Butter Safe Than Sorry

by Tamar Myers

  “Why didn’t you turn it off, then?” she said. “Or, better yet, change the channel to something more uplifting?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “I enjoyed every moment of it.”

  Without warning my very best friend in the whole wide world threw her arms around me and gave me a buttery kiss on the forehead. When she released me, it took a couple of seconds for me to regain my equilibrium.

  “Magdalena,” she gushed, “I’m going to miss you more than I’d miss white bread if it were taken away. Will you write?”

  “You know I get writer’s cramp easily; how about I call instead?”

  “Okay,” she said, and fled outside. It was the last I would see of her for a very long time.

  I took the plate that held the butter cookies into the adjacent dining room. The cookies themselves didn’t even make it as far as the table. No doubt about it they wouldn’t have made it out of the kitchen, had there not been a sign on the door that read: KEEP OUT.

  The cookie culprits were a pack of teenage boys, but the crowd that filled the public rooms of my inn was composed of a wide mix of the friends, neighbors, and relations of Doc Shafor. It was officially the old geezer ’s ninetieth birthday, and the party was my present to him.

  To say that Doc was a lech is a bit like calling Mozart musically inclined. The old coot lived to seduce the fairer sex, moi in particular. If I had a dollar for every time he’d proposed to me, I wouldn’t be envious of Agnes for winning America’s Most Talented (although the truth is, I have plenty of money). Doc has even dated and, in fact, almost married Ida. I heard from the horse’s mouth that they even consummated said relationship, which I think is just too icky to contemplate. The only thing commendable about the old goat’s lifestyle is that he is interested only in mature women. Silly little things with nary a dimple of cellulite, or sign of a crow’s-foot, need not apply.

  Not seeing Doc in the dining room, I pushed through the throng until I got to the den. And voilà! There he was, holding court whilst sitting in Great-great-great-granny Yoder’s hand-carved rocker. Frankly, a person has to be slightly off his, or her, rocker to spend any time in this chair, because it is terribly uncomfortable, built as it was back in the days when to enjoy oneself was considered a sin. Mankind was meant to suffer (it’s all there in the Book of Genesis).

  “Doc,” I said happily.

  “Ah, Magdalena, the fairest maiden in all the land.”

  There followed a chorus of protests from the assembled spinsters, but I held up a silencing hand. “Doc, I believe that I no longer qualify as a maiden, given that I am fifty-six years old and the mother of an eight-year-old child.”

  “Magdalena, you will always be an honorary maiden in my eyes. Come, sit with me.” At that, the flirt-meister pulled me onto his lap. His lap.

  “Doc!”

  “Relax, Magdalena. This will be the last time I’ll ever get to see you.”

  “No, it won’t; I’m only going to be gone three months—unless I take a yen to living in Japan. We’ll be stopping in Osaka on the way back to San Diego. That was a little joke, by the way.”

  “Got it. But even if you come straight back, you’re going to have to share your travel stories with me up at Settler ’s Cemetery.”

  I stiffened. “Doc, are you sick?”

  “I’m old. My time has come, and I know it. Some folks are just blessed that way.”

  “That’s crazy talk, Doc. Only God knows when we’re going to die.”

  “Animals know, Magdalena. Sometimes days ahead. I was a veterinarian for sixty-two years, remember?”

  “But you’re not an animal!”

  “My mama died when she was ninety. She predicted her own death a full nineteen days beforehand.”

  I jumped to my feet and fluffed my skirt. “You’re not your mother,” I said angrily. “You’re the most randy man in of all of Pennsylvania. Why, you’re supposed to ask me to marry you! That’s the tradition, or don’t you remember?”

  And that was the tradition. Doc had been begging me to marry him for decades—and yes, shame on him, he did it even when I was married.

  “Sorry, Magdalena, but all traditions have to come to an end. If you like, you can sit back down on my lap, and we can try to end this party on a high note.”

  “Doc!”

  He winked. But despite his pretense at virility, the dear man died that night in his sleep. I joined the cruise two days late because of Doc’s funeral, but considering it was a three-month cruise, a couple of days was no big deal.

  Incidentally, approximately two hundred people mobbed the open house in honor of Doc’s ninetieth birthday, but only ten people showed up at his funeral—and that included me.

