The Search (21 page)

Jonah offered his mother a stiff handshake. Mammi held onto his hand extra long, Bess noticed, as if she didn’t want to let go.

But Jonah was undeterred. He went to the buggy just as a pony and cart pulled up the drive. It was Andy Yoder, carrying a bouquet of wildflowers in his arms.

When he reached the yard, he reined the pony over to the buggy and jumped off the cart. “What’s going on?”

“They’re heading back to Ohio,” Mammi said, glaring at Jonah.

Andy looked horrified. “But why?” When no one answered, he looked to Bess, but she only shrugged. Then he turned to Jonah. “Well, could I at least speak to Bess? Privately?”

Jonah rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache coming on, but he climbed into the buggy. Mammi stayed put.

Andy gave a sideways glance at Mammi before thrusting the wildflowers at Bess. “What would you say if I wrote to you? Would you write back?”

Billy came out of the barn and stopped abruptly when he saw Andy handing the wildflowers to Bess. “We’d better get going if you want to make that noon bus, Jonah,” he said in a loud voice. He climbed into the buggy.

“He’s right, Bess,” Jonah called out.

Andy looked stricken. Bess got into the buggy and sat in the backseat.

“Write to me, Bess!” Andy yelled as Billy slapped the reins to get the horse moving.

Bess leaned a hand out the window to wave to Mammi and Andy and the rose fields and the house and Blackie.

When Billy turned left onto the road, Bess said to her father, “I want to say goodbye to Lainey.”

“No time,” Jonah answered, eyes on the road. He spoke sharply but without conviction.

“We’re going right past the bakery and it won’t take but a minute,” she said firmly.

Jonah didn’t respond, so Billy pulled the horse to the hitching post. Lainey came out as if she had been expecting them. Bess ran into her outstretched arms.

“I don’t know why he’s doing this, Lainey!” Bess whispered. “Something’s happened to make him upset.”

Lainey didn’t answer at first. Then she pulled back and held Bess’s arms. “Being here . . . it’s hard for your father. It brings up a lot of sad memories. Things he’d rather forget about. Give him time. He’ll come around.” She hugged Bess again and released her.

Jonah came toward them. “Bess, hop in the buggy. I’ll be there in a moment.”

Bess went to the buggy to wait with Billy. She kept her eyes on her father. Lainey was saying something to him, but he didn’t say anything back. He looked away while she spoke, as if he didn’t really want to hear it.

“He’ll be in love with a new girl by week’s end,” Billy said crisply.

Bess’s gaze was fixed on her father and Lainey. “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen him like this.”

“What do you mean? He’s like this all the time.”

She turned to Billy. “Who?”

“Andy Yoder. He’s girl crazy.”

Bess rolled her eyes.

“I’m only looking out for your welfare.”

Bess turned back to her father and Lainey. He was saying something to her now, something that made Lainey look hurt. He returned to the buggy and gave a nod to Billy to get going. Bess waved to Lainey, who blew a kiss at her and waved back, slow and sad.

Jonah and Bess’s quick departure left Billy with a vague unease, as if he had left the barn door open or forgot to water the new rose graftings. Something just didn’t feel right. What was Jonah’s big hurry about, anyway? Billy clucked to old Frieda to get her moving faster. This horse moved plenty fast for Bertha but acted like a tired old nag for everybody else.

His thoughts drifted to the way Jonah and Lainey looked—so serious—when they were talking to each other outside the bakery. If he didn’t know better, he would say they looked like their hearts were breaking. But that couldn’t be right. A straight-up fellow like Jonah Riehl would never get involved with an English girl. Bertha Riehl would have him drawn and quartered.

But what did he know about love? He thought Betsy was straight up, and he sure was wrong about that.
Oh Betsy, Betsy, I thought I knew you,
Billy lamented as the horse plodded along.

He felt himself slipping back into what Bess called his Betsy funk. He tried to snap out of it by thinking again about Jonah and Bess and Lainey. Bess had been trying to figure out what Jonah and Lainey were saying to each other while he was trying to warn Bess not to count on Andy’s devotion for longer than a minute. Bess was awfully innocent about boys, though she didn’t seem to appreciate his warning. She had told him to hush.

“They’re saying something important,” she scolded him, watching Jonah and Lainey. She squinted her eyes, trying to lip-read. “She’s asking him if it would have been better to be raised by
that
man. He’s telling her that he thinks living with the truth would have been better. No . . . best.” She shrugged and blew out a breath. “
What
is going on with those two?”

As Billy turned the horse right into Rose Hill Farm, he felt an odd feeling stir in the pit of his stomach. It surprised him, that feeling. Bess wouldn’t be there anymore.

