Finding Hope

by Janice Kay Johnson - His Best Friend's Baby

  To fill the time, Hannah took the vegetable drawers out of the refrigerator, emptied them, then washed and dried them. She had just put the cabbage, greens, peas, and carrots back in the drawers when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Not Zeb’s usual fast clatter that sounded like a horse galloping down, but a pace so slow, she felt the reluctance.

  She’d hidden her smile by the time he entered the kitchen. “Oh, good, there you are. You still have time to have a cookie or two before you start your chores.”

  “Why didn’t she do them, since she got to stay home all day?”

  “That’s unkind,” Hannah said quietly. “Rebekah has been a help to me, and is sweeping the mudroom right now. You’re bigger and stronger, so you can do things she can’t.”

  He rolled his eyes. “She could clean the chicken coop. She’s just scared she’ll get pecked.”

  “Weren’t you, when you were younger?”

  His mouth twisted, but he mumbled, “I guess so.”

  Hannah poured a glass of milk and set it in front of him along with a plate holding two cookies. Then she sat across from him, watching as he studied them dubiously before taking a bite and then gobbling.

  After the first had disappeared, Hannah said, “Your daad talked to Rebekah when she first came home.”

  Something like despair flashed in the boy’s eyes. “Of course, she told him everything. She’s such a blabbermaul.”

  “Wouldn’t you have admitted to your father what happened this morning?”

  Shoulders stiff, he stared at the remaining cookie without reaching for it. Then those thin shoulders slumped. “If I don’t tell him, someone else always does.”

  “That’s the way of the world,” she agreed. “And your daad understands better than you think. I bet he got into trouble as a boy, too.”

  “He didn’t have someone say she was glad because his mother left him!” he flared back, his dark eyes filled with anger.

  “I wasn’t there,” she said. “When your mamm died, I mean. So I don’t really know what happened.”

  “Bernice wasn’t, either,” he said spitefully.

  “Ja, that’s true. But what I’m trying to say is that, from what your daad said, it sounds like people did a lot of talking back then, too, including other kinder.”

  “Some said it was Daad’s fault.” Now he looked desperate. “That he’d let Mamm ride around in the car with an Englischer, that he should have known something bad would happen. It made me so mad!”

  “You were only . . . five? Six? Just think what your father was hearing. But he worried most about you and Rebekah.”

  As if, by using her name, Hannah had summoned Zeb’s sister, she appeared from the mudroom, clutching the broom that was really too tall for her. Her gaze went from Hannah’s face to Zeb’s.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Zeb whirled in his chair. “None of your business!”

  “But . . .”

  “Zeb, apologize to your sister,” Hannah said firmly. “It’s never necessary to be rude. You could have said, ‘I need to talk to Hannah by myself,’ and Rebekah would have understood.”

  His lips thinned in mutiny, but after stealing a look at Hannah, he muttered, “I’m sorry.”

  “Then can I stay?”

  Hannah leveled a look at him, and he managed to keep his mouth shut. Looking at his sister, she said gently, “You and I had all day to talk. Now he needs some of my time. Please go sweep the porch, too.”

  Rebekah never liked to be shut out, but she went, albeit dragging her feet.

  Once Hannah heard the front door open and close, she said, “Learning to control your anger is part of growing up. I imagine that sisters and brothers often get mad at each other—”

  “Don’t you have any?” he asked in amazement.

  “No . . .” She blinked. “Well, now I do. Emma and Adah are two of them, but I didn’t grow up with them. I didn’t even know they existed.”

  She watched him absorb that. After a minute, he said, “She’s always following me around. I want to be alone sometimes!”

  “Ja, but you also want her to play with you. You and she have been through so much that nobody else understands, that ties you together. Weren’t you mad at Bernice this morning partly because she hurt Rebekah?”

  “Ja.” He did look thoughtful, which gave her hope.

  “Back when you moved, did your daad talk to you about his decision?”

  “Ja, but that doesn’t mean I know why we really moved.”

  She smiled at him as she pushed back her chair. “Well, think about it.”

  He snatched up a cookie.

  “I’m going out to the garden to see what’s ripe.” She opened a cupboard. “You’ll tell Rebekah?”

  He screwed up his face. “She’s coming in now.”

  “Oh, good. She can come with me.” She found a lightweight bowl she could use to collect peas and cucumbers and rhubarb for a sweet bread, making a mental note to retrieve the heavier bowl from Rebekah’s bed. Circling the table, she was able to bend and press her cheek to Zeb’s dark head. “Find your hat before you go out.”

  * * *

  * * *

  When Hannah arrived at her father’s house that evening, he was waiting to unhitch Clover. She’d become accustomed to helping now, her hands going automatically to buckles.

  Samuel looked at her over the mare’s back. “I hear there was more excitement today for Zeb and Rebekah.”

  Glad of the concern in his voice, she nodded and told him the latest. “I was proud of Emma and Adah, though. Rebekah said they waited outside for her and Zeb to say they were sorry for the talk.”

  “They’re good girls,” he said with satisfaction. “Just like their older sister.”

