Abby Finds Her Calling (29 page)

“And never a problem getting us to eat it,” Amos replied. He smiled across the crowd at James and said to him, “I’ll have my Noah gather up the boards and odd pieces left from our last couple of houses, for those wagons you said you’d put together. Noah’s been saying he’d like to make carriages someday—like you, James—so maybe you could put him to work on this project? See if he’s got any aptitude for it?”

An apprentice? James hadn’t considered that. Noah Coblentz was a lanky, loose-limbed kid with red hair like his sisters, so he was the target for a lot of teasing. James raised his eyebrows, glancing at Leon and Perry to gauge their reactions. “Send him over,” James replied when he saw his men nodding. “What with the shop being busy again, I could use another fella making these rigs for the Ropps.”

Vernon was beaming, clasping his hands before him. “Shall we vote and make it official, then? All those willing to move forward on replacing the Ropps’ home—”

“AYE!” The thundering response rang in the rafters of the workshop, so loud that everyone laughed again.

Folks clustered together to make their plans, and later as they were leaving, James appreciated their thanks for the meeting space and for steering them toward a positive goal. Abby’s smile wrapped him like a warm blanket as she bundled up to cross the street and begin her day at the mercantile.

“Fine job, James,” she said. “Only takes one or two to rise above, and the rest will generally follow.”

“Jah, it’s gut to see everybody coming together. And this new project gives them something more worthwhile to talk about than me and Zanna.” He glanced across the road, his heartbeat quickening with an idea. “Is your sister doing all right? Feeling better these days?”

“Barbara pronounced her fat and sassy yesterday during her checkup, jah. She keeps herself busy making those rugs, mostly.” Abby smiled up at him, her face framed by her black bonnet. “I put Zanna in charge of raising her friends’ spirits, so she’s bringing the Ropp girls to my sewing shop to make clothes this morning. With Zanna and Maggie cutting the pieces and Becky stitching the seams on my machine, they’ll all have dresses and aprons, and a shirt and trousers for Rudy, by tonight.”

“Nice of you to lend them your workspace.”

Abby shrugged and pulled on her gloves. “I’m thankful it wasn’t my place that caught fire in the night. We can all do our part to provide them a house, but Adah and her girls have the harder job, making it a home again.”

James nodded at this insight. Abby always considered underlying issues that others missed. “There’s no telling how Rudy will react to our help. Let’s hope he doesn’t take all our gut intentions and pave himself a road to hell with them.” He glanced across the blacktop again, where three figures were walking along the snowy lane with two dogs frolicking around them. “Here come your girls now. Have a fine day, Abby.”

“You, too, James.” She stepped out into the wind, then glanced at him over her shoulder. “Every day’s a fine day if you believe it is. Ain’t so?”

He didn’t know how to reply to such optimism. He could only smile as he watched her step nimbly toward the county road. When he focused on Zanna, walking between her two friends, something
prodded him to grab his coat from beside the door. Zanna rarely got out these days—and never worked in the mercantile now, to keep peace with the folks who didn’t wish to be reminded of her pregnancy.

Across the road he dashed, aware that those leaving the meeting would see him with Zanna and might speculate about that. But he had a debt to settle. The time seemed right, while he was riding the waves of excitement generated in his shop this morning.

“Zanna!” he called, breathless from his sprint ahead of an oncoming car.

She stopped and looked at him full-on with those blue eyes. “James. Gut morning.” Her gaze flickered to the folks getting into their rigs. “Looks like you had quite a crowd for your meeting.”

“Jah, and we got positive results, too.” He willed his heart to stop hammering. This was a matter to be discussed calmly and without anyone else listening in. “Can I have a word with you, Zanna? It won’t take but a minute.”

Z
anna’s eyes widened. Her cheeks tingled, more from curiosity than the cold. Here it was, the moment she’d wondered about since last Sunday, when James had said he needed to talk. “Jah. Um—” She glanced at Becky and Maggie Ropp, who watched with eager interest. “Have Abby help you choose the fabric for those clothes we’ll be making. I’ll be there in a few, all right?”

