by Leslie Gould
Finally, the bus reached the outskirts of Nappanee just as my phone rang. It was the florist. I answered it with the cheeriest hello I could muster. “Hey, sorry to bother you,” she said. “But Ryan’s card was declined.”
I groaned.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Can you call Ryan?” I said. “You should have his number.”
“I can do that,” she said. “But if I can’t get a hold of him, I’ll have to run the other card on file, which is yours.”
“Could you hold off on that?” I asked. “I’m sure he’ll take care of it.”
“I’ll give him a call and see what he says,” she answered.
I hung up with a sick feeling. Hopefully it was just a glitch. Ryan had to take care of it like he said he would. I would need the money I’d put away to relocate, not pay for the wedding he canceled.
The driver swung the bus into the parking lot of the grocery store. Just as I expected, Uncle Seth sat in his pickup. He left the engine running as he climbed out. He wore a heavy coat, a stocking cap over his white hair, thick gloves, and work boots.
I stepped off the bus and retrieved my bag from the driver. Uncle Seth took it from me, despite my protests, and swung it into the bed of the truck as if it were weightless. I was too tired to talk much, but I managed to ask about his family.
His seven children, forty-plus grandchildren, and eighteen great-grandchildren were all doing fine, apparently. Delores, his oldest daughter, was still working as a midwife. Years ago, she and I used to talk business.
“She has her office on my property now,” he said. “It got to be too much for her to make all those home visits, and my place is in a good, central location.”
He paused. “Of course, I miss Edna every day.”
I reached over and patted his arm. His wife had passed away three years ago. I’d sent a card, and Uncle Seth had written a kind note in return. The two had been married for fifty-four years.
As Uncle Seth turned into Mammi’s driveway, the lights from the pickup illuminated the two-story farmhouse and then the white barn. My heart swelled with the feeling of home.
Mammi, bundled in a thick sweater, greeted us at the back door. As Uncle Seth headed up to my room with my bag, Mammi put her hands on both of my shoulders and locked her eyes on mine. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.
Overcome with emotion, I simply nodded.
“Are you hungry?”
I shook my head.
“Exhausted?”
I nodded again.
“Go on up to bed,” she said. “Everything is ready for you.”
“Denki,” I said. “We’ll talk in the morning.” I exhaled, relaxing a little for the first time in almost a week.
The farmhouse smelled just the way it had when I was a girl, like coffee and cinnamon. Wood and lavender. Love and comfort.
Uncle Seth came down the staircase, and after thanking him profusely, I went up, crawling into my childhood bed with my coat still on. Even with that, it was cold. In my tired stupor, I remembered that the bedrooms in Amish homes had no source of heat. I also remembered that I’d only ever visited Indiana in the summer.
I shivered until I finally warmed enough to fall asleep.
PERHAPS I DREAMED about my childhood, because when I awoke—on what should have been my wedding day—my thoughts weren’t on Ryan. They were on my parents.
My father, James Jonathan Mast Jr., left the Amish as an eighteen-year-old. He loved the land, farming, and his family. But he couldn’t, as much as he tried to force himself, join the church. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God. It was the many rules that he couldn’t accept.
One warm spring night in 1989, he left a note to his parents in the middle of the big oak table, the edge of the paper tucked under the sugar bowl. He aimed west and finally, as the sun rose, hitched a ride. Once a week he’d send a postcard to his parents, trying to save them as much worry as possible.
First, he worked on a dairy farm in Illinois and then, in the fall, headed west again. He found a job operating a ski lift in Colorado. The next spring, just after he turned nineteen, he headed to Northern California. He took a job working on a cattle ranch outside of Grass Valley, a town of twelve thousand people, located between Sacramento and Donner’s Pass.
My mother worked in the area on an organic vegetable farm with some of her girlfriends. She and Dad met at a farmers’ market that August, and they both swore it was love at first sight. She was all of nineteen and, of course, more worldly-wise than Dad. But right up until the end of her days, she’d had a sort of childlike innocence to her. Somehow my mother managed to always live in the moment, finding joy in even the mundane.
“Savannah.” Mammi’s low voice was followed by a quiet knock on my door. “Breakfast is ready.”
Although awake, I finally opened my eyes to the gray morning light coming through the east-facing windows.
“Be down in a minute,” I said.
“The kitchen is warm . . .” Mammi’s voice trailed off.
The room, my room, had been my father’s. It was furnished as simply as every bedroom in the house, with a bed, a bureau, and pegs on the wall to hang clothing.
The first time Dad put me on a plane for Indiana, I was six. Mom’s parents had divorced when she was little, and she never had much of a relationship with her father, who’d moved to Houston. And, according to her, her mother wasn’t the “grandma type.”
All I had were Dad’s stories, but I was pretty sure Mammi Mast was the grandma type. She cooked and baked and gardened and quilted. And at the time, because my grandfather had died the year before, she also managed the farm, leasing out most of the land and hiring a farmhand to do the rest.
Mom had had fifteen babies to deliver that summer, and Dad was working fourteen-hour days on the ranch. I often accompanied both of them to work, and I could have easily done that all through the summer. But instead I asked to go see my Mammi in Indiana. So Dad left a message for his mother, and she called back and said, “I’d like to have Savannah visit.”
