“‘Can you help me find my mater?’” Mary Anne said in her whiniest, saddest puppy voice. There weren’t many picture books written in Dietsch, so she translated the words from English as she read them. “‘The chicken didn’t say a word. Chickens were like that sometimes.’”
“Hallo, Mary Anne?” It was Jethro, right on time from work.
“Cum reu,” she said.
Every head turned as Jethro unzipped the tent, stepped inside, and quickly zipped it back up again. Water dripped from his hat, and he took it off and hung it on the hat stand Mary Anne had stolen from the house. His smile could barely be contained as his gaze traveled around the tent. “What is this? A dog party?”
Toby giggled. “Nae, Cousin Jethro. Mary Anne is telling us about a puppy.”
“A puppy? That’s the best kind of story. Can I listen too?”
Toby and Sarah nodded, and all four of them scooted to the left so Jethro could sit next to them. He turned and smiled at Pine. “Do you mind if I join the party?”
Pine blushed under his whiskers, no doubt embarrassed to be caught at storytime with the little kids, but he seemed to relax when Jethro reached into Mary Anne’s cup of paint on the table by her cot and smeared black paint across his own nose. Aden Jr. giggled, and Sarah wasted no time in crawling onto Jethro’s lap. Jethro gave Sarah’s little shoulders a squeeze, and she settled in as if Jethro was her favorite person in the world.
Mary Anne grew warm from the inside out. Jethro didn’t spend a lot of time around children, but he really was a natural fater. He didn’t have a temper like so many men, and he was good-natured when he had a mind to be. If only she could have given him a child . . .
She immediately turned her thoughts in a different direction. It would do no good to cry just as the puppy found his family. “‘I’ll never wander off again,’ the puppy said. ‘Hush,’ said his mater. ‘Drink your milk and go to bed and dream a happy dream. You are safe and all is well.’”
Mary Anne showed die kinner and Jethro the last picture, which was the mommy dog kissing her four puppies good night.
“Read another one,” Toby said.
Mary Anne closed the book. “This is the only one I have. Go and find your mamm. It’s time to wash for dinner.”
Pine took a handkerchief out of his pocket, licked it, and scrubbed at the paint on his nose.
Mary Anne snapped a wet wipe from the container on her table and handed it to Pine. “Here, this will do a better job.” She gave Jethro a wet wipe, and he started on Sarah’s face while Mary Anne wiped up Toby and Crist.
Aden Jr. turned his face away from Jethro’s wet wipe. “Nae. I a puppy.”
“Cum, Aden,” Jethro said. “You’ll want a clean face. What if your mamm thinks you’re a dog and won’t let you have any noodles?”
The thought of no noodles for dinner did the trick. Aden Jr. let Jethro wash his face.
Pine took little Sarah’s hand and led her out of the tent. Aden Jr., Toby, and Crist followed. Mary Anne smiled and handed a wet wipe to Jethro for his own face, then wiped her hands clean. While wiping down his nose, Jethro bent over and retrieved the puppy book from the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him turn it over in his hand and look at it as if he didn’t know quite what to make of it.
Surely he recognized it, unless he had put anything having to do with the baby out of his mind. Maybe Mary Anne was the only one who still mourned the loss.
“You took this out of the storage chest.” He said it so gently that Mary Anne turned and studied his face. It wasn’t an accusation or a scold, and he didn’t seem to be irritated about the tears that suddenly pooled in her eyes.
She sniffed them back and turned her face away. “I needed a book. The rain made die kinner restless, and their mamms got cross.”
He slowly sank to her cot and leafed through the pages. “I bought this the week before you lost the buplie. His first book.”
“And then it went into the chest with every other memory.” She kept her back to him so he wouldn’t see the pain in her eyes. She would never share the deepest parts of her heart with him again.
She sensed him close behind her even before he touched her. Standing behind her, he wrapped both arms around her shoulders and pulled her into the warmth of his chest. Ach, how she had missed his smell. The sharp, clean scent of pine with a hint of earthy cedar. Surrendering to his embrace, she relaxed and rested her head back against his shoulder.