Becky and her sister raised their eyebrows at each other, but they went inside. No doubt they would quiz her about this conversation all day while they sewed. James leaned toward her, his eyes shining like hot coffee. “Zanna, I did something that demands an apology. I’ve got no excuse for it, except that I lost my head for a bit.”

And what could this be about? She watched him, waiting.

“Remember a few weeks ago, when you dialed Jonny Ropp’s number twice and hung up?”

How did he know about that?
Zanna shifted her weight, suspicious now. It wasn’t as though she’d said anything indecent for Jonny to respond to on the message machine—and it wasn’t James’s business if she had!

James sighed. “Well, he called you back. It took me by surprise,
sitting there at the phone and hearing his voice mail message. It hit me all wrong, that you’d be in touch with him, and before I thought about it, I erased Jonny’s message. And I’m sorry for that, Zanna.” He rushed on in a whisper. “I hope you can understand. And forgive me.”

Jonny had called her back?
Jonny called me back! And James is saying—

Zanna forced her thoughts to stop swirling in her head. She desperately wanted to know what Jonny had said. But it didn’t feel right, asking James about that. “I’d called to tell him his mamm could use his—well, what with his dat acting so—oh, never mind!”

Jonny called me back! So maybe when he hears that last message I left him—

James stood rooted as though he had no intention of ending this conversation. “I didn’t feel right, letting it go by without saying something,” he explained. “I hope you feel as gut as you look, Zanna. Hope things are going well for you.”

While James had spoken to her with this same consideration after her confession last Sunday, she hadn’t expected him to keep wishing her well. “Doing okay, all things considered,” she murmured.

Zanna noticed the softness of his brown eyes… the laugh lines that deepened when he smiled at her. While James Graber would always be considerably older than she, and his parents would only get more difficult to deal with, for a fleeting moment Zanna wondered why she’d thrown away their relationship. “James, I—”

A dark red van pulled to a stop in front of them. The driver rolled down the window and grinned at her. His blond hair fell in unruly waves around a face that shot her pulse into a panic.

“Zanna!” Jonny Ropp looked her up and down as though James weren’t standing beside her. “Hey—got your message from last night. Thought I’d check out what you said about that fire. Hop in,” he coaxed, nodding toward the passenger seat. “Fill me in, will you? It’s not like I’ll be staying long, if Dat’s out there.”

Zanna suddenly knew how Lot’s wife must have felt, being transformed into a pillar of salt, unable to think or speak. The dimple in Jonny’s cheek winked at her. “Sorry! Gotta go!” she rasped, clutching her coat around her, and then realizing how that accentuated her belly.

Into the mercantile she dashed, as though one of Mervin Mast’s bulls were chasing her. She beelined toward the back room, where she might get hold of her runaway thoughts in the peace and quiet. From the aisles where the yard goods were displayed she heard familiar voices, Abby’s among them as she encouraged Jonny’s sisters to choose fabric that was warm and sturdy for their new winter dresses.

I saw Jonny and ran like a scared rabbit, while he gawked at my belly…

“So there you are, Zanna. We were thinking James must have had something awfully interesting to say—” Abby stopped in the storeroom doorway. “You look like you just saw a ghost. Are you feeling all right?”

She forced herself to breathe. She made herself drape her coat over a peg as though it were an ordinary day and nothing extraordinary had just happened. “I—I called Jonny’s voice mail again last night,” she confessed in a halting whisper, “to tell him about the fire. He just now pulled up in his van. Asked me to ride out there with him, to see the house.”

Abby’s eyes nearly filled her slender face. “Jonny came
here
?” She glanced into the main room of the store, where Maggie and Becky were choosing their dress fabric. “Shall we tell the girls? Or will they only get more upset if he doesn’t want to see them?”

