“I’ll be back in a little bit,” he told Otto as he pushed open the door to the mudroom. His brother-in-law’s mouth was full, but Levi didn’t wait for a response.
He flew across the lawn beneath the moonlight, so intent on his mission he didn’t realize until he’d knocked several times there were no lights on in Sadie’s house. Mindful she might have turned in early, he knocked louder; he’d rather wake her than wait another instant to ask her to stay.
After rapping his knuckles sore, Levi became convinced Sadie hadn’t returned from shopping yet and he resigned himself to watching for the buggy from his porch. He was halfway back to his house when he realized the baler had been left outside. Whose turn was it to put it away? Mine? Otto’s? Figuring it was an easy enough task to overlook in their urgency to go shopping, Levi rolled it into the barn. While he was there he added another blanket to the horse—it was going to be another frigid night.
As he started back toward the house, he spotted a large lump on the ground near the opposite side of the parking area. It was...yes, it was a baled tree. How had it gotten so far from where the other cut and baled trees were leaning against the wooden frame? Levi wondered if it could have rolled off the roof of a customer’s car without someone noticing it. Or could this be the work of vandals? He heaved it onto his shoulder to carry to the barn. If it really did roll off someone’s car, they’d come looking for it tomorrow and he wanted it to be ready for them.
The Frasier fir was heavier than he anticipated and he was attempting to get a better grip on it when he heard the crunch of footsteps behind him. Already on high alert, he swung around to see who was following him.
“Yow!” a woman shrieked and Levi staggered before setting the tree down. He could barely see her form sprawled on the ground, but he recognized the voice as Sadie’s.
* * *
“Sadie!” Levi exclaimed. “You’re hurt, aren’t you?”
Stunned, Sadie held her breath, trying not to cry. Aware of Levi’s tendency to overreact, she attempted to assure him she was okay but only a moan came out. Before she realized what was happening, he wrapped one arm around her torso and slid his other arm beneath her knees. She protested weakly, but he didn’t listen, so she clasped her hands behind his neck and rested her head against his shoulder as he straightened his posture. This was not how Sadie had envisioned them embracing, and even in the midst of her pain, she felt cheated. Levi barged across the yard and up the porch, and then Sadie felt his stance shift and his muscles tighten as he raised his foot to kick the door.
Otto opened it and Sadie squinted from the glare of the light. “What happened? Is she okay?”
“I knocked her down.” Levi carried Sadie into the living room and gingerly eased her from his arms into a reclining position on the sofa. Kneeling beside her, he asked if she thought she’d lost consciousness.
Sadie noticed how his face had gone pale and how there was a look of desperation in his eyes. He was so close to her she could see the individual whiskers of his mustache. Most were dark but some were reddish and a few even bordered on being blond. She had studied his mustache a hundred times and never noticed the variations in color until now.
Levi’s lips were moving. “Sadie, did you hear me? Did you lose consciousness when the tree hit you?”
Wondering whether she felt dazed because of Levi’s proximity or from her injury, she replied, “Neh. It surprised me but didn’t knock me out.”
Elizabeth and David shuffled into the room, disheveled from sleep. “What happened?”
Instead of answering, Levi told Sadie, “To be on the safe side, we should take you to the hospital.”
Elizabeth burst into tears. “Is Sadie going to die, Daed?”
“I don’t want you to die.” David wrapped his arms around Sadie’s lower legs.
Irritated she had to calm everyone down when she felt so crummy herself, Sadie stated firmly, “I’m not going to die and I’m not going to the hospital, either.” Then she directed Levi to bring her a warm, wet cloth, Otto to fill a dishcloth with snow, Elizabeth to get a glass of water and David to bring her a pillow from upstairs.
Her uncharacteristically demanding tone did the trick; everyone stopped fussing and swiftly carried out her requests. After dabbing the warm cloth against her skin where baling string or pine needles had scraped her face, Sadie gently pressed the cloth-bound snow to her cheek. The others hovered around her until she said, “Quit staring at me like that, please. I’m fine.”
