Naomi waited for him to elaborate, her hands in her lap, twisting and turning the paper napkin.
“I had met Paisley, years ago. She had worked as a waitress at a restaurant near the office of Schrock Investments. Jake and I used to grab lunch there. During that year when I took off, I stayed at her apartment a few nights while I was trying to find work. Now and then . . . well, we would have too much to drink and get carried away.”
Naomi’s cheeks reddened, but her grip on the napkin loosened.
With great tenderness he lifted her face up. “Naomi, nine months ago, if I had known what was waiting for me with you . . . I never would’ve . . . I never imagined I’d fall in love with an Amish girl who lived next door to my grandmother. I never dreamed of the consequences, that I would be hurting someone I loved.” She started to say something, but he put his fingers softly on her lips. “Do you have regrets?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Nothing could ever change the way I feel about you, Tobe. Or that we belong together.”
Tobe’s mouth began quivering and his face crumpled as tears filled his eyes. He brushed the back of his hand across his eyes and drew in a shaky breath before he was able to go on. “Truly? No regrets? Because now is the time to say so.” He asked with a kind of stillness in his eyes as if her answer was especially important.
She smiled, feeling light-headed all of a sudden. Feeling lighthearted. “None. Not a one.”
Rose kept glancing at the kitchen clock—it was after five—then looked out the window. The table had been laid with more than usual care. All of Tobe’s favorite foods had been prepared.
She had wanted to be sure that everything was perfect to welcome Tobe home. Instead, it was chaos. Rain had started and was now pummeling the farm. Baby Sarah seemed particularly fussy this afternoon, Luke was teasing Sammy, something was bothering Mim and she wouldn’t say what—she had the energy of a trapped bird. Mammi Vera truculent, Bethany in a mood . . . this would be no way to start a new life. She sighed. If only it would stop raining.
Her thoughts drifted to Paisley’s whereabouts. She teetered between relief that the girl was gone and concern that she would come back. What irked her more than anything was that Paisley had left with nothing settled. Nothing!
Rose glanced out the kitchen window again. And suddenly, there was Tobe, walking up the driveway with a satchel in his hand, rain running off the brim of his hat. Her big, handsome, restless son. His smile was tired. Her heart skipped with worry about him, as it so often did. A loud whoop sailed down from the upstairs, then a beat of footsteps clamored down the stairs as Luke and Sammy tried to beat each other out the door to greet their brother. They all rushed out to welcome home the prodigal and soon the farmhouse of Eagle Hill was filled with a happy chaos.
Tobe paid special attention to Mammi Vera, which made her glow with happiness. After supper, which was wonderful and noisy, he admired all the improvements to the farm and said the blueberry cobbler was the best thing he’d eaten in years. But he never held the baby, Rose noticed, nor glanced in the baby’s direction when she fussed.
Before turning in, Tobe went to the barn to check on the animals and was gone for quite a while. When he came inside, he had such a pensive look on his face that Vera asked him what he was thinking. “It’s so quiet here—I’d forgotten what silence sounds like in the countryside.”
“That’s why we live here,” Mammi Vera said, delighted.
“That’s why we live here,” Tobe said flatly.
Mim had never felt so at sea. She shifted on the cot to try to get more comfortable. It had seemed to her when she went to bed that she could forget all her worries, that she could sleep and everything was going to be all right, but she awoke in the middle of the night with the horrible realization that two additional people knew she was Mrs. Miracle. Bethany and Ella didn’t worry her, they weren’t loose cannons. But these two . . . there was no telling what could happen. She tried to push that worry out of her head, but crazy thoughts kept shooting through her mind. Maybe she could go ask Bethany right now. Shake her awake and say, “That lady with the spiky blonde hair in the guest flat found out I’m Mrs. Miracle. Tell me what to do.”
Earlier this morning, she had delivered breakfast to the guest flat, like she usually did. Brooke Snyder had a strange look on her face, pinched and pleased. Mim asked if she were feeling well, and she answered her with, “Very well, thank you.” She pointed to the newspaper. “So . . . perhaps you’d like to compose a Mrs. Miracle letter while you’re here?”
