was August. She could wait longer to shift the daffodils she’d found in the woods. For the first two days after she brought the bulbs closer to the house, a groundhog had dug them up. She’d convinced the irritating burrower to leave them alone by dousing the flowers with a liberal amount of chili powder mixed with water. The strong scent had kept the animal away...at least so far.
She squatted by the flower bed and went to work. Less than five minutes later, she heard buggy wheels rattling toward the barn. Wondering who was coming, she gathered the weeds she’d pulled. She tossed them onto the compost pile before she walked around the barn’s corner. If someone was looking for Caleb, she’d have to admit she wasn’t quite sure where he was. He’d had a long list of errands to do in Salem and in Cambridge, about ten miles to the south.
She stopped in midstep, surprised when Eli climbed out of the family buggy. Why hadn’t he said anything yesterday about plans to stop by?
Her breath caught when his nephew hopped out behind him. The little boy looked around with the candid curiosity of a six-year-old, and he pointed to Comet. The horse wasn’t a common color for buggy horses. If the little boy went into the pasture and frightened him, it could be—
Stop it!
She scolded herself for looking for trouble where there might not be any. She wanted to stop reacting to the sight of a young kind, thinking of things that could go wrong, but she couldn’t. Kyle reminded her of Ralph Fisher. Both were spindly and all joints as their elbows and knees stuck out from their thin limbs while they grew like cornstalks.
Eli had noticed her dismay yesterday after the church service. Nobody else had, not even her friends in the Spinsters’ Club. She needed to keep her feelings to herself to halt the questions from beginning again—such as why a teacher hated kids. She didn’t hate them; she loved them. Because she loved them, she didn’t want to be the one to put any in danger.
“Gut mariye,” Eli called.
She waved to him and his nephew and waited for them to cross the yard to where she stood. A siren sounded from the main road, and she flinched.
Kyle did, too, and scanned in every direction to see what sort of emergency vehicle it was.
Eli kept walking as if nothing had happened.
How bad was his hearing?
It wasn’t her business. However, the teacher in her was curious how he’d managed to get by with only his young nephew to clue him in. A few quick tests he wouldn’t know were going on would tell her the extent of his hearing loss.
“I brought plans for the school,” he said when he reached her. “Do you want to see them?”
“Ja.” She didn’t nod to confirm what she’d said. “Seeing them is a gut idea because you want my help, ain’t so?”
His dark brows dropped in concentration. He must have heard some of what she’d said and was trying to piece it together. Wondering why he didn’t ask her to repeat what she’d said more slowly, she sighed. Even her grossmammi had resisted help for years because of hochmut, but pride did nothing to help her escape the ever-narrowing walls of her world as her hearing continued to fail. Nor would it help Eli.
She spoke to Kyle. “There’s chocolate pudding in the fridge. Go ahead and help yourself to some. Have some with a glass of milk, too, if you want.”
“Can I, Onkel Eli?” he asked.
More confusion fled through Eli’s eyes, but he nodded when the little boy made motions that must have conveyed the question without words.
Miriam bit her lip to keep from saying sign language had limits because it could be understood by a limited number of people.
When the little boy skipped to the door and disappeared inside, she saw Eli’s distress before he could mask it. Didn’t he realize that, with Kyle beginning school, he needed to learn a different way to communicate? He wouldn’t be able to depend so much on the little boy.
“Let me show you the plan I sketched for the school,” Eli said, motioning toward the barn.
Was he hoping to head inside where his nephew could give him hints about what was being said?
“It’s such a nice day, ain’t so?” She sat on the cement ramp’s edge. It would be used to bring equipment into the barn, once it was no longer their home. “Let’s go over what you’ve got out here.”
She thought he’d object, but he opened a large sheet of paper and spread it across the ramp beside her. He stood so close, each breath she took was flavored with the scents of his laundry soap and bleach. Unlike her brother’s, his white shirt pulled over his head and had a stand-up collar. The tab front closed with four small buttons. Beneath the cotton, the shadows of the muscles along his brawny arms drew her eyes.
She looked away. Eli Troyer was too handsome for her own gut. She wasn’t Leanna Wagler, believing in the possibility of a storybook hero coming to sweep her off her feet and carry her off to a wunderbaar life.
“What do you think?” he prompted, looking at his drawing. “It’s a rough sketch, but it should show you what I’m planning. Feel free to tell me changes you think will make the school better.”
She looked at the page. It was far more than a rough sketch, she realized. He’d marked out on the floor plan how the desks for the scholars and another larger one for the teacher would be set. He’d drawn the interior walls as if she stood in the room and looked at each one. It allowed her to see where he intended to place the blackboard and the bulletin boards. A generously sized storage closet was in a back corner.
He pointed to the narrow rectangles in the walls. “Those are windows. The bigger ones with the dotted lines showing the space for each to swing open and closed are the doors. What do you think?” He tilted his head toward her.
All air vanished as she found her nose so close to his that the piece of paper would have barely fit between them. She couldn’t move or blink when she raised her gaze to meet the blue-hot heat in the center of his eyes. Every emotion within him was powerful and uncompromising.
Somehow she gathered enough air to ask, “Do you have a pencil I can use? I want to make a small change.”
“Ja.” He groped in his pocket and pulled out a short ruler.
“Pencil,” she repeated as she pantomimed writing. Once he’d looked away, she drew in a deep breath.
What was wrong with her? She couldn’t remember feeling like that when she was with Yost, and she’d been in love with him.
When a pencil was placed in her hand, she realized she’d drifted away on her thoughts. She kept her eyes lowered and squared her shoulders before bending over the page. The sooner she was done with reviewing the plans, the sooner she could put space between her and Eli.
“I think there needs to be another window on either side of the door.” She drew what she wanted on the drawing.
“What are those?”
“Windows.” She gestured toward the barn. “Windows.”
“I know what you meant.” He shook his head. “Windows suck heat out of a building. If there are more windows in the school, you’ll be using a lot more propane to keep the building warm.”
“Two small windows won’t make much difference.”
“I’ve been a carpenter since I was fourteen, and I’ve learned a lot in those seventeen years. One thing I learned is that extra windows means needing more fuel to keep the space warm. No more windows.”
“But—”
“You can’t change facts, Miriam, no matter how much you want to.”
“The fact I know is kinder work better in a sunny place than one filled with shadows.” She folded her arms in front