Emma brushed the residual chip crumbs from her hands and then hugged her knees to her chest. “Tell me more. Please.”
And so he did. He talked of borrowing his mother’s car to drive out to the ice cream shop where Ruby worked that Friday, and how he kept swapping places with other people in line until he was sure it would be Ruby who would take his order.
“I still remember that moment when she looked up from the ice cream case and she realized who I was.” Interlacing his fingers between his head and the tree, Brad lifted his chin until he could see the sky through the bare branches. “She was halfway through the same can I help you I’d heard her say at least a half dozen times while I was playing leapfrog in line, when her eyes widened, the words stopped, and that smile I hadn’t been able to forget since the previous day was trained squarely on me.
“For a minute, I actually forgot there was a line of people behind me. All I could do was just stand there, smiling back at her. The longer I stood there, smiling, the pinker her cheeks got until the girl working the case next to her said something in Ruby’s ear, prompting Ruby to ask me for my order.”
“Was it hard to leave?” Emma prodded, fascinated.
“It would’ve been, sure. But I didn’t leave. I gave her my order, which I still remember—vanilla with this peanut butter hard shell stuff—and watched her scoop it into the cone. When she handed it to me, I gave her the money and found a small table in the corner where I could eat it.... Though it pretty much melted down my hand on account of the fact I spent more time watching her than actually working on my cone.”
“Did she know you were still there?”
“At first, no. But after a while, the girl she was working with looked up, spotted me watching Ruby, and whispered something to her. Next thing I knew, Ruby’s cheeks were all red again, and she was peeking at me, peeking at her.” Brad’s laugh cut through the still air. “After a while, I couldn’t keep sitting there, you know? My ice cream was gone and people wanted my table.... So I moved outside and sat on a bench. Two hours later, when her shift was up, I was there, waiting.”
Emma reached for a cookie and rested it atop her knees. “Was she surprised?”
“She was. She was even more surprised when I offered to drive her home. But she accepted and we talked all the way back to her parents’ farm.”
“What did you talk about?” Emma asked. “Or do you not remember any longer?”
“I remember everything about my time with Ruby . . . everything.” Dropping his hands back to his lap, Brad reached for his drink and took a sip. “I asked her about being Amish. She explained to me that she was getting ready to be baptized soon. She asked me about school and my summer and why I’d been at her English neighbor’s house the previous day. So I told her about my job with my uncle and how my mom wanted me to learn a trade. When we passed the turnoff to this very spot, she pointed it out to me and told me how it was one of her favorite places to go and think.”
Emma drew back. “Ruby came here? To think?”
“She did.” He pointed her attention to the large rock Emma knew all too well. “She liked to sit right there and look out over the pond at all different times of day, but mostly late afternoon, when the sun’s position made it so the top of the pond was—”
“Covered with sparkles,” Emma finished in a gasped whisper. “I-I sit on that same rock! And I like that part of day best, too!”
Draping his hand atop hers, he squeezed. “Like mother, like daughter, it appears.”
It was a lot to take in. A lot to digest. Still, she wanted more. Needed more. “So what happened when you got to Grossdawdy’s house?”
“Grossdawdy? Who is that?”
“That means grandfather. But he would not have been Ruby’s grossdawdy. He was her dat.”
“Ahhh, okay.” Brad tugged at a blade of dead grass beside the blanket and, when the ground released it, wrapped it around his finger. “Here I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Amish, yet that is a word I did not know.”
She broke off a piece of her uneaten cookie but stopped short of taking a bite. “That is because Mamm and Ruby’s grossdawdy went to the Lord when Mamm—I mean, Rebeccah, was not much older than my sister Annie.”