Looking back, it seems awfully trusting of Mom to let me go stay with a woman she’d never met. She must have trusted that Dad wouldn’t send me if I wouldn’t be safe. He was overprotective, to say the least, but he never had qualms about my visiting Mammi.
There may have been another reason too. All in all, we were a happy little family, but I sensed tension between my parents from time to time. Now, as an adult, I guessed Dad probably didn’t talk much about his feelings and that Mom, who was the most emotionally honest person I’ve ever met, was probably frustrated with him. And perhaps hurt. Looking back, I hope it was good for them to have those weeks without me during the summer. I doubted that Dad opened up more, but at least they didn’t have to juggle me along with their jobs. At least they had a little bit of time for just the two of them.
That first summer, Uncle Seth picked me up at the tiny South Bend airport and dropped me off at the Mast family farm. That began an annual tradition, which continued every summer until I was fifteen. After that, I started officially working as Mom’s assistant and began an apprenticeship, sure I wanted to follow her into midwifery.
I think my trips to Indiana did Mammi almost as much good as they did me. Most Amish widows remarried soon after a spouse passed away, but Mammi didn’t seem to have any interest in that. I know managing the farm, keeping the house in good repair, helping those in need, and quilting took up most of her time, but she said her favorite weeks of the year were when I was with her.
Still in my coat, I finally crawled out of bed and slipped into my boots. Then I shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, which was just as cold as my bedroom, and then downstairs to the kitchen. Mammi was right. It was, by far, the warmest place in the house.
She looked so small in her layers of clothes and bulky sweater. “There’s coffee,” she said. “And biscuits and gravy.”
My mouth watered. I hadn’t had biscuits and gravy in years.
Mammi led us in a silent prayer, and then we ate. Suddenly, after hardly eating all week, I was famished. Mammi ate a half biscuit with gravy, while I ate three. When I was finally full, she led us in a closing silent prayer.
As we cleared the table, I asked what she had planned for the day. “I was going to quilt at Jane’s shop,” she said. “But I think I’ll stay home.”
“Because of me?” I didn’t want her to change her plans.
She smiled. “Well, I’d stay if you needed me to. But the truth is I don’t want to take the horse and buggy out. With this storm, it’s a good day to stay home.”
“Could Seth take you?”
“It’s not necessary.” She gestured toward the living room. “I have a quilt to work on here.”
That wasn’t surprising. She always had a quilt she was working on.
“And I can go Monday for the quilting circle. Would you go with me then?”
“Sure.” She’d taught me how to quilt when I was a girl, but I hadn’t done it in years.
The day seemed to stretch ahead of me, as endless as the snowy landscape. I should have been getting my hair done for the wedding. We would have been leaving for Saint Lucia tomorrow. Instead, I was trapped in a cold farmhouse with a dying phone and no car.
But at least I was with Mammi.
I TOOK TWO naps, one before dinner, as Mammi called it, even though it was the noon meal, and then another one after. I felt restless. I needed to charge my phone and go to a coffee shop where I could get internet on my laptop. I needed to call Dad and let him know where I was. I needed to make sure Ryan really was paying for the wedding he’d canceled.
Later, as dusk fell, my mood grew even darker as I looked out the bedroom window into the dreary afternoon. Had I thought I’d come to Mammi’s at the end of December and it would be sunny and bright, like it was in the summer?
I needed to come up with a plan to get on with my life.
I checked my phone by the fading light. No missed calls. No voicemails. No texts. Had everyone forgotten me on what should have been my wedding day? I clomped down the stairs and then wandered into the living room, where Mammi was quilting and humming quietly to herself.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“A little.” Actually, I was starving again.
“I have ham and corn bread. And canned green beans and applesauce.”
“That sounds lovely,” I answered, thinking of the cucumber salad with lemon vinaigrette, the grilled salmon, the sliced flat iron steak, and the garlic mashed potatoes we’d chosen for our wedding dinner.
Where was Ryan now? Most likely with Amber.
“Savannah, are you all right?”
I focused on my grandmother. “Mostly,” I answered.
“I’m sorry for your hatz ache.”
“Denki,” I replied.
After supper, before we cleared the table, Mammi read from the Bible, reading Matthew chapter 18 by the light of the propane lamp hanging above the table. I barely listened as she read Jesus’ words about becoming like a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Mom and Dad had gone to a little community church with a congregation of around a hundred, taking me with them. I also attended Sunday school and a Wednesday night kids’ club, where we memorized Bible verses. I’d already had a faith tradition when I first started visiting Mammi, but her lifestyle was so simple and her faith so visible that it really impacted me.
But after my mother died, I resented God. Why had He allowed it? Dad seemed so lost and hurt that I didn’t feel as if I could talk through it with him. And when I talked with Mammi on the phone, I never admitted my spiritual despair.
Distantly, I heard Mammi read Matthew 18:20. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
In my pain and grief, I had found myself praying less and less. I also stopped seeking out the fellowship of other believers. But when Ryan and I started dating, he was the one who led me back to church. He’d gone with his mother as a child, and although he’d quit going during college, he’d missed it. So we found a community church to attend.
