by Amy Lillard
She was quiet for a long time. Finally, she reached out and plucked one of the candies from the box. It made him happy to see her eating it. He would have loved it even more if she had enjoyed it. But he could tell her thoughts were taking over all her other senses. “Asking for love one time is arrogant enough. To expect it twice?” She shook her head.
“I don’t believe that.”
“What?”
He repeated the words, this time with more conviction, and the more he said them, the more he believed in them. “Why would God only want you to have love in your life for such a short period of time and never again? God loves us.”
She picked another candy out of the box. He couldn’t tell if she was eating them because she was nervous or angry. “That may be true, but love—real love—between a man and a woman is precious. Finding it once in a lifetime is rare enough.”
“ ‘He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.’”
Nadine stood, her chair scooting behind her with a loud complaint. “Do not quote the Bible to me, Amos Fisher. I know what it says. Enjoy the candy.”
And before he could stop her, she was out the door and on her way home.
* * *
“So what are you going to do?” Charlotte asked later that afternoon.
They were sitting at the kitchen table, mulling over the situation with a box of chocolates between them. So far, Nadine had eaten three pieces. Then paired with the three she had eaten at Amos’s. She shook her head at herself. So much for watching her weight.
She pushed the tray of candy toward her daughter-in-law. “I’m going to stop eating this candy for starters.”
“We could put it in the freezer.”
“Or I could take it to the nursing home and leave it there.”
Charlotte shook her head and selected another piece. “I don’t mind having it around.”
“I do.” Nadine pulled on the waistband of her apron.
“I don’t believe for a minute that you’re gaining weight. You’ve always been slight as a reed.”
She wouldn’t go that far. But in truth she had never had a problem with her weight for gaining or losing. Not that it had mattered up until now. She had always been natu-rally thin. So why, all of a sudden, did she feel like she was getting fat?
Because never before had sweets and candies been so at her hand. Charlotte with her baking, then Amos bringing over banana bread and candy. The chocolates were obviously store-bought, but the banana bread, who knew where he got that?
“So what’s really bothering you about Amos?”
Nadine stopped for a moment, unsure if she wanted to say the words out loud. “He has so many ideals and dreams about love.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
She sighed. “They’re not realistic. He’s never been married. Never been engaged as far as I know. So he’s never lost a love and known how much pain is involved.”
Charlotte’s pale green eyes darkened. The pair of them, they knew what it could do. How losing a love—a true, beautiful love—could throw a life so off balance it could never be righted again. When love was taken away, everything changed. Nadine was no fool, and she was not willing to go through those changes again.
“He’s a kind man,” Charlotte finally whispered. “Maybe you should give him a chance.”
Nadine scoffed. “You’re just saying that to get rid of me so you can have the house all to yourself.” The mood had turned entirely too serious. Her fault. Charlotte’s fault. It didn’t matter; it needed a shift.
“Yesterday, you accused me of trying to hold Jenna back because I didn’t like the house so empty—”
“I never said that.” Though she might have implied it a little.
“Today, you accuse me of wanting you to get married so I can have the house all to myself.” Charlotte pushed back from her seat, her cheeks filled with angry color. “Make up your mind, Mammi. You can’t have it both ways.” And with that still hanging in the air between them, she spun around and stomped from the room, leaving Nadine to wonder why she and her daughter-in-law never could seem to get along for more than a few minutes.
* * *
Amos wasn’t sure why he came to things like this.
Because you need to get out of the house.
Well, there was that. But he wasn’t sure this was a productive way to spend time away from home.
He looked around at all the wrinkled faces and heads covered with varying shades of “gray hair,” from snow-white all the way to peppered steel, with a few flashy silvers thrown in to make a good mix.
Tonight, he had been hoping to see one face in particular, but Nadine was nowhere around. He had never asked her if she came to these senior meetings, but he had forgotten. Maybe because he had been so busy trying to convince her that she was worthy of true love a second time. He couldn’t call her husband Jason a true love, so it was him and the Yoder.
Jah, he knew that it was arrogant for him to believe that he would be her next true love, but he had faith in what the Lord was telling him and he was sticking by that till the end. Well, for now anyway.
“Hi.” Aubie Hershberger sidled up beside him and took a drink of punch. There was always punch at these things, that tropical fruit kind that was impossibly red. Amos hated the stuff. Besides the taste, it always stained his lips. “Have you seen Verna?”
“Verna Yutzy?” Amos asked. “She was over at one of the card tables talking to Maddie Kauffman.”
Aubie nodded but made no move to join the two ladies.
Maddie owned Kauffman Family Restaurant and had since the death of her husband a few years back. There had been a little bit of scandal at the time and Maddie’s step-daughter, Lorie, had ended up leaving the Amish to become an Englischer. She taught paint classes at Whispering Pines, the nursing home down the way, and several others, if what he had been told was correct. But it wasn’t Maddie that Aubie was interested in. It was Verna. Like Maddie, she hadn’t been widowed all that long, but unlike most who came to these meetings, she was enjoying her single life.
