by Beverly Bird
Kim stiffened. We. Old, instinctive panic pressed in. “This is my problem,” she said irrationally.
“You came to us for help,” Adam stated.
“Seems to me we can’t give you marrow until we’re tested to see if we’re compatible,” Jake countered. “And I’d kind of prefer the best doctor I can find for that.”
She couldn’t argue with his logic.
“So tomorrow we’ll drive over to Philly,” he added. “We’ll see what the story is.”
Kim swallowed carefully and gave a small nod. Then something else occurred to her. “There’s no way I’m going to take a horse-and-buggy ride through the streets of Philadelphia,” she blurted.
Jake let out a bark of laughter. “You’ve got company on that one. I don’t do the nineteenth-century routine, either. We’ll all squeeze into your car.”
Kim was relieved. Adam may have converted to the Amish religion, but at least Jake seemed as irreverent as ever.
“How have you been getting around while you’re here?” she asked curiously.
“Clip-clop,” he answered dryly. “But Goliath and I have come to an understanding.”
“Who?”
“Adam’s horse.”
Kim got to her feet. “Well,” she said lamely. “We ought to be going, then.”
“Going?” Mariah looked at her blankly. Adam and Jake did, too.
“I saw a lot of motels on the main road coming in. I need to collect Susannah. I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’m...” She looked at all of them. “Exhausted.”
It bothered her to admit it. She hated to show weakness. But the fact of the matter was that seeing them again had done what even these past several weeks of worry and heartache hadn’t achieved. It had enervated her. It had sapped the last of her emotions. She had nothing left to give anyone right now. Unfortunately, they were going to argue with her, she realized. They were going to make her dredge up a little more energy to stand her ground.
“You can’t go to a motel,” Adam said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I’ll come back here first thing in the morning,” she promised.
“Why bother?” Jake countered.
“Because I can’t take any more!” she burst out. “I need to be alone.”
“That can be arranged,” Joe said, speaking for the first time.
Kim looked at him gratefully. “Please.”
“Your old house hasn’t sold yet, has it?” he asked Mariah.
Mariah looked stunned. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I don’t understand,” Kim said.
“Mariah has a one-bedroom grossdawdy house in the village,” Joe explained.
“A what?” Kim asked blankly.
“A grandfather’s house,” Mariah elaborated. “When our elders get too old to run their own farms, we build them small cottages of their own on the property and take over the spread ourselves. My house used to be part of the Miller farm. But then Ethan, their grandfather, became a deacon of their gemeide, their church district. They built him a somewhat bigger place next door so he could hold services there, and I bought the little one when I came back from college. It was perfect for me at the time. Small, cozy and cheap.”
“College?” Sometime during the course of this evening, Kim was sure someone had mentioned that these Old Order Amish weren’t educated past the eighth grade.
Mariah smiled a little crookedly. “Oh, I was punished for it. They put me under the meidung. They shunned me, shut me out, refused to see me, just as we must technically do to Katya now.”
“But that’s archaic!” Kim exclaimed. “For going to school?” She could scarcely believe that Adam had bought into all this.
Mariah looked down at her clasped hands. “It was difficult, but it all worked out. I changed gemeides. It’s a long story, but Joe arranged to lift my meidung when I came here.”
Kim’s gaze moved to Joe again. “You did? How?”
“I’m a deacon here. I voted for it.”
“A deacon,” she repeated.
“I’ve devoted my life to my church. I serve the people here.”
Yet he loosened the rules of the meidung in his own home. She was getting a headache trying to figure this man out. He was proving to be a lot to think about.
“We took all the furniture out of your old house,” Adam was saying as he glanced at his wife.
Joe’s chair creaked a little as he pushed it back. “I haven’t slept in my own bed for four months. Take mine.”
Kim looked at them disbelievingly.
“Good idea,” Adam said. “We can load it into that old open wagon I have.”
