by Emma Miller
Levi hesitated, chewing on the idea for a moment, then murmured, “Ya, I think that would be nice. Wife,” he added.
Chapter Five
Eve’s shy smile softened Levi’s heart. And he was reminded that it didn’t take much to make her happy—just a smile, a kind word, an extra moment of his time.
All week he’d been tense, annoyed with everything and everyone. And that had included his wife. But the way she looked at him now made him want to be a better man, a better husband. As he studied her rosy cheeks and pretty mouth, he thought of what Jacob had said the other day about being patient with Eve. His brother was right. Change had come quickly to her life as well as his, and she deserved patience from him.
As much as Levi hated to admit it, his little brother was probably right about their father, too. By returning home six months early, Levi had changed the timeline for expanding the buggy shop. With him home now, their father had been forced to build before he was ready, but also put out money he hadn’t planned on spending yet. New construction was never cheap, and the up-front cost of purchasing the materials they needed to build a good, sturdy buggy wasn’t inexpensive, either.
“There you go. The last drop,” Eve said, pouring the last bit of melted ice cream into Levi’s bowl.
Levi blinked, bringing himself back to the moment. “Here, let me take yours, too.” He picked up both bowls.
“I’ll get our spoons. And napkins.” She grabbed the utensils and moved a rock they were using to hold down the napkins, so they didn’t blow away. “Oh, dear. There’s only one left.” She held up the paper napkin.
He shrugged. “We’ll share. Come on. Let’s go sit down and dig into this before it all melts.”
“Are you sure?” she fretted, following him. “I could go up to the house and get more napkins.”
He stopped, reminding himself that her legs were much shorter than his, and he waited for her to catch up. “I’m not letting this ice cream melt. By the time you got back from the house, we’d be drinking it.” He smiled at her, feeling like his old self. “We’ll share the napkin, and if I’m too messy, I’ll just use my shirt.” He demonstrated by rolling his shoulder forward and wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve.
She giggled and the sound made his heart sing. He hadn’t known Eve very long, and he didn’t know her well, but he liked making her happy. Something about the way she smiled at him brought a tightness to his chest. The good kind.
“Here?” he asked, gesturing with her smaller bowl of ice cream at the tree she’d picked out.
“Ya.” She sat down in the soft green grass, and he handed her the bowl before sitting beside her.
His back against the tree trunk, Levi accepted the spoon she offered and dipped it into his bowl. The ice cream was smooth and cold and sweet on his tongue. “Mmm. Delicious. Tara has always made a good strawberry ice cream, but I think this is the best she’s ever made.” He cut his eyes at her. “Did you help her make this?”
Eve licked her spoon, nodded. “Ya. I showed her how to sugar the strawberries and let them sit before you mash them.” She pointed her spoon at him. “But the real trick is to add a little bit of fresh lemon juice to the strawberries to brighten their flavor. Mind you, not to the milk,” she warned. “It could curdle.”
He laughed. “Good to know, but I hate to tell you, Eve, I’m not going to be making ice cream. If we have ice cream in our house, it’s going to be ice cream you’ve made or something I bought at Byler’s store.”
She smiled and dug into her bowl. “Ice cream is so good on a warm day like this. Sweet, but not too sweet,” she told him.
He watched her, enjoying the pleasure he saw on her face as she sampled the cold confection. “Oops, you’ve got a little—” He picked up the napkin she’d tucked between them and blotted her chin.
She looked up at him through her lashes, seeming embarrassed and pleased at the same time. “Got it?” she asked.
Levi was surprised to find how much he enjoyed such an intimate moment between them. A moment he didn’t want to end.
“Levi?”
“Got it.” He pulled his hand away and tucked the napkin into his pocket. “I like the dress, Eve. It’s a good color on you.”
