Read A Plain Love Song Online

Authors: Kelly Irvin

Tags: #Romance

A Plain Love Song (10 page)

BOOK: A Plain Love Song
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No matter what I do, even something completely new,

she rears up and lets me have it.

God knows, He sees how hard I try,

but I guess He knows, I’ve met my match.

Adah leaned against the wall, clutching the dishtowel to her chest, listening. He was trying to write a song about breaking the horse. Leastways, that was what it sounded like to her. She liked the rhyming and the rhythm of it. It was just a beginning, but he had a piece of something. She liked the chords he’d chosen.

His voice drifted away and died out. A scratching sound told her he was marking on the paper. She wanted to see what he was writing. Hear what he was thinking. Did the words flow into his head the way they did hers?

“Whatcha doing, Amish girl?”

He peeked around the corner. To her chagrin, she jumped and the heat on her face advertised the fact that she was blushing. “I finished cleaning. I’m heading out.”

“Sure. You were listening to my song.”

“I…it’s nice. I like it.”

“Good, ’cause it’s about you.”

“Is not,” she sputtered. “It’s about the horse, the corral, and breaking the horse.”

“Sure, it’s about that too.” His grin broadened. “It’s not finished yet. You’ll see.”

“I have to go.”

“Promise me one thing and you can go.”

“You can’t keep me from—”

“Just promise me you’ll let me play the whole song for you when I finish it.”

“We’ll see—”

“You’re my first audience for this song. Besides Cap, of course, and I think he’s tone-deaf. He sleeps through most of it. Don’t you want to hear how it turns out?” He gave her that hangdog expression her brother gave her when he wanted the last piece of fried chicken—the one she’d already put on her plate. She always gave in. “Come on, Adah.”

“You called me by my name.”

“I know your name.” He leaned against the opposite wall and rubbed at the spot above the V of his T-shirt where the stitches were. “Come on, I’ll share my song with you and you can share yours with me.”

“I don’t have any songs.”

“Sure you do. That’s why you asked me if the words came first or the melody.”

She struggled with how much to tell him. “So?”

“So, I’m gonna be a country singer someday, a star. With your voice, you could be too. We could be a duet like Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn.”

“You’re daft.” Her mind saw it, imagined it, even as she dismissed the possibility as an impossibility. “I’m the Amish girl who cleans your house. You don’t know anything about me. And your parents will expect you to finish college and come work here on the farm. People usually end up doing what’s expected of them.”

Leastways that had been her experience. As much as the boys and girls she knew ran around when they came to their age of rumspringa, they almost always settled down and did the right thing. They wanted the Plain life. She wanted the Plain life.

Didn’t she?

“Not always. They don’t always.” The showboat cowboy from the corral had disappeared. His blue eyes were dark, his expression pensive. “I’m not spending the rest of my life figuring out how many bushels of wheat we’re getting to an acre and how much fertilizer is needed to increase the yield. You want to spend the rest of your life cleaning other people’s houses?”

“I’ll marry and clean my own house.”

If she didn’t mess it up.

“Stick with me and someone else will clean your house for you.” He straightened and took a step toward her, leaving the crutch leaning against the wall. He balanced himself within reach. “You have a huge, beautiful voice. That’s a gift. Not everyone gets that gift. You said yourself you like to write songs. We could write together. We could sing together.”

She couldn’t drag her gaze from his face. The cadence of his voice mesmerized her. He meant what he said. He was offering her the very thing she’d always wanted. Her dream stood before her in tattered blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and one cowboy boot. “Your song is nice.” Her voice sounded breathless in her own ears. “You have a nice voice too.”

“So let me play it for you when I finish it? And then we’ll see what happens after that. Just don’t run away from the idea.”

“I don’t know if I can—”

“What’s going on here?” Mrs. Hart strode through the hallway, shedding a pair of riding gloves as she stalked toward them in brown leather boots that reached her knees. She wore her jeans tucked into the boots and a crisp white blouse with a button-down collar. Not one red hair on her head moved. “You’ll not get the house spotless standing there chatting with this ne’er-do-well.”

