by Marta Perry
And if you do, what then? her conscience asked. Someday, when it’s safe, you’ll leave, going back to raise Gracie in the English world.
When she did, she would break her sister’s heart again. It would be even worse than the first time, worse than not being here when Mammi died. Grief took hold of her throat, so sharp and hard she could barely breathe.
Bishop Mose stood to deliver the long sermon. She tried to focus on his words, blocking out every disturbing thought.
The bishop began to speak about forgiveness, that corner-stone of Amish faith. Forgive as you would be forgiven. His voice was firm, but gentle and compassionate as always.
She hadn’t expected to be bothered by the service today, beyond a little awkwardness. She’d assumed she could sit through it, saying her own prayers, thinking her own thoughts.
She couldn’t. The detachment with which she’d been able to view the singing had vanished. Bishop Mose seemed to be speaking directly to her, and when he mentioned the Prodigal Son, she felt as if she’d been dipped in boiling water.
She tried to shut out his message. She couldn’t. Her emotions battled, tearing at her, and she had to fight to keep back tears.
Gracie jerked awake on her lap, probably sensing her emotions, and started to cry. Anna cradled her, patting her, but it was no use. Gracie wailed, and Anna wanted to wail with her.
Murmuring an excuse to Leah, she slid out of the row, carrying Gracie quickly toward the door and out into the sunshine.
The moment they were outside, Gracie stopped crying as abruptly as if Anna had thrown a switch. She inhaled deeply, feeling her own anguish subside—still raw, but eased.
She jumped when Leah slipped an arm around her waist.
“Are you all right?”
“Ja. We’re fine.” She bounced Gracie in her arms as she started walking toward the farmhouse, pretending that Leah’s concern was for the baby, not for her. “She stopped crying as soon as we came out.”
“Gut.” Leah walked beside her, holding little Rachel’s hand. “But it was not Gracie I was worrying about. It was you.”
Apparently Leah wouldn’t let her get away with evading the question. Anna took another deep breath, trying to compose herself. She mustn’t say anything, not when her emotions were so raw. It would be too easy to say more than she should.
She shouldn’t, but the words burst out of her anyway. “I’m sorry.” Her voice choked. “I wasn’t here for Mammi. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, Anna.” Leah’s arms went around her, warm and strong and comforting, as they’d always been. “I know you must grieve over Mammi, but she loved you. She didn’t blame you.”
“I should have been here. I don’t even know how—” She stopped, not sure she wanted to hear details.
Leah drew back so that she could see Anna’s face. “Mamm was very peaceful at the end. I think maybe she always knew the cancer would come back, and she’d accepted it. She died at home, with Daadi holding her hand. She just seemed to slip away between one breath and the next, like stepping through a doorway.”
Anna felt as if her heart were breaking. “I should have been here. How could she forgive me for not being here?”
Leah wiped the tears from Anna’s cheeks. “You know the answer to that question, now that you have a child of your own. You never stop loving. Never stop forgiving.”
“Ja, I guess so.” She glanced at Gracie, who was staring at them with wondering eyes. “I just wish I had been here to say good-bye.”
Leah patted her arm. “You’re here now,” she said simply. “That’s enough.”
She should say now that she’d be leaving. Say it quickly, before she hurt Leah again. But she couldn’t. Gracie’s safety was at stake.
You could stay. The voice spoke quietly in her heart, startling her with a possibility she hadn’t even considered. You could stay.
No, she couldn’t. She fell into step with Leah, moving toward the house.
She couldn’t go back to living this way. Her independence was too important to her. She couldn’t give that up.
But they love you here. They love Gracie. You could be safe.
They mounted the steps toward the porch. The scent of coffee floated out of the open door, announcing that someone was anticipating the end of the worship service. Voices came with the aroma, clearer as they moved into the house.
“. . . should be on her knees before the congregation, she should, not sitting there as if she’s done nothing wrong—”
The speaker, realizing she had company, cut off her words.
