Piece by Piece

by Laura Bradford

  “Was anyone else in here with the two of you?”

  Dropping his arms back to his sides, he made a mad dash to the opposite side of the barn, where various implements hung from hooks mounted into the walls. “No. It was just us. The boys are at school, Elijah and Lydia aren’t due back for another hour, at the very least, and there’s no way anyone else came into this barn without me knowing.”

  “Okay, so let’s think this through.”

  “Where did she go?” he yelled. “Where? I mean, one minute we’re feeding the calf and she’s telling me all about Wooly and how she thinks maybe he’s getting better and . . . Where. Is. She?”

  She held up her hand. “Who’s Wooly?”

  “One of the sheep. He’s a little slow, borderline blind, and maybe even a wee bit hard of hearing, too, but the kids love him and have managed to talk Elijah into not—”

  “Is he with the rest of them?”

  “He, who? You mean Wooly?” At her nod, he gestured in the general direction of the driveway. “Yeah, he’s with the others.”

  Beckoning for Caleb to follow, Dani led the way around the satiated calf, through the open barn door, onto the dirt driveway, and . . . “Voilà! Your niece.”

  Caleb staggered back a step, cupping his hand over his mouth.

  “She’s four,” Dani said by way of explanation. “That makes her pretty easy to figure out as long as you’re paying attention to all the clues.”

  His eyes drifted from Nettie to Dani and back again before he took off in a sprint much to the wide-eyed surprise of his target. “Nettie!” He dropped down to the little girl’s eye level and gathered her hands inside his own. “I’ve been looking all over for you! Why didn’t you come when I called you?”

  “Hi, Dani!” The little girl flashed a huge smile at Dani and then pointed at the slow-moving sheep on the other side of the split-rail fence. “I pretended I couldn’t hear like Wooly.”

  “Nettie, you can’t do that! You scared me; I thought—” At Dani’s hand on his arm, he stopped, caught the subtle yet rapid shake of her head, and drew in a long, slow breath instead. “Next time you want to come out here to check on Wooly, just tell me, okay? That way I can come see him, too, instead of running around the barn looking for you.”

  “Yah.” Then, pointing into the sheep pen, Nettie looked up at Dani. “That’s Wooly. He’s my friend.”

  She squatted down beside the little girl and looked through the opening between the fence rails. “He looks like a nice friend.”

  “He is!”

  “I’m glad.” For a few more moments, she watched the animal move across the pen, one blade of grass at a time, and then turned the little girl so they faced each other. “It’s important to let your uncle know where you’re going, okay? Because when your mamm and dat are not here, he needs to know.”

  The kapped head bobbed in a nod that lasted all of about a second before the cornflower-blue eyes that had dropped to the ground in shame were back on Dani’s. “I holded Little Guy’s bottle and he drank it all up!”

  “That’s very good.”

  Nettie’s answering smile dimmed almost the second it appeared on her round face. “But I didn’t say goodbye!” With a fast wave to Wooly, the little girl took a step or two toward the barn, stopped, and turned back to her uncle. “Can we go see Little Guy?”

  “Yes. We can.” When she resumed her trek to the barn, Caleb held out his hand and helped Dani back onto her feet. “Thank you. For coming when you heard my shouts, for having the presence of mind to stop and think, and for keeping me from losing my mind completely. I know it couldn’t have been a pretty sight in there.”

  Her eyes followed Nettie back to the barn. “You’re fine. Really. It’s par for the course with that age group. They wander.”

  “But you were so calm, so cool headed, and I was”—he snorted a laugh—“not.”

  “Practice, I guess,” she mumbled as she branched off toward the grossdawdy house. “Anyway, I’m going to head back inside and—”

  He stepped forward, back into her eyesight, and swept his hand toward the barn. “Could I ask you a favor? It’ll only take a few minutes—ten, fifteen, tops.”

  Wary, she stopped. “What kind of favor?”

  “I . . .” He looked from the barn, to the house, to his truck, his subsequent swallow slow and . . . nervous? Unsure? “Yeah, I left something at my dat’s farm that I really need. Something I want to show the boys when they get home from school. So I was wondering, if you don’t mind, maybe you could look after Nettie while I run over there?”