“Yeah, let’s make Goliath work for his hay,” Jake agreed with almost malicious pleasure.
“You’re going to move a whole bed to a different house just so I can sleep there for a night or two?” Kim said. She looked at Joe. “Doesn’t anyone but me see how absurd this is?”
Joe opened his mouth but never had a chance to respond. “You’ll be here longer than that,” Jake decided. “If one of us is a match for Susannah, you’ll have to hang around long enough for the transplant.”
“Thank goodness that place never sold,” Mariah said.
“There’s a reason for everything,” Katya insisted quietly. “God provides.”
“The house has no lights or heat,” Mariah added, “but we’ll send some lanterns, as well, and I never took the woodstove out of the kitchen—”
“Stop it!” Kim cried.
This time they really looked at her.
“I can’t do this. This is crazy! Moving furniture and... and...” She trailed off helplessly.
“What choice do you have?” Joe asked in that steady tone he had. “How long can you afford a motel?”
She flinched at that, then she rallied. “I won’t let you do this,” she said. “I don’t need to be alone. Not if it means going through all this hullabaloo. I’ll just...Susannah and I can sleep on the floor.” She looked at Joe. “If you’ll have us. Or your floor, Adam.”
“I’ve got ample floor space,” Adam agreed. “But not much in the way of extra beds. Still, there’s always the sofa. You’re welcome to it.”
“That’s not necessary,” Joe said, getting to his feet. “As I said, I haven’t slept in my own bed for months now. Jake and Katya have been too stubborn to use it in the event I might suddenly change my mind come some midnight hour. But that’s not going to happen. I’ll remain on my sofa, they’ll stay in Nathaniel’s room with the children and you and your daughter can take my room.”
“But what about Nathaniel?”
“He’s been staying in the bam loft, and he’s happier for it.”
Kim opened her mouth to argue, and knew it was the best she could hope for. If she protested, there was very little doubt in her mind that she’d blink and find them loading that bed into a buggy, with some poor horse named Goliath struggling and sweating to take it to some other house.
“That would be fine,” she said stiffly.
“We’re staying?”
Kim looked up sharply to find Susannah in the door. How much had she heard? It didn’t matter. Her eyes were bright, and not with fever this time. “We’re staying,” Kim said with difficulty. “For a little while.”
“Cool! I gotta go tell Rachel.” And with that Susannah was gone to tell her newfound friend the exciting news.
Kim sat down again, as though her breath had gone out of her. She looked at Jake. She looked at Adam. “Bullies,” she said finally. Then she paled.
That was exactly what she had said to them a hundred years ago, when they had all lived in that house on Decataur Avenue, on the rare occasions when life had seemed reasonably normal and they were just two average teenage boys driving their little sister crazy.
Chapter 6
Joe shifted restlessly on the sofa as the grandfather clock in the living room chimed once. When it announced the quarter hour, he sat up. He had not slept well since Sarah had died, but to
night was worse than usual. His mind was full, his thoughts racing. Most of them concerned the woman upstairs in his bed.
Some of them were as sour as milk left in the sun, and those had more to do with the bed than the woman. He knew everyone figured he could not sleep there because he was reminded of the nineteen years he had shared it with Sarah. That wasn’t necessarily true. He was reminded of what he had done with Sarah there that had resulted in her death and the baby currently asleep in a cradle in the girls’ room upstairs.
That cradle should have been in his room. He should have been there in the bed beside it. He couldn’t manage it, and his guilt over that was almost intolerable. He could not stand the sight of Hannah. His daughter. His own child. The child who had killed his wife. The child he had created out of his own needs and determination.
Joe groaned. There’s nothing I can do about feeling this way, he prayed. I’m only human. But that was a cop-out. His weakness and his guilt were now poisoning the rest of his family.
Was that why God had sent Kimberley Wallace?
