by Amy Lillard
“Is this seat taken?”
She looked up and smiled. “Levi.”
He nodded toward the space beside her on the couch. Around them a party was happening, people being merry, drinking green-colored punch and eating Christmas cookies, and wishing good cheer upon one another. Most everyone wore a necklace made of shiny garland or a crown fashioned of the same. It was festive and fine, but she was in no way a part of it.
“Sure,” she said. “If you dare.”
He sat down next to her and raised an inquisitive brow.
“I think everyone here thinks I have cooties.” She was completely making too light of the situation, but it was either that or wallow in it, and she really didn’t feel like wallowing anymore. She’d made her bed and all that.
“I don’t suppose it would do any good if I told them you don’t,” Levi asked.
“I’m afraid it would only damage your reputation as well.”
“That sort of thing is very important around here.”
Didn’t she know it. Yes, she did. She knew it when she left and she knew it when she came home. But she had foolishly allowed herself to be molded by Melvin into what he thought they needed to be. He wanted to be a young and hip English couple. Amish-turned-English couple, rather. But to look at him no one would ever suspect that he was Amish. Unless they were Amish too. He wore ripped blue jeans and sneakers, T-shirts with a button-down thrown over it and the sleeves rolled up. His hair was cut in a more English style, shaggy around his eyes and ears, a little too long in the back. He thought it ridiculous for them to have to get married in order to live together. They’d run away together. And she was his girl.
Well, she had been for a while.
“Are you having a good time?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.
Levi looked down into the plastic cup he held. “Would it be terrible of me to say no?”
“You’re talking to the resident pariah,” she said, once again making light of it all.
“Mims insisted I come.”
Tillie gave him a sympathetic smile. “I understand.” She understood that Levi was still healing, something that Mims seemed to have trouble identifying. “Maybe since I was at your house and you’ve been coming over to see the baby, Mims thinks you’re ready to really socialize. That’s why she insisted you come tonight.”
Levi drained his cup of green punch and swallowed before answering. “Mims just likes bossing people around.”
Tillie couldn’t help the laughter that spilled from her. It drew a couple of looks, and she immediately sobered. “I like Mims,” she said. “I always have.”
“She likes you as well,” he said.
She almost asked Levi what had happened between Mims and David, but he spoke again before she could.
“You’re dressed very . . . English tonight.”
She picked at an invisible spot on her skirt. “I thought I’d better get used to it again.”
“There’s no chance of Melvin moving back?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“You called him . . . Told him about the baby.”
“Jah. Yes. I had to leave a message. Hopefully he got it today.” But he hadn’t tried to call or get her a message in any way. And that could only mean one thing: he wasn’t overly concerned that she’d had the baby.
She tried to soften the thought, even in her own head, but it was still harsh. She had known Melvin for so many years, and never would she have thought he would forget what was important. He just wasn’t like that. Yet the only answers were that he didn’t get the message or he didn’t care.
“Maybe he didn’t get the message,” Levi said, echoing her thoughts.
Tillie’s eyes filled with tears, and she blinked them back. No good crying at a Christmas party. No good at all. “I suppose.” You hope, you mean.
“Do you think he’ll come here for you?” Levi shook his head. “What am I saying? Of course he will come here for you. Surely you know that.”
She would like to think that he would. But the Melvin she had fallen in love with was very different than the Melvin she had left in Columbus. This new Melvin . . . she didn’t feel like she knew him at all.
Whose fault is that?
It was no one’s fault; both of their faults. Or maybe it simply was what it was. She had heard her mammi say that from time to time. It is what it is. An easy way of saying God’s will, she supposed. Sometimes things were a certain way because they were that way.
She wondered if she and Melvin were one of those things.
“So I guess I won’t see you if you move back,” he said.
“When,” she corrected.
“Pardon?” he asked.
“When I move back, not if,” she said.
He frowned. “Will you be able to come visit?”
“I doubt it,” she said. Then she shook her head. What was she expecting? A change in the Ordnung just so her mamm could visit with her grandchild? “I mean, no.” There, she had said it. And the world hadn’t collapsed. It even continued on as if she hadn’t said a thing. “You know the rules as well as I do.”
He nodded.
“I’m sure Mamm will come when she can, but . . .” Who knew how often that would be and how long it would take before someone tried to put a stop to that as well? Dear Lord, what a mess she had made of things.
“Then I suppose I should tell you now,” he said. “Merry Christmas, and I wish you well.”
“Merry Christmas,” she echoed.
He looked as if he wanted to say more, but he didn’t. He just stood awkwardly and stretched his legs. “I’ll just go get some punch. You want something?”
She shook her head. Her stomach was in such knots that she wasn’t sure she could keep anything down.
She watched Levi cross the room and wondered if it would be the last time she would ever see him. And she knew; the chances of that were great.
* * *
“Who could that be?” Eunice asked no one in particular when a knock sounded on her door. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Tillie was gone to the Christmas party, Libby was with Mammi, and she was coloring a picture with chatty Peter.