She ran her hand down the skirt of her new hunter-green dress. “Rosemary made it for me. She was going to make me a blue one—blue’s my favorite color for a dress—but she didn’t have any blue fabric.” Seeming to have second thoughts, she looked up at him. “Not that I’m not grateful that she made this for me. It’s been a very long time since I had a new dress and I love it.”
Levi leaned his head against the trunk of the tree. It felt good to just sit here with Eve, to relax and enjoy the Sunday afternoon. The air smelled of early summer: freshly cut grass, sunshine and honeysuckle. Around him, he could hear the muffled chatter of his family and their friends, and in the distance, the bleat of one of his brother’s goats and the lowing of their cows. “Tell me why blue dresses are your favorite, Eve.”
She glanced away, giving him a moment to study her. She had a round face with rosy cheeks and long, dark lashes that framed her brown eyes. She had gorgeous eyes; he didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed that before. The color of hot chocolate, they were big and round and expressive.
“My mam always wore blue. It makes me think of her. I had a blue dress before, but—” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now,” she mumbled.
He took another bite of ice cream that was bursting with bits of fresh strawberry. “When did your mother die?”
“Twelve years ago.” She lowered her gaze to the ice cream on her lap, her voice soft. “Childbirth. The baby didn’t make it, either.”
His first impulse was to reach out and touch her to comfort her, but that didn’t seem right. Married or not, they were still strangers. And what if she didn’t want him to touch her? He spoke instead, hoping his words would be of some comfort. “I’m so sorry, Eve. I have an idea what that’s like. I lost my mam six years ago. Cancer. I wasn’t young like you were. I was already in my twenties, but—” He shrugged.
Instead of looking away, Eve met his gaze. “It’s hard to lose a mother. It doesn’t matter how old you are.” She smiled sadly as if recalling a good memory. “I still miss my mam every day.”
“Me, too,” he agreed, tapping his spoon on the rim of his bowl. “My mam was a good mother, a good woman and always full of fun. She used to play practical jokes on my father all the time. One time, she packed him a lunch and put a note inside his sandwich.” He smiled at the memory, surprised by the emotion it evoked. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten when it happened. “My dat took a big bite right out of the paper before he realized it was there.”
Her eyes grew even rounder. “Was he upset with her?”
Levi looked at her, drawing back. “My dat?” He chuckled. “He thought it was hilarious, even though his friends teased him about it for years.”
She smiled and then asked, “Was it... Did it feel strange when your father married again?”
Scooping a last spoonful of ice cream, he considered his reply. “Yes and no,” he said slowly. “I knew Rosemary and her husband, Ethan, before my mam died. Dat and Ethan were best friends, so he was always around. Rosemary, too, and the girls. Jesse. Rosemary helped care for my mam in the end.”
Levi licked the back of his spoon, disappointed his ice cream was gone. It really was the best strawberry ice cream he’d ever had, and he was proud that his wife had made it. She was a good cook, that was already obvious, and that had been one of the traits he’d wanted in a wife.
People assumed that all Amish women were good cooks, but that wasn’t true. His sister Mary, who still lived in Upstate New York with her husband and children, was an awful cook. It was a family joke. Levi still remembered their mother teasing Mary on her wedding day, saying her husband, Jake, must have been madly in l
ove with her to marry her, knowing she would never learn to make a decent hasenpfeffer.
“Was that hard?” Eve pressed, her brown eyes on him. “Having a new mother?”
“Well, I was old enough that she didn’t become a mother to me. Not in the way my mam had been, at least. When it happened, it felt...right.” He looked up to find her listening intently. She hadn’t asked the question just to make conversation; she really wanted to know.
“My father was devastated after my mother died,” he continued. “And it was the same for Rosemary.” He shrugged. “It seemed natural that they should come together in their grieving, and when it became something more...” He exhaled. “It seemed God’s will to me. To all of us.” He hesitated when he saw a sadness come over her. “I know it wasn’t the same for you when your father remarried. I’m sorry for that.”
Her bowl empty, she took his and stacked them together in the grass. “My stepmother was nothing like Rosemary.”