  I am not a sentimental person. Still, saying good-bye to Freni hurt about us much as giving birth. I thought I’d said my final good-byes after she and her husband, Mose, had helped me clean up after Doc’s party, but of course I saw her again at the funeral. Afterward I walked her to the family buggy.

  “If something happens to me on this cruise, Freni, I have written instructions for them to plant me wherever I am. If I’m at sea, they’re to toss me overboard.”

  “Ach!”

  “Well, there’s no use spending any of Little Jacob’s inheritance on shipping me back in a box. I don’t want to have an open-casket funeral in any case. I think the Jews have it right.”

  “Stop this talk of dying. You will return from this cruise and drive me to attraction.”

  “That’s not quite the vernacular, but hey, if it works, I might have a second career.”

  “Riddles. Always the riddles.”

  “Hmm. In that case, since I’m famous for asking them, let me ask you another: which high school English teacher married a doctor in December, but despite her promise to call her poor lonely mother at least once a week, doesn’t live up to her obligation?”

  Freni shook her head, and as she lacks a neck, her smocked black travel bonnet jerked eerily from side to side atop her stout torso. “It is indeed a shame that you cannot call all the way to California on your cell phone,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Have you tried calling Alison from the kitchen phone?” Freni said. The nerve of her for being so practical!

  “That’s not the point,” I wailed (and this is truly the last time). “A daughter should call her mother, not the other way around.”

  “Yah, perhaps. But times are changing.” She attempted a shrug. “Maybe it is not so important—this who calls who.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that times are changing. You’re Amish, for Pete’s sake. Nothing changes for you.”

  We’d reached the buggy, and from that vantage point, we had a fabulous view over the picnic area and the little town of Hernia. Straight ahead was Lover’s Leap, over which the Maniacal Mantis had tried to toss me. Fortunately my sturdy Christian underwear had saved that day.

  Farther out I could see the rooftops of some of the Victorian homes in the older part of town, and an indentation through the trees that most certainly demarked Main Street. I’d spent a lot of time on Main Street, particularly in the police station—both inside the holding cells as a prisoner, and in my official function as mayor. Across the street from the station is Yoder ’s Corner Market. It was there that I gave birth to Little Jacob, with only the sleazy Sam to act as midwife. Sam! Now he was someone I was going to miss—in the sort of way one misses a splinter that has gradually worked its way out of one’s skin.

  “Magdalena, do you wander off in space again?”

  “What?” Freni had surprised me by stopping off on her way home from the cemetery. Her agenda was to make sure that I called Allison.

  “Isn’t that what the handsome Dr. Rosen used to say?”

  “Something like that. What were you saying, dear?”

  “I was saying that even for us Amish there is change.”

  “Is that so? Give me an example?”

  “The bishop has decree
d that we are to change our hemlines by one inch. Maybe this is not such a big change, but it is still a change, yah?”

  “An inch? Woo-hoo, Freni, sexy-wexy.” I know, it was dreadfully naughty of me, but sometimes I just can’t help teasing her.

  “No, no,” she cried. “We do not make them shorter; we must all make our hemlines longer! The bishop thinks that our church has gotten too liberal from seeing all the tourists in their skrimpy clothes.”

  “Skrimpy? Do you mean—” My ringing phone gave me the perfect excuse to take my foot out of my mouth. “Hello?”

  “Mom? It’s me.”

  “Me who?” I was kidding, of course. The voice belonged to Alison, my ex-pseudo-stepdaughter, and now just plain daughter, one hundred percent, no adjectives needed or wanted.

  “It’s Marie Antoinette,” Alison said without missing a beat. “I seem to have lost my head; you haven’t chanced upon a strange one lying about, have you?”

  “Hmm, is that what it was? I’m afraid I threw it on the compost heap.”

  “Mom, I want to share something with you before you leave on your trip. You’ll be the first to know, but we don’t want you to share it with anyone else right now, because it’s a little early in the game. Can you keep a secret?”

  “Is Barbara Hostetler the best daughter- in-law in the whole wide world?”

  “Ach,” Freni squawked in my other ear.

  “Is Auntie Freni there now?”

  “As big as life and twice as ugly.”

