by Marta Perry
* * *
Chloe
walked up the street toward Susanna’s shop the next day, glad the rain seemed to be over for the moment. She wasn’t sure what kind of reception she’d get from Susanna, but worrying about her was at least a change from fretting over her relationship with Seth. She’d done far too much of that last night, lying in bed unable to sleep, listening to the creek pour over the rocks.
Trading that for her concern about her relationship with Susanna was rather like exchanging a sore throat for a sprained wrist. They both hurt, but it seemed a person could only concentrate on one at a time.
Chloe had been impatient with Lydia’s slow approach to Susanna, but she had to admit that it seemed more effective than her tactics had been. Maybe Lydia understood Susanna better because they were both Amish, while she was an outsider. She couldn’t hope to compete in that area.
Still, she’d been the one Susanna had confided in about the threat to her shop. They’d been friends then, and despite what had happened since, she had to believe that that basic friendship was still intact. And if so, she was determined to build on it. She was going in the shop, and she wouldn’t come out until she’d made some positive forward progress with her sister.
The usual assortment of items was displayed on the porch. Two milk cans, decorated with painted hex signs, stood next to a fanciful bird house, designed to look like an Amish barn. It must be a struggle for Susanna to haul all this stuff in every evening and put it out again every morning. She touched a bentwood rocking chair, setting it gently rocking. If she hung around until closing, she could help.
Susanna was busy with a customer when Chloe entered the shop, so Chloe didn’t approach them. Instead she paused to admire the handcrafted toy display. A row of faceless Amish dolls called to her, and she picked up one.
If their parents hadn’t died in that freak accident on an Ohio highway, she’d probably have one of these tucked away someplace. It would be a battered, much-loved remnant of a happy childhood. If Lydia’s baby proved to be the longed-for girl, she could get one for her new niece.
With an exchange of pleasantries, the customer said her good-byes and left the shop, a well-filled bag hanging from her arm. Chloe faced Susanna, trusting her expression showed confidence.
“I hope I’m still welcome to carry on with my project.” She gestured with the camera bag that she carried slung over her shoulder.
“Of course.” Susanna seemed to make an effort to produce a smile. “You’re well, I hope. And Lydia—she wasn’t too upset after we talked yesterday?”
Taking that as an invitation to visit, Chloe set her camera bag on the counter. “I don’t think so. Lydia seems to have the gift of taking things as they come. That’s probably what makes her such a good mother.”
“The little boys.” Susanna’s smile had a touch of wistfulness. “I would like to meet them, one day.”
“Anytime you say,” Chloe responded, reminding herself that Lydia would be telling her to go slowly. “When you’re ready, Lydia would love it.”
“I would be a little nervous,” Susanna said with a sudden burst of honesty. “I never thought to have any nieces or nephews. What if they don’t like me?”
Chloe had to laugh. “You’re exactly the way I was, the first time I was going to meet them. What would they think of me? But they’re just as loving as their mamm is, and they’ll be delighted to have another aunt.”
This was good. They were talking, sharing their feelings, with no lingering awkwardness over her having blurted out the secret.
“I wanted to ask you . . .” Susanna seemed to run out of words, and a small wrinkle had appeared between her eyes.
“What? You can ask me anything.”
Susanna nodded, apparently accepting her words at face value. “When you told me about our relationship—why did you decide to do it then?”
She hadn’t expected that question, and for a moment she couldn’t think how to answer. “Well, I suppose it was because you’d told me about your problems with Dora’s son about the shop. I wanted you to know that you had family that would be on your side.”
“I didn’t want to think it was because you felt sorry for me.” Susanna’s intent gaze wouldn’t be satisfied with less than the truth.
“Not sorry for you, no. Just . . . hurting, because you seemed so alone.” Chloe managed a smile. “I’m not an expert, but I think that’s what sisters do. They hurt for each other.”
Susanna’s eyes shone with sudden tears. “Denke,” she murmured.
Chloe’s heart leaped. For once it appeared she’d said the right thing. Now if she could just follow up correctly—
“If you decide you want to buy out Dora’s share of the shop, I’d like to help you.”
She knew the answer even before Susanna spoke, reading it in the instinctive shake of Susanna’s head.
“No. I could not take your money.”
“But it would only be fair.” She should probably shut up, but she longed to explain. “I’m not rich, by any means, but I did receive some money from my grandfather when he died. He was your grandfather, too, and I’m sure if he’d gotten to know you, he’d have made provisions for you.”
Susanna’s heart-shaped face was an image of distress. “Please don’t, Chloe. I know you mean well, but I can’t.”
Once again, it seemed she’d rushed ahead of herself in her eagerness to help. Well, if Susanna wouldn’t accept financial help from her, there might be another way.
“All right.” She reached across the counter to pat Susanna’s hand. “I won’t bring up the subject again, but I can’t help worrying about it. The shop means so much to you. It wouldn’t be right for you to have to give it up. Dora’s son must be the most inconsiderate man on earth.”