  She glanced down at her watch and then back up at Caleb. “The boys aren’t due home for almost three hours. Won’t Lydia be home before then?”

  Again, his eyes drifted past hers, his Adam’s apple bobbing with yet another swallow. “I think so, but I can’t say for sure. They hired a driver to take them.”

  “Okay, so why don’t you just take Nettie with you? I’m sure she’d love to see her grandparents.”

  He looked toward the barn again. “I could. But you saw her just now—she’s in her animal zone. Pulling her away from that for what will be a seconds-long stop seems kind of unfair, you know?”

  She took a step backward, her thoughts narrowing in on the letter she still had to write. The single paragraph she’d managed to pen so far needed a few tweaks, if not a complete redo.

  “It would be a huge help,” he continued, pulling her back to the present. “And I’m quite sure it would make Nettie’s day.”

  “Why? She barely knows me. It seems like she’d much rather tag along with you than—”

  “She wouldn’t. Watch.” Lifting his chin, he called out so his voice would be heard inside the barn, “Nettie? Can you come out here a minute?”

  Dani stepped forward. “What are you—”

  He silenced the rest of her question with his index finger. “Nettie?”

  Seconds later, the Amish child came running out to her uncle. “I am here,” she said, hopping from bare foot to bare foot.

  “I see that. Thank you.” Dropping down to Nettie’s eye level, he nudged his chin at Dani. “I have to run down the street real quick to get something I forgot. Would you rather get stuck in the car or would you rather stay here with Little Guy, and Wooly, and Dani?”

  “Caleb, if you word it that way she’s—”

  Nettie ran to Dani, took her hand, and tugged her toward the barn. “Come see Little Guy. He is a very nice calf.”

  “I’ve met your calf,” she said, glaring at Caleb. “If you go with your uncle you can see—”

  “Oh. Hey. Did you check on Sunshine and her babies yet today?” Caleb motioned first toward the barn and then at Dani. “One of the barn cats had a litter of kittens sometime over the past few days. Luke and I found them last night as we were closing things up for the night.”

  Nettie’s eyes widened with her smile. “Yah! She had six kittens.” Releasing her hold on Dani’s hand, she held up two fingers. “This many kittens have black spots on their tummies! And this many”—she bent one finger back down and then pointed at her nose—“have a spot here. And three have stripes!”

  “They’re really cute,” Caleb chimed in. “They’re so little you can’t really tell where their ears and eyes are. But that’ll change soon, right, kiddo?”

  “Yah!” Nettie returned her counting hand to Dani’s and tugged again. “Come see, Dani! Come see!”

  Caleb rocked back on the heels of his boots and grinned. “So then it’s settled. You two go look in on the kittens and I’ll be back in a few minutes. You won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  “Come, Dani! Maybe their eyes will be open!”

  “Probably not yet, kiddo, but you never know. And remember, you and the boys only named four of the kittens. That means two don’t have names yet. Maybe Dani will have a good idea for one, or both.”

  She tried to meet his gaze, to let him know—albeit silently—she wasn’t pleased with the latest turn of
events, but to no avail. Instead, he smiled at Nettie, gestured them toward the barn with a swoop of his thick hand, and then strode toward his truck with nary so much as a glance back at Dani.

  Seconds later, as his engine purred to a start, he tapped his hand against the exterior panel of the driver’s side door and grinned. “Be back in a couple of seconds.”

  * * *

  Lifting her wristwatch into the swath of sunlight coming in from the barn door behind them, she bit down on her lower lip in an attempt to stifle her groan. Somehow a couple of seconds had become five minutes . . . Ten minutes . . . And now fifteen minutes. But still, there was no sign of Caleb or his truck.

  “Do you want to name that one”—Nettie pointed from a white and black fist-sized mound of fur to an even smaller mound of tiger-striped fur—“or that one?”