  “Mom, I hate that expression.”

  “Yah, me too,” Freni said.

  “Apparently, dear, your auntie Freni has the hearing of a serval cat—you know those big-eared, long-legged beauties one sees in films about Africa? Anyway, do you mind terribly if she listens in on the extension?”

  Alison has turned into a genuinely kind young woman, despite the bad example I may have set for her. “Sure, Aunt Freni, you can listen in, but you can’t tell anyone either. So, can you keep a secret?”

  “Does your mother bleach her mustache?” Freni said without missing a beat.

  “What?” I said. “No fair!”

  “That’s okay, Mom,” Alison said kindly, “I’ve been hoping you would for a while now.”

  “You have?” I said. “It’s that obvious?”

  “Well, just when the light hits it a certain way. Mom, don’t get upset; I read somewhere that lots of women your age have this problem. Have you ever considered using a depilatory?”

  Frankly, I was as embarrassed now as I was that time I had the sex talk with Alison. It had been necessitated by a life change in her body that was both exciting and scary—at least for me. It was most definitely an event that called for a celebration. (Incidentally, I believe that in this day and age, when there are so many teenage pregnancies, we should refer to this monthly cycle—at least privately—as “the blessing” and not “the curse.”)

  “Freni,” I said, “now would be a good time for you to go pick up the phone in either my bedroom or my office.”

  The dear woman padded off, but not before reminding me that Amish women didn’t believe in altering their bodies in any way. What God gave them, that’s what he intended for them to keep—well, sort of; they did trim their nails, didn’t they? I posed this contradiction to Freni over the extension.

  “Ach! Must you always argue, Magdalena?”

  “It’s my nature to do so,” I said.

  “So now I get mushy, yah?” Freni said. “I think that I will miss this nature.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet,” Alison said. “Okay, are you both sitting down?”

  “Yah,” Freni said, “your mother ’s bed is very soft.”

  I pulled up a hard kitchen stool and plunked my tired patooty down. “Yes, go ahead, dear.”

  “One of you is about to be a grandmother,” Alison said.

  “Ach du lieber! My Jonathan is with child again?”

  “I think that would be Barbara, dear,” I said, losing my patience. “As much as you adore your Jonathan, he isn’t capable of getting pregnant.”

  “Uh, Mom, it isn’t Barbara either.”

  Sometimes I can be slow on the uptake, and this was one of them. After all, Alison had used the word “grandmother,” a term I had never even associated with myself, not even in my wildest daydreams. After all, I was the mother of an eight-year-old, full of vim and vigor, practically in the prime of my life.

  Okay, so perhaps I’d already reached my “sell by” date, but I still had a long way to go before I got to my “expiration” date, and we all know that some things are still good a ways beyond that. A grandma! Moi? But if that was what I was, then grandmothers still had it—whatever “it” was. Being a grandmother just meant that a new baby was coming into my life, that my joy would be multiplied, and that my daughter and her husband were about to be blessed—and sleep deprived—beyond anything that they could have imagined.

  “Then it’s you,” I said. “Oh, Alison, I’m so happy!”

  “Mazel tov!” Freni said.

  We talked for the better part of an hour. When we hung up, I whooped and I hollered. I swooped and I spun in circles, like the crazy woman that I am.

  Meanwhile, Freni, who was watching from the safety of the doorway, beamed.

  Tamar Myers, who is of Amish background, is the author of the Pennsylvania Dutch mysteries and the Den of Antiquity series. She lives in North Carolina with her husband. Visit her online at www.tamarmyers.com.

  1 Domestic Blue cheese gives cookies a clean flavor, color, and texture. Use less flour with a Stilton-style cheese and more flour with a French-style Roquefort.

  2 Either lemongrass puree or ground powder can be used. The puree can be found in squeeze tubes in most supermarket produce sections and dry powder can be found in either the spice section or in the Asian food section of the international area.

  3 Candied ginger (also called crystallized ginger) can be found in many supermarket produce or spice sections or in a health or gourmet store.

  4 Hazelnuts, almonds, or other mixed nuts may be substituted.

  5 Fresh or dried lavender flowers can be found in health food stores, herb and spice markets, or through online baking supply retailers.