Mim gasped, too surprised to deny she wrote the letters. “You won’t tell, will you?”
Brooke turned to Mim, a smile as brittle as toffee fixed to her face. “Why would I tell?”
Mim squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of something else, or of nothing, but her mind kept circling back to the fact: two people knew she was Mrs. Miracle. She wasn’t sure whom she was more worried about: Jesse, whose father was a minister, or Brooke Snyder, who seemed oddly pleased to hold Mim’s secret. She got out of bed and looked at her face in the mirror. It was gray-white and there were shadows under her frightened eyes. The room grew gradually lighter, although no warmer. She was doomed.
The disturbing black cloud that came on the horizon for Galen and Rose with the arrival of Paisley was something that they danced around, carefully avoided, and tried to pretend wasn’t a problem between them. But when Tobe arrived at Eagle Hill, another storm came and settled on them. This gulf between them was growing huge.
Rose wanted to clear the atmosphere between them. When she discovered the woodpile had been chopped and stacked, she was touched beyond words. She had been so busy lately that she’d hardly had time for Galen. And yet . . . he had chopped a cord of wood for her. And she had forgotten to thank him! She hurried over to catch him when she saw him lead a horse from his barn to the round training pen.
He seemed to be thinking along the same lines of wanting to clear the air. He put the horse in the pen and turned toward her with an eager look on his face.
“I heard Lodestar is back. How’s he doing?”
“Well, he’s not lacking for attention, I’ll tell you that much. Jimmy’s in the barn with him now, brushing and preening him like a mother hen fussing over a chick.”
“Think Lodestar will make a full recovery?”
“In time. God designed his creatures to heal.”
They fell silent then, and a full thirty seconds passed while their gazes held, the only sound was the horse shuffling around in the pen. At last, reaching for her hands, Galen said in a voice so low it was barely audible, “Rose, I want things between us to go back the way they were.”
Her face broke into a radiant smile. “I wanted to thank you for chopping all that wood. I . . . can’t tell you how . . . I hardly know what to say. It might seem like a small chore to you, but it meant so much to me.”
Galen stiffened. In a voice she hardly recognized, he said, “I didn’t chop wood for you.”
Feeding little Sarah a bottle took nearly an hour, but Naomi didn’t mind. The feedings gave her time to study her face, to memorize her row of stubby eyelashes, to watch her temples beating. When the baby’s eyes flitted open, she studied the dark gray, looking for signs of the brown or blue or green they would become.
Edith Fisher was, as usual, practical about the baby. “Don’t grow too fond of the child,” she warned Naomi at the quilting bee the next afternoon. “That unfeeling lout of a mother will be back for her the day it suits her.”
What did people mean . . . don’t grow too fond of the child? The very first time Naomi had held the baby, a wave of protectiveness almost overwhelmed her. This poor, helpless baby had no one else in the world. How could anyone put a limit to the love she felt for this little girl with the big dark eyes, the head of fuzzy brown hair, the endearing habit of holding her little hands clasped together as if she were praying? It was as if baby Sarah had made her life complete.
Nobody had told Naomi how
much she would love this baby because nobody could have known. “I’ll do my best for you, little one,” she promised to her in a whisper, and she could have sworn Sarah smiled.
The thought that Paisley might have a change of heart and return for her daughter was never far from Rose’s mind. It would be awful to have to give Sarah up. She told herself if the mother didn’t want her bad enough to come and get her, then she was too foolish to have her.
She knew she had already grown dangerously attached to the baby. She liked to lie in bed with her and watch her try to work her small hands, the tiny, perfect little fists with their miniscule nails. Sarah would peer at her for long stretches, frowning, as if trying to figure life out. But when Rose laughed at her and gave her a finger to hold, she would stop frowning and settle happily.
The morning after Tobe’s return, Rose intended to let Tobe sleep in as late as he wanted and was surprised to see him come into the kitchen at dawn as she prepared Sarah’s bottle. “What are you doing up?”