Gone would be their daily challenge: he would give her a math problem to figure out, only to have her give him a vocabulary word that he had to puzzle over. She didn’t think she was very smart, but he thought differently. She knew about things he’d never heard of: Latin names of birds that visited the rose fields. She would hold her head in dismay as he butchered the pronunciation. She said he did to Latin what her grandmother did to English. Bess was interested in everything: how to graft a rose, how to gather honeycombs without making the bees mad, even how to track animals. He never knew anyone with such curiosity. He thought about how her eyes always widened when she thought deeply. He would wait and lean in her direction, as a sunflower would follow the sun, for whatever illumination was sure to follow.

He felt a strange ache in his heart, a different kind of ache than Betsy Mast’s devastating betrayal. He was going to miss Bess.

______

Bess had never seen her father like this before.

Jonah was carrying a burden, heavyhearted. He hardly said more than a few words during the long bus ride to Ohio. When they returned to the house late that night, Sallie rushed right over and Bess’s heart sank to her knees. Bess fled upstairs to open up the windows, she told Sallie, and let the house cool off. It was so hot and stuffy inside that candles had melted in their holders. She didn’t intend to eavesdrop, but Sallie and Jonah were outside on the porch, right below her window.

“My oh my, but you gave me a start!” Sallie was saying. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back at all! Not at all!” She spoke so quickly that her words blurred together.

Jonah said something so quietly that Bess couldn’t make out what he said.

“If you were much later, I was afraid we’d have to wait until December to get married. But November will still work. Not a minute too soon, mind you. We’re already way behind schedule. Not to worry, not to worry! It will all get done!” She started listing out all that she had already done—made a list of people to invite, made a list of foods to prepare, decide which house to live in . . . but that could be discussion for another day, she told Jonah. Then Sallie gave up a rare pause. “You do still want to get married, don’t you, Jonah?”

There was silence down below.
Oh please, Dad. Please, please say no!

“Yes,” Jonah finally answered, loud and clear. “Of course.”

Bess’s heart sank. She tiptoed to another room to open the windows and get a cross breeze. She knew when to leave things be.

Maybe, Lainey thought, maybe it was just as well that Jonah had left before anything more serious developed between them. She had a lot of thinking to do about her future, and being around Jonah made her mind a little scrambled. She didn’t like feeling scrambled. She liked having plans laid out, even and straight. Not that plans couldn’t be changed. They could.

In fact, she was changing her plans this very day.

Earlier today, Lainey had met with the realtor, Ira Gingrich, wanting to have an informal conversation about the purchase of Simon’s former house. She had thought long and hard about this. She prayed about it every time she walked past the cottage. She felt as if there was something about that cottage she couldn’t ignore—as if it was a metaphor for how she felt about her life. God was in the business of restoring things. People too. The old could be made new.

Ira Gingrich was a plump, easygoing man with pink skin and white hair, who sat with his hands resting on his belly. The house had been on the market for three years, without a bite, he said sadly. When Lainey made a ridiculously low offer on it as a joke, he squinted at her in confusion. Then a sudden smile creased his face.

“Sold!” he shouted and jumped to his feet, thrusting his hand out to grab Lainey’s and pump it up and down.

Stunned speechless, she was suddenly the owner of a dilapidated, run-down, neglected house sorely in need of some love and attention.

That night, in her little room, she went over her finances and felt rather pleased. The money she had saved up for culinary school would suffice as a down payment. She thought she would talk to Billy about doing some renovations for her. She had a lot of confidence in Billy’s abilities. She had noticed how carefully he worked at Rose Hill Farm. If he didn’t know how to do something, he would find out. She figured out that her bakery hours would cover her mortgage payments . . . just barely. Even still, she didn’t regret this turn of events. Not at all. For the first time in her life, she had a home of her own. And she hoped and prayed that Jonah would come to his senses and at least let her be a sister to Bess. She had squelched the hope that was stirring within her heart for Jonah.

It was probably a good thing that he left when he did, she told herself. Over and over and over. After all, she thought, it made things simpler.

Ira Gingrich sped up escrow so Lainey would close on the house by Friday. Bertha observed that nobody had ever seen Ira Gingrich move this fast, not even at quitting time at the bank. She said he was moving that escrow through like a greased sow before Lainey could think twice and change her mind. Lainey started a list of things she would need: a bed, sheets, a table, chairs. She wondered if Bertha might have a few extra pieces of furniture to loan in that big attic at Rose Hill Farm.

By the time Friday dawned, Lainey woke up more excited than she had ever felt about anything in all her life. She wished she could be sharing the day with Bess and Jonah. Instead of missing them less, she found she was missing them more. Especially Jonah. Every morning when she went to the bakery, she expected him to be there, waiting for her. And often at night, as she had closed up shop, he would happen to stop by to walk her home. She hadn’t even realized how often Jonah filled her thoughts. It worried her. She had only known him a month’s time. Was Caleb Zook right? Was she planning to get baptized for Jonah’s sake?

