Courting Cate

by Leslie Gould

  “I was,” I answered, holding the door wide for him too, directing him outside. “Go play horseshoes with the men.”

  “I’d rather help you.”

  My eyes narrowed as I gestured toward the yard. “Go.”

  “No,” he responded, standing his ground.

  I decided to ignore him and go on with my work, turning my attention to the stove. I grabbed a potholder and lifted the teakettle, pouring the boiling water through the coffee press into the carafe.

  As I did, Pete scraped the leftover food on the plates into the compost bucket, stacking them beside the sink. When he finished, I ran the hot water, adding soap and stirring the bubbles. Next I plunged the glasses into the suds.

  “Cate.” He grabbed a towel and stepped closer. “Can we talk?”

  “No.”

  I quickly washed the sink full of glasses, rinsed them, and placed them in the rack. He dried them quickly and put them away, one after the other.

  I checked the coffee, gathered up a tray of mugs, grabbed the creamer from the fridge, headed outside without saying a word to Pete, and placed everything on the picnic table. He didn’t follow me.

  “I’ll be out in a jiffy with the pies,” I announced. No one answered me, but the croquet mallets cracked ominously behind the apple trees. When I returned to the kitchen Pete was washing the plates, so I started another pot of coffee and turned my attention to the dessert, gathering forks from the drawer and then pulling down a stack of small plates.

  As I placed them on the tray, Pete turned from the sink and said, “Let me carry that.”

  “No thanks.”

  He started to reach for it.

  “I said no.”

  His hands gripped the sides, bumping into mine.

  I flinched, pulling away as if I’d touched a hot burner. “I’d hate to have to pay you for your services.”

  The tray wobbled, but he steadied it.

  His eyes narrowed, locking on mine. “What are you talking about?”

  “M&M might be foolish enough to pay for your help, but I’m not.”

  His face began to redden.

  I stepped wide, opened the fridge and took out the whipped cream Nan had brought, then headed for the pies.

  “Cate.” Pete was behind me, the tray still in his hands. “We really need to talk.”

  I grabbed a spoon, plunged it into the whipped cream, and then yanked it out, my back to him. “So you know what I’m referring to?”

  “Look at me,” he pled.

  I spun around, the scoop of whipped cream clinging to the spoon in my hand, which I may have been holding in a threatening manner.

  He stepped back, balancing the tray.

  I held the spoon higher. “I am not a source of income. Or a project. Or a joke.” My voice was clear and steady, but my knees shook. More than anything, I wanted to fling the cream into his face.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse when M&M came stumbling through the back door, laughing. “We’re going to walk down to the creek. Want to come?” Martin had his sunglasses in his hand.

  “No!” Pete and I said in unison.

  “You go,” I said to Pete. “But first take out the tray.” I pointed to the cream pies and then to Mervin. “You take those.” He reached for them.

  “Martin, you take your Mamm’s pies.” I turned around and flung the whipped cream back into the bowl, as if it were Pete’s face. “And this.” I spun back around, as Pete put the tray back on the counter. I thrust the bowl at him and started toward the living room.

  “Cate?” Pete’s voice had a frantic edge I hadn’t heard before.

  I ignored him and headed to the stairway.

  “Are you going to the singing?” Martin called out from the hallway.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not even if you paid me.”

  Their silence said it all.

  Pete’s voice grew louder. “Cate! Give me a chance.”

  I stopped on the landing. Pete stood on the bottom stair, looking up at me, the bowl of whipped cream still in his hands.

  “Wasn’t the payment from M&M just a stepping stone to what you were really after?”

  He shook his head. “I can explain, honest.”

  “Why would I believe a single word of it? You will amount to nothing—absolutely nothing—without my Dat’s money. Which is clearly what you were after all along.”

  He locked eyes on me one more time, and then he stepped out of my view. A moment later the back door opened and then closed.

  By the time I reached my room, tears poured down my face. My heart might have been as cold as a potato straight from the cellar, but my grief was real. It was my comeuppance for thinking I had a chance at love.

  It wasn’t Dat or Betsy or Addie who came to check on me. It was Nan. I knew by the knock on the door. It was kind, just like her. “Cate?” she softly said.

  “I’m fine,” I squeaked.

  “May I come in?”

  “There’s not anything you can do,” I answered.

  There was a long moment of silence. Finally she said, “Ach, Cate. Let me in. I won’t stay but a minute.”

  I rolled off the bed and trudged to the door, opening it quickly, hoping to get the encounter over as soon as possible.

  Nan’s fair face was flushed, probably from the heat of the day. “Pete asked me to come up. He’s worried about you.”

  “More likely worried about his bleak future,” I muttered, heading back to my bed where I settled on the edge.

  Nan followed me. “He’d really like to talk with you.”

  I shrugged. “It’s too late for that.”

  “He said it’s not.”

  “No, it definitely is,” I said, meeting her eyes. “And it’s worse than I thought. Mervin and Martin are paying him to court me. No. Correction. They were paying him to court Dat’s money.”

  She shook her head slightly. “He said he has a good explanation.” Nan’s face was full of pain. “If you’ll only listen.”