When he reached the blade’s end, he unwrapped it and tossed it back onto the earth, his eyes returning to hers. “When I dropped Ruby off that night, I knew I had to see her again. When I said that to her, her cheeks grew red again, but she did not say no. She said only that Sunday was the Lord’s day—that it was a day of worship and, later, a hymn sing with friends. So I reminded her Sunday was still two days away. That Saturday came first. When she did not say anything, I thanked her for telling me about Miller’s Pond and that I was going to check it out the next afternoon with my fishing pole. And then, when I drove away, I said a prayer—something I didn’t do much of as an eighteen-year-old boy who was too busy being an eighteen-year-old boy.”
“You said a prayer? Why?”
“That Ruby would show up.”
“And she did.” Emma didn’t pose it as a question. She didn’t need to. Her very existence on this earth made the statement safe.
This time, when Brad smiled, it was both happy and sad all at the same time. “That day was our first date as far as I’m concerned. I remember it all. I remember the feel of the sun on my left cheek as I stood right there.” He pointed to the edge of the pond closest to them. “I remember the way my heart started thumping the second I heard the crunching of old leaves behind me. Because when I did, I knew my prayer had been answered. And I remember the way her hands were trembling when I turned around.”
“Why were her hands trembling?” Emma asked, wide-eyed.
“She was nervous. I was nervous. We knew why we were both there—I wanted to see her, and she wanted to see me.” Raking his fingers through his wavy blond hair, Brad exhaled a burst of air at the memory. “I thought about asking her if she wanted to try fishing, but I didn’t want to spend our time together worrying about whether anything was biting on the line. So I suggested a walk. And that’s when she pointed to her—and now your—rock and said maybe we could just sit. And talk.”
He brushed away crumbs from the blanket between them and then took another bite of his sandwich. “I learned about her family, she learned about mine. She told me she enjoyed painting on milk cans, and I told her my favorite part of working with my uncle was when I got to build things—steps, decks, sheds. Told her I wanted to build whole houses one day. And, after a while, she told me about Samuel Gingerich.”
Emma stared at Brad across her half-eaten cookie. “I know Samuel Gingerich. He lives on the other side of the Beiler farm. He and his wife, Hannah, have six children and a seventh on the way . . .”
“Seven kids,” Brad mumbled. “Wow.”
Pushing off the blanket, he wandered over to her favorite rock. Emma, in turn, abandoned the rest of her cookie and followed.
“How do you know Samuel Gingerich?” she asked.
“I don’t.” Brad ran his fingers along the flattest part of the rock, closing his eyes briefly as he did. “Not really, anyway. Ruby told me this Samuel guy had driven her home from the previous hymn sing. And with me being English, I didn’t really register what she was saying, at first. I mean, I gave female classmates lifts home after school all the time. But as we sat and talked, she explained to me how courting works. How, once she was baptized, the next step in her life would be marriage. Samuel Gingerich was looking to be the one she’d start courting and then marry.”
Shaking off the memory, he retracted his hand from the rock and slowly lowered himself to the very spot where Emma often sat. “I tell you, Emma, hearing that was like getting hit with a two-by-four or something. I know I’d literally only met her two days earlier, and even with that, I still didn’t know her beyond a few conversations, but the thought of her getting married? To someone else? I couldn’t do it.... I couldn’t let it happen.”
Mesmerized
, Emma sat down on the far end of the rock, Brad’s ability to make her feel as if she was at the pond, with him and Ruby, like nothing she’d ever experienced before. “What did you do?”
“I asked her to give me a little time to get to know her.” His gaze skirted the pond and their food-strewn blanket before settling back on Emma. “She told me about her upcoming baptism and what it meant. That she couldn’t just take up with me, an Englisher. So I asked her about the way she kept looking back at me that first day, and about her reaction to seeing me at the ice cream shop the next day, and about her being there, with me, at the pond at that moment. And then, before she could answer, I told her why I had stood there, watching her walk away that first day. . . . Why I went to the ice cream shop and waited to drive her home afterward . . . And why I’d prayed that she would come to the pond that day . . .”
“Why did you do all those things?” Emma asked.
