Fearless Hope: A Novel

by Serena B. Miller

  The preacher was apparently finished because suddenly everyone was singing. She had not heard a word the man had said. Her thoughts were too busy, tumbling over one another, remembering how thrilled she was to say yes to Titus’s proposal. With Titus, it had never been an issue whether or not to marry him. She loved him passionately and had happily gone into marriage with him.

  Was it possible to marry someone for whom you felt no love and yet manage to create a good marriage and family? She had always wanted a large family, and in order to have more children, she would have to have a husband. What if Abimelech was the only possibility that ever came along and she waited too long?

  Her options were quite limited when it came to potential husbands. He would have to be Amish. She would never allow her children to be raised by an outsider, to bring strange teachings into her family. Abimelech would be considered a catch in many Amish women’s minds, but the thought of him touching her made her shudder.

  In some ways, Englisch women had it so easy. They could marry whomever they chose. There were no restrictions on them. They divorced and remarried at will. She couldn’t imagine such a thing for herself. The idea of marriage being for life was too ingrained within her.

  A visiting preacher had once said that the divorce rate among the Amish was less than one percent, while the divorce rate among the Englisch was closer to fifty. That meant that half the Englisch people she saw on the streets had been married and divorced, in spite of the fact that the Bible said there was only one reason to divorce—infidelity.

  The idea of one spouse being unfaithful to the other felt so alien to her. She would never have cheated on Titus. The man didn’t exist who could have enticed her away from her husband and children.

  The Englisch lived strange lives.

  Just like that Englisch man she worked for. How strange that he and his wife lived separately most of the time. She couldn’t imagine Titus ever having allowed such a thing.

  The call to prayer came and she slid down onto her knees and bowed her head, one arm around Adam to encourage him to kneel as well.

  In that blessed, silent time of prayer, she prayed for her children, her mother and father, her younger brothers and sisters, Levi and Grace and their new little one, her church, Abimelech Yoder as he, too, struggled to care for his children alone, and lastly, her employer, Logan Parker, who appeared to be a decent man even if he was Englisch.

  A rustle in the crowd alerted her to the fact that the silent prayer was over. Soon it would be time to eat and enjoy fellowship together. It would be awkward for her with Abimelech there, but the thing about being Amish was that you couldn’t really ever escape being around someone you were uncomfortable with if they were part of your church.

  The rain stopped soon after services ended, and the sun came out. As quickly as possible, she left her children with her mother and went out to see to her horse and buggy. The horse seemed none the worse for wear from his impromptu bath—but the inside of the buggy was soaked, just as she’d feared.

  “You might need this.” Bishop Schrock handed her an old towel. His buggy was next to hers.

  “Thank you so much.”

  The bishop grew solemn and cleared his throat. “I saw Abimelech Yoder watching you this morning.”

  She averted her gaze. “I saw that, too.”

  “It is early days yet. Do you welcome his attention?”

  It was difficult having to speak about a man’s attention toward her with the bishop, and the fact that he was her father-in-law made it even more awkward. Although she’d comforted herself with the thought that the bishop and the men of the church would protect her from Abimelech’s unwelcome attention if need be . . . the reality of talking openly about it was highly embarrassing.

  It wasn’t the Amish way to speak badly about someone, so Hope was careful with her answer. “He is a good farmer.”

  The bishop smiled and repeated his question. “Do you welcome his attention?”

  She wiped down the seat of her buggy. “He has many children in need of a mother.”

  “Speak your heart to me, Daughter,” the bishop said. “Will you ever welcome his attention? I heard that he paid you a visit at the Englisch man’s house the other day. He was seen driving away in great anger.”

  She didn’t even bother to ask how the bishop had come by such information. Her father-in-law seemed to have eyes everywhere when it came to the members of their church. She sighed and turned around. “No. I do not. Even if I live forever with no husband, I will never welcome Abimelech Yoder’s attention.”

  “Then I will take care of it.” The bishop’s jaw was clenched as he strode away.

  Hope felt sorry for anyone who was part of a church district not overseen by Bishop Schrock. He was a true shepherd, not only in name, but in his deeds. The Lord had given them a great gift when Bishop Schrock was chosen by lot to become their leader.

  • • •

  Logan was once again struggling to get some pages finished on his latest thriller. It wasn’t great writing, but he was at least able to push the plot along. It was Sunday and there was no place to go and nothing to do. The antiques shop and all the other shops were closed, and so were the restaurants.

  There was nothing to do except wrestle with his laptop and get his word count up. Two thousand words was the assignment he had given himself this morning. He’d achieved that, but they were not particularly good words. With the word-count function at the bottom of the screen, he had to fight to keep himself from checking his progress every few sentences.

  If he ever got this last novel in the series finished, he might never begin another one. The only writing he seemed to enjoy these days was the WWII story he had started at Violet’s, which he pounded out on that antique typewriter, where there was no word count to check, only the satisfaction of completed pages piling up.