Too late. Anna stopped, vaguely aware of Leah’s arm going around her.
She couldn’t deal with this. Clutching Gracie, Anna pulled free, turning to flee across the yard, stopping only when she realized that there was nowhere to go.
Leah reached her a second later, taking her hand. “Anna, it’s all right. Don’t listen to them. They don’t know—”
Anna shook her head violently. “Don’t. They only said what everyone else is thinking. I don’t belong here anymore.”
“Wait, here is another handful of receipts.” Samuel passed the papers over to Anna, who sat next to him at Joseph’s desk in the shop, trying to make sense of their bookkeeping.
She took the receipts, raising her eyebrows a little. “Are you sure that’s all?” She obviously wasn’t impressed with their system.
“I hope so.” He hitched his chair a little closer to the desk, frowning at the stacks of papers. “I did tell you that I’m no gut at the paperwork, ain’t so?”
“You did.” She sorted through receipts, her face intent on organizing. “But you’re not the only one. Some of these date from before Joseph was hurt.”
“We get so involved in the work, you see.” That wasn’t much of an excuse, but Anna nodded.
“I didn’t realize how busy the shop was. You have almost more work than you can handle,” she said.
“Ja. Between the needs of dairy farmers to use machinery to meet government regulations and all the small businesses our people now run, it’s commonplace to use hydraulic and air pumps powered by diesel engines. So that means more machines to be repaired or converted all the time.”
“So Joseph’s love of tinkering has paid off, I guess.” But her face was shadowed when she said the words, and he suspected she was thinking of the accident. She didn’t speak of it, though, just focused more intently on the receipts.
The activity did give him a chance to study her face and wonder how much she was hiding behind her concentration on the work. Myra had told him about Anna overhearing Mary Stoltzfus’s unkind words, having heard about it in her turn from Leah. If Anna had thought to keep it quiet, she’d be disappointed.
Myra had been near tears when she told him. With all her tender heart, she wanted to see Anna settle down and be happy here.
Anna will not talk about it, she’d said. She should. You try to get her to speak, Samuel. You’ve been through it, so you know.
Ja, he knew. And he cared, but it was dangerous, talking to Anna about his time away. Talking would reveal his own still-raw places. And whether Anna would be helped if he did—that he didn’t know.
Anna tapped a stack of receipts into neatness and fastened them with a paper clip. “You’ve got to do better,” she said, frowning sternly at him. “You and Joseph both. These tax records have to be in order for the quarterly payment.”
“Ja, I know.” He ran his fingers around his collar. He had a healthy respect for the IRS, and he didn’t want to make any mistakes, especially with Joseph laid up. “You tell me what to do, and I’ll try to do it.”
“I think the simplest thing would be for you to put every scrap of paper for the business into the boxes at the end of every day.” She gestured to the small cardboard boxes she’d placed on the desk, one marked for income and one for expenses. “Don’t try to enter them into the ledger. I’ll take care of that.”
“Gut, gut. Nothing would make me happier.”
“I hope Joseph feels that way.” A faint line appeared between her brows. “I wouldn’t want him to think I’m interfering.”
“He’ll not think that. And even if he does . . .” Samuel hesitated. “You’d know it was just the pain and frustration speaking, ain’t so?”
She nodded. “It’s hard for him to be laid up this way, I know.”
“He should be happy you understand so much about keeping the books. I’d be lost in a blizzard of paper if I tried.”
A smile chased the worried look from her eyes. “My boss used to say that. The owner of the restaurant where I worked. He was a wonderful chef, but he couldn’t keep track of finances at all, so I helped him with that. He liked to say that was why he gave me time off for my college classes.”
“It sounds as if he was a gut friend,” Samuel said, wondering how he could possibly lead the conversation into what had happened at worship. Myra was counting on him to do it.
“Antonio always said the people who worked at his restaurant were like family, and that’s how he treated us. Jannie worked there, too. That’s how we became close.”