“He’s not that. He’s very kind and caring of his mother. I’m sure he just doesn’t realize how difficult the financial side is right now for me. Everything will work out.” But the words rang hollow.
“Have you considered a business loan from a bank?” Chloe made an effort to keep her tone casual. “That’s done all the time in situations like these. Unless it’s against the rules for Amish to borrow money, that is.”
Once again, she’d bumped up against something she didn’t know about her sisters’ beliefs.
“No, it’s not forbidden. Amish do borrow sometimes, for new equipment and the like.” Susanna actually seemed to be mulling over her words. “But I wouldn’t begin to know how to do such a thing.”
“I’d be happy to help, if you want to try.” Chloe had to fight to control her eagerness. “I can’t tell you the number of forms I’ve filled out in my life. I could stop by the bank today and see what’s involved in making a loan application.”
Susanna seemed to teeter on the edge of hope. “If I could do that . . . of course, I’d need to find out what Dora would consider a fair price.” A shadow crossed her face. “And her son.”
Yes, the son. Well, now that she was finally making progress with Susanna, Chloe was not about to let Nate Gaus mess things up. If he tried, he’d have to deal with her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nate
had been telling himself there was no need for him to stop by the shop to see Susanna. No need at all. He could easily have left a message on the business phone to tell her his mother wouldn’t be in this afternoon.
So why was he approaching the gift shop? It annoyed him that he didn’t have an immediate answer to that question. He always knew his own mind. Anyone would say that about him.
He was trying to be fair about this situation, as he’d told Susanna he would. Still, it was time to come to a conclusion about the business.
This should be a simple enough matter—settle things with Susanna, and then tell Mamm what they’d decided. He tried to ignore the little voice in the back of his mind that insisted it wouldn’t be that
easy.
He stepped inside, pausing for a moment by the door to let his vision adjust after the bright sunshine outside. At first he thought the shop was empty, and then he realized Susanna was at the back counter with another woman—the Englisch woman who’d been here the day Mamm took sick. The one who was, oddly enough, Susanna’s sister.
He walked toward them. Maybe the Englischer would take the hint and leave if he said he had to talk to Susanna. He glanced at her and discovered she was glaring at him with obvious dislike.
Switching his gaze, he greeted Susanna. “Susanna.” He nodded to her. “How are you?”
“Fine,” she said automatically. He thought she looked a little surprised, maybe even unsettled, at the sight of him. Then she glanced toward the Englisch woman. “You remember Chloe Wentworth, my . . . my sister.”
So. He hadn’t thought Susanna was ready to claim the woman as her sister. It seemed he’d been wrong.
“Is Dora having a problem? Why are . . .” Susanna let that trail off, probably thinking it rude to ask him why he was here.
“Mamm won’t be in this afternoon. She wanted me to let you know.” There, that was his ostensible purpose for coming.
“She’s not ill? She seemed fine at church.” The worry in Susanna’s face threw him off stride. Her love for his mother was obvious, and it had to be figured into the discussion they must have.
“I’m afraid she had another bad dizzy spell late yesterday.” He glanced at Chloe, hoping she’d accept that this was a private matter.
She didn’t show any signs of moving, however. She leaned against a table filled with baskets, her arms crossed.
“Oh, no.” Susanna’s eyes were dark with distress. “I hoped the change in medication would put an end to the dizziness. She must feel frustrated.”
That was exactly what his mother felt. She couldn’t accept anything that prevented her from doing what she thought she should.
“Ja, that’s it,” he said. “We called the doctor’s office, and he wants to do some more tests. So we don’t have any answers yet.”
“Please tell her not to worry about the shop,” Susanna said. “I’ll take care of everything. She must concentrate on getting better, ain’t so?”
He nodded, glad she’d given him this opening. “It seems to me that we—you and I—should come to some conclusion about the future of the shop. Then Mamm can stop worrying about what’s happening here when she should be thinking about herself.”
Susanna frowned. “She wouldn’t like to think we were making decisions that should be hers.”
Each time he thought he was making headway, he ran up against the same roadblock. Susanna was as stubborn about protecting his mother as Mamm was about looking after her.
“Not making decisions for Mamm,” he said, trying to sound persuasive and to ignore the other woman glaring at him. “It’s just a matter of showing her that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about giving up the shop. Changes will be easier to take if Mamm knows we all agree on what will happen, ain’t so?”
Persuasion didn’t seem to be working. Susanna’s gaze was doubting, while Chloe’s was outright hostile. Well, he had no choice but to forge ahead.
“It seems to me the first question is whether you want to sell the shop outright if Mamm can’t go on with it.”
Susanna’s face set firmly, making her appear momentarily older than her years. “No.”
That was blunt and decided. Well, better to know than wonder. Still, had she really thought this through?
“You’re sure you don’t want to go back home to Ohio?”
Susanna looked almost surprised at the question. “This is my home now.”
Did she mean Oyersburg or the shop? He didn’t know, and maybe she didn’t, either.
“Well, then, the logical thing is for you to buy out my mother, ain’t so?”
“I suppose so.” She seemed to lose some color. “How much are you thinking her share of the shop is worth?”
