Amish Brides

by Jennifer Beckstrand

  He grabbed his straw hat and opened the front door. Suvie was planting petunias on the small, circular berm in the center of Aaron’s yard. He frowned. A tall, spindly, dead rosebush stood in the middle of the berm, and he didn’t want Suvie anywhere near it. Pressing his hat onto his head to keep the wind from taking it, he jogged outside yelling Suvie’s name. Huge drops of water pelted him in the face, and he squinted to keep from getting rain in his eyes. “Denki for coming and for the casserole. I’ll finish planting tomorrow.”

  Suvie laughed and blinked the water from her eyes. “Rain is a gardener’s best friend. I can’t rest until these flowers have a gute home.”

  Aaron groaned inwardly. He couldn’t very well leave Suvie to plant her flowers by herself in the rain. And he couldn’t very well risk her disturbing the rosebush. “Okay, then. I’ll help you finish.”

  “No need. I’m already wet.”

  “I’ll go get my gloves and a trowel.”

  She studied his face and smiled. “Okay. It will be fun.”

  Fun like a hole in the head. “Do you mind planting those petunias in the bed up against the house? This piece of ground is special.”

  She raised her eyebrows into a question but didn’t argue. “For sure and certain.”

  Growling all the harder, Aaron ran to his toolshed for his leather gloves and a trowel. He would be soaked to the skin by the time all those petunias got planted, but it didn’t seem right to leave Suvie to do it herself. What would his mamm say? He grabbed a shovel on his way out. Maybe he could dig one big hole and bury all the petunias at once.

  When he returned, Suvie had moved herself and the petunias to the flower bed right under the front window. Unfortunately, he hadn’t pulled the weeds there for three years, and it was a mess. “Are you sure I shouldn’t just do this tomorrow?” he said, knowing what her answer would be before he even asked. Suvie seemed like the determined type. If she wanted those flowers planted, they were going to get planted, come high water or pouring rain.

  With both hands, Suvie tugged at a tall, leafy weed. It released its hold on the soil, and she was catapulted to the ground and onto her backside.

  “Are you okay?”

  She smiled even though she was now sitting in the mud. Water dripped like rain off the brim of her black bonnet. “Cocklebur. Those things are persistent.”

  “Let me.” With his shovel, Aaron made quick work of the other two cockleburs, and Suvie smiled at him as if he’d invented petunias.

  He suddenly found it hard to breathe, as if her grin had paralyzed his lungs. Either that or the rain dripping down his face made it hard to catch a breath.

  Ignoring his breathing problems, Aaron worked his shovel along the edge to loosen the thick weave of grass that had encroached on the flower bed. Once he had gone around the perimeter of the flower bed, Suvie pulled up the loosened mounds of grass and tossed them onto her growing pile of weeds. They finished pulling weeds together, and Aaron worked the soil with his shovel. Of course, it wasn’t really soil anymore—more like a giant mud puddle, and the water was rising.

  Suvie pinched a petunia from the container and tried to dig a hole with her trowel. Mud immediately oozed into her hole, and she smiled wryly at Aaron. “It’s like planting flowers in a bowl of pudding.”

  Aaron swiped his hand across his face to clear the water from his eyes. “Maybe we should try tomorrow.”

  She cocked an eyebrow and laughed. “You keep saying that. I’m beginning to suspect you’re not having fun.”

  Was he having fun? He didn’t know if fun was the right word, but he hadn’t been having a completely unpleasant time. “I haven’t played in the mud since I was ten. But planting flowers seems futile. What if they wash away?”

  Suvie’s smile grew even brighter, though he couldn’t guess why. “You’re right, of course. This is no time to plant flowers.”

  Aaron heard a crack and a whoosh and looked up just in time to see his rain gutter burst at the seam directly over his head. A gush of water slapped him in the face and chest, then bounced off him and hit Suvie smack on top of her head. She sucked in her breath and released a high-pitched squeak as rainwater cascaded from the broken gutter and soaked her clear to the skin.