“I didn’t know what to do, Mary Anne,” he whispered. “There was so much blood, so much pain when it happened. I told Gotte I would do anything, anything if He would spare your life. I promised I wouldn’t ask for another thing ever. ‘Just save my wife. Spare my wife, Lord.’”
A tear dropped onto her face and slid down her cheek. It wasn’t hers.
“And then the horrible news of no more babies. I told myself I had done it by making promises to Gotte that no man had a right to make. It was like falling into a dark hole with no bottom—just falling and falling with nothing to hold on to. I was afraid to grab on to you for fear of taking you down with me. We lost touch, and I didn’t know how to help myself, let alone my fraa. I’m so sorry, Mary Anne.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
His arms tightened around her. “It matters very much to me, and I think it matters to you too. I tried to pretend our grief didn’t exist. I asked you to stop crying. I bought a fishing pole and told myself I was happy.”
Mary Anne hooked her fingers around Jethro’s forearm. “We stopped talking.”
“Because it hurt too much.”
“I shut you out because I couldn’t bear to disappoint you one more time.”
“I thought I had fixed you—that you weren’t broken or sad anymore.” He nuzzled his cheek against her kapp. “I wanted to believe you were better because you packed away the baby blankets and stopped crying.” He ran his hands up and down her arms. She stiffened to keep from trembling. “I was devastated we couldn’t have a buplie, but heartzly, I was never disappointed in you one day in my life.” He lay a feather-soft kiss on her forehead. “Don’t you see? You are enough. I couldn’t love you any more than if you had a dozen babies.” He took her shoulders and turned her around. “You are enough, Mary Anne. You always have been.”
A sob she’d been valiantly trying to suppress slipped past her lips. Jethro tugged her to him and clamped his strong arms all the way around her, as if she belonged to him and he belonged to her. Some sort of dam broke, and it was impossible to keep the tears back. She wept as she hadn’t wept in almost four years. Jethro didn’t make a sound, but she could feel his pain in the great shuddering breaths he took in time with hers.
He didn’t tell her to hush, and she didn’t care if he was disappointed or not. He held on to her as if she might run away. She held on to him as if he might disappear. “I wanted a baby so bad.”
He smoothed an errant hair from her cheek. “You would make the best mater in the world.”
“I begged Gotte for a baby, but He stopped listening a long time ago, and I stopped praying. I have to make my own happiness. You have to know that I’m not waiting for Gotte or you or anybody else.”
He didn’t pull back, and he didn’t chastise her like she expected him to. He gave her a tender, I-love-you-no-matter-what smile and teased the edge of her bottom lip with his callused thumb. If she’d been trembling before, now her body was practically vibrating. “All I care about is your happiness.”
A part of her wanted him to argue with her, to tell her how wicked she was, so it would be easier to leave him, to cut him out of her life. Another part of her—bigger or smaller, she couldn’t tell—wanted him to convince her that he was the one who could and would make her happy if she’d let him.
She held perfectly still as he traced his thumb down the valleys of her throat. She should definitely pull away right about now. They were alone together in her tent, and this kind of thing would definitely come to no good.
Not really, but she didn’t contradict him. She couldn’t think straight when he was that close.
He stepped back, coming up against the cot in his effort to put some distance between them. “But I want to show you something first. Can I bring it in? It’s a little wet.”
She gathered her thoughts in time to be able to give him a fairly reasonable reply. “What is it?”
“I brought you a present.” He grinned. “Ach, vell, it’s not really a present because I don’t think you’ll want to keep it for yourself.”
With that puzzling answer, he unzipped her tent and disappeared into the rain. The storm had petered out to a sprinkle.
Jethro ducked back inside carrying the old bench that used to sit in one corner of the barn. It was rickety and gray with age.
He set it next to the cot and smoothed his hand over the top. He should have come up with at least three splinters. “I braced the legs and put in about a dozen screws. A cow could sit on this thing.” To prove himself, he sat down and patted the space next to him. “Try it out.”
