by Emma Miller
Tara giggled as Lovage whipped off her filthy, tomato splattered apron and tossed it over the chair beside their mother. “I was wondering how long it would take for her to upset your applecart, sister.”
“No one is upsetting my applecart,” Lovage said defensively. “She’s supposed to be in here working with the rest of us. I know she doesn’t care much for kitchen work, but fair is fair.” She tucked her damp hair behind her ears and into her scarf as best she could. “I’ll be right back, Mam.”
Lovage passed Bay in the mudroom on her way out.
“Where are you going?” her little sister asked, a case of empty Ball jars in her arms. She spun around as Lovage whisked by.
“Ginger’s flirting with Lovey’s beau again!” Tara hollered from the kitchen.
“I’ll be right back,” Lovage told her little sister as she tried to temper her anger. This wasn’t the first time she’d caught Ginger flirting with Marshall. Only the day before, the first day he’d come to help their stepbrothers with the new greenhouse, she had realized Ginger was missing from the kitchen, only to find her down in the barnyard, watching Marshall, shirtless, wash at the pump after a day of hot work.
Lovage stepped out on the back lawn and the hot, humid August heat hit her like one of the waves she’d seen down at Rehoboth Beach the previous weekend when she and Marshall and several other single folks, along with Edna and John Fisher as chaperones, had hired a van for the day to take them to the boardwalk. Lovage had been in awe of the beautiful strength of the waves, and just a little frightened by them.
She strode around the side of the house to where thirty feet of multicolored dresses and shirts flapped on the clothesline in the hot wind. “Ginger!” she called. Then, through the ripples of fabric, she caught sight of her pretty blonde sister. Sure enough, there she was with Lovage’s beau. Well...he wasn’t officially her beau because she still hadn’t agreed to walk out with him, but her sister certainly was aware that they were almost a couple. “Ginger!” she called again.
Ginger, standing in front of Marshall, giggling, turned. The look on her face said she knew she’d been caught.
“Could you get Mam another case of quart jars from the cellar?” Lovage asked, ducking under the clothesline and making a beeline for the two of them.
Marshall looked at Lovage, smiled lazily and lifted a frosty glass of iced tea to his mouth. “There you are,” he said.
Lovage strode up to them. More of Ginger’s blond hair was out of her scarf than in it and the front of her pale green dress looked like it was wet, making it almost inappropriately see-through. Lovage could practically see her slip! “Mam’s waiting,” she said tersely.
“You came out of the house to tell me you needed a case of jars from inside the house?” she asked with a chuckle. Shaking her head, she looked back at Marshall. “I guess I should go inside. Let me know if you boys need more tea or anything else. We have watermelon if you’re hungry.” She began to walk backward from him. “Just to tide you over until dinner.”
Lovage rested her hands on her hips, watching her sister go. When Ginger disappeared through the door, she turned back to Marshall.
He smiled and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You shouldn’t be so hard on her. She’s young.”
“She was flirting with you, Marshall.” She tried to sound annoyed, but now that he was in her presence, she wasn’t really. He did that to her. He calmed her. And made her feel more confident of his feelings for her and hers for him. Feelings she could feel growing daily. “Again.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I was wondering when you were going to come out. I thought if you didn’t come soon, I was going to have to make some excuse to come up to the house.”
“You would have seen me for dinner. I made tuna salad.” She fussed with her hair, wishing now she’d taken a moment to run to the mirror in the bathroom and adjust her scarf. “You told me you liked tuna salad.”
“I like anything you make, Lovey.” He turned, dragging his boot in the bright green summer grass. “Come on, walk back with me. I don’t want the guys to think I abandoned them the second day on the job.”
They walked around the clothesline. “How’s it going?” she asked.
