“Aden,” Estee called, with a cheerful lilt to her voice that only heightened Lily’s panic.
Still hunkered over his shovel, Aden glanced their way and froze. Lily recognized a mixture of pain and embarrassment in his eyes as he slowly straightened to his full height. He was so tall. And so handsome.
Her gaze involuntarily flew to his lips, and she couldn’t fight back the memory of his tender kisses or the way her heart raced when he enfolded her in his arms.
Why did she react like this? She’d seen him at gmay three times since the puppy mill disaster, but because of the bann, he always sat in front and stole away as soon as church ended.
Her heart was like to pound out of her chest. Was this still a childish fascination or something else?
They seemed to be the only two people in the world as Estee pulled Lily forward. His green eyes pierced hers as if he wanted to read her thoughts.
The connection broke when Estee swung open the creaky gate, and it screeched like a barn owl.
Aden held up a hand. “Wait. It’s slippery.”
After propping his shovel in the snow, he gingerly made his way down the sidewalk, put himself between them, and offered his arms. “You don’t want to break your arm the day before your wedding,” he said. He stared directly at Estee and ignored Lily completely.
Estee glanced at Lily and immediately latched onto Aden. “Denki. I didn’t expect a snowstorm in early November.”
Lily froze in confusion. She wanted to take Aden’s arm more than she’d ever wanted anything in her entire life, but if she did, she might revive feelings she couldn’t control.
Aden nodded at Estee and then lowered his gaze to the ground. “I am forbidden to speak to Lily or even be near her, but I think your fater would forgive me this one time.” His voice trembled with emotion. “Maybe your dat will overlook my transgression since I am no longer under the bann.”
Three days ago, Aden had given a kneeling confession and been reinstated into full fellowship, or so Estee had reported. Lily hadn’t been there to witness it herself. She and Dat had agreed that it was a gute day to stay away from church.
“Lily?” Estee prompted.
Aden still averted his eyes as if to look at her might turn him to stone.
Some part of her registered that she would be very rude if she didn’t take his offered arm, even if Dat were angry about it. She slipped her arm through his and couldn’t help but feel the hard muscles beneath his coat. Of course he had strength. He’d lifted her from the water once as if she weighed no more than a feather.
They stepped carefully to the porch, with Lily feeling increasingly grateful for Aden’s arm. It would be too easy to slip on the icy sidewalk.
“I haven’t salted it yet,” Aden said apologetically, as if the falling snow and dangerous ice were somehow his fault.
He had cleared the steps. Lily grabbed the railing and pulled herself to the safety of the porch. Aden didn’t let go until he made certain she and Estee were secure. “It will be salted by the time you come out,” he assured them.
Lily dared a look into his face. He turned his head and studied the cracks in the sidewalk. She couldn’t find her voice, even to thank him.
Thank goodness for Estee. “Denki, Aden. I’ll make sure they save you a large helping of carrot pudding at our wedding. It always gets eaten first.”
“I won’t be to the wedding,” Aden said. “I am going back to Sugarcreek tomorrow morning, Lord willing.”
Lily should have been relieved. Of course she didn’t want Aden at her wedding. Dat would not want him there either. But the disappointment almost choked her. Aden was leaving Huckleberry Hill? What about his grandparents? Did he care nothing for their well-being?
Estee frowned. “I wish you would stay. Floyd thinks you are the smartest man alive. And the roadsides have never been so clean.”
“You’d better get inside and warm up,” Aden said. “You don’t want frostbite for the wedding.”
Without a proper good-bye, he disappeared around the corner of the house with Pilot following close behind. At least that dog wouldn’t be bothering Lily anymore. Without Pilot licking her all the time, her hand sanitizer supply would be good for months.
Mrs. Deforest answered the door gripping her walker with one hand. Her arms were thin and covered with age spots, and her face was a map of wrinkles against her salt-and-pepper gray hair. Lily hadn’t seen her in over two years. She had aged significantly.