Mary Anne hesitantly sat. She’d rather not get a sliver in her hinnerdale. The bench didn’t make one noise and didn’t sway so much as a quarter of an inch. “It’s wonderful solid.”
He smiled as if she’d given him the moon. “I used one thousand-grit silicon carbide sandpaper. You could dance barefoot on this thing and never get a sliver.”
“It’s too bad I don’t dance.” She stood and ran her hand across the seat, then knelt and fingered the legs and the underside. Soft as a buplie’s bottom. “This is beautiful. It must have taken you hours.”
His face practically glowed. “Do you think you can sell it?”
“You want me to sell it?”
“After you paint a farm scene on it, or flowers or a quilt design. Whatever you want. Do you think someone would buy it on your friend’s Etsy page?”
“Jah, of course. Englischers like Amish furniture. I sold another chair three days ago. And my quilt. Not an hour after Pammy put it up for sale, someone bought it for five hundred dollars.”
Jethro seemed genuinely happy and interested that she’d sold a quilt. “They’ll probably buy them as fast as you can make them.”
“Yesterday someone put in a custom order for a quilt.”
“Is that gute?”
She tried not to smile too wide. “Jah. They want a queen size with butterflies on it.”
He gave her a half smile. “Your favorite thing.”
“I’ve never done anything like it before. Pammy helped me find a pattern. It will be beautiful.”
“For sure and certain. You’re going to be rich.”
“Not rich, but maybe have enough to move out of the woods.” Her smile faded as she realized what that meant for Jethro. And for her. Would she be happy living by herself, or would the loneliness overwhelm her on cold winter nights? Would she find herself longing for Jethro’s warmth or be content to cuddle in a fuzzy blanket with a gute book?
Living alone meant she would be able to do whatever she wanted to do, buy whatever she wanted to buy, paint and quilt to her heart’s content, but maybe it would get tiresome without Jethro there. She’d miss that gute smell he brought home with him every day and the ready smile he was starting to show more often. If she left him for good, Jethro would be devastated. When she had first moved out, she had wanted to believe he didn’t love her and would barely miss her except for the chores that wouldn’t get done. But it wasn’t so easy now that she knew the truth.
Jethro adored her.
How would she live with herself, knowing she’d done something so unfeeling to someone she loved?
Jah. She could admit it. She loved Jethro. He was a gute man, and not all that bad to look at. But maybe love wasn’t enough. She had been every which way in love with him on their wedding day. That hadn’t kept bad things from happening, and it hadn’t kept her from falling out of love with him in the end.
Still, the thought of Jethro unhappy made her miserable.
Jethro gave her a sad smile and stood, as if every bone in his body ached. “Lord willing, you won’t have to camp much longer.” He swiped his hand across his mouth. “I . . . I want you to be happy, Mary Anne.”
“Denki,” she said, frustrated that the tears sprang to her eyes so easily. She blinked them away. “I think I’ll paint a whole flock of butterflies on this bench. I love butterflies.”
“I know you do.”
* * *
Mary Anne counted the money again as she ambled toward Jethro’s tent. One hundred and fifty dollars for Jethro’s old bench. She could hardly believe it. What a gute sanding job that had been.
Jethro had brought her two more chairs from a secondhand store in Shawano. He’d sanded them to buttery smoothness and told her she could sell them on Etsy. She had painted cows and horses and an old barn on the seats, and Pammy had sold them for fifty dollars each. Jethro was going to be so happy when he got his money.
It had been two weeks since Jethro had brought her that bench, and the camp seemed to change in some way every day. Mandy and Noah had gone home. Mandy was close to having her buplie, and Noah was anxious to have her in a more comfortable place to sleep. Emma and Ben had also pulled up their tent, with many apologies and regrets from Emma. Ben’s MS was acting up, and she didn’t want to risk his health.
