Heart in Hand: Stitches in Time Series #3

by Barbara Cameron

  Her mother glanced down at her traditional Amish dress and laughed self-deprecatingly. “I’m not much of an adventurer now.”

  “You have a spirit of adventure in your heart,” Annie told her.

  She studied her mother, looking so slim and pretty in a dress of deep green, her dark brown hair tucked neatly under her snowy white kapp still showed no gray. Jenny never missed the fancy clothes of the Englisch . . . never missed anything from that world, from what she said. Annie wondered how she would feel visiting the city she’d made her home base for so many years.

  “Getting excited?”

  “It’s going to be so amazing!” She looked at her mother. “I’m still surprised Daed said he wanted to go.”

  She sat up and hugged her mother. “But I’m glad he did. He’s so, so proud of you. We all are.”

  “I appreciate it,” Jenny told her. “But we’re not going to the event for them to make a fuss over me. You know that’s not our way.”

  “I know.” Annie pretended to roll her eyes. “It’s because the organization is helping children. And because your friend, David, is being honored, too.”

  “Exactly.” Jenny paused and grinned. “Of course, it doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun while we’re there.”

  Annie reached under her pillow and pulled out a handful of brochures. “I sent off for these. Look, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, Times Square . . .”

  “And the New York Times?” Jenny looked over the information packet for the newspaper. “Hardly a tourist attraction.”

  “Please?” Annie bounced on the bed like a kid. “I want to go so bad. Badly,” she corrected herself.

  Jenny chuckled. “I guess it would be attractive to someone who wants to be a writer.”

  She glanced over at Annie’s small desk. “I remember when you started keeping a word journal. How you loved finding new words to tell us about.”

  “So this is where you went.” Annie’s father appeared in the doorway.

  He filled the doorway, this tall and handsome father of hers. She and her brothers and sister had gotten their blond hair and blue eyes from him.

  “Matthew, look! Annie’s gotten all sorts of brochures of places to visit for us to look at before we go to New York City.”

  “The New York Times?” he asked, sounding doubtful. “I’m not sure your brothers and sister are going to be thrilled with going on a tour of a newspaper.”

  Annie looked imploringly toward her mother.

  “Maybe we can think of someplace you and the rest of the family would like to go, and Annie and I will go on the newspaper tour, maybe the television studio where I used to work,” Jenny suggested.

  “It’s no surprise the two of you would want to go there.” He picked up the brochure of the Niagara Falls. “This looks amazing. Amos and Esther went there last year and said the boat ride was exciting. Bet Joshua would love this.”

  They heard a crash downstairs.

  “The Bontrager children are never quiet,” Jenny said, sighing. But she wore a smile. “I’d better go see what they’re up to.”

  She patted Matthew’s cheek as she passed him. “Supper in ten.”

  “Smells wonderful.”

  Laughing, she shook her head. “I’m making baked pork chops.”

  “One of my favorites.”

  She glanced back. “And something easy I can’t mess up. Well, at least when I set the timer.”

  Matthew waited until she left the room and then he looked at Annie. They laughed.

  “I heard you!” Jenny called back.

  He struggled to suppress his grin. “It’s still fun to tease her about her cooking.”

  “You have to stop,” she told him sternly.

  “You do it, too. It’s just too easy to tease her when she makes comments first. But she’s become a good cook. Not that I’d have been any less happy to be married to her if she hadn’t.” Tilting his head, he studied her. “So I guess you’re going to miss Aaron while you’re gone.”

  She frowned at him. “Don’t tease.”

  “He’s a nice young man.”

  With a shrug, Annie gathered up the brochures and tucked them under her pillow.

  “Annie? Is there a problem?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “We used to be able to talk about everything.”

  She looked up and felt a stab of guilt. He looked genuinely disappointed.

  “He’s afraid I’m going to stay there,” she blurted out.

  Matthew pulled over the chair from the desk and sat down. “You’re not, are you?”