He chuckled. “No one is like our Rosemary. Before she and Dat wed, she came to each of my brothers and me, and to my sister, and told us she would never try to take the place of our mother. But she hoped, she said, that she could be something between a second mother and a friend to us. And she’s been that. And more importantly, she’s been a good wife to my father. She makes him happy.”
When Levi glanced at his wife, he saw that she was smiling at him. “They have a happy marriage,” he went on. “The kind of marriage I hope that one day you and I will have, Eve.” This time, before he could think better of it, he covered her small hand with his.
She looked up at him. “I want that, too, Levi. For us to be a happy couple.” She looked away and then back at him again. “But how can that be if we never see each other?”
Levi felt the prickly heat of defensiveness on the back of his neck. “We see each other.”
“Not enough,” she answered. “You work such long hours. I only see you for meals. I want to spend more time like this with you.”
She smiled up at him, but he didn’t smile back. Suddenly he was feeling the weight of his father’s disappointment on his shoulders again. His father wasn’t happy with him, and now his wife was telling him that she wasn’t, either?
Levi pulled his hand away. “I work hard all day, Eve. To earn our keep here. And to make a life for us.” He pointed in the direction of the barn. “Jacob and I broke our backs this week, putting those walls up to expand the buggy shop. I did that for us. For you.”
“Levi, I didn’t mean—”
He interrupted her without allowing her to continue. “Do you not understand that the buggies I build in that new workshop space will give us the means to have a house, to put food on our table? I assume that’s what you want? A house of your own? Or do you want to live under my father’s roof for the rest of our lives?”
She folded her hands in her lap, averting her gaze. “I wasn’t criticizing you, Levi.”
He stood up. Everyone else was finishing up their ice cream, too. The couples were parting, and the men were gathering to head back to the barn to see the airbags he was going to install in the buggy he would be building. As he turned back to his wife, he spotted Rosemary watching them.
“Stand up,” he told Eve without looking at her.
“What?”
“Please stand up.” He put out his hand to help her. “And smile.”
She came to her feet and moved in front of him, forcing him to look at her. “Levi, please. I didn’t mean to—”
“Smile,” he repeated. “People are watching us. It wouldn’t do to see us arguing. We’re supposed to be the happy newlyweds.”
“I wasn’t arguing with you, Levi. I only—”
He held his exaggerated smile, frozen on his face.
She went silent and forced a smile.
“Danke. Now, I’m going back down to the barn. I’ll see you at supper.” As Levi walked away, he could feel Eve’s gaze on his back.
And once again, he felt her discontent with him.
* * *
Eve turned the wooden handle on the glass butter churn as hard as she could, watching specks of yellow appear in the thick, rich cream. It was a rainy afternoon, and the women of the household were all gathered in the kitchen. Rosemary was pressing the wrinkles out of a prayer kapp from a whole pile of clean kapps, while Tara was making sourdough bread. Nettie’s sleeves were rolled up as she scoured the gas stovetop vigorously. And Ginger had come to visit, bringing her two youngest, and was busy shucking early peas she’d brought from her garden.
“I was talking to Chloe yesterday,” Tara announced as she turned dough from a bowl onto the kitchen table across from where Eve sat, churning the butter. “She came with her aunt to the greenhouse to buy flowers, and Chloe said that her aunt said that we might be splitting up our church district.” She became more distressed with each word. “Chloe asked me what I knew about it, and I told her not a thing. Is that true, Mam? Are we splitting up our church?”
“Tara, you and I have talked about gossiping,” Rosemary admonished with a sigh. “Let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouth, but only what helps others.”
Tara raised her floured hands. “But it’s not gossip if it’s true. Is it true? I don’t want to split our church. We’ve been going to church with the same folks since we came to Hickory Grove.”
“Calm yourself, dear.” Rosemary picked up a can of spray starch and shook it. Something rattled inside.