No.
She had an unwavering certainty that it was more than that. She had been longing for something all of her life . . . and when her VW Beetle died on Main Street in Stoney Ridge, it wasn’t long before she knew she had found what she had been looking for. She wasn’t one to think that only the Amish were Christians . . . she’d been around too many types of people to know that God cared about the interior condition of a person’s heart, not their exterior labels. But for her, she knew she worshiped God best here. What she liked best was that being Amish, to her, meant that every part of her life was a testimony to God.

She had given away her clothes and makeup and was wearing the garb now. Even at the bakery. Mrs. Stroot took one look at her, shook her head, and blamed Bertha Riehl. It took Lainey a few days to feel comfortable, to get used to startled stares. After a while, she decided that the reason the Amish wore Plain clothes was to identify them as belonging to God. So each time she was reminded she was dressing differently from others, it drew her attention to God. She liked that.

As she was dressing this morning for work, it dawned on her that she had an answer to the bishop’s nettlesome question: if Jonah Riehl was the reason she was going Amish, that reason was gone. Most likely, he was planning his autumn wedding to that Sallie woman in Ohio whom Bess had mentioned once or twice.

And still, Lainey was determined to become Amish.

Bertha Riehl burst into the bakery midafternoon on Friday as Lainey was pulling chocolate chip cookies out of the oven. “Been to see Simon. He’s only got a few weeks left. They said we should take him on home. Let him die in peace.”

Lainey set the trays on the counter to cool. She took off the mitts. “You’re awfully kind to do that, Bertha.” She slid a spatula under each cookie to loosen it.

Bertha eyed the cookies. “Do what?”

Lainey put a warm cookie on a plate and handed it to Bertha. “For taking in your brother. For seeing him out.”

Bertha took a bite of the cookie. With a full mouth, she said, “I’m doing nothing of the kind.”

Lainey looked up, surprised. “Where will he go?”

Bertha kept her head down over her plate with the cookie.

The terrible truth dawned on Lainey. “Oh Bertha, you can’t be thinking I would take him in!”

Bertha snapped her head up. “Why not? You got a house now.”

“But . . . but . . . why can’t
you
have him?”

There was never a more surprised look on a person’s face. “Simon was shunned.”

“That was so long ago! The bishop would certainly understand. Simon is dying!”

Bertha nodded. “Mebbe so. But my Samuel wouldn’t hear of it. If he were still living, it would give him a cardinal arrest.”

That remark didn’t surprise Lainey. It was always Bertha who had come visiting, bringing casseroles and tucking money under the sugar bowl. Never Samuel. People often made the mistake of blurring the Amish together, assuming that because they dressed alike and looked alike, their thoughts ran alike. But that assumption was wrong. Bertha and Samuel Riehl were as different as two people could be. She remembered every detail of Samuel: the clear-rimmed glasses and broad smile, the grandfatherly bald head like a warm, bright lightbulb. He seemed so trustworthy and kind, and he was, as long as it fit inside the Amish box.

Lainey came to herself with a start. While Jonah had his father’s warmth, he also had his father’s strict observance to rules. How had she not seen this before? Now she understood why Jonah left Stoney Ridge so abruptly after learning Simon was the real father of Bess. He was his father’s son.

A combined sigh of impatience and exasperation from Bertha jolted Lainey back to her present dilemma. “Bertha, that house is a disaster. It’s not safe! There’s no way anyone could live in it . . . for weeks! Maybe months! I don’t even take possession of it until the end of today.”

“We’ll help.”

Lainey didn’t know what to say. Her stomach twisted up in a firm knot. “I have to think about this, Bertha. You can’t just bully me into it.”

Bertha lifted her eyebrows as if she couldn’t imagine what Lainey was talking about. “Just don’t take too long. He’s getting ejected from the hospital next Friday,” she said at the door.

“What if Simon doesn’t agree? Have you thought of that?”

“You leave Simon to me,” she said. “He may be a tough caricature, but he’s still my baby brother.”

Lainey covered her face with her hands. When Bertha Riehl got her mind set on something, you’d just as well prepare to see it through.

Ira Gingrich handed Lainey the keys as soon as he received her cashier’s check. She left his office holding those keys so tightly that they made a red indentation in her palm. Ever since Bertha had paid her that visit to the bakery and told her she should take in Simon, she had been filled with doubts about buying this cottage. She had an inner debate with herself. If our possessions belong to the Lord, why is it so hard to share them with others in need? And Simon certainly needed
someone
.

But then she would go back to wondering why
she
needed to be the one to help him. She began to question if becoming Amish was such a wise thing, after all. If they believed so strongly in community, why would she be left on her own to take care of Simon? Maybe she had glamorized being Amish. Maybe it wasn’t any different than so many other Christian churches. Big intentions, little action. A mile wide and an inch deep.