  Aaron reached up and tried to push the section of rain gutter back into place, but it gave a loud groan and broke off completely. It thudded to the ground, missing Suvie only because he grabbed her wrist and yanked her out of the way before it could conk her in the head.

  With heart going a mile a minute, he took a step back. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t look okay. She looked like a drowned rat. One side of her mouth curled upward as she propped her hand on her hip. “You haven’t cleaned those rain gutters out lately, have you?”

  Not for three years. “Sorry. I’m afraid of heights.”

  She started laughing. Suvie laughed a lot, but considering she was soaked to the bone and her chin was quivering, he wouldn’t have expected her to laugh at that particular moment. “Don’t apologize. The look on your face was worth a whole garden of broccoli.”

  He didn’t like broccoli.

  But did it matter? Suvie’s smile had him so ferhoodled, he couldn’t begin to make sense of his scattered thoughts. All he knew was that the look on her face was worth a strawberry rhubarb pie. With whipped cream.

  She pulled her bonnet off her head and wrung it out like a dishrag, but the scarf under the bonnet was just as wet. She looked so soggy yet so positively, adorably bubbly with water dripping from the end of her nose, he couldn’t help it. A chuckle started from deep within his throat and flew out of his mouth. Suvie eyed him in surprise and then joined him. He laughed until his tears mingled with the rain running down his face.

  Suvie tried to catch her breath and did her best to look indignant. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Jah,” he said.

  She smiled so wide, he could see most of her teeth. She had very nice teeth. “Afraid of heights. A likely story.”

  Aaron couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard. Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember if he’d laughed in the three years since Mary’s passing.

  Guilt tugged at him like a bucket of cement hanging around his neck. He shouldn’t be laughing. What was there to be happy about? Mary was dead. Mary would never have a chance to share a laugh with anybody again.

  Suvie wiped her cheek with her damp bonnet and studied Aaron’s face. “Are you okay? Your hat won’t sag like that once it’s dry.”

  Aaron tried to hide his frown. Suvie didn’t need to know how much it hurt him that other people were happy. The sooner she went away, the better. “Don’t worry about the petunias. I’ll plant them tomorrow. Lord willing, it will be dry.”

  Suvie hesitated as doubt traveled across her face. “Oh. Jah. I won’t worry. I know they’re in gute hands.”

  “I won’t let them die.”

  Another long pause. “Okay.” She bent over and extracted her trowel from the mud. “Maybe I will see you at the feed store sometime.”

  She turned and took three steps toward her buggy when his conscience practically screamed at him. His conscience sounded a lot like his mother, and she wasn’t about to let him send Suvie off like that. The scarf covering her hair drooped precariously over her ears and her mint green dress looked as if it had been weighted down with rocks. “Suvie, wait.”

  She hesitated.

  “Why don’t you come in and dry off?”

  She gazed up at the sky, which was still dripping with rain. A slow smile formed on her lips. “It might not do any good.”

  “I have an umbrella.”

  She took off her gloves and smoothed a piece of soggy hair from her neck. “Do you have enough towels?”

  He thought hard about that. “I have two.”

  That must have been the right answer. She nodded and slogged her way to the front door. Aaron followed, opened the door for her, and winced. It was the right thing to do, inviting Su
vie in to dry off, but he wasn’t much of a housekeeper and the kitchen was a mess. Mary had always kept the house so tidy, and when she died, polishing the furniture and shining the chrome had seemed unimportant compared to nursing his broken heart.

  Suvie sat down right inside the door and took off her shoes. Gritty, muddy water dripped from her socks, which she also removed and stuffed inside her shoes. Aaron pried his boots off his feet and set them on the mat by the front door. He pulled Suvie to her feet, and she followed him into the kitchen.

  The cheesy, watery casserole sat on the table. “Did you make that?” he said.

  She turned a dark shade of pink. “I wanted to impress you, but I’m not a cook. Your mammi Anna made it. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Have you ever tasted Mammi’s cooking?”

  “Nae.”

  He cracked a smile. “There are probably better ways to impress me.”

  She bloomed into a smile. “Oh, sis yuscht. I was a little unsure when I saw the floating chunks of Spam.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I always eat Mammi’s cooking, no matter how bad it is.”