“I’m glad you had friends there,” he said. “It can be lonely out there among the English.”
She nodded, her eyes darkening, and he thought she’d experienced that loneliness, too.
“But you decided to come back,” he ventured. “I guess, with the boppli, you wanted to raise her with your real family.”
For a moment something a little startled showed in her eyes and was quickly hidden. Then she nodded. “Gracie has loved it here.”
She almost sounded as if she were saying good-bye. Maybe he’d just have to be blunt about it.
“I heard what happened with Mary Stoltzfus yesterday. You are upset.”
She pressed her lips together. “It was nothing. Do you have a copy of the last quarterly tax form?”
He passed the form over. “Ironic, that was. Seems to me Mary Stoltzfus would have been better off in the barn hearing Bishop Mose talk about forgiveness. Maybe she’d have learned something.”
Anna’s hands stopped moving on the ledger. She pressed them flat against the pages, staring down. He heard the soft inhalation of her breath.
“It’s not easy to forgive,” she murmured. “Or to be forgiven.”
“No. It’s not.” He thought about his own return. Forgiveness was never easy, especially when it was yourself you had to forgive.
“When you came back . . .” she began, but then stopped, shaking her head. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter.” He startled himself, as much as her, when he put his hand over hers on the ledger. He could feel her tension in the taut muscles. “I don’t know that it helps you, but when I came back, I had doubts about belonging again. Fears about how other people would accept me, but mostly doubts about why I came back.”
She looked up then, eyes surprised and intent. “You doubted yourself?”
He wanted to back away from it, deny that he doubted, then or now. It seemed a weakness, admitting it. But how could he help Anna’s struggles if he didn’t?
“I came back because my mamm was sick. I had to, and I wanted to. My family needed me.” He paused, not wanting to put it into words. “I came back for gut reasons, but not because of faith. When I knelt before the congregation, I knew they forgave me, but I felt like a fraud.” His voice thickened. “Sometimes I still do.”
It was very quiet in the shop, so quiet that all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing.
Then Anna gave a little sigh. “Denke, Samuel. Thank you for telling me. For being my friend.”
Friend. The word echoed in his mind. He had thought he wanted to be Anna’s friend, but all at once he knew he wanted to be more than that. And the idea scared him half to death.
“No, no, Sarah.” Anna gently removed the toddler, who was trying to reach the squeezer they’d set up on the picnic table in the yard, ready to do a big batch of tomatoes. “That’s not for little ones. You and Gracie play with your ball.”
She tossed the ball across the lawn and watched Sarah run after it, her sturdy little legs pumping. Gracie stood, waving both hands in the air as if she’d fly. Apparently deciding she could go faster crawling, she plopped onto her bottom and sped after her cousin.
“These tomatoes probably look like a bucketful of red balls to them,” Myra said, pouring a pail of tomatoes into the hopper.
Anna shoved the wooden plunger down and began turning the crank. “Wouldn’t they have a grand time with them? We once went to a tomato battle . . .” She let that sentence die out.
“You and your friend?” Myra didn’t seem bothered by the mention of Anna’s life in the English world.
Anna nodded, watching the tomato juice pour out of the squeezer into a bowl. “Jannie and some other friends. It was a tomato festival at the county fairgrounds.”
Liz had gone. And Carl, the boy Anna had dated for a month or two before realizing they had nothing in common other than sitting beside each other in class. Pete had been there for a while, grumbling and complaining.
Then he’d disappeared for an hour and come back, bright and talkative. She should have realized what that meant, but she’d been too naive, and was just glad that Pete wasn’t making Jannie miserable any longer.
“And they threw tomatoes at each other?” Myra cleaned the next batch, hands moving quickly as she cut out any bad spots.
“Ja.” Anna smiled, forcing thoughts of Pete and his drug use out of her mind. “Picture a game of eck ball, only with tomatoes.”
Myra giggled. “That sounds like fun. Nobody seems to play eck ball much anymore.”