The twins backed away and settled onto the oversize chair while Otto stoked the fire, but Levi remained crouched beside the sofa. His coloring was better now, but his expression was still laden with remorse as he scrutinized her. If only he was as sorrowful about my leaving as he is about my injury... If only he knew what’s really hurting me...
“You may feel okay now, Sadie,” he said. “But we should make sure you don’t have a concussion. I twirled around really fast. The force might have—”
“Pah!” Sadie sputtered. “I don’t have a concussion. The tree didn’t hit me that hard. Even in the dark I saw it coming out of the corner of my eye. I was already starting to duck.”
“All the same, I think—”
“I think it’s time for the kinner to get back to bed. Do you want to take them or should I?” Sadie figured threatening to walk upstairs in her condition was the only way she could get Levi to stop harping about going to the hospital.
“I’ll do it,” he said glumly before leading the children away.
* * *
“I’m glad Sadie’s not going to die,” Elizabeth said.
Levi recognized the question in his daughter’s statement; she needed reassurance. He was the last person qualified to give it to her, but he said, “I’m glad she’s going to be fine, too.”
“So am I,” David agreed. “I love her.”
“I love her more than you do,” Elizabeth challenged him.
“You do not,” David countered and their arguing was music to Levi’s ears, a return to normalcy.
After tucking them in, he padded down the stairs and into the living room. Sadie was alone, sitting upright, but her eyes were closed and she rested her head against the pillow David had brought her. She’s so pretty. Immediately Levi felt a pinch of guilt for having such a thought, especially now, when Sadie was wounded. Because of him. He cleared his throat and she opened her eyes.
Sitting across from her, Levi listened as she explained how she’d asked Maria to drop her off at the end of the driveway. In case the twins were awake, Sadie didn’t want them to hear the horse and look out the window because she was carrying—actually, pulling—their Christmas gifts. She had just stashed the sleds in the barn and was going to the daadi haus when she saw someone carrying a tree up ahead of her. Uncertain whether it was Otto, Levi or a thief, she was sneaking up behind him to get a better look.
Levi gasped. “That was dangerous! If it had been a thief, there’s no telling what might have happened.” It was an ironic thing to say, considering he’d just clocked her in the head with a tree.
“I was fairly certain it was Otto or you. Although I couldn’t make sense of why you’d be hauling trees at this time of night.”
“I wasn’t. I’d actually gone to the daadi haus to talk to you about something when I noticed a stray tree in the parking lot. I thought we had vandals. That’s why I spun around like that. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s my fault. I was following you too closely and it was dark. I must have startled you.”
It was true, she had startled him, but that didn’t make Levi feel any better about what he’d done. How could I have been so dopplich? he chastised himself, just as he’d done following Leora’s accident. Flooded by memories and stricken by feelings of shame and inadequacy, Levi could hardly speak and was glad when Otto reentered the living room.
“I just put the sp
are tree in the barn, Levi,” he said, warming his hands near the stove. “I hid the sleds, too, Sadie.”
“Denki. Perhaps tomorrow before supper you could bring them to the porch, Levi, so I can give them to the twins when we’re done eating?” She shifted on the cushion, allowing both men a better view of her swollen cheek. Poor Sadie—she was probably in more pain than she was letting on.
Otto whistled. “You’re going to have some shiner in the morning.”
“I haven’t had a black eye since my bruder spiked a volleyball at me. Now, that was no accident. But it turned out well for me because he had to do my chores for a month,” she said.
“I wouldn’t want to eat Levi’s cooking for a month.” Otto guffawed. “Your eldre are going to take one look at you and regret ever letting you kumme to Maine. I’d love to see their faces when you tell them Levi whacked you with a Grischtdaag tree.”
“Maybe I should say I got bowled over by a moose, instead.” Sadie started to smile but then she cringed and touched the side of her face.