“Good. Footing for the foundation is in and we’re starting on the rear wall. Will made a good blueprint. He’s good at planning. He already knows exactly how much lumber we’re going to need and has taken into account the square footage of the old windows we’re going to use.” He shook his head. “It’s all I can do to plan out a plot of peas in the garden. I’m fine once I get my hands into it, but I’m not one for paperwork. Or building, really.” He glanced at her. “Sam’s the one who’s handy around our place with a hammer.”
“I was wondering why you volunteered to help out with the greenhouse.” She walked closer to him, the skirt of her dress brushing against his pant leg. She was amazed by how comfortable she was becoming with him. How at ease. “I can’t tell you how thrilled Mam is that the boys are building it for her. She had one back in New York, and even though she would never say so, I think she misses it.”
“I’m just trying to make your mother like me.” He winked at her.
She laughed and gave him a little push. “She already likes you.”
“Enough to tell you to marry me?”
She made a face at him. “I thought you promised not to bring up marriage for at least a week.”
He pretended to be thinking, then pointed to her. He was wearing dark denim trousers, a blue shirt, suspenders and his old straw hat with the piece missing from the brim. He looked like all the other men pitching in to build the greenhouse. Yet he didn’t, not to Lovage. Because she thought he was the most handsome one among them.
“I thought I agreed to a day.” He held up his finger as if thinking. “Okay, how about this. At least agree that we’re walking out together.”
“And why should I do that?” she teased, feeling a little giddy. Because she was ready to admit that she wanted to be his girl. That she practically already was, whether she would admit it or not.
“Because I’m irresistible,” he explained. “And because everyone already thinks we are.”
“Only because you keep telling people we are.” She poked at his arm playfully.
“So that’s settled.” He flashed her a grin. “As far as building the greenhouse, I’m not great with a hammer, but I can do what I’m told. And I’m glad to help out.” He glanced at her. “Plus, it’s a chance to see you more often.”
His smile was infectious. “I guess you could have broken another britchen strap. You used that excuse for two weeks.”
He laughed and they stopped as a speckled black-and-white Guinea hen ran in front of them. “Well, you told me it would be done in a week and then it wasn’t ready. I had to come every day to check on it.”
She cut her eyes at him, feeling lighthearted. Mischievous. “What makes you think it wasn’t ready on time? Maybe I was using your britchen strap as a way to see you.”
“Ah, clever.” He waggled his finger at her. “My grandmother warned me you might be one of those kinds of women. One to try to manipulate a bachelor.”
“Oh.” She sighed. They continued to walk side by side, past the fenced-in garden toward the sound of saws and hammers. “Is she still trying to convince you I’m not good for you?”
“Ne, she’s coming around. Will come around.”
Lovage caught sight of another one of her mother’s Guinea hens racing across the lawn. The first she assumed was just a stray that had somehow escaped their coop, but now the second made her suspicious. “She is not,” she teased. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“We just need to give her time.” Marshall moved the glass to the other hand, glanced around and then caught Lovage’s hand with his own. “Sam’s already smitten with you. I thi
nk if you don’t agree to marry me soon, my own brother will be moving in on my sweetheart. That was smart of you, bringing him that mechanics magazine you found at Spence’s Bazaar. The way to some men’s hearts is their stomach, but Sam can always be bribed with a gadget magazine or a ball of copper wire.”
Lovage savored the feel of Marshall’s hand in hers and felt her heart skip a beat. When she’d moved to Hickory Grove more than a month ago, she thought she knew what life had in store for her. She’d practically convinced herself she wanted to be an old maid. That it was her duty to remain at her mother’s side and help her with the new ready-made family she and Benjamin had created together. But suddenly Lovage was dreaming of her own home, her own children, God willing. And of a life with Marshall.
“I didn’t buy him the magazine to try to get him to like me,” she argued good-heartedly. “I just saw it in a pile of old magazines for sale and thought it might be something he could get some ideas from, and it was only fifty cents. Two for—”
A third Guinea hen crossed their path, followed by a fourth and then a fifth.
“Oh, no,” Lovage said, pulling her hand from Marshall’s. “I bet Mam’s Guineas are out again.” She shook her head. “I should go.”