  “Now, how do you know I was a good girl?” she teased, helping him pull the lightweight buggy into the barn, while Clover, freed in the pasture, lowered herself to the ground and began to roll, hooves kicking the air.

  “Because I think you’re a good woman now,” he answered seriously. “And I wonder if your mamm wasn’t a better mother than you think.”

  She stared at him in shock. “How can you say that, after what she did?”

  “Would you be the woman you are now, good-hearted, happy taking care of other people, able to have faith in the Lord, if she hadn’t raised you with love?”

  Her mouth hung open, and for a full minute she couldn’t have formed a word to save her life.

  “Come. Sit down,” he invited.

  The hay—or straw?—bales were handy. She took one, her daad the other.

  She blurted, “Taking care of other people?”

  Why had that come out?

  “You’re so good with your sisters and brothers. You sat with Zachariah when he was sick and read to him, for his sake and for Lilian’s. You are happy when the food you serve pleases people. Sunday, I saw you with Gideon’s kinder. The way you touch them, smile at them, and the way they trust you.”

  “I didn’t know until I came here how much I like kinder.”

  “You try to live as God asks of you.”

  “The first time I remember going to church I was seven or eight, maybe. Mamm was dating a man who was a churchgoer, so . . .” She glanced nervously at Samuel.

  He nodded his understanding, his expression holding a depth of acceptance, even serenity, Hannah couldn’t conceive.

  “I loved going to church. Whenever we moved, I found a church within walking distance. Mamm . . . never understood, but from the first time I went to a service, I felt as if I was being embraced. God’s word taught me who I wanted to be.”

  “A fine woman,” he said contentedly.

  “Denke.”

  Not until now, she realized, did she see clearly what she’d found in those churches—and what she hadn’t. Her
attendance had always been taken for granted, but not remarked on. She hadn’t been enfolded the way she craved. In some churches, pastors lectured their congregants in ringing tones about sin, while others focused more gently on hope and forgiveness. Especially as a child, she’d wanted a blueprint for how to live based on God’s will, but no one ever gave her one. Probably, she’d come to believe, that was up to parents to provide for their children.

  A silence settled over them. Samuel neither moved nor spoke, his patience seemingly unending.

  There were questions she hadn’t yet dared ask. This seemed like the right time. “How did you meet her?”

  “In town. I was young.” He shrugged. “I sometimes went to the Mill Café.”

  Englisch owned, Hannah understood, versus the Amish-owned Country Days Café. Samuel had been kicking over the traces, in his modest way.

  “Your mamm was a waitress there. She flirted, and I took her for a ride in my buggy. Your mamm . . .” He hesitated. “Jodi was pretty, of course.” His sidelong glance held humor. “To a man in his twenties, that matters. A boy, maybe, not a man.”

  Hannah laughed.

  His gaze became unfocused. “She was always smiling. She made me laugh. I started to think about what it would be like to spend my life with a woman so joyful, a woman who seemed to shine from within. Always happy.”

  “Was she ever really like that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said simply. “Once we spent time together, her certainty seemed as great as her joy. She learned the language, took the necessary classes so that she could be baptized.” He glanced at Hannah. “She’d grown up in her parents’ church, so she had a start. We got married.”

  Hannah reached for his work-worn hand. He started, as if he’d forgotten he was talking to someone else, but then his calloused fingers closed around her hand.

  “There were things I hadn’t noticed about her,” he continued, voice heavier. “When you came, you began right away to help: in the kitchen, the garden, with the housework, as if you didn’t know how to sit and be lazy. Jodi had visited, and I thought she was just shy with my mamm and sisters and the others. But once we were married, I found she didn’t know how to cook and didn’t want to learn. At first, she did a little housework, talked about what a big garden she’d start.”

  Oh, Hannah knew all of this. Her mother talked, but expected others to do the work. And, no, that wasn’t altogether fair; Jodi had held job after job after job, in between being taken care of by the men who eventually grew impatient with her, if she didn’t get tired of them—or have to flee from them. Most often, she worked as a waitress. At least she could whirl around a room from a family group to a couple to a single man or woman. She loved to chat, to flirt, to laugh with people. But she always lost those jobs because she was too slow, because other waitresses had to take some of her tables, because she didn’t do her share of the cleaning and prep work. She thought nothing of arriving five minutes late, too, and was invariably surprised when her bosses lost patience with her unreliability.

  “She became unhappy right away. Lonely, when I worked all day. She’d say, ‘There’s nothing to do!’ ” He shook his head in genuine puzzlement. “There was much that was important to do, but she ignored it. Once we expected you, she became happier, although then she claimed to be sick to her stomach or so tired she couldn’t do housework or cook. She skipped our worship a few times, too sick, she said. She dreaded hosting when our Sunday came around, then insisted she was only nervous that people would think she hadn’t done what she should have.”

  Hannah understood his bemusement. She’d now heard enough women talking to know how excited they were to hold the worship in their own homes. Scrubbing and polishing in advance was part of the happiness at truly being part of the congregation.

