Hidden Life (9781455510863)

by Senft, Adina

  Emma could feel the blood seeping into her cheeks, and ducked her head to concentrate on her seam. “It was only the once, so there was nothing much to say.”

  “There must have been something, or you wouldn’t be blushing.”

  Drat. The girl had eyes like a cat. “Maybe there was once, on my side. Not now, of course.”

  Her cheeks felt like they were on fire. Why did her body have to pick now to betray her?

  “Oh, Emma.” Carrie’s eyes were so full of sympathy that Emma was tempted to leap up from the treadle and run outside, scattering Carrie’s chickens and not stopping until she was safe two fields away.

  “It was nothing, so stop trying to make it something,” she mumbled. “He’s married and it’s wicked to even talk about it.”

  Now it was Carrie’s turn to jump to another subject. She began to tell them about Amos Yoder’s plans for their rented fields, and the fire faded from Emma’s face as she sewed.

  But the pain remained in her heart, and not even the thought of the letter would make it go away.

  Karen’s John, no doubt prodded by his wife’s advancing pregnancy and shortening temper, wasted no time in making the arrangements, even though the weather was as fractious as a teething baby, with sunshine one minute and a cold downpour the next. Emma heard the sound of a wagon coming up the drive and stepped out on the spongy porch to see who it was.

  Grant Weaver guided his horse past the turn to the lane, but just as she moved to step inside before he saw her, he turned his head to look over at the Daadi Haus.

  He’s just giving his next job the once-over. Of course he was. But that didn’t stop the lightness in Emma’s heart as he raised a hand in greeting and drove on past.

  You’re a fool. He’s married and if he ever dreamed the sight of him gave you such pleasure, he’d make sure never to venture over to this side of the settlement again. Never mind his shame—at least that wasn’t his fault. Your shame would be all yours.

  People had entertained themselves enormously over the rumor that she and teenaged Aaron King were courting. But if word got out that she was pining for a married man, their pity would be savage—and so would their opinions on the matter.

  Oh, no. She would have to walk very circumspectly once Grant began work on this house, and never let him see anything but the sober, studious woman who cared for her mother. The girl who had once thought the world held no greater gift than a ride home in his buggy under the stars must be buried so deeply she could never come out.

  So Emma told herself as she got on with scrubbing the kitchen floor, which never seemed to stay clean for more than a few hours at this time of year. She and Mamm didn’t track it up so much, but the Kinner running in and out to visit their Mammi brought half of Nature in with them.

  She’d just finished and had begun on the bathroom floor when a knock sounded at the back door. “Aendi Emma?”

  Emma got up off her knees and waved both hands at six-year-old Victor, as if to shoo him back toward the door. “Careful, I just washed it.”

  He teetered, the toes of his muddy boots on the edge of the linoleum, and grasped the door jamb. “Mamm says can you come over to the house for lunch. Mammi too, if she’s feeling up to it.”

  “I am feeling up to it,” came Lena’s voice from the front room. “What a treat.”

  What brought this on? was more like it, but Lena would never say so. The fact was that it was typical of Karen to send one of the children as a messenger instead of coming for a visit herself. She always sounded flustered and busy when they hinted at seeing her more often than a couple of times a week, and usually made some comment about how Emma’s help would be very much appreciated in the big house instead, since as a single woman she had much more leisure time.

  Maybe Emma didn’t have four children with another on the way and a big household with its canning and cleaning and sewing to do. But it wasn’t because she didn’t want those things.

  Besides, she couldn’t leave Lena for hours every day. What if she took a turn and there was no one there to help? Wasn’t that why the family had singlemindedly decided Emma’s place was here, caring for Mamm and Pap until he had been taken away from them? It was she who had gone in to the hospital in Lancaster and taken the training on caregiving and how to administer medicine and operate the oxygen tank. It was she who gave Lena needles in the middle of the night when she had to, much as she hated it and cried herself to sleep afterward.

  It was she who acted on her love for Mamm every single day, and if all she asked in return was a little quiet in which to write, then she would not feel guilty.