Amos could relate. He had enjoyed being single himself, doing what he wanted and having plenty of time to worship and pray and not have to worry about another person.
Yikes! When he said it like that, it seemed petty and selfish.
“Are you going to talk to her?” Amos asked. It was better than mulling over his own thoughts.
“All in good time.” Aubie took another drink of punch.
Amos looked around to see if anyone had brought bottled water. Maybe next time he would bring his own. “Aubie, have you ever seen Nadine Burkhart at one of these things?”
Aubie shook his head. “No, but she’s pretty new. She’s probably settling in.”
They had been there for almost a year, but that was Wells Landing for you. They were kind and welcoming, but if you hadn’t been living there for twenty years, you were considered “new.”
Amos nodded. “Maybe we should invite her.”
“We?”
“Jah, we.” Nadine was missing out on all the people and the fun things the seniors did. Jah, the punch was terrible and the cookies ... well, he should make some for the next meeting. Those store-bought ones left a lot to be desired. But if he invited her himself, he had a feeling she wouldn’t come to even one meeting. And how sad would that be?
Aubie just shook his head and continued to sip his punch and watch Verna Yutzy. The man was smitten, anyone could see, but he had yet to do anything about it. Maybe because everyone knew that Verna was enjoying not having to answer to anyone save God, but he didn’t know that for a fact.
“Say,” Amos started, turning to Aubie in hopes of gaining his full attention. “Courting isn’t so easy these days, huh?”
For once, since Amos had pointed out where Verna was, Aubie turned to look at him. “That’s why we come here.”
Amos frowned. “To court?”
“When we were younger, we were in our youth groups and buddy
bunches, then we got married and went to separate groups. You know, the women went to quilting circles and the men went to Bible study and joined the volunteer fire department. Now that we are back to single again, we need a buddy bunch.”
“Or a youth group . . .” It was all starting to make sense.
Aubie chuckled. “I would hardly call anyone here youth, but basically, jah.”
Amos had never thought of it that way. Once someone in the group got married, they stopped coming. Case in point: Abe Fitch. Once he married Esther Lapp, he never came to these things again. It was a shame, as far as Amos was concerned. Card night was fun, but not as special as when they went glow-in-the-dark bowling or on the hayride in the fall. There was even talk of a painting lesson with Lorie Kauffman. The bishop was a little concerned about them painting, but since Lorie had been raised Amish and knew and respected their culture, he was contemplating allowing them to have a lesson. Amos thought that sounded like great fun. He always had a creative side though he hadn’t been allowed to express it for one reason or another. He hoped they had a night with Lorie planned soon.
“But at a singing,” Amos started. “Once you got the girl in the buggy, no one else knew what was happening.”
“That’s right.”
“So . . .” How do we know what to do? was on the tip of his tongue to ask, but he managed to bite it back. “This is different though. I mean, we’re not going to be driving anyone home.” Second-marriage couples usually courted in secret, sometimes not letting anyone in their family know that they were dating until the wedding was set. Even still, they had all come on their tractors tonight. It wasn’t a Sunday when they had to drive their buggies to church. The whole dynamic was off. What was he supposed to do?
Amos looked to Aubie, who still seemed to have eyes for nothing and no one but Verna. He wasn’t going to be any help. But maybe Amos could mosey around the room and see if he could pick up some pointers from any of the other men in attendance.
Benny Esh was talking to Cleon Byler about fishing when Amos sidled up.
“Ever think about getting married again?” he asked when there was a break in the conversation.
Both men turned to look at him wearing identical expressions. Ones that seemed to say they thought he had lost his mind.
Amos waited.
The men just stared; then Cleon stirred. “Oh, you were serious.” He gave a little cough. “There was a time when I thought about it, but once I hit fifty, that idea went out the window. I mean, my children are all grown, I live in the dawdihaus, and my two daughters take turns bringing me my meals and cleaning the space.”
His meaning was clear. What did he need a woman for?
“What about you?” Amos turned to Benny.
The man rocked back onto his heels and studied the ceiling as if it might contain all of the answers. “I don’t know. I guess I thought about it once or twice, but—”
Amos waited.
“Well, I decided that a woman was the last thing I needed.”
What about love? Amos wanted to shout. What about companionship? But he thought better of it. Maybe he needed to choose his advisers with a little more ... discretion. He couldn’t say that Benny and Cleon were the sharpest tools in the barn.
Lord forgive me my uncharitable, but totally accurate, thoughts. Amen.
He nodded to the men and murmured a quick danki before moving on again.
He found Mose Beachey and John Yoder discussing the rainfall expected for the growing season. Since both men had turned their farms over to their respective children, he wondered why it mattered so much to them. Old habits died hard, or so they said.
“So,” Amos started, somewhere between the barometric pressure and the overall cloud cover expected for the following week. “Do either of you ever think about getting married again?”
They turned to look at him, both seeming a bit horrified at the thought. Then they turned to look at a group of the women standing cluttered by the dessert table.
“I don’t know,” John said. “Women . . .”