“Well, here’s Estee come to see me off,” she said in her gravelly voice, made rough from years of smoking. “It’s ’bout time you come. That no-good son of mine says we’re leaving tomorrow no matter how many good-byes ain’t been said yet.”
Estee had worked for Mrs. Deforest for almost five years. She didn’t mind the old lady’s cantankerous moods. Lily found her abrupt, but Estee understood her and said Mrs. Deforest didn’t mean harm to anybody.
She invited them in and glanced out the screen door. “I told him he didn’t need to clear the sidewalk. I ain’t going nowhere today. But he said there might be visitors.”
Lily had to ask. “How . . . how do you know Aden Helmuth?”
Mrs. Deforest waved off Estee’s assistance and motioned to the sofa. Estee and Lily sat and watched as Mrs. Deforest hobbled to her recliner and sat down with a grunt. “I’m taking the chair with me. I told Barnard I won’t go without my chair. They feed you three meals a day and a snack.” She shook her finger at Estee. “Though that hospital food won’t be near as good as homemade Amish cooking. I might starve.”
Maybe Mrs. Deforest hadn’t heard the question or perhaps she’d forgotten it already. Lily didn’t dare ask again. Besides, it was none of her business whose sidewalks Aden wanted to shovel.
A look of confusion crossed Mrs. Deforest’s face before she nodded to herself. “Estee, go in that front bedroom and get your wedding present. It’s on the dresser.”
Estee obediently walked into the other room and came back with a gift wrapped in shiny white paper and tied with a baby blue ribbon. “Thank you, Mrs. Deforest. You didn’t have to get me a present.”
“Well, I sure did. You’ve been with me for how many years, Estee?”
“Five.”
Mrs. Deforest waved her hand in the air. “All this is going. Barnard sold it to an estate auction. Except my chair. And my horse. I told the young man to take my horse.”
Now she had Lily’s attention. “Aden?”
“I thought he was a hoodlum come to rob me. My imagination runs wild at night sometimes. He came to my door and said he noticed my skinny horse. Asked if he could feed her for me.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Estee said.
Mrs. Deforest leaned forward and lowered her voice. “His people think he’s wicked for taking care of the animals, so I’m not to tell anybody. And don’t you tell neither.”
“Of course not,” Estee said. “I don’t think he’s wicked.”
Lily sat like a statue and barely heard another word as Estee and Mrs. Deforest talked about care centers and bad hospital food and Barnard Deforest, who wanted to sell the property and move to Miami.
Surely the Plain people didn’t think Aden was wicked for taking care of animals or for cleaning up the pond so birds would have a place to nest, did they? They accepted Aden from the very first. They liked him and even sympathized with his tree story.
Lily’s heart felt like a jagged stone. The community didn’t have a problem with Aden’s schemes. Aden had been shunned because her dat demanded it. His precious daughter, who’d rarely done a bad thing in her life, had been terrified and humiliated, and Aden had to pay.
“. . . I hope your feelings aren’t hurt, Lily,” Mrs. Deforest said, as if she didn’t care about Lily’s feeling at all. “We’re not that close, and you’ll get plenty of other presents.”
Lily tried to follow the thread of the conversation. Her mind barely registered what Mrs. Deforest had said. “Ach, no. Estee is the one who ha
s taken care of you.”
“Estee says you are quite anxious about leaving home. Some girls have trouble adjusting to marriage. I hope you’re not one of them. A husband needs a sturdy wife, not a girl who whines like a kitten because she misses her mommy.”
Estee didn’t even glance at Lily. “Lily is more likely to miss our dat. They are very close.”
“At least you Amish don’t have phones. You can’t call your dat every day and complain about your husband.”
“I won’t ever complain about Floyd,” Estee said. “He is nearly perfect.”
Mrs. Deforest got a twinkle in her eye. “Any fool can see you’re befuddled. I remember those days. I don’t know what I ate for breakfast this morning, but I can clearly recall my wedding day. I tried on my wedding dress every day for a month before the wedding. Merlin wore his Navy uniform. When I walked down the aisle, he looked so handsome I thought I would burst.” She sighed. “Those were happy days.”
