“No lectures, big brother.” John picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and started out of the barn. No way was he going to admit that he didn’t have the time—or the money—to enjoy the single Englisch-guy lifestyle.
He dumped the contents of the wheelbarrow and returned to the barn.
“Seriously, you and Daed couldn’t get along? It would have saved you from having to get your own place.”
“I tried.”
“Did you?” David asked quietly.
John felt his defenses leap up. “It’s not me!”
“Nee?”
“No.” John refused to use Pennsylvania Dietsch since he’d left the community. “I just seem to . . . irritate him. Nothing I do, nothing I say is right.”
“Yeah, I always felt that about you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I was joking, John.”
He stared off into the distance and sighed. “I know Mom was happy I was here, but I just can’t handle it anymore. And if I stayed, I’d just be pressured to join the church. You know that. So I found myself a place.”
“Something you can afford on your own? I thought you and Sam looked before he got married.”
“A friend of my boss has a caretaker’s cottage he hasn’t been using. It needs some fix-up so I’ll be doing that to reduce the rent.”
“Well, I guess that’s gut,” David said doubtfully.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I’d hoped you’d work out the problems with Daed if you stayed here.”
“Well, I couldn’t.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think it’s for the best. I appreciate you and Lavina having me here.”
“Anytime.” David laid a hand on his shoulder. “Anytime. I mean it. And I know Sam and Mary Elizabeth asked you to stay with them.”
“Yeah, just what a newly married couple needs. A brother hanging around so they have no privacy.”
“You’re forgetting Mamm and Daed live with us, and they don’t intrude on our privacy.”
John shuddered. People always said things could be worse. And they could. He could be an old married man like his brothers and have his parents living with him. He was just twenty-three. He wasn’t ready to be a married man anytime soon.
“Look, I’m glad you and Sam are happy being married. But I’m not ready. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready.”
David paused shoveling and regarded him. “I thought you were interested in Rose Anna for a long time.”
John shrugged and shoveled up more manure. “That was a long time ago. And I can safely say we’re not going to get back together now.”
“Now?” David straightened. “What happened?”
“You mean Dad didn’t tell you?”
“Nee.”
He stopped and propped his arm on the shovel handle. “She has quite a temper, that Rose Anna.” He told David about the snowball fight.
“You didn’t! Right there in the kitchen?”
“She started it!”
“Ya, and you didn’t have any trouble finishing it, did you?”
John looked hard at him, trying to see if David was judging him. But David was grinning.
“She’s sure holding a grudge,” John said as he went back to shoveling.
“The Zook maedels schur never held back on letting us know how they felt.”
“But Lavina forgave you. Mary Elizabeth forgave Sam.”
“Ya. But we met them halfway.”
“You know Rose Anna. She wants all the way—and everything her way.”
“She reminds me a lot of you.”
“I don’t have to have everything my way.”
“Nee?”
“No!”
They went back to shoveling and didn’t speak. When the wheelbarrow was full, David stood with his hands resting on his shovel. “Lavina forgave me. And then she saved my life. She persuaded me to come home. It was hard at first. Daed was as miserable as he ever was when I first came back. He’d always been hard. But he was angry at getting the cancer.”
“I know all this.”
“Ya. But maybe you’re forgetting that things changed for the better. And it’s because of Lavina leading me back home, back to church, back to God.”
“I’m happy for you,” John said quietly. “But I don’t need the same things.”
“Nee?”
“No. And I don’t need you trying to bring me back to the church. I know that’s what you and everyone in the church is supposed to do to save me. I don’t need saving.”
He propped the shovel against a wall, pushed the wheelbarrow outside, and dumped the contents. Turning, he started back and then stopped. He took a deep breath to steady himself, then another. It was no good getting mad at David. They’d both gone to church since they were babes in their mother’s arms. They were taught that if someone strayed from the church, you had to try to save them or they couldn’t go to heaven.
By the time he went back inside David had spread bedding in the stalls for the horses. “I gotta go,” he told him. “I promised to put in a couple hours with Peter.”
“Eat first. Please. Lavina will be so disappointed if you don’t.”
John hesitated.
“Please.”
He nodded. It was tough to say no when he brought up Lavina. “I can’t stay long.”
“I’ll tell her you have to eat and run.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound very gracious.”
“She knows how you are.” David grinned at him and slung an arm around his shoulders.
“Think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” John grabbed him in a headlock, and they tussled for a few minutes before David managed to throw him off.
“I’m not so soft, am I, bruder?” he asked, chuckling.
“I let you go,” John said. “I’m hungry.”
But just to make sure David didn’t try to prove him wrong, he took off to the house.
***
“How are the quilting classes going at the shelter?” Mary Elizabeth asked as they sat working on their quilts in the sewing room of the Zook home later that week. “I was so sorry to miss them the past two weeks.”
“We had some excitement the other day.”
“Not an angry ex-husband—”
“Nee, nothing like that.” Rose Anna knotted her thread, clipped it with scissors, and looked at her schweschder. “We have a new resident who came to the class and had an anxiety attack.”
“Quilting class made her anxious?”