  She frowned. “Of course not.”

  But oh, to stay longer than the four or five days they planned to visit. There was so much to see, so much to write about . . .

  “Gut,” he said, looking relieved.

  She stood. “I should go down and help Mamm with supper.”

  He nodded. “I’m right behind you. She might need me to get the apple pie I smell baking out of the oven.”

  “Men!” she said, laughing as she walked from the room. “All you think of is your stomachs.”

  “Hey, a man works hard, he needs to eat.”

  When she got downstairs, she saw her mother didn’t need her help—Mary was visiting and staying for supper. She stood at the counter slicing bread while Johnny set the table. Joshua was no doubt out in the barn finishing his chores. There was nothing he liked better than to feed and water the horses.

  She’d known her siblings would be doing their evening chores. But it had been a good excuse for getting out of a discussion of Aaron with her father. She hadn’t liked what Aaron said about her going to New York City. And there was no need to be getting into it with her father in any case. Such things weren’t discussed with parents until you actually knew you were getting engaged and right now, she and Aaron were just friends.

  It was fun going to singings and church activities and things with him, but she wasn’t ready to get married yet. Fortunately, her parents wouldn’t dream of pressuring her to do so. Many of her friends were waiting a little longer than their parents had before they married. After all, marriage was forever in her community.

  At least, until death did you part.

  She’d been so young when her mother died Jenny had been the only mother she’d ever known. Although Jenny moved with only a trace of a limp from the car bombing she’d suffered overseas, she’d experienced problems recovering from it that had affected her speech. Annie had bonded with her when her father had offered to drive Jenny to speech therapy on the days Annie went for help with her own childhood speech problem.

  But maybe Annie was closer to Jenny, too, because Jenny had lost her mother when she was young and knew how it felt.

  Their shared interest in writing came as her mother helped her with schoolwork and found Annie loved to put her active imagination on paper. Now her tiny room was full of boxes of journals and bound collections of poems and short stories.

  Annie watched the way her family worked together in the kitchen getting the family meal on the table—especially loving the way her parents got along. Her father had come down the stairs and insisted on checking on the pie. Her mother shooed him away from the oven, insisting it needed five more minutes. She smiled at the way they pretended to argue, all the while teasing each other and loved seeing them occasionally sharing a kiss when they thought their kinner weren’t watching.

  They were different than the parents of most of her friends. Jenny’s father had been born Amish, but decided not to join the church, so she was familiar with the Amish ways and had visited her grandmother here for years. Although Jenny and Annie’s father had fallen in love as teenagers, Jenny had left one summer to go to college, and her father had married Annie’s mother some time later.

  But then the terrible bombing overseas years later had an amazing result: Jenny’s grandmother had invited her to recuperate at her house, and Jenny had been reunited with Annie’s father. After she joined th
e church, the two of them had gotten married. So they were different from the parents of her friends in that respect. Annie always wondered if they seemed more in love than other married couples because of all they’d been through. Then again, Amish couples didn’t usually indulge in public displays of affection.

  “Go tell Phoebe supper’s ready,” Jenny told her.

  It was a simple thing to do—just a few steps across the room and a knock on the door of the dawdi haus.

  Phoebe opened the door with a smile. “No need to knock, child. Mmm, something smells so good.”

  “Matthew thinks the pie should come out,” Jenny said as Phoebe stepped into the kitchen. “I think it needs five more minutes. You decide.”

  Phoebe opened the oven door and nodded. “Jenny’s right, Matthew. You know you’re just impatient to be eating it.”

  He sighed and pulled out her chair. “You’re right.”

  She patted his cheek before she sat. “Be patient. Even after it’s done you’ll need to let it cool a little.”

  Joshua came in from the barn, letting in a cold blast of wind. He took off his jacket, hung it on a peg, and went to wash his hands.

  The wind picked up and rattled the kitchen window. “Hope it doesn’t snow early this year,” Phoebe said. “It’d make travel to the big city hard.”