The space behind Lily’s eyes throbbed with a dull ache. She didn’t feel happy. She wasn’t even content.
Estee stood. “We’ve got to be going, Mrs. Deforest. There is still lots and lots of celery to wash.”
Mrs. Deforest made a great effort of standing up. “You’ll write to me?”
“Of course.”
“That’s one thing I like about the Amish. Nobody writes an old-fashioned letter anymore. Barnard wants me to use email, but I don’t even know how to turn on the computer.”
“I will write you as often as you write me back,” Estee said. She nodded to Lily, who already had her coat and gloves on.
Another inch of new snow blanketed the sidewalk. Aden was nowhere to be seen. They walked carefully to the road where they could travel more easily by digging their boots into the snow.
With the wedding present tucked under her arm, Estee turned and looked at the house one last time. “Even though you don’t approve, I’m glad Aden is taking Blossom. I feared her son would send that poor horse to the glue factory.”
Lily stopped walking and stared at Estee. “What makes you think I don’t approve? I care about the animals too.”
“But you think he’s wicked for barging in on other people’s lives.”
Lily was at a complete loss for words. “I . . . I don’t think he’s wicked.”
Estee unleashed a laugh tinged with bitterness. “You could have fooled me. And everyone else in the district. You treat Aden like he is dirt under your fingernails.”
“No, I don’t. I shunned him like everybody else did.”
Estee shoved her hand in her pocket and sighed. “I apologize. I promised I’d never mention Aden again. You better go home and tell Dat I spoke Aden’s name. And while you’re at it, if you have the guts, be sure to tell Dat that we saw Aden today and that I was friendly. Tell Dat how you did your best to ignore Aden even when he helped us across the ice. He won’t be mad at you because nothing is ever your fault.”
A tear slipped down Lily’s cheek, and she hid it by wiping it away as if she were brushing an errant lock of hair from her face. “Estee, don’t be mad.”
Estee turned around. “I’m taking the long way home. Tell Mama I’ll finish washing the celery when I get back.”
Lily couldn’t move. She wanted to brush off Estee’s scolding but froze at the thought that she deserved every word Estee had thrown at her.
She remembered that horrible night, the look on Aden’s face, and she cried out in pain as the truth hit her. Her sobs floated into the air and were caught by the drifting snow.
She wanted to crawl into a deep, black hole and never resurface. She had been cruel to Aden because she had been unable to see past her own humiliation, and he had felt so guilty about what had happened that he welcomed the shunning. He thought he deserved it. Tyler had said as much. He wanted to punish himself because of her suffering.
He knew how the arrest had traumatized her, and he hated himself for it.
Ashamed and embarrassed, she had laid the blame on the one person who would not fight back. To preserve her wounded pride and her father’s affections, she had thrown Aden to the wolves.
What a fool she had been. Courage meant not knowing how things were going to turn out and taking the risk anyway, because the risk was worth the bad ending.
Aden thought she despised him, but who could dislike noble, brave, lovable Aden? He risked his life for dogs and didn’t mind getting arrested to save horses and puppies. He had braided her hair and chained himself to a tree. He hated steel traps and bore a beautiful scar on his eyebrow.
And she loved him.
The feeling grew in her heart like a sunrise on a clear wintery day. She loved Aden Helmuth to her very bones.
But Dat had talked her out of loving him. He’d set his back against Aden and convinced Lily to do the same. She had obeyed him because she always obeyed him.
Reeling from the realization, Lily put one foot in front of the other in the direction of home.
This wasn’t Dat’s fault. She had talked herself away from Aden because Dat had always been safe. She feared that if she didn’t have his approval, she wouldn’t have anything. Tears blurred her eyes until she could barely see where she stepped. She couldn’t begin to fix the mess she’d created.