They both stopped and stood there for a moment face-to-face, eye-to-eye. “So it’s official,” he said softly. “I’m your beau and you’re my girl.”
Lovage was just about to answer him when suddenly they were interrupted.
“Lovey!” Ginger hollered, running across the grass toward them. “Lovey, you have to come!”
The sound of her sister’s voice sent a chill down Lovage’s spine and she lifted her skirt and raced toward her. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Mam!” Ginger shouted breathlessly. “Come quick! She’s fainted!”
Chapter Eight
“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” Rosemary insisted, lifting the wet washcloth from her head.
From the stool beside the couch in the parlor where her mother was lying, Lovage gently replaced the cloth she’d soaked in cool water and a little eucalyptus oil. The room was relatively cool and semidark with the curtains closed, and it was quiet. Like their parlor back in New York, they rarely used the room except when they hosted church. Evenings with their new blended family, because there were thirteen of them living at the house, were usually spent in the kitchen or the larger family room, a phrase Rosemary had heard one of their English neighbors use, and now insisted that’s what they call the large living room.
“Maybe just to check your blood pressure, Mam?” Lovage leaned closer, lowering her voice so that Ginger, Tara, Nettie, Bay and Jesse, who were out in the hallway where their mother couldn’t see them, wouldn’t hear her. “Benjamin said you told him that the midwife was concerned with your blood pressure last visit.” She glanced over her shoulder at her stepfather, who was pacing the parlor liked a caged wildcat she’d once seen in a zoo. That had been her one and only trip to a zoo; she hadn’t been able to bear it, seeing God’s wild creatures locked up in cages, because no matter how large and airy they were, they were still cages.
“Benjamin.” Rosemary made a tsking sound and turned on the couch to look at her husband. “That isn’t what I said she said at all. What she said is that women my age can have problems with their blood pressure, and that I should get one of those fancy home blood pressure cuffs from the drugstore.”
“And did you?” Lovage asked.
“Ne, but that has nothing to do with anything,” Rosemary quipped. Then, patting her hair pinned in a bun, she cried, suddenly flustered, “Oh, my, my kapp! Did I—”
“Don’t worry. I took it off so it wouldn’t get mussed.” Lovage had unpinned the starched white prayer kapp from her mother’s barely graying red hair before they half walked, half carried her into the parlor. Once the girls had settled their mother on the couch, Lovage had placed it on a little rosewood table that had once been her maternal grandmother’s. Like most women, Rosemary was very protective of her prayer kapp, a precious symbol of her faith. Each night, before getting into bed, Rosemary carefully removed all the straight pins that kept her kapp in place, removed it, stuffed it with tissue paper to keep its shape and placed it on her dresser.
“Did I wrinkle it when I fell?” she asked with concern.
Lovage smiled down at her mother. “Ne, not a bit, Mammi.”
Rosemary sighed with relief and then glanced in Benjamin’s direction. “I suppose you thought you needed to tell him,” she said, not sounding all that upset about it.
“You would have wanted me to do the same if it had been Benjamin lying on the kitchen floor with tomatoes rolling all over,” she teased.
Rosemary closed her eyes for a moment, resting her hands on her rounded belly. “My own fault. I should have let one of the girls move the basket of tomatoes. I just got light-headed, is all.”
Smiling, Lovage glanced over her shoulder at her stepfather pacing back and forth across the room. He was hatless, his rusty brown hair plastered to his head with perspiration, except where one piece stuck up in the back like a rooster’s comb. His broad, sunburned face was etched with lines of worry, his lips pressed flat together as he struggled to stay calm. Seeing him in such a state of worry brought a tenderness to Lovage’s heart. He loved her mother so much that it seemed to physically pain him to see her in distress.