Ryan’s spiritual seeking was one of the things that had truly endeared him to me. We didn’t have time to get involved much more than Sunday mornings, but we figured we’d do that after we were married.
When Mammi reached the end of the chapter, she closed her Bible and then, without saying anything more, began collecting the plates. I stood up to help, eager for some activity to warm me.
Later, once I was back upstairs, I plugged my nearly dead phone into the portable battery pack I’d brought along. Then, as I lay in bed staring at the pitch-black ceiling, I tried to pray. Really I did.
Dear God . . .
But then nothing more came.
Just as I was finally starting to drift off to sleep, my phone startled me awake. In my half-awake state, I was sure it was Ryan.
It wasn’t. It was an Indiana number.
I woke up enough to accept the call and croak, “Hello?”
“Sorry to call so late. It’s Delores.” My Uncle Seth’s daughter. “I have the flu. High fever, aches, and chills. Sore throat and cough. The whole deal.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. . . .” Why was she calling me?
“I have a mother in labor. I can’t find another midwife to cover for me. Would you do it?”
I was wide awake now. “I’m not qualified.”
“It’s her third Boppli. I don’t foresee any problems.”
“I don’t have any equipment,” I said. “Or a vehicle.” Surely she wouldn’t expect me to take Mammi’s buggy.
“I know,” she said. “I have an extra set of gear in my shop. Dad will bring it to you. And you can drive his pickup.”
When I didn’t answer, she said, “I’m guessing that going out in a snowstorm to a birth is the last thing you want to do. . . .”
I didn’t say anything. She was right about that.
“This woman just needs someone with her, another woman. She’ll do fine.”
“How about a neighbor? Or relative?”
“She recently came back to Nappanee after being away for years. She’s a widow who remarried a year ago. Her name is Arleta. She has two older children, but she doesn’t have any relatives in the area. I did leave messages for a couple of her neighbors, but no one’s called me back.”
I doubted any Amish were checking their messages on a night like tonight.
“Can’t your dad drive me there?”
“He could except he’s not feeling very well either. I told him to wear a mask when he picks you up. You’ll need to drop him off at his place and then keep going.”
“He’ll be there in a few—” She broke off in a deep cough.
When she stopped, I said, “I haven’t been to a birth in nine years.”
“You used to assist your mother. And you’d started an apprenticeship.”
“But I never delivered a baby on my own.”
“Your being there will only make things easier for Arleta. There’s no way it will make it worse.”
I swung my legs over to the side of the bed. “What about liability issues?”
“You will simply be helping a woman in need. No one’s going to sue.”
I wasn’t so sure. “Why don’t you send her to the hospital?”
“I tried,” Delores answered. “Her husband was the one who called me, and he refused. Believe me, I’ve tried every other option possible.”
A horn honked outside.
“What if something goes wrong?” I asked.
“Well, if you have a question, call me. If it’s an emergency, call 9-1-1.”
“All right,” I finally said. “I’ll go. What’s the address?�
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“Dad has it,” she answered. “Plus special driving directions.”
I stood and grabbed my car charger from the front pocket of my suitcase. “And you’re sure Uncle Seth has everything I need?”
“Jah, positive.”
I shuddered. God help me. I could be making the biggest mistake of my life, but the thought of a woman laboring by herself in a snowstorm was more than I could bear.
CHAPTER 3
The snow fell fast as I steered Uncle Seth’s pickup along the country road. I had my phone plugged in to the cigarette lighter—luckily I’d been able to find my old-school adaptor—and my GPS was set for Arleta’s house.
Plus I had Uncle Seth’s special instructions. “If your GPS tells you to turn left at the county road, keep going until you come to the next lane. Vernon always keeps that lane plowed.” He’d told me that between coughs, behind the mask that he must have retrieved from Delores’s office, as I took him back to his house. He also told me to make sure not to flood the engine of the pickup when I restarted it the next morning.
Not all babies came in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. I’d assisted Mom plenty of times when babies came during the day, in the summer, or the fall, or the spring. But of course, even in Northern California, they came in the middle of the night during a snowstorm.
That was one of the things I’d liked best about the Bay Area. No snow.
Perhaps I should start my job search in Florida. That was far away from the Bay Area. And blizzards.
The pickup lurched forward and jerked three times. It hadn’t done that yesterday when Uncle Seth was driving. I pressed harder on the accelerator. The engine caught. Relieved, I grasped the steering wheel tighter and started up an incline. It couldn’t be called a hill.
The sputtering started again. I checked the gas gauge, horrified for a moment. But it was fine, showing the tank was nearly half full.
The GPS on my phone instructed me to turn right. As I did, the sputtering grew worse. I managed to steer the pickup toward the side of the road before it lurched again and then stopped as the engine died altogether.
After turning the key on and off, I pressed my head against the cold steering wheel. I must have been delusional when I told Delores I’d drive on a wintery road to deliver Arleta’s baby. Maybe grandiose. At this rate, Arleta would deliver on her own.