Kimberley. Her name suited her, he decided, prowling the downstairs rooms. It made him think of the tree in his front yard, sturdy and strong and magnificent, yet somehow feminine as its limbs dipped and swayed. It had withstood the tornado that had roared through Lancaster County many years ago, and it had done it by bending.
Kimberley Wallace “Mancuso” bent when she had to. He liked that. She hated doing it. He respected that, too.
He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
Joe stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked up. He thought he heard the baby stirring, and he moved quickly for the back door. He went outside into the night, just in case she woke up.
One particular idea wouldn’t go away. It had been haunting him all night, from the moment he’d understood the full magnitude of Kimberley’s dilemma and that she would probably be staying in the settlement for a while. And it was dangerous and selfish, because it would allow him to continue to hide from the infant who had hopefully gone right back to sleep upstairs.
He had to get rid of all these well-meaning women, Joe acknowledged for the thousandth time. Neither he nor his children could tolerate their chirping, chaotic cheerfulness much longer. Then there was Nathaniel, who didn’t want to go to Berks because he considered his father too fragile emotionally for him to leave. Dinah had missed two church socials in the past month alone. Matt and Gracie were so far reasonably unblemished by it all—except that Mariah, who still taught at the closest school in spite of her pregnancy, had said that Gracie was slipping in her studies. And Joe knew that that was because she was up late most nights helping Dinah with the baby. The aunts—in fact, all the women except Katya—went home at night. And Katya and Jake couldn’t stay here indefinitely.
Joe needed help. He needed it desperately. He needed those women to go, but he could not bear to care for Hannah himself. He knew that he and Kim could help each other. She could get him over this hump, and he thought she might do it if he asked. She didn’t want to be touched by anyone else’s problems, but she was. It was there in her eyes. Joe had watched them all night.
He had simply been trying to judge her character. Clearly, she was beautiful. But he was a man who had just lost his wife. He certainly wasn’t thinking about her in any romantic, sexual way, although he did wonder if she would be wearing those jeans again tomorrow.
Joe tore his eyes from the sky and went back to the house. He stood in the foyer, listening for a moment, and heard nothing but soft snores drifting down the stairs. He was immeasurably relieved that Hannah had indeed gone back to sleep. He would not have to wrestle with himself about taking a bottle to her so neither of his elder daughters would have to get up to do it.
He returned to the sofa and lay down, staring at the ceiling. And he prayed, a prayer that was no more reverent or worshipful than anything else he had been feeling lately.
“What do You want me to do here?” he whispered. “You gave me this fork in the road, you dropped her at my doorstep, so now give me a hint. Which way I am supposed to go?”
He received no answer. He never did when there were forks in the road.
Kim slept so well and so deeply it surprised her. For as long as she could remember, she’d been prone to insomnia. Yet here in this strange house, with people she’d only just met and others she’d lost years before, she’d let down her guard enough to actually dream. She could not remember what the dream was about, but it had left a lingering feeling of goodness that made her want to crawl back into it because the day ahead was not welcoming.
She opened her eyes, instead, and looked around the room. A bright, cold sun poured through the windows to her left. They were bracketed by white cotton curtains with small, yellow, embroidered flowers. Sarah’s work, no doubt. Kim frowned.
Her eyes skimmed the rest of the room. She hadn’t really looked at it last night, partly because she’d been truly tired, partly because she couldn’t have seen much anyway in the glow of the single lantern she’d carried upstairs. It sat beside her on the bedside table now, next to a thumb-worn Bible and a ceramic vase full of dried flowers. She craned her neck to look up over her head. The framed sampler quilt above the bed made her heart squeeze. It was the Lapp family tree. The baby’s name had not been added to it. The woman had never been able to finish it.
There was no closet in the room. How could a man and wife live without a closet? Kim answered herself immediately. Because these people didn’t have the extensive wardrobes of everyone else in the world.
A row of pegs ran high along the top of the wall opposite the bed. Those on the right were bare. On the left side hung several pairs of black trousers, some shirts—white and blue and lavender, all starched—a straw hat and a pair of suspenders.