“Should I move the fan, Rosebud?” he asked, hurrying to adjust the direction of the big, old-fashioned metal-blade fan he’d run an extension cord to from the gas generator one of the boys had brought from the harness shop. “This better? A good thing I didn’t let you talk me out of this contraption. I told you it would come in handy when I picked it up at Spence’s a couple of weeks ago.” He looked to Lovage. “Your mother thought it was a waste of money, an Englisher electric fan, but it moves the air around, doesn’t it? Cools off the room.” He stopped to stroke his gray-streaked beard thoughtfully. “Maybe I ought to get a second one, to circulate the air better in a big house like this.”
“Atch, Benjamin, stop your fretting.” Rosemary waved him away. “You’re worse than a die aldi.”
Lovage had to press her lips together and look away so as not to laugh out loud at the fact that her mother was calling her husband an old woman. Immensely relieved that it seemed her mam was all right, Lovage felt like she needed a good laugh.
Rosemary lifted the washcloth from her forehead again. “What are you doing in here, anyway, Benjamin?” she fussed. “A man doesn’t belong in a woman’s house midday. Don’t you have something to do on this great big farm? Peas to hoe? A buggy to make?” She looked up at Lovage. “How long was I out?”
Lovage smiled tenderly at her mother and patiently replaced the cloth. “Just a minute, I think. You were already coming around by the time I got back to the kitchen. The girls did a good job when they realized you were going to faint. Everyone stayed calm. Tara caught you so you didn’t fall and hit your head, or injure the baby.” She whispered the last words in her mother’s ear so as not to worry Benjamin any further. He was already distraught enough.
Rosemary closed her eyes for a moment, again exhaling. “What can I say? For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. Benjamin wanted to put that fan in the kitchen. He told me it was an awfully hot day for canning tomatoes. But they came ripe all at once. We certainly weren’t going to let them rot on the vine. Stutzman women don’t waste good food provided in abundance by the Lord.”
“I told her to let me put the fan in the kitchen,” Benjamin said, returning to his pacing. “I said, Rosebud, let me set that Englisher fan in the kitchen for you.”
“But I hate the noise of that generator,” Rosemary told him. “A person can’t think with that monster rumbling!”
Lovage sat back on the stool, thinking this was the closest her mother and Benjamin had come to an argument in her presence since they’d marr
ied eighteen months ago.
“Rosebud, please let me do something for you. What can I do?” Benjamin approached the couch, wringing his beefy hands. “Could I call a driver? I can use the phone in the shop. It won’t take me but a minute to run down there. I really think you should go to the hospital.”
“Really, Benjamin, you’re going to run to the shop. Then you’ll fall, too, and what will our children do with us? We’ve only one couch in the parlor.”
Benjamin stood over her, not seeing the humor in his wife’s words. “Rosebud, please.”
“I don’t need to go to the hospital and that’s final. What does a man know about such things? I have an appointment tomorrow with the midwife. That will be soon enough to see someone.” Rosemary started to sit up. “I got overheated and closed my eyes for a moment, nothing more. I’ve always been a fainter, especially in the summer.”
“Mam, please, lie down,” Lovage insisted, “or you’ll be dizzy again.”
Rosemary lay back with a huff of exasperation. “Tell him, Lovey. Tell Benjamin I faint when I get hot. It has nothing to do with my condition.”
What her mother said was true. She did faint in the heat sometimes when she overdid it. But when she’d been carrying Jesse, Lovage remembered, it had happened several times late in the pregnancy. And she’d been ten years younger then. “I don’t disagree with him, Mam,” Lovage said softly. “Let him call a driver. Just get checked out.”
“And go to an Englisher hospital with all of that sickness and disease? Certainly not,” she insisted, her tone becoming terse.
“Rosebud, listen to your daughter,” Benjamin pleaded quietly.
Rosemary looked up at Lovage. “Could you leave us a minute, daughter. Check on the girls in the kitchen. I don’t want Tara overcooking the tomatoes. She always wants to leave them in the hot water too long. It only takes a minute or two to split the skins if the water is the proper temperature.”
