie grabbed the damp cloth Maria used to wipe sap from her hands and rushed to her side. Elizabeth and David spotted them there and started trotting in their direction, but Sadie shook her finger, signaling them not to approach. Maria accepted the cloth from Sadie and blotted her lips with it.
“I didn’t mean to imply Levi makes me retch,” she joked weakly and tried to laugh, but then she was sick again.
Sadie stroked her friend’s back, feeling terrible. She should have noticed the woman was genuinely ill, but she’d been so upset that she’d only seen what she wanted to see. When Maria stood upright again, Sadie extended her arm and led her to a chair inside the workshop. “You sit here and I’ll go hitch your buggy to take you home.”
Maria tried to stand but plunked right down in the chair again. “Neh, I’m okay. I can’t leave. I haven’t made nearly enough wreaths yet. Levi is counting on me. Besides, I gave Walker a ride today. I can’t leave without him.”
“You’re sick and you need to go home and get to bed. I’ll finish the wreaths if I have to work all night and all day tomorrow and tomorrow night, too. It’s the least I can do,” Sadie said penitently. “I’m so sorry, Maria. I was being overly sensitive.”
“Neh, you have a right to be upset. You told me you weren’t interested in romance, so I should have discouraged Grace from pairing you up. But I figured you do so much for Levi’s familye that you deserved a break,” Maria explained.
Sadie gave Maria a sideways embrace. “Please, let’s put this behind us, okay?”
“Okay, but you have to believe me when I say I think of Levi like a bruder. A very sullen bruder. He hardly said two words the rest of the evening after you left. I think he would have preferred to eat with you, not me,” Maria maintained. “Tell me, was it really that bad eating with Jonathan, too?”
“Let’s put it this way...within thirty seconds he told me he was courting someone in Pennsylvania and he didn’t want me to get my hopes up about him the way so many other meed did.”
“He said that?”
“Jah, and he also belched six or seven times during the course of supper and not once did he excuse himself.” When Maria groaned, Sadie said, “Oops, sorry for mentioning that. Are you still nauseated?”
Maria nodded. “If this keeps up, I don’t know how I’ll ever manage to make Thanksgiving dinner. I can hardly say the word, much less cook the food. I’m sorry—I was looking forward to all of you coming, and now it’s too late for you to make other plans.”
“Don’t even think about that. I’ll take care of dinner for Levi and the twins. Do you want me to make something to bring over to your mamm?”
“Denki, but she actually was sick last night, too, so I doubt she’ll feel gut enough to eat anytime soon. Besides, my ant is there.”
Just then the twins and Scott and Walker barged through the door, laughing loudly.
“Walker and Scott came to take the wreaths to the barn. They said we could help,” David proudly reported.
“Jah. We finished everything we need to do before we open on Friday, so Levi said we could leave early this afternoon. He had to run to town to get cash for the cash box. Are you almost ready to go, Maria?”
Maria looked at Sadie. “If you’re sure you can—”
Sadie didn’t hesitate. “We’ll finish up here without any problem at all. I’ve watched you make so many wreaths I could do it in my sleep.”
It wasn’t until after Walker, Scott and Maria left and Elizabeth commented she was getting hungry that Sadie realized the only groceries Levi had purchased for Thanksgiving were the ingredients for dessert. Pumpkin pie, with nutmeg. Levi’s favorite, she thought wryly. But what could she do about it now?
&nb
sp; * * *
Levi pulled off his coat and hung it in the mudroom. The house was dim and quiet and he didn’t smell anything cooking. His imagination scudded from one horrible scenario to another, the way it always did when the children weren’t where he expected them to be. Without bothering to remove his boots, he strode to the living room and then called Elizabeth’s and David’s names as he charged up the stairs even though the hall and rooms were dark. Breathe, he told himself as he clomped back downstairs and outside onto the porch.
“Elizabeth! David! Sadie!” he called into the dark. No response. He started for the barn and on the way he noticed light coming from his workshop. Maria probably knew where they were. He sprinted to the little building, but before he even reached the door he could hear the children singing Christmas carols. Levi slowed his pace and released a sigh. Denki, Lord.