“Because the moment I saw her, I knew Ruby was the one for me.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she stayed silent, the man’s words, and the raw honesty with which they were spoken, in direct contrast to Mamm’s regarding Brad’s feelings for Ruby. Unless . . .
“What did Ruby say?”
“At first, nothing. But just as I was starting to think I’d made a complete fool of myself, putting my heart on the line like I did, she told me she felt it, too. And that she was scared.”
“I would be scared, too,” Emma said, her voice suddenly hoarse. “You are an Englisher, and she was planning to be baptized.”
Nodding, he repositioned himself on the rock so as to face Emma directly. “I didn’t really know what that meant for the Amish—the part about being baptized. I didn’t realize what was expected by her community and what she, herself, would have to eliminate from her life moving forward. I just figured her biggest worry was about me being English. That she was scared because she didn’t know my world all that well. So I told her we’d take it slow. That we’d get to know each other on dates.”
“Dates?” Emma echoed.
His answering laugh filled the space between them. “Oh, Emma, sometimes, when I look at you, I feel like I’ve rewound back twenty-three years and . . .” He waved away the rest of his sentence only to gather his next breath in time with his exit from the top of the rock. “She wasn’t baptized yet, so that was a plus in our corner. So, too, was the fact she was still technically on Rumspringa. But she’d already made the decision to be baptized the next time the bishop did one and so we had to get creative about how and when we’d see each other. I didn’t want to just always come here. I wanted to take her out, get rid of her fear about the English world, and get to know everything about her that I could.
“Sometimes those dates came during the time she’d have been riding her scooter home after work. Instead of her spending all that time getting home, I’d throw her scooter in the back of my truck and we’d use that time to do something together. Sometimes those dates happened when all her chores were done and her parents thought she was working, but she wasn’t. And sometimes—”
“You mean, Ruby . . . lied?”
“No. She just didn’t correct them when they assumed she’d been at work.”
“But she would not have had money to give her dat on days she did not really work.”
“I gave her money. From my job.”
“But that is not work,” Emma protested.
“Trust me, kiddo, it was worth every penny and then some. Because it meant Ruby and I could spend time together—real time, on real dates.” He stopped, his smile draining from his face. “I’ve replayed every moment we ever spent together hundreds—no, thousands—of times over the past twenty-two years. In fact, I’m not sure I’d still be here right now if it wasn’t for those moments . . . and you.”
She recovered her gaped mouth. “Me?”
He held his hands out to her and, when she took them, pulled her to her feet, the emotion in his blue eyes surely reflected in her own. “I wanted to be the kind of man my little one would’ve been proud of. If she’d lived.”
“I did live,” Emma whispered.
“Thank God for that.”
Chapter 9
She was just rounding the final bend in the road between Miller’s Pond and the farm when the clip-clop of an approaching horse and buggy forced her thoughts into the moment. Lifting her hand as a shield against the late-afternoon sun, Emma stepped to the side of the road and waited for the charcoal-gray buggy of her brethren to draw close enough she could identify the horse or its driver.
Yet just as the white marking between the mare’s eyes was starting to click into place, Mary’s round face peeked around the edge of the buggy cover. “Emma, hello! Isn’t this a wonderful surprise!”
Relieving her hand of sun-shielding duty, Emma waved to her friend and waited for the buggy’s shadow to engulf her. When it did, she mustered the closest thing she could to a smile, lifted her gaze to her friend, and wobbled a hairbreadth at the second face peeking out around Mary’s.
“Hello, Emma.”
She shifted her weight across her boot-clad feet and waited for the sudden flapping inside her chest to stop or, at the very least, slow enough to let her think straight. “Levi . . . Mary . . . hello.”
Levi’s large brown eyes held hers for a moment before the quiet jut of his chin sent her focus in the direction she’d just come. “It is getting cold.”
“Yah.”
Rolling her eyes toward the buggy’s ceiling, Mary jumped in. “So where are you coming from and where did you get that?”