  “We must all make sacrifices yet.”

  She smiled at him and he smiled at her, and they came to an unspoken understanding about Mammi’s cooking. “I’ll get a towel,” he said, hoping she didn’t notice the dirty dishes in the sink or the garbage piling up in his trash can.

  Suvie squeezed water from her apron into the sink. “I’ll wait here.”

  Aaron’s stockings squished all the way up the stairs. He sat on the floor so he wouldn’t get his bed wet and took them off. With lightning speed, he dried off and changed his trousers and shirt, feeling more and more awkward the longer he left Suvie downstairs by herself dripping on his dirty kitchen floor.

  Mary would never have let herself get caught in the rain like that. She would have been sensible and waited for a dry day so her hands wouldn’t have gotten muddy. She never allowed a hair out of place or tolerated a wrinkle in her dress.

  It wasn’t a bad quality to dive into a project like Suvie seemed to prefer. Weeding and planting in the rain had been like an adventure. Almost getting smacked in the head with a rain gutter was definitely exciting. He banished that idea from his brain. Mary was dead. He wouldn’t let himself have an adventure. She wasn’t there to share it with him.

  Aaron retrieved his only other bath towel from the closet and practically ran down the stairs. “Sorry it took so long. I dried off.”

  She straightened the scarf on her head, and she must have wrung out the hem of her dress in the sink because it was no longer dripping on the floor. She stood staring at his sink with an almost woeful look on her face.

  He really should have done those dishes yesterday. And the day before. “Is everything okay?”

  “This sink is atrocious.”

  He didn’t know what atrocious meant, but it didn’t sound good.

  She slid a stack of dirty plates to one side of the sink. “Don’t you ever clean it? It’s a travesty to have such a beautiful stainless steel sink and keep it hidden under all this dirt.”

  He didn’t know what travesty meant either, but it sounded like she was lecturing him. Didn’t she know how hard it was just to get up in the morning? He slumped his shoulders. “I don’t have the heart to do things around the house. Everything reminds me of Mary.” Why had he told her that? Suvie didn’t care about his broken heart.

  She either didn’t recognize the sadness in his voice or decided to ignore it. “Ach, that’s just an excuse.” She smiled as if she didn’t even feel sorry for him. “A sink like this needs to be cherished. Mary probably picked out this sink.”

  Aaron furrowed his brow. Mary had picked it out when they were building the house. How did Suvie know such things?

  Her smile got wider. “Stainless steel is practical and pretty. Mary was always smart about things like that. I love how she could take scraps of fabric that didn’t seem to match at all and make a beautiful quilt or a pillow. Do you remember that quilt she made that sold for six hundred dollars at auction? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Aaron took a deep breath as ribbons of warmth traveled up his arms. Nobody seemed to feel comfortable talking about Mary anymore, and yet here was Suvie Newswenger standing in his kitchen praising Mary’s sink and her quilting.

  “Jah,” he murmured. “Mary was always sewing or quilting something.”

  “Or cooking. Her pretzels were like manna from heaven, and I confess I envied them. The best I could ever do was a decent loaf of bread.” She took the towel from his hand, removed her scarf, and scrubbed the towel against her hair like a piece of sandpaper on wood. “My family ate a lot of doughy bread before I managed to bake it right. Once my mamm sliced my bread and put the whole loaf, slice by slice, in the frying pan to finish cooking. We drizzled olive oil on it and made excellent toast.”

  Suvie deftly wrapped her hair back into a bun and secured the scarf at the nape of her neck. Her fingers were long and graceful, and Aaron had a hard time pulling his gaze from her chestnut brown hair that caught the light from the window.

  He lowered his eyes, mostly so the warm glow of her hair wouldn’t distract him. “You’re right. I should have taken better care of Mary’s sink.”

  While she dabbed at her arms with a towel, she glanced in his direction and laughed. “It’s not as bad as all that. You’re not in trouble. And it will only take me five minutes to get this sink back in shape. The floor will take a little longer.”

  “The floor?”

