she do less than protest his high-handedness?
“What was I to say to Simeon?” he went on. ‘“Nay, old friend, you can’t come to share bread with us until I see if my daughter wants to marry either one of your boys?’” He found a withered lima bean and cast it to the brown-and-white rat terrier sitting at his feet. Gilly caught the bean in the air and chomped it joyfully.
“It was a shock to see Micah and Neziah all dressed in their best, here at the table.” Ellen glanced at her mother, but she snored on, her hands loose in her lap, her bowl of unshelled beans hardly started. “She was good tonight, don’t you think?” she said, waffling by talking of something easier. “Her morning started bad, so I worried...”
Her father’s face was lost in shadow now, but Ellen knew he was smiling. He had such fondness for her mother, his love seemingly growing stronger with his wife’s slow mental decline. “She perked up when I told her that the children were coming. Buzzed around the kitchen like she was forty. Her biscuits were light enough to float, don’t you think? And she was sharp as a needle at supper.” Her father continued to hull limas, his fingers moving unconsciously without pause. Fat beans dropped by ones, twos and threes into the wide basket in his lap.
“Jah,” Ellen agreed. “No lapses in memory.” And her mother’s biscuits had been good tonight. She’d not forgotten the rising or the salt as she did sometimes. And she hadn’t let them stay in the oven until the bottoms began to burn. Once, not long ago, Ellen had come in from the garden to find the kitchen full of smoke and her mother standing motionless in the center of the room, staring at the stove and coughing. Ellen had had to get the biscuits out of the oven and shoo her mother outside where she could breathe. It was those lapses in judgment that made Ellen apprehensive about her mother’s health.
“So, Dochter, did you enjoy yourself on your outing with young Micah?”
“I did have a good time,” she admitted. “But you know I would have put the Shetlers off if I’d had the choice. This isn’t something that I can decide in a few hours.”
“But you are open to being courted by Micah or his brother?” When she didn’t answer right away, her father pressed on. “You have to marry, Ellen. You know that, don’t you? What will you do when your mother and I go to our reward? We’re not young, either of us. You’re a healthy young woman. You need a family of your own. And it would fill our hearts with joy if you could give us a grandchild before we die.”
She swallowed. Her throat felt tight, as if an invisible hand was squeezing it. It was all perfectly logical, of course, but what about her heart? Her parents had married for love, and she had hoped for the same.
“I’m not asking you to marry either of Simeon’s boys,” he father went on. “I’m only asking that you give them a chance.”
Her gaze met his, but she still didn’t speak.
“Just...just a month. That’s all I ask of you. Give them a month.” He smiled the smile he knew she could never resist. “Is that too much for an old man to ask of his daughter?”
He said it so sweetly that she sighed and looked at the lima bean in her hand. “No, I suppose it’s not too much to ask, so I will walk out with them,” she said softly. “But I’ll tell you now—” she pointed with the empty hull at him “—I’ll only truly consider Micah, not Neziah.”
“Don’t be foolish. You cared for Neziah once. You came close to marrying him.”
She tightened her mouth. “That was a long time ago,” she said. “Marrying Neziah would have been a mistake. We were—are—too different. He isn’t the husband for me, and I’m certainly not the wife for him.” Memories she hadn’t stirred up in years came back to her, and she felt her heart trip. Things had been so complicated with Neziah, and she had been so young. “I’d feel trapped in a marriage with him.”
“Then you’re wise to refuse him.” He leaned closer to her. “But you are open to being courted by Micah?”
She nodded. “Jah. If you think I should do that, I will.”
“And you don’t think it’s being unfair to Neziah to allow him to believe you’re considering his suit?”
“Honestly, Dat, I think he went along with Simeon’s idea just to please his father. I bet he’s trying to figure out at this very moment how to get out of this.”
“Then we will put this all in God’s hands,” her father said. “He’s never failed to be there when we need Him. It pleases me that you are willing to walk out with the Shetler boys, and I will place my hopes and prayers on the best solution for all of us.”
She nodded, her heart suddenly lighter. “I’ll put my trust in Him,” she agreed. And for the first time in years, she allowed herself to think of a different life than she had thought hers would be...one that included a husband, a baby and new possibilities.
* * *
“I’m hungry,” Joel said in Deitsch as Neziah lifted him out of the bathtub and wrapped him in an oversize white towel.
“Jah, me, too,” Asa agreed in Deitsch. “I want milk and cookies. Can we have milk and cookies, Dat?”
“English,” Neziah reminded them. “Bath time is English. Remember? Soon Joel will go to school, and the other children will speak English. You wouldn’t want them to call him a woodenhead, would you?” Asa wriggled out of his grasp and retreated to the far end of the claw-footed porcelain tub. “Come back here, you pollywog.” He captured the escapee and stood him beside his brother. It always surprised him how close they were in size, even though Asa was nearly two years younger. Neziah wrapped his younger son in a clean blue towel and sat him on the closed toilet seat.
The bathroom was large and plain with a white tile floor, white fixtures and white walls and window shutters. Neziah wondered if his boys ever realized how lucky they were not to have to use an outhouse as he had for much of his childhood. He hadn’t minded the spiders and the occasional mouse or bat as much as he had the cold on winter nights. He smiled. This modern bathroom with its deep sink, corner shower and propane heater was a great improvement. The Amish elders might be slow to change, but they did make some concessions to the twenty-first century, and bathrooms, in his opinion, were at the top of the list.
“My tummy hurts,” Joel said in English, sticking out his lower lip. “I have hungry.”
“After the big dinner and all the pie you ate at the Beacheys?” Neziah chuckled. “I don’t think so. You’ll have to wait for breakfast.”
Joel’s face contorted into a full-blown pout, and Asa chimed in. “Me hungry, too.”
“Bed and prayers.” Neziah whisked off the towels and tugged cotton nightshirts over two bobbing heads. “Brush your teeth now, and maybe we’ll have time for a little Family Life before lights out.” Family Life was one of the few publications that came to the house, and Neziah made a practice of reading short stories or poems that he thought his sons might like at bedtime.
“But we’re hungry,” Joel whined, retreating to the Deitsch dialect. “My belly hurts a lot.”
“Then cookies and milk will only make it worse,” Neziah pronounced. He scooped up Asa and draped him laughing over his shoulder and took Joel’s hand. “Bed. Now.” Joel allowed himself to be tugged along reluctantly to the bedroom and the double bed the boys shared. Neziah deposited Asa between the sheets then reached down for Joel.
“Read,” Asa reminded. He pulled the sheet up to his chin and dug his stuffed dog out from under his pillow while Joel wormed his way over his brother and curled up on top of the light cotton blanket and sheet.
A breeze blew through the curtainless windows on the north side of the bedroom. Like the bathroom, this was a sparse chamber: the bed, a bookcase, a table and two chairs. There were no dressers. The boys’ clothing was all hung