Lia and Moses’s family were still there. Lily and Aden seemed to enjoy living in a tent more than they liked their house. Mary Anne was concerned that they might camp here forever. Sarah Beachy and her boys were still camping, even though Sarah assured them she was going to get scoliosis or sciatica or some other back ailment before the summer was out. Sarah wasn’t actually in camp much except to quilt and sleep. She spent her days at home, doing chores or visiting one of the expectant maters she cared for. Sometimes Mary Anne would hear someone come and fetch Sarah in the middle of the night for a delivery. Sarah must be exhausted all the time.
Their pile of firewood and kindling grew higher every day because Jethro had caught Mary Anne hauling sticks from the woods and absolutely refused to let her do it again.
Because Jethro was the only one on his side of the camp, he ate with them every morning and every night. He was always so appreciative of Mary Anne’s kaffee that his smile made her giddy whenever he came for breakfast.
Jethro was chopping wood when Mary Anne arrived at his campsite. He exploded into a smile when he saw her, and she tried not to stare at his arms as he raised the ax over his head. His whole upper body looked as if it had been chiseled from a gute piece of cherrywood. He brought the ax down hard on the log, splitting it with one blow and sending wood chips skipping every which way.
After throwing the split logs onto his growing pile, he buried his ax into the chopping block and wiped his forearm across his forehead, never losing that smile that made her a little dizzy. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his neck. “When I don’t see you for a while, I forget how pretty you are.”
She turned her face away to hide the blush. “You saw me this morning.”
“It seems like an eternity when I’m away from you.”
Even though she knew he was teasing, she couldn’t help the way her heart thumped inside her chest. “Pammy sold that bench you sanded. And the chairs.”
“Did she?”
She pinched the money between her fingers and held it out to him. “One hundred and fifty dollars for the bench plus a hundred for the chairs.” She grinned. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
He drew his brows together, stiffening as if she’d just delivered some very bad news. Not exactly the reaction she’d been expecting. “What do you mean?” he said.
“That bench you fixed up. I painted it, and Pammy sold it on Etsy. Didn’t you . . . isn’t that what you wanted me
to do?”
He slowly nodded. “Jah.”
“Vell, I’m paying you the money Pammy got for it.”
Jethro took off his hat and gloves, bowed his head, and slowly combed his fingers through his hair. “This is . . . this is what you think of me?” It was a question, but she had no idea how to answer him. “I hoped that after all I’ve tried . . .”
Mary Anne eyed him in confusion. It was plain enough he wasn’t angry, but he was hurt—deeply, profoundly hurt—as if she’d slapped him across the face. Had he wanted her to keep the bench as a gift? Was he upset she’d sold it? She tried to remember the conversation. She was sure he had asked her to paint it and sell it on Etsy. “What . . . what did I do wrong, Jethro? I don’t understand.”
With his hat and gloves in one hand, he turned his back on her and stood perfectly still, staring off to the west as if waiting for the sun to set. She held her breath. Was he going to explain? Give her a reason to apologize? “You didn’t do anything wrong, heartzly.”
“Then why won’t you look at me?”
He glanced in her direction and smiled as best he could, but the pain she saw in his eyes was almost unbearable. “Some things just can’t be fixed.”
Was he talking about her? Was he finally giving up on them because of something that happened with an old bench? Her legs wobbled like jelly. She didn’t want him to give up. Not now. Not when she’d just discovered that his gaze made her weak and his touch made her breathless.
He seemed to remember she was there. Squaring his shoulders, he turned and gave her a warm, soft look like melted chocolate on a graham cracker. “Will you tell your mammi I won’t be coming to dinner tonight? I think she was making her famous meatballs just for me.”
Mary Anne forced a smile. “For sure and certain they’re famous. One fell off Moses’s plate and burned a hole in the tablecloth.” Not a single line changed on his face, even at the mention of Mammi’s cooking. “Lily got some corn on the cob, and I’m making blueberry cobbler.” She tilted her head to coax him to meet her eye, but he was determined to look at anything but her. His avoidance drove a sliver of glass right through her heart. “Aren’t you hungry?”
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