  Word had gotten out soon after about what he was doing, and other elderly men and women began to come in to see him. They sat at the round claw-foot table, drinking Violet’s tea, and told him their stories. To his knowledge, none of them knew that he was a professional writer, and yet their need to tell their stories was so great, they didn’t seem to care. They simply seemed grateful for a listening ear. They liked having someone pay attention to the fact that their lives had mattered.

  “I was a nurse in London.” One precious lady in her late nineties had chatted with him only yesterday about her experience in the war. She’d lain propped upon pillows on her bed at the nursing home, gazing at a picture of her husband that someone had hung for her on the opposite wall. She had been a war bride whom a local soldier had brought back to Holmes County, and she still had a lovely English accent. “I worked at the hospital during a time when the German bombers were being quite . . . energetic.”

  “How did you feel about everything that was going on?” he asked.

  “Pardon?” She leaned forward to hear him better.

  He repeated his question. “How did you feel about the air raids, the rubble, the danger?”

  “How did I feel?” She glared at him with faded blue eyes. “There was no time to feel, young man! We had too much work to do! If we had stopped to feel, we would never have won the war!”

  His fingers flew, trying to get the strength and dignity of that woman’s conversation down on paper.

  As he worked, and his typewriter story grew and deepened, the less interested he became in the novels that had made him famous. Still, he labored on, trying to fulfill his contract. Punching words into his laptop each evening. Following the script. Following the template. His heart just wasn’t in it.

  There was no script or template for the WWII story. It was creativity at a level he’d never experienced before. Blending the old with the new. Fictionalizing people’s real-life experiences, but remaining true to the values they had expressed.

  What had once represented a sort of playtime and a way to get past his writer’s block was quickly becoming an obsession. The stack of
pages accumulated on that old claw-foot table.

  The more people he talked to, the more a part of the community he felt he was becoming. The older generation had families who began to recognize him and greet him on the street and in the stores. He wasn’t Nate Scott to them. He was just Logan Parker, a slightly eccentric outsider whom Violet—a woman who had taught English to half the people in the county—had taken under her wing and thought might have the potential to become a good writer. If he really applied himself.

  He was thoroughly enjoying his new life . . . except for the book that was due soon, which he did not want to write.

  Two thousand words were plenty for one day. Now what could he do? Normally he would have worked around the house, except that Hope had already taken care of everything. All was tidy. All in good repair. Even the mousetraps were set.

  The girl seemed happy to have so much as a spoon to wash these days. He would have to work even harder at giving her something to do. It was a strange situation to be in. He had begun to deliberately scatter things around just to give her something to pick up and put away. He didn’t want to lose her, and he was fairly certain she was the kind of person who would not take money without first doing what she considered an honest day’s work.

  The rain had finally stopped. He decided to take a long walk. This January had been warmer than normal, and exceptionally rainy.

  He came in an hour later from a long tromp in the woods, exhilarated from the exercise. Hiking on his own property was much more fun than walking on a treadmill in the gym.

  At the door, he stopped to wipe the mud off his feet and then thought better of it. Tracking in dirt might give Hope all of ten minutes of mopping to do tomorrow.

  He pulled off his damp sweater. He hadn’t talked to his mother in a couple of weeks because she was involved in a high-profile case that was keeping her and her firm ultrabusy, but she usually gave herself a break on Sundays if at all possible, no matter what else was going on.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was eleven o’clock. If she’d gone to St. Patrick’s this morning, she would be back by now and having her second cup of coffee. When he was younger, she would have spent part of the morning with several Sunday newspapers scattered about, but these days she read her New York Times and Wall Street Journal online. It should be a good time to call. He went out on the front porch, where the reception on his cell phone was best.

  He had continued to come up against things that felt familiar to him, curves in the road where the feeling of having been there before would hit yet again, the inside of the country store in nearby Trail, where he stopped to purchase some of their famous bologna. He had begun to wonder if maybe he had been here at one time during his childhood. It was the only thing that made sense. It was normal for a person to have déjà vu from time to time, but not this often or this intensely.

  He had even slowly worked his way off his antidepressant medication, wondering if it had been somehow causing this—but the feelings of strange familiarity still did not go away.

  The sound of his mother’s smoky drawl made him smile. She had given up cigarettes years ago, but all that smoking had left a permanent roughness to her voice. She tended to speak slowly, and with a certain built-in sarcasm. It worked well in the courtroom, and made her stand out in a city that moved and talked fast. With him, though, there was never any sarcasm. She was all mother, all the time. As he’d grown older, she’d become one of his closest friends.

  “Logan. It is so good to hear from you.” The instant she realized it was him, a smile wrapped itself around her words.

  “Is the case going well?”

  “We won!” she crowed.