“Kate says she has PTSD as well as being abused by her ex-husband. She hadn’t been out of her house in months, then she had to leave when he beat her.”
She frowned. “She came to the class and couldn’t handle sitting by the window. She was hiding under her table. It was so sad.”
“What’s PTSD?” their mudder asked.
“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Kate said Chris Matlock had it after he served in the military. You remember, he used to be Englisch before he came here and married Hannah, Matthew Bontrager’s schweschder.”
“So this woman was in the military?”
Rose Anna nodded. “Kate said she served in Afghanistan.”
“Imagine, women in the military,” Linda said.
“Kate was in the Army before she came here to work as a police officer,” Rose Anna reminded her.
“I forgot. Seems like she’s been here so long she’s always been a part of Paradise.” Linda got up and put another log on the fire.
“So what happened?” Mary Elizabeth sat, needle suspended over her quilt, looking at her. “Kate got under the table and talked to her awhile and got her to come out. Then they went downstairs. When Kate came back she told me that when Brooke returns we should find her a table away from the window.”
“Sad.”
“I think it’s time for a cup of tea,” their mudder announced a few minutes later. “I’ll go put the kettle on.”
“We’ll be right down.” Mary Elizabeth watched h
er leave the room then turned to Rose Anna. “So, how’s Peter?”
“He’s fine.”
“Just ‘fine’? That doesn’t sound so gut.”
Rose Anna stared down at the quilt in her hands. “I like Peter. I really do.”
“But?”
“But I don’t feel the same way about him that I do about John.”
“Well, from what I hear, Peter might be happy about that.”
“What?”
Mary Elizabeth tried to fight back a smile. “You’ve got really good aim.”
It took a moment, and then Rose Anna realized what her schweschder was talking about. She rolled her eyes. “How did you find out? Nee, let me guess. Waneta told Lavina, and she told you.”
Mary Elizabeth just grinned.
“Are you going to tell Mamm?”
“Do I look like a tattletale?”
“Ya.” She paused then shook her head. “Nee. That would be our older schweschder. She was always telling on us.”
Mary Elizabeth laughed. “Well, if I don’t there’s no guarantee Lavina or Waneta won’t, you know.”
“I don’t know what got into me,” Rose Anna said, remembering. “He was getting into his truck, and suddenly I just saw red. Before I knew what was happening I was making a snowball and throwing it at him.”
She sighed. “And you know John. He didn’t just keep going on his way. He got out of his truck and started firing snowballs back at me.”
Mary Elizabeth shook her head. “The two of you have always gone head to head.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who does that.”
Her schweschder just looked at her.
“Anyway, when I ran inside his haus, he followed me. He actually followed me into the kitchen and rubbed snow in my face. In front of his own mudder.”
“Bet he got a lecture from her,” Mary Elizabeth muttered.
Rose Anna grinned. “And hopefully his dat heard about it from her and he had something to say to John.”
“Now that’s just mean! You know he and his dat don’t get along. I bet Amos burned his ears off.”
“I know.” She giggled. “I wish I could have been there for that.”
“Shame on you.” Mary Elizabeth tried to look stern. Then she giggled, too.
“Are you going to tell Mamm?” she asked her again.
Her schweschder stared at her for so long Rose Anna felt apprehensive. “If she asks me, I have to tell her,” she said finally. “But I won’t go telling her. That would be gossiping.”
Rose Anna nodded. “Danki.” She sighed. “But like I said, Lavina or Waneta could.” She set her quilt down. “That’s what I get for my behavior. It’s just that John makes me so mad sometimes.”
“Now he doesn’t make you anything,” Mary Elizabeth chided as she put her quilt down. “It’s how you choose to react.”
“Look out,” Rose Anna told her as she narrowed her eyes. “I’m feeling like reacting right now.”
Laughing, Mary Elizabeth ran for the stairs. “You’ll have to catch me first.”
Linda looked up as they clattered down the wooden stairs. “Well, well, there’s two dainty, ladylike maedels.”
She turned to her mann sitting at the kitchen. “Do you know these hooligans, Jacob? They look like our dochders, but I’m not schur.”
He chuckled. “Sounded like heifers coming down the stairs, but ya, those do look like our dochders.”
Their mudder shook her head and smiled as she poured boiling water into mugs. “I wasn’t schur. Kumm, have your tea.”
Rose Anna pulled out a chair and sat primly. “Mary Elizabeth was chasing me.”
“Really?”
She stared at Mary Elizabeth, then her mudder. She’d learned her lesson about impulsive behavior, hadn’t she? “Nee,” she said after a long moment. “I was teasing her.”
The four of them shared a break with cookies and tea—well, her dat was having his usual coffee. He never drank tea.
After a few minutes he got to his feet, saying he had to get back to his chores. He shrugged into his jacket and grabbed up another cookie before heading out the back door.
Linda went upstairs shortly afterward, leaving Rose Anna and Mary Elizabeth alone at the table.
“You’re being awfully quiet.”
Rose Anna stared down into the contents of her tea cup wishing she could find an answer there. “I can’t—Peter—I can’t—” she lifted her hands, let them fall as she shook her head. “I tried to fall in love with Peter. I wasn’t just flirting with him the way you and Lavina thought.”