Nate glanced around, hoping the women couldn’t tell that he was at a loss, an unusual thing for him when it came to business. He’d been so sure that after thinking it over, Susanna would have decided that they should sell the shop outright. Setting a price that way would be simpler than trying to establish an appropriate cost for Mamm’s share.
“There is the value of the stock, in addition to the value of an established business, to consider.”
“What about the amount my father put up for my half of the business? Wouldn’t that be fair?”
Her question startled him. He hadn’t thought she’d have an opinion already. “That’s true, but the shop has far more stock now than it did then,” he pointed out. “You’ve been on the verge of running out of space for the past year or so.”
“The increase in the number of craftspeople the shop represents and the amount of the stock they carry is due in large part to my sister’s effort.” Chloe’s interruption seemed to startle Susanna as much as it did him. “You can’t simply divide that in half.”
“But I . . .” Susanna began.
“My mother’s reputation and knowledge made the shop what it is,” he countered, glaring at Chloe.
“My sister’s vision and efforts expanded it far beyond the original concept.” Chloe came right back at him, and he thought she was enjoying this battle.
He wasn’t. “This is a matter for Susanna to decide.” Not you.
“And for your mother,” Chloe retorted. “Maybe we should get an independent valuation of the stock.”
“Amish don’t bring outsiders into their business decisions,” he snapped.
“Stop, both of you.”
Susanna’s decided voice had both him and Chloe swinging to look at her. Emotion had brought a pink flush to her cheeks, and he was startled at how pretty she was with a bit of animation in her expression.
“I won’t have quarreling about the business Dora and I built together.”
“No, of course it’s not right,” he said, regretting that he’d let the woman egg him into a battle. “I apologize, Susanna.” He took a breath, trying to come up with a reasonable way to deal with this situation. “Suppose you think it over and decide on an amount you think is fair. I will check through the tax records and do the same. Is that acceptable to you?”
Susanna nodded.
“We’ll talk about it later, after we’ve both had a chance to prepare,” he said. And he could only hope they’d be able to do it without her sister.
* * *
By
Tuesday afternoon, Seth was feeling a little stir-crazy. He’d been cooped up in his small furnished apartment by a steady downpour that had started before dawn. All this rain was courtesy of Tropical Storm Leo, which had worked its way up the East Coast during the past few days.
The apartment was an improvement over the motel where he’d stayed when he’d first begun to spend so much time here, but it still wasn’t suited for extended periods indoors. It made him feel like a gerbil in a cage.
He’d been trying to concentrate on his latest project, but his thoughts kept straying to Chloe and her outrageous suggestion that he was leaning toward becoming Amish again. The trouble was that maybe the idea was less fantastic than it seemed.
Was he really considering joining the church? Reversing the action he’d taken years ago when he’d jumped the fence to the outside world?
People did, of course. It was common enough not even to cause much comment when a young man left the community before baptism, stayed in the Englisch world for a couple of years, and then came home, much to his parents’ relief. It even happened with young Amish women, though much less often.
He ran his fingers through his hair. That wasn’t remotely his situation. He’d been away more than ten years, and he’d built a successful career in a technological field that was about as far as it could b
e from Amish life. Six months ago he’d have laughed at the suggestion that he’d ever give that up.
He wasn’t laughing now. Seth paced to the window and stared out at the rain. Maybe these thoughts had been building up ever since he’d moved his base of operations back here in January, when the situation with Jessie had reached a crisis and his mother, still in a rehab facility after she’d broken her hip, had been unable to cope.
At first the change had been a matter of necessity. He couldn’t ignore his family’s needs, and they couldn’t be farmed out to someone else. He’d had to deal with them. But gradually, as winter turned to spring and then summer, he’d found himself adapting to the slower pace and rediscovering the forgotten joys of a quieter, simpler life.
Unfortunately his job, flexible though it was, demanded speed, busyness, movement. It called for teleconferences in the middle of the night and flying off across the country at a moment’s notice.
This last was the source of his current stress. It had begun simply enough, with a conversation with his boss over the new project. Steve was a friend as well as a boss.
As a friend, he understood Seth’s reluctance to commit to a lengthy stay in San Francisco at this time. As the head of the company, he had to make decisions that were best for business. He’d made it clear that as valuable as Seth was to them, if his heart wasn’t in the work any longer, maybe he should consider making a change.
Seth’s lips twisted. Steve had no idea just how great a change Seth was thinking of.
Could he do it? Could he give up the technology he loved? And if he did, what about Chloe?
He’d accused her of being prejudiced, but maybe the truth was that she simply knew where she belonged, unlike him.
Frustrated with the direction of his thinking, Seth grabbed the remote and switched on the television. Even a steady dose of political chatter was preferable to his thoughts.
But the news networks weren’t preoccupied with the latest Washington chatter. Instead, they were focused on the storm. Hurricane Leo, the news reporter announced, weakening now to a tropical storm, was still packing a powerful punch in terms of the rain it was pouring on the vulnerable areas of the northeast.