  She glanced back at the still-empty driveway and listened closely. No gravel against tires, no slam of a car door, no tune being whistled, no I’m here filtering its way toward the hay-strewn corner of the Schlabachs’ barn now doing double duty as a temporary feline maternity ward.

  “Dani?”

  “I’m here, sweetie.” Giving in to the frustrated sigh that was no more Nettie’s fault than her own, Dani lowered herself onto the ground beside her friend’s daughter and really took a moment to soak up the mamma cat and her six sleeping newborns. “They sure are little, aren’t they?”

  “Yah! They are this big.” Nettie cupped her little hand in the space between them. “Luke says they are only a little bigger than the size of Little Guy’s hoof.”

  “So that’s the calf’s official name? Little Guy?”

  “Yah!”

  Nodding, Dani shifted to the left to afford a more unobstructed view of the barn’s newest additions. “Which kitten did you get to name?” she asked.

  Nettie scooted up onto her knees and inserted her finger between the railing’s first and second slats to indicate the little mound closest to the mother cat. Like one of the two she’d offered to Dani to name, this one was white with a few large, almost cow-like black spots visible on his exposed side. “I call him Spots. Because he has spots.”

  “I see that.”

  “And that one, he is Silly Nose. Mark named him that.” Nettie’s face grew serious. “I don’t think he has a silly nose. It is just hard to see because it is little.”

  Not wanting to disparage the six-year-old’s choice in names, she verbally nudged the little girl’s attention onto the next kitten. “And who is this one?” she asked.

  Nettie scooted forward until her chin was resting on the wooden rail. “That one is Mr. Paws. Luke picked that name.”

  “That’s a cute name.”

  “Yah. And that”—Nettie pointed to the next kitten—“is Bender. David named that kitten.”

  “So we have Spots, Silly Nose, Mr. Paws, and Bender. Very nice,” she mused. “Good solid names for”—she stopped, looked over at Nettie—“what is the mamma cat’s name again?”

  “Sunshine!”

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “She likes to sit in the sunshine,” Nettie said. “When I want to play with her and I cannot find her, I look for the sunshine and there she is!”

  Dani looked back at the feline now busily licking her babies, the fingers of sunlight through the open barn door stopping well shy of their makeshift bed. If the animal noticed, though, she showed no indication, her focus, her every ounce of energy, directed toward her young.

  “Which one, Dani?”

  Shaking away her gathering gloom, she turned back to Nettie. “Which one, what?” she echoed.

  “Which kitten do you want to name?”

  She looked again at the two nameless babies and, after careful consideration, pointed to the tiger-striped member of the crew. “How about we call that one Smokey? Or maybe Shadow? Or Fluffy? Or—Wait! I know; we could call it Button!”

  “Button?”

  “Because it’s cute as a button cuddled up to its mamma like that.”

  Nettie tilted her head left, then right, clearly considering the name. Then, poking her head through the slat, she looked down at the kitten in question, his tiny striped head now the focus of his mamma’s tongue. “Do you want to be Button?”

  After a second, maybe two, Nettie began to nod. Hard. “I think that kitten would like to be called Button.”

  “Do you think maybe we should check with Sunshine first? Since it is her kitten?” Dani asked.

  “Yah! I will ask!” Nettie poked her head through the opening again. “Sunshine? That kitty you are licking”—Sunshine paused in her licking to look up at the little girl and blink—“is Button, okay?”

  Sunshine blinked again and went right back to licking the kitten in question, much to Nettie’s clap of delight. “Sunshine likes it, Dani! She really, really does!”

  Dani answered Nettie’s near face-splitting smile with a tiny one of her own and then pointed the little girl’s focus back to the last unnamed kitten, its position next to Button making it a veritable shoo-in for the next lick bath. “Now what about that little one there? The one that looks a lot like Spots? That one needs to have a name, too, right?”

  “But Rose went to be with God.” The little girl’s smile disappeared as she deflated back down to the floor, her seemingly boundless energy gone in an instant. “She cannot name her kitten.”

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. I . . .” Recovering her gaze from its immediate nose dive, Dani looked up to find Nettie closing the gap between them with one big scoot. Less than a second later, the child’s head was nestling against Dani’s arm.