  “The wood is beautiful. It needs a good clean and polish. The gute news is that I planned on being here all morning planting petunias. I don’t have to be to work until one.”

  “You . . . want to mop my floor?”

  Her lips twitched in amusement. “There are three Froot Loops stuck to one of the floorboards, and a Christmas peppermint drop in the corner that won’t budge without a chisel.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  Suvie draped her towel over one of his kitchen chairs. She didn’t look much drier, but at least she wasn’t dripping on his floor, which he apparently hadn’t swept since Christmas. “I don’t want to alarm you, but your dust bunnies are so big they’re reproducing.” She took the dirty plates out of the sink. “You can do dishes while I mop.”

  Aaron widened his eyes. “Can I?”

  Suvie’s laughter proved she wasn’t annoyed with him. Did she ever get her feathers ruffled? “One thing you need to know about me is that I’m bossy. Kick me out anytime you want.”

  “Well, I would, but I really need my floor mopped.”

  Without asking, she searched his broom closet until she found the mop and a bucket, which had been pushed clear to the back. The broom was a little closer to the front. He’d dropped a mug sometime around Easter and had to sweep up the broken glass.

  Suvie had the nerve to rifle through his cupboards until she found some detergent to clean the floor and an old bottle of wax. “I’ll bet Mary loved this kitchen,” Suvie said. “The window lets in so much light.”

  Suvie swept and mopped while Aaron washed up the dishes and wiped down the counters. They talked about Mary and how she liked things tidy and how their first fight as a married couple happened because Aaron didn’t pick up his stockings. Suvie told him about her greenhouse and her sister who loved dogs but was allergic to them and her brother who had lost the hearing in one ear after a long illness. She laughed at his story of his nephew who refused to eat anything but bread, peanut butter, and potato chips, and his mamm, who thought apple cider vinegar cured everything.

  Suvie was loud and funny and not afraid to tell him about the time she’d stolen a pie her mother had made and had eaten the whole thing, or the time she had painted red spots on her face to get out of going to school on the day of the spelling bee. She couldn’t have been more different from Mary, who was so prim and proper she was worried about singing too loud in church. Mary would never have worn a mint green dres
s. She would have been mortified to be accused of being a peacock. But the color suited Suvie. It brought out the blue of her eyes.

  Maybe Mary had been overly concerned. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with mint green.

  Suvie did most of the talking as she scrubbed the sink until it looked as new as the day Mary had picked it out, then shooed Aaron out of the kitchen and waxed the floor until it was so bright he had to squint when the light reflected off it.

  He didn’t mind that she talked so much. He liked the sound of her voice, and he didn’t feel the uncomfortable need to come up with clever things to say to her. He could just listen and talk when he felt like it. And Suvie wasn’t one of those girls who wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise. She seemed to sense when he wanted to say something and when he didn’t and was happy to fill in the awkward silences with her own stories.

  Suvie tiptoed to the closet and stowed the mop and bucket, retrieved her bonnet, trowel, and gloves from the table, and gave Aaron a smile. His heart pressed against his ribs until he almost couldn’t breathe.

  For sure and certain he loved a shiny sink.

  “I’m coming tomorrow to finish planting petunias,” she said. “And then I’ll help you take out that dead rosebush yet.”

  Aaron clenched his teeth, took a deep breath, and tried to remember that Suvie couldn’t begin to understand what he and Mary had shared. “That rosebush is wonderful important to me. I like it just the way it is.”

  Suvie grinned. “But it’s dead. I don’t wonder that it scares folks away when they drive past your house. If people find out about the rain gutter, you’ll never have another visitor again.”

  It felt as if his horse, Coke, had galloped into the room and parked a hoof on his rib cage. “Mary planted that rosebush the week before we were married. It is a remembrance of our love for each other. I don’t want it moved.” His voice cracked, but he didn’t lose his composure. So what if his eyes stung? Suvie would never notice.

  Suvie leaned toward him and suddenly seemed five feet closer. “Ach, du lieva,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Of course we can’t pull it out. If you’d told me that earlier, I wouldn’t have been so insistent. I’m sorry I insulted your rosebush.”