“Just a minute, and I’ll be right back,” she told Peter, who barely stopped his own rattling speech to acknowledge her words. It seemed to Eunice that he was making up for all the words he had missed saying in those first years after his family had died.
That wasn’t it, of course, but sometimes she wondered.
“Coming,” she said as the person knocked again. It had to be someone they knew. They sat too far off the road for anyone in trouble to wander down for help.
She wrenched open the door, expecting to see a familiar face but not prepared for the one that was there. “Amos!” Her voice sounded unnaturally high. “Come in, come in,” she said, standing aside and motioning him into the house. “It’s too cold these days to linger on the porch.”
He nodded his head and removed his hat and coat. “I don’t suppose you have any coffee still warm.”
“I can make you some.”
“I don’t want you to do all that,” he said.
But how could she not? He was the bishop. “It’s no trouble at all.” She led him through the dining room, where Peter was still coloring, and into the kitchen. Maybe she shouldn’t have walked him past her grandson. After all, Peter was one of the ones that got away. He and Jamie had converted to the Mennonite church so that Jamie and Leah could be married right away. Once they realized that the one thing Peter needed most in order to heal was a stable, loving home, they knew they had to provide him with one as quickly as possible.
Eunice figured some of the doctrines also struck with Jamie but it wasn’t something the two of them ever talked about. Leah hadn’t joined the Amish church before she left for the English world and landed with the Mennonites, and she wasn’t traditionally shunned. Eunice was certain that Amos wasn’t happy that she had managed to drag two more of his members with her, but agai
n, it was something they just didn’t talk about.
“What brings you out on a night like tonight?” That was the question she asked, when she already knew the answer. A woman could hope. And pray. And she had prayed a lot that something would happen that would allow Tillie and baby Emmy to stay there with the community. Yet she knew. Rules were rules, and the Amish had a very strict and strong set of them. Still Eunice hoped that maybe there was something they had overlooked. Wishful thinking. That was all.
“We need to talk about Tillie.”
She nodded, poured him a cup of coffee, and gestured toward the container of cranberry bread on the table. “Would you like a piece?” she asked. “We try to make it every Christmas.” She was babbling and needed to stop.
“Where’s Abner?” Amos asked.
“In his workshop.” He seemed to spend most of his time there these days, working on a late Christmas order. At least she hoped that was the real reason for him to be there, and it wasn’t that he was avoiding them all and what was to come.
“I think he needs to be here for this.”
Eunice popped back up and went to the dining room, where Peter still sat. “I need you to run to the barn and get your dawdi.”
He looked up from his drawing. “You want me to run?” he asked. “Like really fast or just sort of fast?”
She hid her smile at his so-serious question. “Sort of fast is fine. Just tell him that the bishop is here.”
Peter nodded, dropped his crayon, and headed for the door.
Eunice returned to the kitchen, where Amos Raber waited. “He should be here in a minute,” she said. And she sat down on the bench side across from him.
Amos shot her a tight smile.
Eunice tried to return it. “Are you sure I can’t get you a piece of cranberry bread?” she asked. “It’s got pecans.” Perhaps that was the dumbest thing she had ever said to the bishop. Maybe to anybody. But the air seemed thick and heavy with what was to come.
Amos drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “No. Danki.”
Where was Abner? Perhaps she should have told Peter to run really fast instead.
Eunice jumped to her feet. “Can I warm up your coffee?” She already had the pot and was pouring it into his cup before he could even answer.
Where was Abner?
She almost wilted with relief when she heard the front door open and close. Peter’s running footsteps mixed with Abner’s steady ones, and a moment later he appeared in the kitchen.
“Amos,” her husband said by way of greeting.
The bishop stood, reached out a hand to shake.
“I’ll get you some coffee,” Eunice said. She grabbed another mug and poured her husband a cup. He sat down next to the bishop, and she eased back to the bench across from them.
“I suppose you know why I’m here,” Amos started.
Abner nodded. That was her husband, a man of few words.
“Tillie and the baby,” Eunice said.
“I’ve been patient,” Amos started. “And I’ve tried to be fair. But some things . . .”
He didn’t have to say the words for Eunice to know what he was talking about. The rules were the rules. Explicitly spelled out in the Ordnung or not, they had to be followed.
“I know it’s Christmastime,” Amos continued. “But after . . .”
“I understand,” Abner said with a firm nod.
Eunice understood too, but she didn’t like it. “When?” she asked.
“Tuesday at the latest. I’ll give you Christmas and second Christmas, but any longer and I’m afraid it will start to affect the district as a whole. And your own standing with the church.”
It was a nice way of saying that if Tillie stayed she would be shunned, and her family would be as well. It would affect them all, from Libby and Mammi all the way over to Jim and Anna just across the way. Hannah and Aaron, David, Gracie and Matthew, and everyone in between.
Tuesday. They had until Tuesday and Tillie would have to go back to wherever it was she had gone in the first place. Eunice hoped against hope that perhaps she could stay in Pontotoc, but even then, Eunice wouldn’t be able to have much contact with her. That was all a part of it. The thought broke her heart. She had lost her daughter for good.