  “I miss Rose. She meeted Wooly, but she did not meet Sunshine or Poppa Pig.” Nettie slanted her chin to see the kittens again. “I think she would like Sunshine and Poppa Pig. I think she would like Spots, and Silly Nose, and Mr. Paws, and Bender, and Button, too. They are very nice. They are my friends. They would like to be friends with Rose, too.”

  Then, her tiny voice trembling, the child abandoned her view of the kittens in favor of Dani. “I like to make Rose smile and laugh with my jumps. I like to wave my hand at Rose when she eats. I like to walk on my toes very quiet when Mamm says she is sleeping. I like to sit with Rose right here”—she pointed at her dress-draped lap—“when Mamm sits next to me. I like to take walks with Mamm and Rose. They make Mamm happy. Now Mamm does not smile when we walk. She makes”—Nettie lifted her finger to Dani’s cheek—“wet like that, too.”

  Oh how she wanted to run, to put as much distance between herself and the woebegone face peering up at her as if she could provide some sort of answer, some sort of fix for that which had neither. Instead, she swiped the tears from her cheeks and quietly pulled the four-year-old onto her lap.

  “I want Rose to come back,” Nettie said, her bottom lip puckering with ready tears of her own. “But Luke says she cannot. Not ever.”

  Dani glanced back at the door, her heart pounding.

  Please, Caleb, please . . . Please come back . . . It’s been too long . . . I can’t do this . . . I—

  A flutter of activity in her lap became a hug as Nettie buried her face against Dani and began to cry—a sound so raw, so all-encompassing, it took a moment to find any words, let alone the right words.

  “Once you give someone your heart in love, they will never be far away.”

  Squeezing her eyes closed, she let the words, and the voice that delivered them in her thoughts, travel her back to a moment she hadn’t visited in years. There, she could feel her mother’s hand rubbing circles against her back. There, she could hear the soft, gentle sounds of reassurance and love. And there, the emptiness inside her chest felt a little less empty.

  It was a nice place to be if even for a little while—a place she needed, a place Nettie needed, too.

  Dani looked down at the little girl through parted lashes and began to rub her back, around and around and around. “Shhh . . . Shhh . . . It’s okay, Nettie,” she said against the little girl’s ear. “I
’m here. I’m here.”

  Seconds turned to minutes as she held the child close, letting her know, again and again, that she was there, and that it was okay to cry just as Dani’s mother had done for Dani so long ago.

  When the little girl’s tears finally subsided, Dani loosened their embrace just enough to afford a view of Nettie’s face. “Do you know what my mamm told me when my grandma—my grossmudder—died?” she asked, lacing her fingers behind Nettie. “When I wasn’t much older than you are now?”

  Nettie’s red-rimmed eyes widened. “Were you sad? Like me?”

  “Very much.”

  Shame dove the child’s gaze down to Dani’s lap. “Did you cry and cry like me?”

  “I sure did,” she said. “Because I loved my grossmudder very much. But when I stopped crying, my mom—my mamm—told me something very special.”

  “What?”

  “She told me that once you give someone a piece of your heart, it is theirs forever—even when you cannot see them. Like . . .” She trailed off, searching for the best way to help a four-year-old understand something so big. But just as she was fearing she couldn’t, the words just seemed to appear on her tongue. “Like right now. Your mamm is not here in the barn with us, right?”

  Nettie shook her head.

  “Okay . . . But you still love her and she still loves you, right?”

  “Yah!”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “About Mamm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mamm bakes yummy bread that I can eat!”

  “What else?”

  “She plants pretty flowers!”

  “What else?”

  “She cleans my clothes!”

  “Hmmm . . .” She weighed the direction the answers had taken and then subtly reclaimed the wheel. “Tell me something she does that makes you feel all happy inside.”

  “She kisses me right here”—Nettie pointed at her forehead, a smile stretching her cupid bow mouth wide—“before I go to sleep.”

  Bingo . . .

  “Is that why you smiled just now? Because it made you happy to think about her doing that to you?”

  “Yah!”

  Halfway there . . .