Eck ball, or corner ball, was a uniquely Amish sport. “Maybe boys don’t like getting clobbered with that hard ball.”
“You’d never get me doing it, that’s for certain-sure,” Myra said. She glanced at the tomato juice, seeming to measure the amount. “I was thinking I could cook down some sauce and make spaghetti when the family comes on Friday.”
“I seem to recall everyone telling you that you weren’t supposed to fix a thing,” Anna said. “This is to be a chance for everyone to visit with Joseph, not to give you extra work.”
“Ach, spaghetti is easy enough, and I know the children like it. Besides, it is Gracie’s first birthday we’re celebrating, so we have to make cake, too, ja?”
Gracie’s birthday. Anna’s heart clutched at the thought. “I can’t believe she’ll be a year old already.”
“I know what you mean. When Sarah turned one—” She stopped, swinging around as the back door opened. Daad appeared, supporting Joseph as he made his way slowly out onto the porch.
“We thought we’d come out and watch you work,” Daadi said.
Joseph nodded, pressing one hand against his ribs. “Got to make sure you’re doing it right.”
“You’d best be careful, or I might come after you with these tomatoes.” Anna held up red-splashed hands.
Joseph chuckled and then groaned, clutching his ribs tighter. “Ach, don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much.”
“Then you’d best stay away from these two little girls.” She nodded to Sarah and Gracie, who were rolling across the grass like a pair of puppies. “They’re being a circus.”
He smiled, his face looking less drawn every day, it seemed. “They make me feel gut.” He settled in the chair Myra held for him, looking up into her face and saying something soft that made her smile and touch his cheek despite the tomato stains on her hand.
Anna’s heart squeezed. The love between Myra and Joseph seemed to grow stronger with this adversity over Joseph’s accident and with the waiting to hear the results of Myra’s amniocentesis.
She had been waiting these past few days, too, and she wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. A sign, maybe. Stay? Or go?
Her emotions had been all over the place. She hadn’t even realized until she sat in worship on Sunday morning that she’d been considering staying. Thinking
about being Amish again, forever. Committing herself to bringing Gracie up Amish.
Then had come that overheard nastiness, and she’d found it impossible to hang on to her emotions. Luckily no one had been there to see but Leah.
Of course they’d all found out anyway. If you wanted to keep anything to yourself, you’d better not belong to an Amish family, where one person’s trouble or joy belonged to everyone.
She should have been annoyed that Samuel, of all people, had been the one to speak to her about it. Should have been, but wasn’t. Samuel had been through this situation, so he knew. And he cared—cared enough to talk about his own deepest feelings to her.
Since then, they hadn’t had a private conversation. They’d both been busy, constantly surrounded by other people. Still, if he’d wanted to, he could have found some excuse to be alone with her.
She glanced across the lawn. With the workday over, Samuel had gone on to his second job, working the big gelding. They were in the ring now. By this time, the horse was following him around like a puppy dog.
Daad gave her the next pail of tomatoes. “I thought I’d help you and let Myra have a break.”
She nodded, watching as Joseph held out his arms to his small daughter. Myra bent over them, her hand moving, probably unconsciously, to stroke her belly.
“Are they going to be all right?” Anna asked the question softly, turning to her father as if she were a small child again.
“It will be as God wills.” Daad’s fingers closed over hers on the handle. “They will deal with whatever comes, with His help.”
She nodded, tears stinging her eyes. Her emotions were just too close to the surface for comfort.
Daadi busied himself with cleaning the next batch. “Little Gracie likes to watch Samuel with the horses, doesn’t she?”
Anna nodded, a little surprised by the change of subject. “Samuel certainly has a gift for training horses. I never thought he’d have that skittish animal practically eating out of his hand.”
“Samuel knows how to be slow and patient. The creatures sense that. After all the troubles with his daad running away and his mamm dying, he’s turned into a gut man.” Daadi glanced at her, his eyes bright with curiosity.