She followed her friend’s finger down to her own hand and the last of the black and white cookies Brad had insisted she take as he headed back to his office. “I just got them, is all.”
A glance back at Mary yielded a raised brow—a raised brow Emma knew meant more questions were near if she didn’t head them off. Fast. “Would you like a cookie?” Emma asked, holding one out to Levi. “They are very good.”
“Very good are your oatmeal cookies.”
The unexpected praise scurried her gaze toward her boots. The sudden loss of the cookie from her fingers redirected it back to Mary.
“I am not picky about my cookies.” Mary’s grin receded long enough to take a bite of the vanilla side of the cookie. “Yah, it is as good as it looks.”
“Mary!” Levi scolded.
“What? You turned it down! It is not my fault if you are ferhoodled.” Again, Mary rolled her eyes before bringing her full attention back to Emma. “So where are you coming from?”
“Miller’s Pond.”
“With cookies?”
“Yah.”
“Why were you there?” Mary asked, the cookie all but forgotten.
“I . . .” She cast about for something to say short of the truth she didn’t want to share in front of Levi. In the end, she settled on being as vague as possible. “I had something to do.”
The second the words were out, she knew she’d chosen the wrong response. Vague didn’t work with Mary. Vague with her friend was like dangling a mouse in front of one of the barn cats and expecting it to walk the other way.
In short, it didn’t work.
Turning to her brother, Mary gestured outside the buggy. “If it is okay, I would like to walk with Emma to her farm. When she is there, I will start home and you can pick me up when you are done at Bishop King’s.”
“I can walk alone, Mary,” Emma protested. “It is still plenty light out.”
“Yah. But if I walk with you, it is less time in the buggy with”—Mary pointed at her brother—“him.”
His eyes on Emma, Levi addressed his sister. “I have a much better idea.”
“This should be good . . .” Mary teased.
“Perhaps you should walk, and Emma shall ride with me.”
“Hmmmm . . .” Mary’s grin moved from teasing to something that made Emma’s cheeks grow even warmer. “Perhaps that would be good. But not today. Today, I will walk wi
th Emma. She has much to tell me, don’t you, Emma?”
She wanted to protest, but the truth was, she did want some time with Mary. So much had happened since they’d last spoken, so much she wanted to share. Before she could even nod, though, Mary was out of the buggy and standing beside her, the girl’s arm snaking its way around Emma’s.
“There is no need to hurry, Levi,” Mary instructed. “If I make it home before you do, I will think about setting a spot for you at the dinner table.”
“Mary!”
Levi’s soft laugh led Emma’s widened eyes back to his. “It is okay, Emma. I am used to my sister. But she forgets the many things I find in the barn that I could put in her room if she is not nice.”
“Levi Fisher, you would not dare!”
With a wink directed solely at Emma, Levi urged the horse on its way with a firm click of his tongue that was quickly drowned out by Mary’s answering huff. “If Levi so much as puts a mouse in my room, he will not eat for days.”
It felt good to laugh, and laugh she did. “I don’t think your mamm would let Levi go hungry, Mary.”
“Maybe not. But I could do something to his food to make it taste bad.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Mary’s answering shrug made Emma laugh even more. “You are right. Maybe. But it is fun to think about sometimes. Just as it is fun to think of you being my sister one day.”
Emma stopped, mid-step. “How could I be your sister?”
“When you and Levi marry.”
This time, her laugh was more of a snort as she wiggled out from her friend’s hold and reclaimed her earlier pace. “You are talking nonsense today, Mary.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Liddy Mast will be your sister one day.” Emma stopped, spun around, and batted her eyelashes until Mary caught up. “And when she is, Liddy will do this”—she batted them harder—“across the table at you every time she and Levi come for supper.”
Mary held up her palm. “Please. Do not say such things.”
“Why? I am not like them. I am like him. I speak the truth.”
“Not like them? Who is . . .” Mary’s eyes widened, narrowed, and then widened again. “Wait! You are like him? As in—”
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