Her heart squirmed uncomfortably, partly at the intimacy of using Joe’s bedroom, of even being here to see all this, and partly at the idea that a man who lived this way could intrigue her so.
Is that what he did? Yes, she admitted, taking a moment to sort through her chaotic thoughts and impressions from the day before. He was so steady, so calm—in contrast to his troubled eyes. He was devout—a deacon, for God’s sake!—but he had loosened the rules of that meidung thing in his own home. And he was sending his son away to a less strict setdement.
There was a strong and stalwart masculinity about him, and a pull to him that always let her know when he was looking at her. He had looked at her a lot last night. Remembering the business of “Sugar Joe” and “Loe Japp,” she had decided that it was safest to ignore it. But he had been searching for something, she thought now. She couldn’t imagine what it might be and wondered if he had found it. The thought that he probably hadn’t—at least, not if he was expecting joy at this family reunion—left her feeling a little sad.
Kim finally tossed the quilt aside and sat up. Then she gasped. Oh, it was cold! She hadn’t done anything with the wood-burning stove last night, the one that sat in the corner of the room. Never in her life had she had to arrange for her own heat. It had never even occurred to her.
She wondered where Susannah was. Her daughter had pleaded and begged to be allowed to spend the night in Dinah’s room with all the other girls, and Kim had seen no harm in it. But it made her feel guilty. Everyone else was piled up four or five to a room, and she’d ended up with this one all to herself. Still, she wanted Susannah to enjoy all that she could, while she could.
Her heart squeezed again, hard enough to take her breath away.
She needed to find her daughter now, needed to assure herself that she was healthy today, so far as that went. She put her feet to the cold floor, shivered, and went to her suitcase to dig for a clean pair of jeans and a warm sweater. She found her toothbrush and her cosmetics case, and carried them out into the hall. Then she stopped dead. She hadn’t thought to ask where the bathroom was, either.
“Downstairs,” a deep male voice said.
Kim whipped around. Joe watched the
way her tangled dark hair swirled. In the clear light of the new day, she looked young and achingly vulnerable, though he knew from Jake and Adam that she was in her late twenties.
“Thank you,” Kim managed to reply. And she wondered again what it was about him that rattled her with his mere proximity.
“And yes, we have running water,” he added.
Her jaw dropped. He laughed. It was a rich, dark, rusty sound—and he looked as startled as she was when he heard it.
“I never thought about that,” she admitted. “No electricity, no plumbing. No heat.” She shivered again.
“I thought of it for you. It’s true that we have no electricity—the ordnung prohibits hooking up to anner Satt Leit power sources and becoming dependent upon your world. But we have generators and hydraulic motors to supply what energy we need. And we have wells and septic tanks and all that good stuff.”
“Thank God,” she said fervently.
His mouth crooked into a smile again. “Come on. I’ll show you the way.”
He went down the stairs, and Kim followed. The bathroom was beyond a door next to the one that led outside into the backyard. It was tucked behind the kitchen like an afterthought. It probably had been, she mused. In the daylight she realized that the house could easily be a hundred years old, though it showed signs of having been lovingly tended.
“Thank you,” she said yet again, but he’d gone. Kim frowned and looked up the hallway to the foyer. It was empty. For a large man, he moved like smoke.
Probably because of the time right after she had run away, Kim had never stopped appreciating showers. They were the highlight of her day. They not only cleansed her, they soothed and relaxed her. But Joe Lapp did not have a shower. She filled the tub, instead, and sank into it. She couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a bath. At first it beat all the blessings of a shower hands down. Then she began worrying about Susannah again.
She got out and dried off quickly, dressing anew, brushing her teeth with one hand while she worked the snarls out of her long hair with the other. She pulled on jeans and a sweater and anchored her hair into a braid, then hurried into the kitchen.