  “I hired a woman to be here,” Samuel continued, “as Gideon has with you, for the days when my female relatives were too busy with their own families to help. You were only a boppli when I found old friends of hers were picking her up, and both of you were gone all day sometimes.”

  This was far and away the most Hannah’s father had ever said in one sitting. A quiet man, he enjoyed having his family chattering around him, but except for the occasional interjection, only listened. “He says that’s what he’s best at,” Lilian had confided one day, laughing softly. “Listening.”

  Like Gideon, Hannah couldn’t help thinking.

  But her daad must understand Hannah’s hunger to know how she’d come to be born—and why everything had gone so awry.

  “We both must have known we’d made a mistake, but we had you. And for me, marriage was for a lifetime. But when I pressed her to be more of a partner, she became angry. All I wanted was a housekeeper, she said.” He sighed. “But when I told her she could visit her friends, but she couldn’t take you with her, she . . .”

  Rather than waiting while he groped for words, Hannah said, “She threw a screaming fit.”

  “Ja.” He was still perplexed, she saw. “But I stood firm, and she was furious with me after that. I don’t know why she stayed as long as she did.”

  “Because she had to have money? An idea of someplace to go?” But especially money, Hannah realized. Her friends were likely as young and free and easy about finances and responsibilities as Jodi had been—and still was.

  Or had Mom actually been happy to leave her small daughter in someone else’s hands? Someone who would change stinky diapers, potty train her when the time came? Start teaching her to cook, to sweep floors, to pull weeds?

  Then Mom could flit home at the end of the day and delight her child with fanciful stories and overflowing love that probably made the other women in the young child’s life seem dour and lacking in joy.

  Oh, yes, Hannah thought. I was probably thrilled the day my mommy said, “Today, you’re coming with me. We’ll have all kinds of adventures!”

  Samuel broke into her thoughts. “I do not like speaking harshly about her. You know your mamm better than I ever did—”

  “She never changed. She could be happy and fun. I always knew she loved me.” Did I really? Hannah asked herself. Should love be so careless? But as a child, she’d never dared let herself question the depth of her mother’s love. How could she, when Mom was all she had? With a sigh, she went on, “But Mom was also wildly emotional, inconstant, longing to have a man to take care of her. I’d say she was unreliable, except she never abandoned me. We were a team. That’s what she’d say. So . . . I suppose she did teach me to love, and I learned to be practical, because she wasn’t, and I think that’s a good thing.”

  “Ja.” He squeezed her hand again. “I think the same.”

  Hannah bent forward, feeling as sick as Rebekah had pretended to be. “And so I love her, but I still can’t forgive her.”

  “Forgiveness will ease your burden,” her father said mildly, but then they sat quietly for a time, feeling no more need for speech.

  Samuel Mast was infinitely reliable, kind, she thought; a rock that would never break, any more than he would betray the smallest of trusts. For a woman who flitted through life, he must quickly have gone from irresistible to intolerable. Probably dull, infuriating. Certainly not fun. The two had been ill suited from the beginning, and too young and foolish to see that.

  Hannah laid her cheek against her father’s solid shoulder, and wondered how it could be that she was so much more like him than she was like the mother who’d raised her.

  She didn’t wonder at all why she was so powerfully attracted to Gideon, possibly even falling in love with him, another man she had not the slightest doubt was steadfast, trustworthy . . . and capable of tenderness.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Julia and Miriam arrived Thursday afternoon, as promised, to help Hannah cut out and sew a new dress and aprons. Knowing their lives were as busy as hers, she felt blessed by their friendship, offered with no
expectation of anything in return.

  Her aenti Sarah had given her two older dresses that didn’t fit Hannah well, but given her daily activities, that didn’t really matter. When she apologized for not having Julia’s dress and apron ready to return, she admitted that the last time she’d worn it, she’d stained the apron red as she baked strawberry pies, then splattered grease on it frying pork and sausage for a pork potpie.

  “I soaked it, but I haven’t had a chance to wash it and make sure I really got the stains out.”

  Julia only laughed. “Aprons are meant to get dirty,” her new friend assured her. “There’s no way you can cook and take care of your garden and house while staying spotlessly clean. Though I admit, I never look forward to weschdagg.”

  Hannah already knew that was “washday.” She and the other two women had evolved to speaking a hodgepodge of Deitsh and English, the Deitsh increasingly dominating as her fluency grew.

  While they cut out lilac cotton for her first new dress, Julia told Hannah about the lessons Miriam had given her in speaking Deitsh, back before she’d even consciously considered converting. “She’d quiz me. She made me learn to say, ‘Ich hab en aker grummbiere geblanst.’ ”

  Hannah put that together. “ ‘I planted an acre of potatoes’?”

  Miriam let out a peal of laughter. “You understand! Now you can say you speak Deitsh.”

  Hannah laughed, too. “I’m sure there are more useful things I could learn to say.”

  “Ja, like ‘Sell kann ennichpepper duh.’ ”

  Her hands went still while she thought. “ ‘Anyone can do that’?”

  Both the other women crowed in triumph.

  In a teasing way, they threw out sentences and phrases while they were there, including some that were undoubtedly meant to help her understand the next service.