  “It wouldn’t dare snow and interrupt Annie’s trip,” Jenny said as the family took their seats at the big wooden kitchen table.

  “Annie’s trip? I thought it was Jenny’s trip,” Matthew remarked.

  “I think she’s even more excited than I am.”

  She grinned. “You’re right.”

  They were just about to thank God for the meal when they heard a knock on the door.

  “We know who it is,” Joshua said, rolling his eyes.

  “Be nice,” Jenny told him with a stern look. But Annie saw the smile playing around her mother’s lips.

  “I’ll get it,” Annie said, but there was no need. No one else was getting to their feet.

  She opened the door and found Aaron standing there, wearing a big smile.

  “Good evening,” he said, smiling as he stepped inside and took off his hat. “Sorry I’m late.”

  The Stitches in Time Series

  Stitches in Time is a very special shop run by three cousins and their grandmother. Each young woman is devoted to her Amish faith and lifestyle, each talented in a traditional Amish craft and in new ways of doing business—and yet each is unsure of her path in life and love. It will take a loving and insightful grandmother to gently guide them to see that they can weave together their traditions and their desire to create and forge loving marriages and families of their own.

  And now for a sneak peek into the first chapter of Her Restless Heart, Mary Katherine’s story, the book that started the Stitches in Time series.

  1

  A year ago, Mary Katherine wouldn’t have imagined she’d be here. Back then, she’d been helping her parents on the family farm and hating every minute of it.

  Now, she stood at the front window of Stitches in Time, her grandmother’s shop, watching the Englischers moving about on the sidewalks outside the shop in Paradise. Even on vacation, they rushed about with purpose. She imagined them checking off the places they’d visited: Drive by an Amish farmhouse. Check. Buy a quilt and maybe some knitting supplies to try making a sweater when I get back home. Check.

  She liked the last item. The shop had been busy all morning, but now, as people started getting hungry, they were patronizing the restaurants that advertised authentic Amish food and ticking off another item on their vacation checklist. Shoofly pie. Amish pretzels. Chow-chow. Check.

  “Don’t you worry, they’ll be back,” Leah, her grandmother, called out.

  Smiling, Mary Katherine turned. “I know.”

  She wandered back to the center of the shop, set up like the comfortable parlor of an Amish farmhouse. Chairs were arranged in a circle around a quilting frame. Bolts of fabric of every color and print imaginable were stacked on shelves on several walls, spools of matching threads on another.

  And yarn. There were skeins and skeins of the stuff. Mary Katherine loved running her hands over the fluffy fibers, feeling the textures of cotton and wool and silk—even some of the new yarns made from things like soybeans and corn that didn’t feel the same when you knitted them or wove them into patterns—but some people made such a fuss over it because it was using something natural.

  Mary Katherine thought it was a little strange to be using vegetables you ate to make clothes, but once she got her hands on the yarns, she was impressed. Tourists were, too. They used terms like green and ecological and didn’t mind spending a lot of money to buy them. And was it so much different to use vegetables when people had been taking oily, smelly wool from not very attractive sheep and turning it into garments for people—silk from silkworms—that sort of thing?

  “You have that look on your face again,” her grandmother said.

  Mary Katherine smiled. “What look?”

  “That serious, thoughtful look of yours. Tell me what you’re thinking of.”

  “Working on my loom this afternoon.”

  “I figured you had itchy fingers.” Her grandmother smiled. She sighed. “I’m so glad you rescued me from working at the farm. And Dat not understanding about my weaving.”

  Grossmudder nodded and sighed. “Some people need time to adjust.”

  Taking one of the chairs that was arranged in a circle around the quilt her grandmother and Naomi worked on, she propped her chin in her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair. “It’d be a lot easier if I knitted or quilted.”

  Leah looked at her, obviously suppressing a smile. “You have never liked easy, Mary Katherine.”

  Laughing, she nodded. “You’re right.”