  “It’s too late.”

  She sat down beside me, one hand flat against the bed, the other on my shoulder, bringing me a measure of comfort.

  “I can’t put myself through any more of this,” I said. The pain was nearly unbearable.

  “Love can be scary, sure, but sometimes you have to take a risk, before—”

  “You haven’t taken a risk again—not in all these years.”

  “I’m waiting for the right man,” she responded. “Which I think Pete is for you.”

  “No, he’s not.” I was done with men.

  After a moment of silence, she spoke again. “Just know Pete can be stubborn.” Even though she didn’t say it, I was sure she was thinking too. “He gets it from his mother. I just hope the two of you don’t let a misunderstanding”—clearly she didn’t fully comprehend the situation—“get in the way of your future.”

  “We have no future.”

  She pulled me close, our kapped heads touching. “I’ll be praying,” she said. “For both of you.”

  She left after that, as peacefully as she’d arrived. If anyone else had told me the same thing, I would have been offended, but I knew Nan meant well. She just didn’t know what she was talking about.

  I slipped the Mary Todd Lincoln biography from my nightstand and curled up on my bed, ready to escape. I’d survived before after my heart was broken. I would again. One last time.

  I longed for a good sleep that night, but Betsy’s sobbing kept me from it. I pulled my pillow over my head, but still the sound of it filled my ears. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, there was a ping on the window. She must have stopped to breathe, because otherwise we both would have missed it.

  I was pretty sure it wasn’t Pete.

  I peeked out from under my pillow. Betsy sat up, took a ragged breath, exhaled, and then hurried to the window. I could tell from the expression on her face it was Levi. It wasn’t one of bliss or happiness or even contentment. It was pure pain.

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nbsp; She waved at him, pointed to the back of the house, and then grabbed her robe, her hair bouncing on her back.

  I sat up in bed. “Stop.”

  She glared at me. “He’s waiting for me.”

  “I know you’re mad at me. But this is the way it has to be.”

  She stepped toward the door.

  I stood. “You had no right to encourage Mervin and Martin—to not tell me what was going on.”

  She turned her profile toward me. “I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I truly love Levi. I want to marry him.”

  I chose my words carefully. “I’ll talk to Dat again, but even if by some miracle he agrees, promise me you’ll wait awhile. You’re still too young.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll be eighteen soon.” In two steps she was at the door.

  As I called out, “Betsy!” her footsteps fell on the stairs, in quick succession. I turned toward the window. A moment later, she was running into Levi’s arms.

  I crawled back into my bed, my flashlight in one hand and a book in the other.

  I’d taught myself to read, but it was my Mamm who had taught me how to pray.

  She told me God wanted me to talk to him, tell him about the little things, and the big things. Silently. Respectfully. Consistently. But for the last two years, since I overheard Seth tell Martin and Mervin—and everyone else gathered around—that once he married me his money worries would be over, praying had been a struggle for me. Tonight was no different.

  Betsy returned a half hour later. I shone my flashlight in her direction, and she shielded her red-rimmed eyes.

  “Sorry.” I turned it off, ready to try to sleep.

  Betsy’s steps fell across the wood floor, coming toward me. “Scoot over,” she said.

  I did.

  She lay down, bumping against my legs, and pulled the quilt around her. I tugged it back my way. I expected her to lash out at me again, but she didn’t.

  “Tell me about Mamm,” she whispered.

  It was what I used to do, through the years, when she crawled in bed with me at night.

  Happy with the change of subject, I started at the beginning. “Mamm liked to garden and cook. She was happy and content.” Her personality was far more like Betsy’s than mine. She always looked on the bright side. I didn’t find out until after Mamm died that she’d had several miscarriages and a stillbirth between Betsy and me.

  “She trusted God—and she was a really good mother, the best.” That’s what Dat always said, but I knew both Uncle Cap and Aunt Laurel felt my Mamm had spoiled me.

  Betsy scooted closer to me as I continued the story. “As you know, most Amish mothers don’t talk about their pregnancies to anyone, let alone their children, and Mamm didn’t until that last month. Then she talked about the Bobli—about you—every day. She told me how to bathe and dress an infant, how to change a diaper—even how to give a Bobli a bottle if needed.”

  We practiced everything on my faceless doll. Because I liked to learn, even then, about anything and everything, I soaked up every detail. The funny thing was, Mamm kept me home from school a year after I should have started. She said I already knew how to add and subtract, and because I was reading, I was mastering English too. She couldn’t imagine what I would learn that I didn’t already know. She said I had plenty of years to be a scholar, but this was her last year to spend with just me.

  Later, once I’d read about premonitions, I wondered if Mamm had had one. If that was why she’d kept me home—because, as it turned out, it was our last year together at all.

  “Go on,” Betsy said. I was at her favorite part.

  “The day you were born started out as the happiest day of my life. Because of all her complications, Mamm delivered in the hospital. Our grandmother hired a driver, and we went to visit the two of you. I held you the entire time I was there. You were so lovely, right from the beginning. Dat was beside himself with joy, and although Mamm seemed weak, I’d never seen her—the happiest person I knew—as joyful. When it was time for me to leave, Mamm said she and you would be home in a few days.”