She didn’t love Tyler, but since the day she’d talked to Anna, she’d been too terrified to admit that she couldn’t marry him. Well, now she said it out loud. “I can’t marry Tyler Yoder.”
I want to marry for love.
The desire grew inside her until she felt like shouting.
I want to marry for love!
She wanted to get breathless when her husband walked through the door in the evening. She wanted his kisses to make her feel like she was flying. She wanted her husband to rock her babies and pray with her family. She wanted to believe the man she married was perfection before learning to love him for all his faults.
She wanted to marry for love. No other reason was good enough.
God had been trying to send her a message, and she finally found the courage to listen. How else could she explain Anna’s strange quilting visit, Estee’s lectures, or Mrs. Deforest’s wedding stories? She had felt God tugging at her for weeks.
She must cancel the wedding.
The idea made her ill.
What would all the relatives say? Everyone would be shocked. She should have sorted out her feelings weeks ago, they would say. Or how cruel of her to string Tyler Yoder along like that.
What about Tyler? His heart would be broken like glass against the pavement. She’d promised him things. He’d call her a liar.
Dat would invoke the memory of Onkel Zeke, ask her if she’d learned nothing from his mistakes. Then, when he saw he couldn’t dissuade her, he’d rant and yell and kick her out of the house, refusing to speak to her ever again, just as he had done with Aden.
Aden.
She didn’t care about anything else anymore.
Let Dat banish her from her own home. Let the people of the community, and especially Tyler, despise her forever. She would endure any embarrassment, any anger, any rejection for the chance of being with Aden.
If she didn’t have Aden, she didn’t have anything.
Even as fear paralyzed her, Lily knew what she must do. She closed her eyes, thought of the man she couldn’t live without, and mustered the courage for the most important undertaking of her life.
Aden ran as hard and as fast as he could through the unforgiving snow in no direction in particular. At first Pilot thought he was playing tag and loped merrily beside Aden with his tongue lolling to one side of his mouth.
But Aden soon outran even Pilot. He ran until his throat cried out in thirst and his legs burned with agonizing heat. He ran until he had no strength to stand. It didn’t work. He could not run far enough to escape his love for Lily.
It made no sense to love her. She despised him. She was about to marry a better man than Aden. But that did nothing to subdue the ache that filled his s
oul at the thought of losing her.
Dawdi said to let God do His job. Aden had been trying to let go of what he couldn’t control and go quietly about living a Christian life, trying to bless others but not to force them. He certainly couldn’t force Lily to love him, no matter how badly he longed for her.
So why had God abandoned him?
The answer came as he stumbled to an ancient tree standing in the middle of a stranger’s pasture. It wasn’t God’s job to see that Aden felt perfectly happy all the time. Everyone couldn’t be happy all the time. If Aden were happy right now, it was a good guess that Lily’s dat would be miserable.
One thing is needful. Choose that good part.
Rather, it was God’s job to love His children. It was Aden’s job to let that love carry him through the hard times as well as the good times.
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Well, he was certainly in the depths. Would God carry him through it?
Unable to support his legs any longer, he sat in the snow with his back against the trunk, buried his face in his hands, and wept.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lily clutched her throat and swallowed hard. Since she’d left Mrs. Deforest’s house, her heart had kept up a relentless pace, pounding against her rib cage. But as she had set her face toward home, her love for Aden burned in her bones, lending her determination amidst her growing distress.
But now, when the time had actually come to face Fater, she was so deliriously frightened that she wasn’t altogether certain she wouldn’t pass out.
Estee had been understandably cold to her during supper. Lily had been too terrified to speak. Even Dat, in all his excitement about the weddings, had sensed something amiss. He asked both girls three times if they felt well.
Mama had made all of Estee and Lily’s favorites for supper, but Lily could barely force down two bites. Dat chuckled and said something about wedding-eve jitters. Lily could not give him a reply. He would find out soon enough.
Huckleberry Summer (Huckleberry Hill) Page 27