  “Denki, Victor,” she told her nephew, and padded over the expanse of the drying floor to give him a hug. “We’ll be there at noon sharp. Can I bring anything?” He looked unsure, as if Mamm had given him no instructions on that score. “What if I make that coleslaw you like?”

  “That one with the cranberries and peanuts?”

  She’d been thinking of the one with the pickles in it, but all right. Luckily she still had dried cranberries left from Christmas. “It’s my favorite, too. Even if nobody else likes it, that means more for you and me.”

  Delighted, he nodded. “I’ll go tell Mamm.” He took off at a run.

  Lena put a cautious foot on the shining floor and made her slow way over to the kitchen table. “I’ll shell the peanuts for you while you shred the cabbage.”

  “You’re supposed to be resting.” Emma got the ingredients out of the fridge and hunted up the jar of cranberries.

  “I have all afternoon to rest, and besides, I like peanuts.”

  Lena would no more miss an opportunity to help than she would tear off her oxygen and run across the fields. Before long, Emma was walking slowly down the lane, the bowl of coleslaw tucked under one arm and Lena’s tank dangling from the other hand.

  When they climbed the front steps one at a time, the door swung open. “Mamm,” Karen said, managing to kiss Lena’s cheek and take Emma’s bowl in one smooth motion. “Come right in. We’re just sitting down.”

  Emma tossed her shawl over the back of a chair in the sitting room, but Lena kept hers wrapped around her shoulders as Karen guided her into the kitchen and seated her in the chair closest to the woodstove. Out of habit, Emma moved to help Karen get the food on the table, and had no sooner picked up a bowl of mashed potatoes when she realized there were two extra people. Grant was one of them. And the other was…

  “Hullo, Emma.” A man got up and it was a good thing she was already leaning over to put the potatoes down, because she dropped the bowl with a clank.

  “Joshua?” Her mouth would hardly form the sounds. It was too busy hanging open like a trapdoor in the hayloft.

  “The very same. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  They had only recently been talking about him, but still, she barely recognized him. The fat boy of her childhood escapades and the stocky youth of his troubled teens were both gone, and in their place was a tall, handsome man whose hazel eyes snapped with humor—as if he knew a grand joke about the world and wasn’t letting you in on it. He still had curly hair—lots of it, too. Nothing as prosaic as a bald spot for Joshua. And no beard, because he wasn’t married.

  “When did you get back?” she finally managed, reaching over the table to shake his hand.

  “Just this week.” He resumed his seat and she got her feet moving over to the stove, where Karen was dishing up chops in mushroom gravy. She handed Emma the platter and Emma put it at the head of the table in front of John’s place.

  “Hullo, Grant,” she said to the man sitting opposite Joshua. Did he think she had been rude, paying all her attention to Joshua and none to Karen’s other guest? “Wie geht’s?”

  “Gut,” he responded. “Your sister was kind enough to invite me for lunch when she already had company.”

  Karen made a deprecating noise. “People come and go all day long around here. What’s one or two more, especially when we haven’t see
n either of you in a long time?” She put Emma’s coleslaw in front of him. “As I was saying, John has hired Joshua to farm the new section we bought. John! Kinner!” she called over her shoulder. “Alliebber kumm!”

  John came in on a tide of children and they washed up at the kitchen sink. When everyone was settled at the table, silence fell as they said grace over the steaming food. Emma raised her head and helped little Andrea, who was four, to some potatoes and chops. When she dished up her own plate, she found Joshua’s twinkling gaze on her.

  “So you didn’t recognize me, hey?”

  “You’ve changed a bit in ten or twelve years.”

  “You haven’t. You look exactly the same.”

  That was a pity. And here she was thinking she’d become a ravishing beauty. “I hope the changes with you have been on the inside as well as the outside,” she said smoothly. “Have you seen Daniel and Mary Lapp?”

  He flinched theatrically, as if she’d wounded him. “As it happens, they were the first folks I visited after my own family.”