When he opened the door he immediately spotted Sadie at the clamping machine and Elizabeth gluing cord to a trunk slice. For some reason David was sitting on the floor atop a mound of scrappy boughs and pine needles.
“Hi, Daed. I’m an eagle. See my nest?” his son asked proudly.
“He’s supposed to be helping make ornaments,” Elizabeth tattled.
“Sadie said if I sweeped the floor I could use the branches to make a nest.”
Levi held in a laugh and greeted Sadie, who explained Maria was ill and Walker had taken her home in her buggy. Because she hadn’t made quite enough wreaths before she left, Sadie and the children had taken over for her, with Sadie assembling the boughs and the children making ornaments and cleaning the workshop. “I guess we lost track of time but we know how important opening day is, so we wanted to help. I’ll go start supper now—I can kumme back later to finish putting ribbons on these and to tidy up the last of my mess.”
Overwhelmed by Sadie’s efforts to help him with both the twins and his business, Levi thanked her profusely. “After all the hard work the three of you did, you shouldn’t have to make supper tonight. How about I take the kinner with me to the phone shanty and I’ll order a pizza delivered?”
“Jah, pizza!” David exclaimed.
“Eagles don’t eat pizza,” Elizabeth informed him.
Sadie must have sensed an argument was about to erupt, because she set down the shears definitively and announced, “Everyone loves pizza, even eagles. While you’re going to the shanty, I’ll clean up here and then head to the haus to set the table. Kinner, go put your coats on first. You might want to wear one, too, Levi.” She had a saucy grin.
Levi looked at his arms as if they didn’t belong to him: he’d been so panicked when he discovered the house was empty he’d left his coat hanging in the mudroom. “Jah, I’ll do that,” he said sheepishly, although by then he hardly needed a coat, he was warm from blushing so hard.
Chapter Five
After they’d all finished eating pizza, Sadie washed the dishes while Levi gave the children baths and tucked them into bed. It wasn’t until he came downstairs again that she realized she’d forgotten to talk to him about getting groceries for their Thanksgiving meal since they weren’t going to Maria’s house tomorrow. She offered to either stay with Elizabeth and David at the house or go to the supermarket herself, but Levi declined.
“It’s late and I wouldn’t want you out on the roads when there’s so much traffic. The local residents are careful for buggies, but at this time of year a lot of people visit from out of state and they aren’t used to sharing the road. Besides, you said you baked a pie—that’s what the kinner want most. And I do, too.”
Sadie was too embarrassed to tell him both pies were pumpkin. With nutmeg. “But there’s hardly anything to eat in the pantry. If you hadn’t suggested pizza tonight, I was just going to make macaroni and cheese.”
“Thanksgiving is meant to be about giving thanks, not about eating. Don’t worry about us. You deserve a day off with your friends.”
Levi’s comment caught Sadie off guard. “My friends? What friends?”
“I thought you were going to celebrate Thanksgiving with people you met at the hochzich,” Levi said awkwardly. She had forgotten all about saying she didn’t want to spend Thanksgiving with him.
“Neh, I didn’t have any plans to spend the day with anyone else. I, um... I just didn’t want to feel like a third wheel,” she confessed, avoiding his eyes as she wiped an imaginary spill from the countertop with a dishcloth.
“A third wheel?”
Sadie hung her head and played with the cloth. She might as well confess it. It wasn’t as if she was saying she wanted Levi to court her. “I thought you were interested in courting Maria and I didn’t want to feel like I was...in the way or something.”
Levi cocked his head as if considering her comment and then spoke slowly. “Maria is a gut friend. She and Leora were very close and she helped a lot with the kinner whenever my mamm needed. And she was a comfort to me when my mamm died. In some ways, I’m closer to her than I am to my own sister-in-law. But if I were interested in courting someone, it wouldn’t be Maria,” he said.
What does he mean by if he were interested in courting someone?
With a droll laugh, Levi said, “I assumed you wanted to spend Thanksgiving with Jonathan.”