He sat on the bench by the kitchen door to get his boots on. “The warden raised poultry. When he found out I was raised Amish, he assumed I know all about chickens, which I didn’t. But there was a surfeit of spare time in prison, so I read all I could and the warden let me take care of his chickens.” He shrugged. “Better than doing laundry.” He pulled out a boot from under the bench. “I heard Harold the rooster crowing, so I thought I’d get up and feed your hens. Mim told me that the old hens were waiting for an opportunity to peck her eyes out.” He stuck his foot in one boot. “I used oregano powder in the chicken feed. Made them healthier. Antimicrobial and antibacterial. Mind if I try it?”
Odd, Rose thought, that prison life would be the thing to make a farmer out of Tobe.
“Bethany said you were due to host church soon. I’m sure there’s a lot to be done to get ready. I want to help out as long as I’m here.”
Her breath caught. Was he already thinking of leaving? He’d only been home one night. “Tobe, I’m going to ask you a question and I want an honest answer.” She motioned to Sarah, tucked in her arm. “Is there any chance this baby is yours?”
Tobe dropped his boot and looked up sharply. A long moment passed, then another. “Yes. A small one, a very small chance, but there is.”
Rose went cold inside. A hope she had kept burning, sure that he would say he had never known Paisley, extinguished.
“I met Paisley a couple of years ago. She was a waitress at a coffee shop. In fact, Jake introduced us. Then when I was gone that year, working odd jobs, I didn’t have a place to stay one night and she let me stay at her place . . . ” He hesitated and glanced at Rose.
She lifted her free hand in the air. “I think I can fill in the blanks.”
“Rose, Paisley was friendly with a lot of guys. It was never a thing between us.”
She glanced down at the sleeping baby. Never a thing? “Paisley had a different opinion about that. She said you were planning to marry her as soon as you were released.”
“We never, ever made plans like that. I haven’t even seen her since that . . . those few nights when I stayed at her apartment.”
“Why would she claim you’re the baby’s father if you weren’t?”
“I have absolutely no idea. She told a pack of lies and is trying to palm her child off on me.”
“She seemed to think you were going to inherit Eagle Hill.”
He scratched his chin. “Maybe I said something like that once. Mammi Vera always makes it sound like I will.”
“She also seemed upset when she found out that your grandmother wasn’t knocking at death’s door.”
“Is that why she left?” He picked up the boot and jammed his stocking foot into it.
“I don’t know. When I told her you were coming home, she became agitated. A few hours later, she vanished. Obviously, she didn’t want to see you.”
“Well, doesn’t that prove to you that I’m not the father of that baby?”
“Sarah. Her name is Sarah. And no—Paisley’s disappearance only proved to me that she wasn’t a fit mother.” She wiped some drops of formula off Sarah’s cheek. “The bishop wants to have a talk with you.”
Tobe shook his head forcefully. “Oh nooooooo. No, no, no. I’m not baptized. I am not about to sit on the sinner’s bench over something like this.”
“I asked him to come. He’s the leader of our church. Stoney Ridge is a small, tight-knit community. A baby has been born who bears your name on her birth certificate—”
Tobe winced.
“—and there needs to be some discussion about what to do with baby Sarah. We need some guidance. All of us.” She was trying her best.
Tobe looked down at a spot on the floor for a long moment. Then he lifted his head. “When is he coming?”
“Around eleven this morning, he said. The deacon will be with him.”
He slapped his hands on his knees and rose to his feet. “Good. Mim and the boys will be over at Windmill Farm for the afternoon and Bethany will be at the Sisters’ House. I want Galen and Naomi to be here. Mammi Vera too.” He was sliding away without answering.
“Why?”
“Rose, if you don’t mind, I’d rather explain everything when you’re all together.”
Elmo and Abraham drove up in the deacon’s buggy right at eleven o’clock on the dot. Rose was struck by how elderly and frail the bishop appeared as he climbed out of the buggy. He was shaped like an S hook, bending or straightening as he spoke to each person. She knew he played an increasingly smaller part in the events of the church and that most things were done by Abraham, his bustling, energetic deacon.