Mrs. Hart talked like that, like she’d learned English from an old novel. Adah forced a smile. “I’m finished. I was just letting your son know that I’m leaving.”

Mrs. Hart shook one long, slim finger with a nail painted a deep red at Adah. “Not just yet. The tiles in the guest bathroom look a little scummy. Take another pass at them, will you? And then stop by the kitchen and I’ll pay you.”

The tiles in the guest bathroom were perfectly clean. The bathroom hadn’t looked as if it had been used since the last time Adah scoured it. “Yes, ma’am.”

She squeezed past Mrs. Hart and darted toward the hall that led to the bathroom.

“Adah.”

Adah turned back at the command in her employer’s high pitched voice. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You said your father doesn’t want you working in the house when I’m not around.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It takes two to tango.”

Adah had never danced, let alone done the tango. “Ma’am?”

Mrs. Hart fixed her with a hard stare. “You do your work, you get paid, you hustle home. That way no one gets into trouble.”

Jackson shifted on his crutch. The paper in his hand fluttered to the floor. “Mom, nothing’s going on here. I was just talking to her about—”

“Hush now. I know how you are with girls.” Mrs. Hart picked up the paper. She didn’t even look at it before she crumpled it in a ball. “I don’t want any lip from you. You may be twenty-one years old, but I can still take a hickory stick to your behind. By the way, you stink like cigarettes. I catch you smoking in my house, I’ll tan your hide.”

Adah doubted that, but she understood Mrs. Hart’s point. Clearly.

“I’ll take care of the bathroom.”

“Double check the toilet as well.”

“Mom—”

Mrs. Hart stalked away.

“Adah—”

“No.” Adah didn’t look at Jackson. Her place had been made clear.

“Come on, Adah. Don’t let her spoil things.”

There was nothing to spoil. Mrs. Hart was right. Adah headed to the bathroom. A toilet awaited her attention.

Chapter 9

O
nce inside the Harts’ guest bathroom, which was bigger than her own bedroom, Adah shut the door and leaned against it, breathing in and out until an unexpected, unworthy anger mingled with embarrassment subsided. She had no need or right to be angry. Mrs. Hart was right and this home belonged to her and Mr. Hart. Adah simply cleaned. Nothing more. Mrs. Hart had reminded her of her place. Adah inhaled again and knelt to remove the cleansers from the cabinets that ran underneath the long marble counter fitted with two deep sinks and brass faucets. The aroma of spearmint and eucalyptus hand soap calmed her. Cleaning calmed her.

She glanced in the gold-framed rectangular mirror that covered the entire wall over the sinks. Ugly, cherry red blotches darkened her cheeks and neck. Her prayer kapp had slid to one side and tendrils of hair escaped her once neat bun. She didn’t look like a good Plain girl. She looked guilty. Her hand went to her kapp, fumbling to straighten it. Her fingers shook. She smoothed the hair and closed her eyes against the self portrait in front of her.
I’m sorry, Gott. Sorry. I don’t know why I can’t seem to do better.

A sharp rap at the door broke the silence. She jumped, her heart slamming against her rib cage. Surely Jackson wouldn’t follow her into the bathroom. Unless he was bent on getting her fired. She needed this job or she would quit.

No, she wouldn’t. Not when she had the chance to see Jackson play the guitar, see how it was done, hear how it was done. Sing songs with him.

The door swung open. RaeAnne Hart stuck her head in, her long, shiny black hair hanging down in a rippling curtain that partially hid her face. “Hey, Adah. Mom said you were in here.”

Adah tried to arrange her face in neutral lines. Jackson’s sister didn’t know her. RaeAnne wouldn’t be able to read the turmoil that raged in her. More embarrassment cascaded over her like a steamy waterfall. Matthew had told her once he could read every emotion on her face. He liked that about her. She couldn’t hide her feelings. An honest face, he’d said. He didn’t like it so much the night he told her he loved her and she hadn’t returned the favor. What he’d read on her face had hurt him, something she never wanted to do again. “Did you need in? I can wait outside.”