  Looking at Naomi and Anna, her cousins aged twenty and twenty-three, was like looking into a mirror, thought Mary Katherine. The three of them could have been sisters, not cousins. They had a similar appearance—oval faces, their hair center-parted and tucked back under snowy white kapps, and slim figures. Naomi and Anna had even chosen dresses of a similar color, one that reminded Mary Katherine of morning glories. In her rush out the door, Mary Katherine had grabbed the first available dress and now felt drab and dowdy in the brown dress she’d chosen.

  Yes, they looked much alike, the three of them.

  Until Mary Katherine stood. She’d continued growing after it seemed like everyone else stopped. Now, at 5’8”, she felt like a skinny beanpole next to her cousins. She felt awkward next to the young men she’d gone to school with. Although she knew it was wrong, there had been times when she’d secretly wished that God had made her petite and pretty like her cousins. And why had He chosen to give her red hair and freckles? Didn’t she have enough she didn’t like about her looks without that?

  Like their looks, their personalities seemed similar on the surface. The three of them appeared calm and serene—especially Naomi. Anna tried to be, but it didn’t last long. She was too mischievous.

  And herself? Serenity seemed hard these day. In the past several years, Mary Katherine had been a little moody but lately it seemed her moods were going up and down like a road through rolling hills.

  “Feeling restless?” Naomi asked, looking at her with concern. Nimbly, she made a knot, snipped the thread with scissors, then slid her needle in a pincushion.

  Anna looked up from her knitting needles. “Mary Katherine was born restless.”

  “I think I’ll take a quick walk.”

  “No,” Leah said quickly, holding up a hand. “Let’s eat first, then you can take a walk. Otherwise you’ll come back and customers will be here for the afternoon rush and you’ll start helping and go hungry.”

  Mary Katherine was already mentally out the door, but she nodded her agreement. “You’re right, of course.”

  Leah was a tall, spare woman who didn’t appear old enough to be anyone’s grandmother. Her face wa
s smooth and unlined, and there wasn’t a trace of gray in her hair worn like her granddaughters.

  “I made your favorite,” Leah told Mary Katherine.

  “Fried chicken? You made fried chicken? When did you have time to do that?”

  Nodding, Leah tucked away her sewing supplies and stood. “Before we came to work this morning. It didn’t take long.” She turned to Naomi. “And I made your favorite.”

  Naomi had been picking up stray strands of yarn from the wood floor. She looked up, her eyes bright. “Macaroni and cheese?”

  “Oatmeal and raisin cookies?” Anna wanted to know. When her grandmother nodded, she set down her knitting needles and stood. “Just how early did you get up? Are you having trouble sleeping?”

  “No earlier than usual,” Leah replied cheerfully. “I made the macaroni and cheese and the cookies last night. But I don’t need as much sleep as some other people I know.”

  “Can you blame me for sleeping in a little later?” Mary Katherine asked. “After all of those years of helping with farm chores? Besides, I was working on a design last night.”

  “Tell us all about it while we eat,” Naomi said, glancing at the clock. “We won’t have long before customers start coming in again.”

  “I worry about Grandmother,” Anna whispered to Mary Katherine as they walked to the back room. “She does too much.”

  “She’s always been like this.”

  “Yes, but she’s getting older.”

  “Ssh, don’t be saying that around her!”

  Leah turned. “Did somebody say something?”

  “Anna said she’s hungry,” Mary Katherine said quickly. “And happy you made her favorite cookies. But everything you make is Anna’s favorite.”

  Anna poked Mary Katherine in the ribs, but everyone laughed because it was true. What was amazing was that no matter how much Anna ate, she never gained weight.

  Nodding, Leah continued toward the back room. “We’ll have it on the table in no time.”

  Anna grabbed Mary Katherine’s arm, stopping her. “Shame on you,” she hissed. “You know it’s wrong to lie.” Then she shook her head. “What am I saying? You’ve done so much worse!”