  She’d bet that was true. If Bishop Daniel had sent him away, only Bishop Daniel could welcome him back. “And were they glad to see you?”

  “I think so. I’m not the rapscallion I was when I left, you know. I can see what you’re thinking.” Emma very much hoped not. “I was honest with the bishop, and he with me. We agreed that the past should stay in the past and the present was in God’s hands.” He paused, a silence filled with the clinking of cutlery on stoneware and the sound of little Victor gulping down his milk. “I hope everyone else will agree, too.”

  “No reason why they shouldn’t,” John said, his deep voice a rumble in his chest. “If God and the bishop say the past is forgotten, then it is.”

  “Did you do something bad?” Victor piped up, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  Joshua smiled at him while Karen vainly attempted to wipe her son’s face. “I was a bit of a prankster when I was younger,” he said. “Things got out of hand and I got into a fast gang—faster than was good for me or them. Bishop Daniel suggested to my pop that I spend the summer with some cousins up in Shipshey. One summer turned into a winter, then a permanent job, and before I knew it, I’d been there ten years.” He shook his head and turned his attention to spooning a small mountain of Emma’s coleslaw onto his plate.

  “And you never found a girl up there to marry?” Karen asked, handing him the pickles.

  “Never found one who would have me. They’re smart cookies up there in Shipshey. I figure I might have better luck back home.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Emma said. “The girls here are pretty smart, too—and they have mighty long memories.”

  Grant chuckled into his yeast roll and Joshua looked offended. “Come on, now, Emma. Go easy on a fellow or he won’t give you a ride to the singing on Sunday night.”

  “I can drive myself, thank you.” She hadn’t gone to the singing in several weeks. It was just too awkward, feeling like somebody’s mother at a table full of giggly sixteen-year-olds sneaking glances at boys she used to babysit.

  “Don’t listen to her—she’d love to go with you,” Karen told him. “What time will you be by?”

  Emma gawked at her, unable to believe what she’d just heard. She’d suspected why Joshua Steiner had been invited to lunch, but hadn’t expected Karen to involve herself further. Clearly Karen had given up on Emma’s abilities in the courtship department and had decided she needed a little more help.

  And when Karen got the bit in her teeth, there was no stopping her.

  Chapter 4

  Could there ever have been a lunch more uncomfortable than this one?

  In all her years, Emma couldn’t remember feeling like this—even when she’d been sixteen and full of raging emotions and hormones that had no outlet except in the pages of her little dime-store notebooks. So here she sat, one chair away from the man her wicked heart still yearned for, while the one she didn’t want let her sister manipulate him. The question was, why did Joshua allow it? He couldn’t be interested in her as a woman. Was he just entertaining himself? And what did it say about a man that he would allow her to be mortified like this and do nothing to ease it?

  Maybe he didn’t know she was mortified. She should be grateful, in that case. Pride was a sin, but a woman still had to hold her head up. There were some things that the people around you didn’t need to know.

  After dessert, John let out a belch that made Karen beam with satisfaction. He didn’t need to say, “Another gut meal, Fraa.” The second helping he’d taken was proof enough that it was, and the clean plates of her guests backed it up.

  “Karen, denki for the lunch,” Lena said when John pushed his chair away from the table. “I must be getting back now.”

  Emma got up at once, only too happy to hurry the meal to its end. “I’ll take you.”

  Karen and Maryann began to stack the dessert bowls, which held the crumbs of a preserved-plum cobbler. On any other day, Emma would have stayed to help. Today she was going to get out that door as fast as Mamm could walk, and Karen could send as many pointed glances at the stack of dishes as she wanted.

  “I’ll walk you over.” Joshua pushed his chair back as well.

  And add fuel to Karen’s fire? Not likely. “No, thank you, Joshua,” Emma said with firmness. “We know our way, and have done for several years now.”

  “But you need help with the oxygen tank.”

  “I brought it and a bowl of coleslaw without help. Denkes for the offer, though. It was nice to see you.”