She shook her head. “Well, I did flirt with him, and he flirted with me. It felt gut to have a man want to be with me after John didn’t want me.”
Mary Elizabeth just sat listening.
“But I don’t feel Peter is the mann God set aside for me.”
“And who is?” Mary Elizabeth asked her cautiously.
“John.”
“If he is—and I’m not saying he isn’t—don’t you think things would have worked out before now?”
“Sometimes it takes more time,” Rose Anna said firmly. She got up and put her cup in the sink.
Then she turned to face her schweschder. “And sometimes God needs a little help.”
3
Mary Elizabeth snorted tea out her nose. “God needs a little help?” she gasped.
Grabbing a paper napkin from the basket on the table, she dabbed at her streaming eyes. “Rose Anna, sometimes I can’t believe what comes out of your mouth!”
Rose Anna sniffed. “I don’t see anything wrong with saying that!”
Her schweschder scooted her chair away from her.
“Why’d you do that?”
“When He hurls down a bolt of lightning, I want to be out of the path.”
“Very funny. God wouldn’t do that.”
“You’re schur of that, are you?” Mary Elizabeth selected another cookie and bit into it. “Let me know if you’re going to make outrageous statements like that so I don’t choke, allrecht?”
Rose Anna made a face at her. “I just think since things haven’t happened the way I want, maybe I need to do something about it.”
“You don’t think you have? What do you call talking to John about it?”
“I must just not be going about it the right way.” She tilted her head as she studied her schweschder. “You and Lavina both got the mann you wanted. You went after them. So why shouldn’t I?”
Mary Elizabeth opened her mouth and then shut it. “I don’t think we went after them the way you’re talking about doing with John. Almost as if you’re . . . hunting him down.”
“I’m just talking about being determined. I’m not going to hunt him down.” She got a mental picture of doing that and almost grinned. After all, she’d been pretty aggressive about pelting him with snowballs.
The back door opened letting in a blast of cold air. Lavina rushed in carrying a blanket-covered bundle in her arms. The bundle let out a cry.
“Look who’s here!” Rose Anna rushed to take the boppli from her schweschder. She walked over to the stairs. “Mamm?”
But footsteps were already clattering down the stairs. “Did I hear Mark?” She rushed into the kitchen and held out her arms. “There you are! I’ve been waiting all morning to see you!”
“It’s gut to see you, too, Lavina,” Lavina said with a rueful smile.
Linda laughed as she crossed the room to her eldest and kissed her cheek. “It’s gut to see you, too.” She cradled Mark in her arms. “He’s getting so big!” She turned to them. “We’re going upstairs to visit. We’ll see you later.”
Lavina watched her mudder leave the room. “I’m feeling kind of unnecessary here.”
“Oh, nee, you came at a gut time,” Mary Elizabeth told her. “Rose Anna here was just saying you and I got the mann we wanted by going after them, so why shouldn’t she?”
“I didn’t say that!” she protested.
“You schur did.
”
“I didn’t mean it quite that way.”
Lavina shed her coat and hung it on a peg by the door, then walked over to the stove to pour herself a mug of hot water. She took a seat at the table opposite Rose Anna and chose a tea bag from the bowl on the table.
“So what did you mean?” she asked as she dunked the bag in the water.
“Just that you wanted David, and Mary Elizabeth wanted Sam, and you didn’t let yourselves get discouraged when things were tough. You went after them.”
“ ‘Went after them’ sounds like they were big game or something,” Mary Elizabeth pointed out.
Lavina chose a cookie and nodded. “It does.”
“Want to hear something even worse?” Mary Elizabeth asked. “She said she wants John, and she figures, since she doesn’t have him, God needs a little help from her.”
“That’s not exactly what I said.”
“Close enough,” Mary Elizabeth said with a smirk. “I moved my chair away from her. You know, just in case God sent a bolt of lightning down at her. You might think about it, too.”
Lavina laughed. “I don’t think He needs to. He’s like us. He’s used to Rose Anna being outrageous.”
“I’m not outrageous!”
“Well, outspoken, anyway.”
“Can’t argue there,” Mary Elizabeth muttered.
Rose Anna folded her arms over her chest. “The two of you just can’t stop treating me like a kind.”
“Once the boppli of the family—” Mary Elizabeth began.
“Always the boppli,” Lavina finished.
The two of them giggled and looked at her indulgently.
Rose Anna stood. “I’ll just take my immature self off so the two of you don’t have to bother with me,” she said huffily and flounced over to the refrigerator.
“Now no sulking. We didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Lavina came over to say. She patted her shoulder. “We were just teasing you. Weren’t we, Mary Elizabeth?”
“Ya.”
“I looked up teasing in the dictionary once,” Rose Anna said, lifting her chin. “It means to annoy in fun.”
“Kumm, sit down.” Lavina led Rose Anna back to the table. “I suppose it might look like I pursued David,” Lavina began. “You know he and his dat couldn’t get along, and when David had enough and moved out, I was devastated. We were supposed to get married, and here he left the community and it looked like we’d never see each other again let alone get married.”
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