At least they would have this one last Christmas.
* * *
“Did you have a good time?” Leah asked on the way home.
“Not really,” Tillie said truthfully. But it was no matter. It wasn’t like she was staying very long. Soon she would have to decide what she was going to do. Though in truth she felt like Melvin had already made that decision for her. She would go back and somehow make it on her own. Perhaps she would have time after Christmas to call Dawn or Cindy at the day care center and talk to them about coming back to work and whether Tillie could get some kind of deal on childcare for Emmy. And she would have to go talk to Melvin whether he wanted to talk to her or not. She would need a place to stay.
“If I can’t get in touch with Melvin,” Tillie started, “can I stay with you for a little while? You and Jamie. I know it’s asking a lot,” she said. “But if I can’t talk to him, then I don’t have a place to go back to. You know I’m going to have to leave soon.”
“But—” Leah started, but Tillie shook her head.
“We both know I’m not going to be allowed to stay. Not unless Melvin comes back and decides that he wants to be Amish once more. And you and I both know that’s not going to happen.”
Leah sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
“But I probably shouldn’t stay with you. It might bring a lot of trouble to you.” Tillie shook her head in despair. “Maybe a friend?”
Leah reached over across the console of the car and patted Tillie’s leg. “We’ll figure out something.” Then she gasped. “The apartment above the store. Brandon is going to move into it soon, but you could stay in it for now.”
“But my job is in Columbus.” At least she hoped it was.
When had everything turned so blessed complicated? It seemed as if every life choice and decision was weighing heavy on her heart. When would it ease up?
“So that’s not our answer.” Leah put both hands back on the wheel and turned her full attention to the road. “We will find an answer. There is an answer, and God will give it to us. We just have to pray.”
Tillie wished she had Leah’s positivity. She had been praying for a long time now, and it just seemed as if God wasn’t answering. She wondered if she’d made such a mess of things that He was leaving her to her own devices.
You know better than that.
And she did.
“Uh-oh,” Leah said.
“What?” Tillie asked.
“I think that was the bishop,” she said as she turned her car down the drive.
“Amos?”
“Is there any other bishop?” Leah asked.
“No.” She supposed there wasn’t. And they both knew that if the bishop had been to their house visiting the night before Christmas Eve, it was something important. And she could guess what it was. It was all about her and the shame she had brought her family.
Leah pulled her car to a stop in front of the house. “I’ve got to go in and get Peter, but if you want, I can stay.”
Tillie shook her head. “Jamie’s expecting you back,” she said. “Sorry he wasn’t feeling well tonight.”
“He just has a case of the shunning blues.”
Tillie hadn’t thought about it that way. Jamie was shunned by the church, excommunicated. But she knew that most of the district overlooked it, considering he did it for a little boy—left the church, that was. His only sin was caring for someone else. And most could overlook a lot for that very reason. But when they looked at her, they didn’t see love but transgression. Though love was in there somewhere. Even if it was gone now.
Was it gone? “He could have sat with me on the couch.”
Leah palmed her keys and got out of the car. “Next to Levi, or on t
he other side?”
“Cute.”
“I think he likes you.” Leah smiled and headed up the porch steps and into the house, leaving Tillie to trail behind. Levi might like her. She liked him. Maybe even more, or it could be, given half the chance. But there wasn’t even a quarter of a chance, a sliver of a chance that they could have. Like it or not, it didn’t matter.
Peter was coloring at the dining room table when they came in. Leah stopped to admire his picture, and Tillie headed into the kitchen where she figured her mamm would be. She passed her dat on the way in. He frowned at her, grunted, but didn’t say a word. It was a sure sign that he was angry. He had barely spoken to her since she’d been back. His own brand of shunning. It hurt. It broke her heart. But she understood it. Her dad was old-school. And that’s just the way it was. The church and God came first. Even the love for a child was after that.
Mamm sat at the table, wiping tears on the end of her apron. She dropped it quickly when she saw Tillie. She sniffed and tried to act like everything was just fine.
Tillie’s heart broke all over again. The mistakes she had made were so great and the baby she had was so beautiful. She couldn’t understand why it all still seemed to be such a mess. “I’m so sorry, Mamm.”
“I love the church,” Mamm said with another sniff. She gave Tillie a reassuring smile that didn’t quite hit the mark. “And I love you. More than you will ever know.”
“How long?”
“Tuesday.”
Tillie felt as if the giant hand squeezed her heart and stole her breath. Tuesday. Could she figure it all out by Tuesday? Probably not. Maybe Wednesday, but that was still pushing it. Tomorrow was Saturday and Christmas Eve, Monday second Christmas and a holiday for all the Amish. She might be able to make it into town to Leah’s store and call the day care center, then that didn’t give her much time to get things together for Tuesday.
“You think I can have till Wednesday?”
“I’m sure Amos will understand.”
Tillie certainly hoped so. It was only a day. One day to figure out her life.
She collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs and braced her elbows on the tabletop. She cradled her head in her hands and tried to catch her breath. She was used to things moving as fast in the English world, but not in the Amish. Yet here she was.