“Nope. Stay put.” Her flip-flops slapping on the slick black and white tiles, RaeAnne sashayed in skintight jean shorts over to the toilet, flipped the lid down, and plopped on it. She snapped her gum a couple of times and studied Adah with sharp blue eyes that were bright against her fair skin and dark hair. She and Jackson could be twins, if she were a whole lot taller, heavier, and a little bit older. “I want to talk to you.”

In the months that Adah had cleaned for the Harts she’d run into RaeAnne a sum total of three or four times. Jackson’s only sister spent a lot of time riding horses or staying in town where she attended high school. Adah had seen her around town and at a couple of the concerts she and Matthew had attended, but never close enough to exchange hellos. They lived in different worlds, after all. When RaeAnne stayed at the farm, she made a huge mess of her room and didn’t seem to know the purpose of a dirty clothes hamper, choosing instead to drop her clothes wherever she stood when she undressed. “Did I need to work on your room some more?”

“No, dude. It’s so perfect it gives me the willies. Who knew there was carpet under all those clothes? Problem is when you put them in the hamper like that, Mom expects me to actually wash them.”

That made sense to Adah, who’d been doing laundry since she was
tall enough to fill the wash machine with water and run the clothes through the wringer to the tub of rinse water. All RaeAnne would have to do would be drop the clothes into a machine, add soap, and turn a knob. That didn’t actually amount to work in Adah’s way of thinking. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Nope.” RaeAnne snapped her gum some more, plucked at the hem of her purple T-shirt, which read R
EAL
W
OMEN
D
RIVE
P
ICK-UPS
, and fixed Adah with a sharp stare. “Jack has a girlfriend.”

“What?”

“My brother has a girlfriend.”

“That’s good, I mean, I guess.” Adah picked up a sponge and the bottle of glass cleaner. Why would RaeAnne tell her this? All Adah wanted to do was finish cleaning the bathroom, collect her payment, and get home. She didn’t want Daed sitting on the porch waiting for her when she arrived. “But it’s none of my concern.”

“That’s the thing. Dani Jo is a friend of mine. She’s had a crush on Jackson for like forever, you know?” RaeAnne leaned back and crossed her arms over her flat chest. She sounded much aggrieved. “They hung out over the Christmas break and he’s been texting her and talking to her on Facebook and all that while he was at school. She was all excited for him to get back to New Hope and now he’s home and he hasn’t called her once in two weeks.”

And all that. All things Adah didn’t do. Couldn’t do. She’d watched the kids at the concerts, whipping out their phones, their thumbs flying, expressions intent. Half the time they were on the phone and missing the performance. “Okay.”

“He’s totally ignoring her.” RaeAnne’s voice caught. She ducked her head. “When she messages him, he doesn’t answer.”

“Why are you telling me this? Why aren’t you talking to your brother about it?”

“After you helped him out when he had his little accident in the corral, he pestered Mom with questions about you at the supper table. He even asked me about you, like I know anything about you guys. I told him to get a life. He’s been mooning around the house ever since.”

“He has a broken ankle.”

“His fingers aren’t broken. I’m telling you, he stopped texting her the day he met you.”

“Maybe he thinks he can’t court her because he can’t drive right now.”

“Dani Jo can drive. Leastways she can when her parents unground her for that fender bender she had on the way to the movies Friday night.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“I did. He said the time away at school kind of like changed his thinking on things. He says Dani Jo’s too immature for him. That’s totally bogus, if you ask me.” RaeAnne raked her hand through her hair. It fell in a perfect wave on her shoulders. “She’s eighteen and she has a job at the Dairy Queen and she’s on the honor roll at school. She’ll be the head cheerleader in the fall. She does it all. What more could he ask for? Dani Jo’s been my best friend like forever. She’s perfect for him.”

BOOK: A Plain Love Song
4.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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