“Are crazy,” Mose finished for him. “Not crazy-crazy, but crazy.” His eyes were wide.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with a woman if I had one.” John took a drink of his punch and grimaced. “Is there any bottled water over there?”
Mose shrugged. “Sometimes jah, sometimes no.”
“But courting . . .” Amos started again. He couldn’t let this drop. “What about courting?”
John looked at him as if he had taken leave of all his good sense. Not much unlike the look he’d received from Cleon and Benny. “You want to go courting?” John asked. He nodded toward the gaggle of women.
Gaggle ... that was the only word to describe them, clustered together and clucking about this, that, and the other.
“Well, if a man were to decide to get married again—”
“Or in your case, for the first time,” Mose pointed out.
“Jah, but if a man wants to marry, he has to court a woman, jah?” Surely that much hadn’t changed.
“That’s right.” John nodded.
“Then how would we go about courting at our age?”
Mose stopped, tilted his head to one side, and studied him. “You thinking about getting married?”
“No, no, no, no,” Amos blustered. “I was just thinking about it. The concept of it. When we were teenagers, we had singings. We don’t do that often as adults. I mean not like we did back then. So how do people who want to get married again—or for the first time later in life,” he added to appease Mose. “How would they go about it?”
John stared at him for a moment, then turned back to the crowd of people—the sea of wrinkled faces and gray hair—and shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea.”
Chapter Six
“I’m not ready for this,” Charlotte complained the following afternoon.
Nadine nodded. She understood. Her heart felt ... constricted as she watched Jenna browse through the fabric store, her fingers trailing along the various bolts.
They were shopping for wedding fabric. It was time. Jenna had grown up. She had found someone to love, but, Nadine knew, letting go was hard. Charlotte wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready. But here they were.
“I don’t want it too dark,” Jenna was saying.
Most of the women in Wells Landing wore darker colors, but Jenna preferred lighter ones. No one said anything, but Charlotte was more of a rule follower when it came to district standards. Nowhere was it written that they had to wear navy, burgundy, or forest green; it was just understood. So when they had moved, Charlotte had managed to talk Jenna into teal and purple and medium-green shades, but Nadine knew that she wasn’t all that happy about her daughter’s nonconformity.
“You don’t want anything too light either,” Charlotte said.
Jenna didn’t respond. She slid a bolt of fabric from its shelf and laid it across the table in the center of the store. “I like this.”
Charlotte opened her mouth to respond, but Nadine squeezed her arm in warning. Jenna was asserting her independence. Nadine could see it, but Charlotte was too close to realize that Jenna wanted to choose her fabric and she wanted their approval and not their opinions.
The fabric was electric blue, the sort of color that fancy Englisch painted their cars so everyone would notice them as they drove down Main Street, honking and waving. As far as Nadine was concerned—and she was fairly certain Charlotte as well—it wasn’t an appropriate color for a wedding in any district.
“You should pick out a couple more,” Nadine said, her voice free of censure. If they told her no outright, she was going to dig in until she got her way. “That way we can compare the fabric itself. You don’t want anything too scratchy.”
Jenna’s chin was lifted at a stubborn angle. She lowered it a bit. “No,” she said. “Of course I don’t.”
Nadine nodded toward the many rows of material. “Pick out a couple more, and we can look at them all to
gether.”
Jenna nodded, and her shoulders lost some of their tension.
“What are you doing?” Charlotte asked where Jenna couldn’t hear.
“You know how she is,” Nadine replied.
“I know how she is now and how she used to be.” Charlotte didn’t have to say that she preferred the latter. It was all there in her voice.
“If you protest the first choice, she will want it all the more. She’s not going to find another blue like that. So she’ll pick out a couple more and then we’ll guide her toward a more acceptable color. In the end, she will think she picked it all by herself.”
Charlotte grinned. “You are one smart lady.”
Nadine returned her smile. “It’s just years of living.”
Now why did that make her think of Amos Fisher? He had barely been on her mind since she had seen him last. She hadn’t thought of him more than six or seven times. Possibly eight. But was it her fault that every time she passed through to the stairs she was confronted with that large, large, large heart-shaped box that Amos had brought over filled with a monstrous amount of candy? And of course there was the candy itself. She had been eating it for days, even after she told herself to stop. Nervous eating, she supposed. And who was making her nervous? The very man who brought over the candy. What did they call that? A vicious cycle. Jah, it was a very vicious cycle.
“This is nice.” Jenna brought over another bolt of blue fabric. This one was almost teal, a little more on the blue side. It wasn’t as dark as Nadine knew Charlotte wanted her dress to be, but it was a step in the right direction as far as Nadine was concerned.
Nadine and Charlotte waited patiently while Jenna browsed around to find another blue she thought would be good for her wedding dress.
“This one,” Jenna breathed.
Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t think that’s the color.”
“Then the first.”
Nadine stepped between them before the argument spun out of control. “The first one is too scratchy. And it is rather ... bright. I’m afraid that it will take away from the day instead of adding to it.” She brushed a hand across Jenna’s cheek.