“I was so shocked I didn’t tell him they were here. I don’t know.” Zanna grabbed for the back of the chair where she usually sat to fill bags with spices and cookie sprinkles. “Honest to Pete, Abby, I don’t know anything right now. My brain’s whirling so fast it might spin right out of my head!”

.   .   .

James reminded himself that he was wiser and more mature than Jonny Ropp, the hellion who’d taken advantage of his fiancée. Of course, this kid in the van didn’t know any of that—did he? Unless Zanna had told Jonny about her engagement, and told him he was about to become a father, Jonny probably assumed that Zanna had been chatting with James Graber as she had all her life, because he lived across the road. Yet something in Zanna’s expression when he’d mentioned Ropp’s phone message suggested she hadn’t spoken with this fellow since last July…

It would be so easy to give Cedar Creek’s most flamboyant smart aleck an earful about what Zanna had
really
gone through of late, and then send him packing. Jonny wore a black leather jacket, but no hat. The shiny ring in his ear boldly announced that he hadn’t joined the church and never intended to.

“So… there really was a fire?” Jonny demanded as he gawked out the window of his rumbling van. “How come I didn’t see it on the news?”

James saw no reason to get chatty. After all, Jonny hadn’t asked how he was, or what was up with Zanna, or anything else that would reconnect him to anyone here in Cedar Creek. “Bishop Gingerich didn’t want reporters and TV cameras—”

“Oh, that’s right. Amish are good at keeping their secrets.”

James clenched his jaw.
Jah, like when Zanna didn’t tell you she was marrying me last July.

“Secrets aren’t always a gut idea, you know,” Jonny said. “They make it easier for folks to get away with stuff—to sweep problems under the rug, like they never happened.” He turned off his ignition and opened the van’s door to step outside. “If people knew what my mother’s had to put up with in the name of
submission
to the Old Order’s ways—” He bit off his sentence as though he’d revealed more than he had intended to. He leaned against his van and crossed his arms as though he didn’t quite trust James. “So is the house totally gone or did Zanna exaggerate about that in her voice mail? Did everybody make it out okay?”

James scowled. “Why would she exaggerate about your house burning down?” he demanded. “If the fire trucks hadn’t arrived when they did, the milking barn and all the other outbuildings would’ve burned, too, you know.” James was familiar with folks who started talking about one thing and then swerved into a different subject. As far as he was concerned, it was rude—and it led folks to believe things that weren’t true.

At least Jonny looked more concerned now. His eyes widened and he raked back his hair as he considered what he’d just heard. The Ropp boy stood taller these days—their eyes were on the same level even if the two of them didn’t see eye to eye—and it seemed Jonny wanted to prove to James that at nineteen he was a man. And a man of means, as well.

“Jah, the girls came downstairs, hollering about the fire, just in time to get out through a window, along with your folks,” James explained. “The house and the shed burned to the ground, though.” Something made James want to lay it on with a heavy hand, to see what Jonny Ropp was really made of. Was he still the loudmouthed daredevil who’d sped through Cedar Creek full tilt on a motorcycle, scaring the sheep and cows? If so, he had no business—no right—to raise Zanna’s child.

“They lost all their savings, too,” James added. No sense in leaving out this very important detail, considering Jonny supported himself quite well by driving—or that’s what folks said, anyway, and that’s what his big van and that flashy motorcycle suggested. “Guess your dat got into it with a teller a while back and then pulled their money out of the bank. Stashed it in the house.”

“He yanked out
all
of their—you can’t be serious!” Jonny paced to the front of his van and back again, as though deciding what to say next. “When Zanna left a message that they’d lost— Well, a lot of that money was what Mamm earned at the cheese factory. But Mamm’s all right? And the girls, too?”

“Jah. The three of them are staying with the Lambrights.” No need to reveal how the locals had voted to rebuild their home, at least
not until he heard Jonny’s own plan for helping his family. “The girls are at the mercantile now.”