  Betsy sighed. Now came the hard part. “But only I came home, with Dat,” she whispered.

  I nodded in the darkness. The next morning he climbed out of a car holding Betsy. I knew before he reached the house that Mamm wasn’t coming home. “I met him in the driveway and took you from him.”

  That was the day I became a mother. I was the one who fed Betsy that day, even giving her a bottle in the middle of the night. At first everyone was in such shock they didn’t realize who was feeding and diapering her and keeping her clean. When Dat walked into the kitchen and saw me giving Betsy a bath on the table, he gasped and called for Mammi as he stepped slowly toward me, as if he might startle me and make me hurt the Bobli.

  Because her cord hadn’t fallen off, I wasn’t giving her a tub bath, just a sponge one. I’d told him earlier she had stuff under her chin, like cottage cheese, and my grandmother too, but they’d been talking about the funeral.

  “You bonded to me,” I said to Betsy. “I’ve never been more thankful for anything in my life than having you as my Schwester.”

  I felt her body tense a little beside me. “So what happened that time after church, before grandmother died? When you tackled Seth. When you were still in school.”

  I’d been eleven. The incident wasn’t part of our usual story.

  Betsy added, “Is that what Dat was referring to? When he said people thought he should remarry.”

  “Ach, Betsy, that was a long time ago.”

  “Jah, but I can’t remember the details.”

  I scooted closer to the wall, until my arm pressed against it. “I’d made you a new apron—back when I used to try to sew. After church, while we were still in the Mosiers’ barn, Grandmother yanked it off you and said I’d done a horrible job, that I needed to rip out the hem and redo it. I left the barn.” Fled, actually, in absolute humiliation as my grandmother called out, “You’re going to make an awful frau.” “I kind of bumped into Seth on the way out.”

  “Bumped?”

  I cleared my throat. “Well, knocked into might better describe it.” He’d been standing in the doorway with a group of his friends, watching my grandmother berate me. When I turned toward the door, he laughed and pointed at me.

  “So that started your problems with Seth?”

  “Basically.” The next day was when he tackled me at first base, sending me into the mud.

  “And it made the bishop think Dat should remarry. . . .”

  I turned toward her. “Jah, but after that I was on my best behavior. And because Grandmother couldn’t sew for us anymore, Dat hired that out. We made it all work.”

  Betsy yawned. I hoped she was done with her questions.

  She wasn’t. “So why did you court Seth, once you were grown, if he’d been mean to you?”

  “I thought he’d changed.”

  Betsy’s voice was matter-of-fact. “He probably had.”

  Annoyed, I answered, “He hadn’t.”

  “People do, you know.” She reached for my hand.

  I didn’t answer. I was pretty sure they didn’t.

  Betsy yawned again, and after a few moments her body relaxed beside me. A minute later she released my hand.

  My thoughts traipsed through what we’d talked about. Through the years, I went from thinking in Pennsylvania Dutch, my first language, to English. Maybe because of how much I read. But there were a handful of words I continued to think of only in my mother tongue. Dat. Mamm. Bobli. Schwester.

  Shahm was another one of them. That was what I felt after my grandmother’s diatribe—shame—something I’d experienced plenty of times since.

  The whole episode with Pete had filled me with Shahm again, the kind that made it hard for me to think, to reason, let alone pray. The kind that made me feel as if I were a child again.

  I loved Betsy, but I couldn’t subject myself to more shame just to make her
happy.

  CHAPTER

  11

  I held my head high and squared my shoulders as I marched down the hill to the shop the next morning.

  The crew parted, making a path to the entrance. I unlocked the door and held it open. Martin and Mervin were the first to go through. They kept their heads down. Levi was the last. He looked at me but didn’t speak.

  After I filled my coffee cup, I retreated to my office and stayed there all morning, not even leaving for a refill.

  I heard noises a couple of times from the showroom and made out the sounds of a few cars pulling into and then leaving the parking lot. I assumed Pete was working but hadn’t actually seen him. Nor did I want to.

  In the afternoon, Dat knocked on my door and entered before I said anything.

  “Fess up,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “About?”

  “Well, Betsy has been moping around the house all day, for one thing. And I think you know the reason. And then Pete tells me, just now, that he’s giving his two-weeks’ notice. He’s going back to New York.”

  I kept my face as blank as I possibly could.

  “Did you know about this?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you surprised?”

  I shrugged.

  He put both hands on my desk and leaned forward. “How did you and Pete go from being a couple to this?”

  “Technically we never were a couple. We were hardly even courting.” I met Dat’s eyes. “And if Pete wants to go home, who am I to stop him?”

  “Is that what this is all about—you not wanting to leave Lancaster County?”

  I shook my head, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I moved from Ohio to marry your Mamm. It was the best decision I ever made, for lots of different reasons. Don’t be afraid of change.”

  “That’s not it at all. Pete and I aren’t right for each other. We never got as far as talking about . . . any of that stuff.”

  He pushed back from my desk and stood up straight. “Could you talk to someone about all of this? Your aunt Laurel?”