  “Congratulations.” The woman was deadly when it came to protecting her clients.

  “So how are you getting along?” He heard her take a sip of coffee.

  His mother had a need for coffee that rivaled even his own. In fact, sometimes he thought it rivaled normal people’s need for oxygen. She said it took the place of cigarettes.

  “Getting words down on the page as usual.” It was his stock answer, but evidently she heard something in his voice that made her dig deeper.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Can you remember if I was ever in Holmes County as a child?”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Mother? Are you still there?”

  “I’m still here, darling,” his mother said. “I’m just trying to remember. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did Grandmother ever take me on vacation here by any chance?”

  “My mother?” She gave a throaty chuckle. “Hardly. If your grandmother took a vacation, it was always to Europe.”

  His grandmother had been a painter, and had spent a great deal of her time in Paris. He, too, could not imagine his grandmother bringing him here.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I think I mentioned to you when I told you about buying the house that it felt familiar?”

  “You did.”

  “It’s still the strangest thing, Mom,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been here before.

  “It’s called déjà vu, dear.”

  “I know, but this feels . . . different.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve never been in Ohio in my life,” she said. “As far as your grandmother? I doubt we could have paid her to go there. The Midwest wasn’t exactly her thing.”

  “No.” He smiled. “French sunsets were her thing.”

  His mother laughed. “I still have several of those paintings of hers in storage if you’d like a few for your house.”

  “Several?”

  “Um . . . maybe thirty.”

  “One thing about Grandmother,” he said. “She was as prolific as she was eccentric. Too bad she wasn’t a particularly good painter.”

  “I miss her, terribly.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You did have a good childhood, didn’t you, Logan?” There was an unfamiliar catch in his mother’s voice. “I mean, you did have a happy life in spite of having two nutty women raising you?”

  “Mom,” he said, sincerely, “I had a great childhood. You were always so good to me. Grandmother, too. I never lacked for anything.”

  He could hear his mother sigh with relief and he wondered if age was finally catching up with her. It was rare for her to need reassurance.

  “Is there something wrong, Mom?”

  “No, dear. I just miss you, that’s all, but I’m glad you’re enjoying your new home.”

  “It’s beautiful here. I’d love for you to come for a visit.”

  “You know what? I might just do that pretty soon. I’ve got a few more cases to get off my desk first.” Her voice grew stronger. “Now, you get back to your writing! I need another Nate Scott novel to read.”

  chapter FOURTEEN

  “Is Nate Scott your favorite author?” Hope asked.

  He was deep into a book he’d purchased about WWII artillery. “Why do you ask?”

  “You have an awful lot of his books lying around. I read a few pages.”

  “What did you think?” He waited, curious about her answer.

  “I did not like it much.”

  He winced. Now even his housekeeper was giving him bad reviews. He might as well tell her the truth.

  “I’m Nate Scott.”

  “You have a fake name?”

  “A pseudonym. A lot of authors do that.”

  “You wrote all those books?” She digested this. “Why?”

  “Because that’s what I do. That’s how I make my living. That’s who I am.”

  “Oh.” She thought it over. “Is that the reason for the crazy room?”

  “The crazy room?”

  “The one with all the colored note cards taped to the wall with strange things written on them?”

  “That’s the method I use to structure a book.”

  “Oh.” She looked confused.

  “I tape the plot to the wal
l where I can look at it and think about it and change it.”

  “Oh.” She thought this over, too. “That is your job? Making things up?”

  It was obvious that she did not think much of his method, his books, or the profession he’d chosen.

  “That’s how I make my living. I knew from the time I was a child that I wanted to be a writer. It’s worked out well for me.”

  “That’s nice.”

  He had been around her long enough to know that when she used the word nice she was just being polite. To her, being a writer was probably synonymous with being lazy.

  “Isn’t there anything you ever wanted to do since you were a child, Hope? I mean, something in addition to being a wife and mother?”

  “Ja.” She seemed uncomfortable with the question.

  “What was it?”

  “You will laugh at me.”

  “I would never laugh at you.”

  “I always wished I had a farm to run.” Her voice was shy. “A place where I could be in charge. I always thought I would make a very good farmer, but my father told me it was not an appropriate thing for a girl to do. I think he was probably right.”

  “I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

  “It is. Women grow vegetable gardens and mow yards, but I’ve never known an Amish woman farmer unless she was helping her husband.” She seemed to lose interest, or perhaps she was embarrassed for having voiced her dream. “You must tell Violet who and what you are.”

  “I will. Soon. It’s just that she assumed . . . and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and then one thing led to another.”

  “One thing always leads to another. That is why we are taught by our preachers not to let Satan get a toehold.”

  “You’re right. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”

  Hope nodded approval. “Good.”

  • • •

  Violet was not nearly as surprised as he expected her to be, and much more excited than he’d ever dreamed.