“Neh! I’d rather go hungerich!” Sadie clamped her hand over her mouth. That was an ungenerous remark but it didn’t seem to faze Levi. The corners of his mustache twitched as he appeared to fight a grin.
“You will go hungerich if you join us for Thanksgiving dinner,” he warned. “But we’d wilkom your company.”
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be,” Sadie replied, finally meeting Levi’s eyes.
It was true, too, although that didn’t mean she wasn’t lonesome for her family. The next morning Sadie walked to the phone shanty to call Cevilla at their agreed-upon time. As she listened to her stepmother describing Rebekah’s wedding, she realized how much had changed in the short time she’d been away. How much she had changed. It didn’t trouble her at all to hear about how, in addition to the cakes her family and guests supplied, Rebekah had ordered a specialty three-tiered lemon-raspberry cake. And she giggled as Cevilla complained that Sadie’s father had nodded off during the ceremony and when she gave him a nudge, he’d jerked to attention, nearly falling out of his chair.
Then it was Sadie’s turn to describe what life in Maine was like and how she was getting along in her new job. She couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “The kinner are very sweet and my days fly by. Maine is beautiful, although it’s freezing here. We might even get snow today, which is what Elizabeth and David are hoping for. But Levi doesn’t want it to snow too much because he’s concerned it will keep people off the roads tomorrow. That’s the first day the farm opens to customers. Oh, and guess what—some of the Amish men here wear mustaches!”
“Neh!”
“Jah! Levi has one and at first it was distracting, but now I think it makes him look handsome,” Sadie blurted out.
Fortunately, her brothers were with Cevilla and they must have kept her from hearing Sadie’s remark, because all she replied was, “Uh-oh, it looks as if someone else is coming to use the phone. We should give them a turn. But first your brieder want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving.”
Sadie’s younger brothers called out their greetings in the background and Sadie echoed their sentiments. Suddenly she didn’t want to get off the phone, but she knew Cevilla needed to go home and continue her meal preparations, so they said their goodbyes.
On the way back to the daadi haus, Sadie hugged her arms around her chest. Her coat was too flimsy for this weather and she was chilled to the bone. Chilled and hungry; she was fasting until dinner, the way the Amish in Little Springs always did. To take her mind off her physical discomfort, she read Scripture and prayed for most of the morning and then curled up on the sofa in a quilt. Reclining there, she listed ten things she was thankful for
in her diary, just as she did every year.
Faith in Christ.
Salvation through God’s grace.
Family.
My own health and the good health of those I love.
Church family.
Provisions for all my physical needs.
The opportunity to live on a Christmas tree farm in Maine.
Satisfying work.
Elizabeth, David and Levi.
Hope.
Sadie closed her diary and thought about that last item: hope. It was no coincidence it immediately followed Levi’s name. Despite her best efforts—or at least despite her initial intentions—to push all notions of romance and courtship from her mind, she had the tiniest glimmer of hope something might develop between Levi and her.
* * *
“Kumme, Elizabeth and David. Put those cushions back on the sofa. Sadie will be here any minute,” Levi said, folding the quilt the children had draped over a set of chairs to make a cave for themselves. “She’s our special guest today, so we need to show her how thankful we are she came to Maine to take care of you.”
Elizabeth emerged from beneath the quilt with her nose wrinkled. “What’s that schtinke?”
“I’m melting butter for the noodles.”
“It smells really bad, Daed. I think it’s burning.”
Levi darted into the kitchen. Elizabeth was right: the bottom of the pot was already scorched. He removed it from the element and placed it in the sink. He’d clean that later. Then he took a new pot from the cupboard and measured a third of a cup of butter into that and turned the gas to low. “Elizabeth and David, please kumme in here and set the table,” he called, just as Sadie rapped on the door.
“Sadie’s here!” David charged past him.
Elizabeth and Levi followed him to the mudroom to welcome Sadie. “May I take your coat?” he asked awkwardly, still holding a spoon in his hand.
Courting the Amish Nanny Page 7