Eve was fascinated by the canned starch. Back home, she had mixed powdered starch in warm water, dipped her and her sisters’ kapps in it, let it dry and then pressed it. The way Rosemary was doing it wasn’t nearly so messy and made much more sense, especially with a whole house full of women.
“Wait.” Nettie turned from the stove, steel wool in her hand. She was wearing pink rubber gloves so she wouldn’t burn her hands with the caustic cleaner she was using. “Are we changing churches? Does that mean we won’t go with the Fishers anymore?”
“Nettie’s sweet on Jeb Fisher,” Tara explained to Eve.
“She’s doing it again, Mam,” Nettie said. “Make her stop.”
Rosemary sighed. “Doing what, dear?”
“Teasing me about Jeb. I keep telling her we’re just friends.”
“Maybe.” Tara giggled. “But she’d like them to be more. That’s why she doesn’t want our church to split up.” She turned her attention to Eve again. “Because then she couldn’t sit in the women’s pews and stare across the aisle at Jeb every other Sunday.”
Eve turned the crank of the churn harder as she followed the conversation. The butter was forming into chunks now. She loved the process, feeling the soft, squishy butter in her hands, adding just the right amount of salt and waiting to see if the blocks came out of the wooden mold in perfect shapes.
Nettie walked to the sink and tossed the pad of steel wool in. “Is there any truth to what she’s saying, Mam?” She rinsed a clean washrag and walked back to the stove to wipe it off. “Why would our church split?”
Rosemary gave the kapp a good spray of starch. “For the same reason our church split back in New York. Too many people. With so many Amish moving to Hickory Grove, the church districts are getting too big. We have to be able to fit everyone under one roof for services, and with Chloe’s family just arrived, we now have thirteen families. It’s becoming unmanageable.”
“But wouldn’t the new families just start their own church?” Nettie asked.
Rosemary lifted the iron off the woodstove and when she skimmed it over the white kapp, it sizzled. “I don’t know how it will be done, if it will be done, but my guess is that established families will have the opportunity to become a part of a new district, mixing the old with the new.” She tilted her head one way and then the other. “Some families will go, some will stay.”
“They did just that in Seven Hick
ories. I bumped into Hannah Hartman in Byler’s store the other day, and she said that she and Albert and her daughter Susanna and her husband all joined the new church district.” Ginger glanced Eve’s way. “Hannah’s second husband is Albert Hartman. He used to be Mennonite, and he’s our vet. When they married, he became Amish, and the bishop lets him drive a truck for work.”
An Amish man with a truck? Eve couldn’t imagine.
“Well, I don’t know if I get a say,” Nettie went on, as she wiped the stove down. “But if I do, I want to stay. I like our district.”
“Nothing has been decided, Dochter. It hasn’t even been decided that we’ll be forming a new district. We’re just talking.”
“See, then I wasn’t gossiping,” Tara declared happily. “I was passing on information that Nettie didn’t know.”
Eve unscrewed the lid on the glass churn and dumped the ball of butter into a clean cloth.
As she began to squeeze the liquid out of the yellow butter, the back door opened, and she heard the scrape of heavy boots. She recognized the rhythm of her husband’s footsteps and a moment later Levi walked into the kitchen with Ginger and Eli’s son Philip in his arms. The five-year-old was holding a clean rag to his nose, and it was clear he’d been crying.
“Ach, what happened?” Ginger set the pan of peas on the table and walked over.
As she made her way across the kitchen, Eve caught a glimpse of a slightly rounded belly beneath her apron and dress. She was obviously in the family way. Eve didn’t know how she had missed it. No one had mentioned that Ginger and Eli were expecting, but that wasn’t all that unusual. Of course women talked among themselves in quilting circles, but pregnancy wasn’t something normally discussed in the presence of Amish men, even if the men were brothers or stepfathers.
Levi lowered the boy to the floor. “Just a little bloody nose. He was chasing one of the cats through the buggy shop, tripped and—” He shrugged. “It happens.”