Levi recognized Otto was only kidding, but his words cut him to the quick because they were true. Sadie’s family—and Sadie herself—had entrusted her welfare to him as her employer. And through carelessness, he’d proven himself incapable of taking as good care of her as she’d taken of him and his children. Which was the same that could have been said about him and Leora...
His self-reproach was interrupted when Sadie rose and slipped the quilt from her shoulders and folded it into a square. “I should go.”
Levi was relieved when she didn’t refuse his offer to walk her to the daadi haus. After seeing her inside and building a fire in the woodstove, he asked, “Can I get you anything else?”
“Denki, I’ve got everything I need. But you never said what it was you were coming to talk to me about before you hit—before I fell.”
Levi hesitated. Beneath the glare of the kitchen’s overhead gas lamp, Sadie’s cheek looked even worse than it had before and a line of red tracks was forming where she’d been scratched by pine needles. I did that to her. The desire to erase the damage, to soothe away her pain with a thousand gentle kisses was so intense Levi’s legs trembled. What am I thinking?
Levi couldn’t ask Sadie now—maybe he couldn’t ask her at all. He needed more time to decide.
“It can wait. Let’s talk about it tomorrow evening, after the kinner go to bed.” In the event he didn’t ask her, he figured he’d be able to come up with another topic by then.
At home Levi found Otto standing by the kitchen sink polishing off the last piece of peanut butter sheet cake. “You know, this cake reminds me of Leora. She frequently made it because she knew how much I like it,” he said in between bites. “I still miss her a lot. I miss her sense of humor, her courage. The way she always looked on the bright side of things.”
“I still miss those things about Leora, too.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I love both my sisters, but Hannah’s not like Leora was.” Otto wiped his sleeve over his lips. “Leora’s more like...like Sadie—”
“Leora was one of a kind—”
Otto held his hands up and halted Levi midobjection. “Of course she was. But her temperament was more similar to Sadie’s than it is to Hannah’s.”
Between the twins’ meltdown and Sadie’s injury, Levi had little patience left over for Otto’s rambling, especially about Leora. “Just what are you getting at?”
“I think if Leora had to choose someone to care for Elizabeth and David, she’d choose Sadie over Hannah and my mamm. And I think you owe it to Leora to choose Sadie, too.”
Levi balked. “But—but I don’t even know if Sadie would be willing to stay here for gut.”
“That’s right, you don’t. You’ve got to take a chance—take a risk—and ask her first.” Otto clapped the crumbs off his hands and left the room without another word.
Levi slumped into a chair. Was Otto right? Resting his head on the table, he covered his head with his hands, as if that could keep his mind from reeling. Round and round his mind went until sheer exhaustion forced him to come to a conclusion: Elizabeth and David need Sadie. They love her. Just because I’ve been an irresponsible employer doesn’t mean they should suffer. And I’ll try even harder to be careful from now on... Yes, for his children’s sake, Levi was still going to ask Sadie to stay on as their permanent nanny.
* * *
The night seemed to go on forever. It wasn’t pain that kept Sadie tossing and turning—not physical pain anyway. It was the excruciating desire to know what Levi wanted to talk to her about. When morning finally arrived, Sadie discovered Otto was right; she definitely had the start of a shiner. Or half a shiner. The bruising on her swollen cheek—deeper red today, with a hint of blue undertones—was creeping sideways toward her eye, but at least the scrapes were crusted over.
“How do you feel?” Levi asked before she even crossed the threshold of the mudroom into the kitchen.
“I’m gut.” Relatively speaking.
“Sadie, your face looks like this,” Elizabeth informed her, puffing out one of her own chubby cheeks. Sadie had to giggle; it was a case of the kettle calling the pot black.
She and the twins occupied their morning with baking, cleaning and singing, followed by a late-afternoon trip to the workshop. Since the van would arrive to pick Sadie up at eight o’clock the next morning and the farm was closed on Christmas Eve, Sadie wanted to take the opportunity to bid Maria goodbye. The women exchanged gifts, promising each they wouldn’t open them until the twenty-fifth.