They all gathered in the living room—Rose, Galen, Tobe, Naomi, Mammi Vera, Bishop Elmo, and Deacon Abraham. Sarah slept in her Moses basket, wedged in between Rose’s and Naomi’s chairs.
Tobe looked so uneasy that Rose almost felt sorry for him. He had the helpless expression of a man who knew he was looking at disaster but couldn’t figure out how to stop it. “This whole situation is very complicated,” he said.
“Simplify it so we can understand,” Galen said in a sharp tone.
“Galen,” Rose said. Her voice sounded a warning note, but he didn’t meet her eyes.
Abraham steepled his fingers together. “Tobe, people make mistakes, and once the mistake’s been made, you have to move on and figure out what to do next while you try not to make a bigger mistake.”
“I don’t disagree about making mistakes,” Tobe said. “I’ve made plenty. But I don’t believe I’m the father of Paisley’s child. I’m going to get a DNA test to prove that and clear up any lingering suspicion.”
Elmo was about to say something when Tobe lifted his hand to stop him. “There’s something else. Another reason I need to prove to you that I’m not the baby’s father because . . .” He glanced at Naomi. She gave him a nervous but encouraging smile. He reached over, took her hand, and breathed a deep breath. “Last fall, Naomi and I were married in a civil ceremony while I was in custody in Philadelphia, right before I was sent to FCI Schuykill.”
His words fell like a stone into the room. Everyone went entirely still. The only movement came from Mammi Vera, who started clutching her chest.
“You must be joking,” Galen said.
Naomi was looking at her brother calmly, her honest eyes fixed on his.
“It’s not a joke, Galen,” Tobe said. “It’s a fact. It was the best way to ensure that Naomi could have visitation rights at the prison. As my wife, she could be on the preapproved visitor’s list and visit as often as she could. If she wasn’t a family member, she’d have had to get special permission through the warden. We knew we wanted to marry. Circumstances caused us to speed it up.”
Galen went white with the news; he was still white. “Naomi, you visited him at the prison? In Minersville?”
“Yes,” she said in a quiet but steady voice. “Often.”
“I was only allowed a certain amount of visitor points a month,” Tob
e said. “Rose, that’s why I discouraged you from visiting.”
Ah. Things were starting to make sense to Rose.
“Why did you never tell me this, Naomi?” Galen’s voice was full of emotion.
“What would you have said? What would you have done?”
There was something so bleak and honest in Naomi’s tone that Rose could see Galen’s fury diminish. Had Galen known, he would have had to inform the church leadership, and most likely, she would have been put under the ban.
Rose wished she could reach out and hold Galen’s hand, to let him know that she was there beside him while he absorbed the blow. She knew it was a terrible discovery to him. By contrast, she felt a sweeping relief. She had sensed that Tobe and Naomi had a significant connection and she was actually pleased to think that Naomi stood by him while he was away. She was glad Tobe had someone else in his corner, someone who saw the best in him, someone who cared for him no matter what.
“Well,” Galen said and stopped. “This is surprising news,” he said, rather stiffly, coldness in his voice.
“We haven’t, uh, um, consummated the marriage. We intend to wait until we could have a church wedding.” Tobe looked at Naomi, whose cheeks flamed rosy red. “We still intend to wait for that . . . official ceremony.”
The bishop let out a deep sigh of relief. “Well, now, this might all work out in the end.”
“Not so fast,” Galen said. “There’s a baby in the middle of this. And a woman who says Tobe is the father of her child.”
Tobe nodded. “The DNA test will take care of that.”
A trace of stubbornness appeared in Galen’s jaw. “And if the baby is yours?”
Irritation crossed Tobe’s face. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
The bishop cleared his throat. “Tobe and Naomi, would you give us a few moments to talk?”
Tobe and Naomi left the room and went out to the front porch. Rose heard the faint creak of the porch swing as they sat on it.
Galen glanced at Elmo. “So what do you have to say?”
Revealing, The (The Inn at Eagle Hill Book #3): A Novel Page 16