  “Such an independent woman.” His humor restored, he set his winter hat on firmly and hooked his coat off the tree by the door. With a word of thanks to Karen and John, he started out to his buggy.

  Emma wasn’t so sure he’d meant to be humorous. Independent was hardly a compliment.

  “I’ll walk over with you, if I may,” Grant said from behind them. He’d hardly said a word during lunch. The few sentences he’d exchanged with John about estimating how much wood they’d need hardly counted. “If I’m going to put in an order for lumber, I might get a better price if I look the porches over and include all of it at once.”

  Emma did her best to keep her breathing even. “Certainly.”

  What a sense of humor God had. He had switched things about so thoroughly that now Emma was more uncomfortable than ever. At least she knew how to handle Joshua—and could give as good as she got. Grant just left her tongue-tied and miserable, afraid that anything she said would expose too much.

  Then again, how much could she expose in a hundred yards?

  Emma, you think too much about yourself. Think about him and all his troubles and you’ll be less likely to dwell on your own.

  “How are the children, Grant?” Lena asked, clutching his arm and stepping carefully over the ruts and puddles in the lane. John graveled it every year, but somehow it all managed to travel away, so that by spring, a fresh wagonload had to be raked down its length again.

  “They’re well,” he said. “Sarah wanted to go to school so bad last fall with all her cousins that I let her go, even though I didn’t think she was ready. She’s not so forward as Katie is. But she’s proved me wrong.”

  For a moment, Emma imagined herself in the little girl’s place. Who wouldn’t want to go to school with other children you knew and learn about the world, instead of staying with a babysitter in a house empty of your mother’s love? Emma would have begged to go, too.

  “And the baby? Some of the mothers were saying that a bad cough was going around this spring.”

  “He hasn’t got it yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.”

  “You called him Zachary, didn’t you?” How did Lena know this? Emma wondered. Did she keep track somehow of every child in the settlement?

  “Ja. I wanted to name him David after my father, but Lav—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Mostly we call him ‘babes.’”

  “How old is he now?”
>
  “He’s a little over two,” Grant replied.

  The poor little thing. His mother had left so soon after he was born, he’d barely had time to get attached to her.

  Emma stepped into the moment of awkwardness with a smile. “I hope you start calling him Zachary when he goes to school. Otherwise he’ll have a terrible time.”

  Grant’s lips flickered in what Emma hoped was an answering smile. “We’ll do that. Here you are, Lena.” He helped her up the front steps, Emma following close behind with the oxygen tank.

  “Denki, Grant,” Emma said. “It was kind of you.”

  “I was coming over anyway.” He settled his hat more firmly. “I’ll just take a few measurements, if that’s all right?”

  “Of course. Do whatever you need to.” And I’ll have the pleasure of watching you do it. Our windows are wide so we can see the beauty of God’s creation.

  But Lena had other ideas. “Emma, I’d like to take a rest. Could you read to me for a little while?”

  A knot of dismay and truculence formed instantly below Emma’s breastbone, but she fought it down. What could she say? No, I’d rather watch this married man working outside, Mamm.

  The sound of boots treading back and forth on the porch was familiar, and at the same time utterly new. She should be thanking God for her mother’s gentle way of removing her from temptation, instead of indulging in invisible rebellions. As Lena took off her shoes and stretched out on top of the quilt, Emma opened her Bible at the bookmark in Ecclesiastes.

  Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit.

  Emma sighed and began to read. Yes, between the two of them, Lena and the good Lord had quite the sense of humor.

  Emma closed Moses Yoder’s pasture gate behind her and walked through the wet grass. Thank goodness she’d put on her gums—rubber overshoes that the Youngie tended to avoid because they were ugly and favored by old ladies. But Emma figured she was old and eccentric enough to choose practicality over fashion without any noise from anyone. The seasonal creek at the very back of Amelia’s place was in full spate, and the sun had finally gotten down to business and caused the forget-me-nots to make a blue cloud of tiny blossoms over the grasses. By next month they’d be a sticky cloud of burrs, but until then, she’d enjoy their fleeting beauty.