“Levi hasn’t asked you to stay...or asked you anything else?” Maria whispered into Sadie’s ear as they embraced.
“Neh.” Sadie didn’t mention Levi wanted to speak with her later. There was no sense disappointing Maria if things didn’t work out as she hoped—Sadie would be disappointed enough for both of them.
Maria pulled her head back and looked her squarely in the eye. “There’s still time.”
“You’re going to keep saying that until the moment my van drives away, aren’t you?”
“Jah. Unless Levi professes his undying love before then, in which case I’ll say I told you so!” Maria said, making Sadie crack up.
Buoyed by Maria’s optimism, Sadie herded the twins home so she could prepare a pot roast. Any sadness the children felt about Sadie’s departure was overshadowed by their anticipation of exchanging gifts, and supper was a lively, talkative occasion. Elizabeth and David were so excited they didn’t even want to eat the bread pudding they’d helped Sadie make for dessert.
The four of them gathered in the living room to read the Nativity story from Scripture, pray and sing a few carols. Then Levi told the children it would be nice if they gave Sadie her gifts before opening their own. David shyly presented her with a small cardboard box. Inside were a dozen oddly cut pieces of wood.
“It’s a puzzle. I drew it and Onkel Otto cut it out. It’s a tree. A Fraser fir.”
“Now open mine,” Elizabeth demanded, giving Sadie a sachet of balsam potpourri made from needles she’d collected herself.
On the brink of tears, Sadie could hardly get the words out. “Denki. I’ll treasure these.” She wrapped her arms around both of them. When she finally let them go, she clapped her hands. “Now, time for your gifts!”
After telling the children their presents were too big to wrap, she asked them to close their eyes until she brought in the sleds from where Levi had rested them against the house on the porch.
“Okay, you may open your eyes now,” she said.
“Sleds!” David whooped.
“One for each of us!” Elizabeth hollered. “Daed, can we keep them?”
“Of course you can keep them,” Levi answered, although Elizabeth’s uncertainty wasn’t lost on Sadie. She wondered if Levi would resort to his usual restrictions after she left.
&nbs
p; “Can we go sledding tonight?”
“Neh, not in the dark,” Levi said.
“How about if we go tomorrow morning, bright and early, before I leave?” Sadie asked.
“That’s a gut idea. Elizabeth and David, you’ll need to get some sleep so you can be up and dressed by the time Sadie comes over in the morning,” Levi suggested.
The children obligingly scrambled upstairs, lugging their plastic sleds into their rooms with them. Levi got them ready for bed while Sadie prepared tea and dessert, which she brought into the living room. When Levi returned, he took a seat in the chair and Sadie handed him his cup before sitting on the sofa. She was so intent on finding out what he wanted to talk to her about, she couldn’t swallow a morsel of bread pudding and she would have forgotten entirely about exchanging gifts with him if he hadn’t handed her a box wrapped in bright green paper and tied with a gold bow. With trembling hands she pulled the paper off, revealing a photo of some kind of funny footwear.
“Snowshoes!” she exclaimed. Otto had said snowshoes came in various shapes and styles and it delighted Sadie that Levi gave her a gift that appealed to her fondness for athletics.
“Er, neh. They’re protective foot coverings. Crampons. You put them on over your boots and they keep you from slipping,” Levi explained.
Sadie’s mood plummeted and her eyes burned. It’s the thought that counts, she told herself. Which was exactly why she felt so let down. Even Harrison had given her a more personal present than that. Blinking, she managed to utter her thanks before handing Levi the envelope containing the gift card she gotten him.
His mustache widened with a smile when he read the inscription aloud. “Denki. I’ll enjoy using this sometime in the near future... And speaking of the future, there is, uh, something I’d like to ask you to consider.”
Courting the Amish Nanny Page 16