The Outcast (17 page)

I turn onto my side and face the wall to hide the hot tears streaming down my cheeks in accord with Leah’s
sobs. I act like I am asleep, but in light of my culpability, sleep will not come.

AMOS

Early the next morning, Samuel Stoltzfus is released from the hospital. Everyone surrounding him is still glassy-eyed from sleep deprivation and achy from having sat in one position for too long. Samuel, on the other hand, slept through each of the night nurse’s checkups. He whistles as he runs a comb over his hair and tugs his suspender straps up over his shirt.

“You think you could make me some
pon haus mit abbel budder
when we get home,
Fraa
?” Samuel asks, then sneers at the purple Jell-O cubes still on his tray. “After this
hutsch
, I’m right hungry.”

Norman Troyer looks over at Samuel in shock. The way Helen stands with her body slanted against the wall makes it obvious that she really needs to be lying down. Her hair, which has thinned at the temples from being pulled into a bun for so many years, is oily and strubbly, her face creased from having slept with it pressed against the pullout chair. But Samuel doesn’t notice this. He has not paid attention to his wife’s appearance in thirty-some years; why should he pay attention now?

“
Jah
, Samuel,” Helen says, giving her husband a smile
that only emphasizes the bags beneath her eyes. “I’ll make you some
pon haus
when we get home.”

Samuel nods in satisfaction. Tobias comes into the room with Gerald Martin.

“You all ready?” Tobias asks. Looking at the expressions on everyone’s faces, he already knows the answer.

Because of Samuel’s heart attack, the plans regarding the Stoltzfuses’ move have changed. Helen cannot pack up the
haus
and also take care of her husband, and Tobias and Leah cannot leave their other children in his sisters’ care long enough for Samuel to recover and make the arduous journey from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. Listening to this deliberation over the past three days, Rachel has known what the easiest solution would be.

But that does not mean it is an easy choice.

During the time when Rachel needed her parents the most, she was abandoned by them. But now that they need
her
, she feels compelled to help—and she knows she will feel guilty if she does not choose to remain behind while everyone else goes home. Rachel knows there is another answer to this quandary: she could travel back to Tennessee and take care of Tobias and Leah’s other children, but after Tobias’s behavior the night after Samuel’s heart attack, she knows he would never allow Gerald Martin to drive her down to Tennessee unchaperoned.
For that matter, he probably would not want her watching over his children, even for such a short time.

So, after much inner turmoil and one phone call to Ida Mae, Rachel chooses to stay and help her
mudder
pack. She’s hoping that if they both work, they can finish within the week. This would get Rachel back to Tennessee in time to tend to her reflexology patients and schedule a doctor’s appointment for Eli, whose cold has left but whose inflamed lymph node has not.

Watching Gerald Martin’s van drive away with her sister, brother-in-law, and nephew inside, Rachel recalls another morning—a humid spring morning the very opposite of this—when Leah left for Tennessee. Rachel had no idea when Leah climbed into the van and waved from behind the window that she was only doing so because she knew her
mamm
and sister could not see the tears streaming from her eyes. Seeing those tears would have lessened the sense of betrayal Rachel felt, but it would not have cured it. Only a week in advance, she’d been told that the next Monday her twin would be moving to the Copper Creek Community in Tennessee. When Rachel had asked why—perhaps thinking her sister had obtained a teaching position at the
schul
—she learned that a mere two weeks after that, Leah would wed a thirty-year-old widower with four children. This widower had been their
nochber
on Hilltop Road, but neither Rachel nor—if she were honest—Leah could remember Tobias King except for the fleeting image of a dark-haired
man who wore a leather apron over his pants and pounded hot metal in a wooden lean-to attached to the barn.

Rachel suspected that Leah hadn’t told her because Leah feared her sister would talk her out of the only decision she had ever made without Rachel’s consent. Still, Rachel would have appreciated being let in on the news sooner than she was. Perhaps, given more time, Rachel could have resigned from her position at the Muddy Pond
schul
and moved down to Tennessee as well. She would never have lived with Tobias and Leah, but she could have lived close enough that she and Leah might see each other more than twice a year.

But without time, that could not happen. None of that could happen. So Leah moved to Tennessee, and two weeks later, the wedding took place as planned. Two months after that, when Leah revealed that she was with child and asked her sister to move down, Rachel felt like everything was working out as it should have all along. She resigned from her teaching position, paid a driver to take her to Tennessee, and moved into Leah and Tobias’s white farmhouse—into the very room next to where Leah and her newlywed husband slept.

If only Rachel had known what devastation that move would bring, she never would have made it. Not even for the love of her sister, for what happened after that move risked it all.

Rachel

A week after his return from the hospital, my
dawdy
wearies of his ailment and rises from his bed like a phoenix from the ashes. By this point, the entire contents of the house have been disassembled, swaddled in bubble wrap, and nestled in the banana boxes my
mamm
had the foresight to collect from Weis Market when my sister wrote saying that she and
Dawdy
should move down. Despite this preparation, there is still plenty to do before Gerald returns to pick us up tomorrow. My
dawdy
has been sedentary for so long, however, he cannot imagine another day lying around as my
mamm
and I carry boxes past him.

“Want to go to Root’s?” he asks.

I look over my cup, then set it back on the counter. Sleeping beneath my
dawdy
’s roof for the first time in a year and a half has galvanized the pain his emotional absence has always caused. Because of this, nothing in me wants to spend quality time with this man who has never had quality time to spend before. Nothing in me wants to talk with this man who has said no more than two dozen words in the eight days I’ve been here, all of which were uttered in the same clipped tone he uses when dealing with difficult horses. But then I recall my middle-of-the-night conversation with Leah. I know if we are ever to change the dynamics of our relationship with our father, we must not duplicate the same rejection we have always felt. Instead, we will have to embrace him with all of his mistakes and
hope that with the example of our steadfast love, our
dawdy
will be able to love us the way he should have from the beginning.

“Let me check with
Mamm
first. See if she can watch Eli.”

Dawdy
slaps his thighs and gets to his feet. “I’ll go hook up the buggy.”

When I tell my
mamm
that we are traveling to Root’s Market, she seems as surprised as I. “It’ll be
goot
to get that
rutschy mann
out of the
haus
. He gets underfoot when he’s bored.”

“Eli’s still asleep.” I point over my shoulder. “Do you mind?”

My
mamm
shakes her head. Her
kapp
strings sway from where they have come untied. “You watch
Dawdy
and I’ll watch your
suh
. I say you have a harder babysitting job than I.”

I smile, turn to leave.

“And, Rachel?”

“Jah?”

“Don’t let your
vadder
eat everything in sight.”

Balancing on that narrow seat, watching the immaculate farms of Lancaster County slip past, I am reminded of all the times Leah and I made this journey from Mount Joy to Manheim with our father. She and I would sit together rather than on either side of
Dawdy
, and the whole time,
we would whisper and giggle until he quieted us with an eyebrow raised over a stern blue eye. But if I was riding alone with
Dawdy
—perhaps on our way to help a
nochber
with his horse gelding or to bring one back that we could break and train—I would sit in the buggy with my hands in my lap, wordlessly staring out the window as I am doing now.