Last Bride, The (Home to Hickory Hollow Book #5) (18 page)

Mandy certainly hadn’t noticed anything wrong with Tessie’s mind, and she wished her mother wouldn’t say such things.

“Since you and Tessie were always closer than the other girls, I’ve been wonderin’ what you think ’bout this.”

Mandy shook her head. She guessed her mother hadn’t sensed the difficulties between her and Tessie these past couple of years. She went to the sink to lather up her hands, using some homemade soap she and Tessie had made a few months ago. She let the warm water run and run, then finally turned off the faucet and dried her hands. “Would ya like a piece of pie or something to eat?”

“Kumme sit by me,” Mamma said, tapping the table. “Why do you think Tessie didn’t confess her sin . . . havin’ a baby out of wedlock?”

They were getting into dangerous territory, speculating like this. “Not to be disrespectful, Mamma, but we shouldn’t be talking ’bout this, should we?”

“Well, it wasn’t just at Preaching. She’s been mum on that point with me when I’ve asked, as well—hasn’t admitted to any wrongdoing. Other than saying she was disobedient to me and your father, that is.”

“Ach, then, I just don’t know.”

Mamma fell silent, shaking her head slowly.

“We must pray for Tessie, Mamma. Something’s troubling her . . . and not just her pregnancy.”

Her mother looked at her, eyes shimmering. “’Tis a mystery, and your father and I fear it will be her undoing.”

Is Tessie too mindful
of the past to be fully aware of the present?
thought Mandy sadly.

She brought out some peanut butter and a stalk of celery, washing the latter and cutting it into smaller sticks. Then, carrying a tray over to the table, she managed to get her mother to agree to have a snack, and for the longest time they sat and nibbled, mercifully without saying more.

T
he first thing that crossed her mind when Tessie spotted another letter from Levi two days later—another snowy Friday afternoon—was that he was wasting time writing to her.
Surely
he
hasn
’
t
received
my
own
letter
just
yet
.

She experienced concern and a speck of sadness at seeing her name on this envelope. Had he gone deep-sea fishing, she wondered, giving his Grandmammi more gray hairs? She pondered his longing for adventure and managed a faint smile.

She appreciated his thoughtfulness, if that’s what it was. Levi Smucker had always been the sort of fellow a girl might expect to be exceptionally kind, even sympathetic, back when she’d first known him at the one-room schoolhouse up the road. Levi often wore a caring expression, especially when one of the younger schoolchildren needed help. She recalled seeing him assist one of the little boys who’d fallen and hurt himself during a rather rough corner ball game at recess. And while Levi most likely didn’t know of Tessie’s present state,
he had expressed concern early on for her loss of Marcus.
Yet Marcus was the
very beau who kept Levi from having a chance with
me. . . .

Hurrying up the lane toward the house, Tessie was thankful she’d thought to bring her woolen scarf this short distance, wrapping it around her neck and part of her face, the way Dawdi Dave did this time of year. She made a mental note of promising Mamma to go over and clean his place tomorrow, before she went to the Bird-in-Hand shop to help out Mandy and Cousin Emmalyn.

Meanwhile, she had Levi’s second letter to read, but it could wait till she helped make supper—no sense in raising eyebrows by rushing to her room. She folded the envelope in half and pushed it into her black woolen coat before finding her allotted peg in the outer room, near the kitchen. Quickly, she removed her snow boots and scarf and made her way into the house with the rest of the mail—two circle letters for Mamma and some odds and ends, mostly ads from Englisch-owned stores in Bird-in-Hand, as well as one for the Amish Village down in Strasburg.

“Not much mail today, looks like,” her mother remarked with a glance at the two letters that interested her most. “I’ll read them later—something to look forward to.” She placed them on one of the bookshelves on the far wall.

That was the last thing Mamma said the whole time they worked together to peel a batch of potatoes for mashing, then scraped carrots and chopped onions. When it came time to brown the round steak, Mamma said she needed to get off her feet for a spell and headed into the sitting room with her letters in hand.

Adding flour, a can of mushroom soup, and a bit of water for the steak to simmer in, Tessie considered why Levi would write her again so soon. Her curiosity grew as she contemplated it further while setting the table for Dat, Mamma, and herself.

While the steak and gravy cooked, Tessie was tempted to go and read her letter, as well, but there was a stir at the back door, and her sister Marta came in with twins Manny and Matthew. The little boys came running over and hugged Tessie’s knees. “Well, hullo there,” she said, leaning down to hug them collectively. “Nice to see you both!”

Marta’s strawberry blond hair was perfectly parted down the middle and looked like she’d just washed it. Still wearing her heavy black coat, Marta set a large basket of canned goods down on the counter. Snowflakes graced her shoulders like sprinkles of flour. “Thought I’d stop in and share some of my extras,” she said, explaining that she’d gone to BB’s Grocery Outlet in Quarryville, where she’d bought up lots of dented, bent, and bargain canned goods. “Especially tomato sauce, since I can be lazy sometimes.” She rolled her eyes at her own remark and laughed.

Mamma appeared around the corner, carrying her opened letters. “Well, aren’t you nice!”

Marta glanced again at Tessie, and Tessie took the cue that perhaps her sister had come to talk with their mother. “Come, let’s go an’ see what we can find to play with in the front room,” Tessie said to the boys, who still had on their coats and hats.

She could hear Marta take right up with Mamma, rattling away in Deitsch the minute she must’ve thought Tessie was
out of earshot. Tessie caught just this much: “There must be far more to the story, ain’t so?” Instantly self-conscious, she was glad she’d brought the twins in here to play awhile.

Let Mamma go ahead and talk to
Marta, instead of me,
she thought crossly.

———

After Marta and the twins left, Tessie put supper on the table, and Dat came into the kitchen to wash up. When they said amen after the silent table blessing, he stated, “It’s time we’re more careful with lamp oil and whatnot. Need to be more frugal all around, I daresay.”

Tessie nodded her head, wondering.

“Are things goin’ all right with the family business?” Mamma asked.

“Oh, ain’t the steers a’tall, May.” Her father cast a look at Tessie, as though waiting for her to speak up. “Want to be prepared if your baby’s born with . . . well, serious problems,” Dat said kindly.

“I don’t expect ya to—”

“Don’t be
lecherich
—ridiculous. Families do what they have to.” He sounded more stern now, an irritated look on his lined face. He didn’t have to say,
“If you’d just listened to me in the
first place, we wouldn’t have to scrimp on candles
and gas for the lamps and who knows what all
in the future.”

So now, on top of everything else, Tessie felt guilty she might potentially sap her parents’ financial resources. She felt so miserable during Bible reading and rote prayers, she slipped in a prayer of her own from her heart, asking the almighty One to help mend her broken relationship with Dat.
Somehow or other, as You
see fit.

For the longest time that evening after family worship, her father sat and read
The Budget
beside the heater stove in the front room. Mamma simply sat rocking, her eyes drooping closed now and then.

Tessie wondered what things were going round in her mother’s head, glad to see her relaxed for a change.

When they decided to call it a night, Tessie went around behind her parents and turned off all the gas lamps. Then she went to the outer room to locate her coat and pulled out the letter from Levi Smucker. Remembering what Dat had suggested earlier—about taking care to be thrifty—she went to sit in the dark on the floor near the stove, which was dying down and soon to be mere embers. She reached for the flashlight on the table near one of the more comfortable upholstered chairs and turned it on.

Once again, she was taken aback by the length of the letter, with accounts of some time spent at a nearby park, where Levi had played volleyball with a few visiting youth his age. For hours they’d played, he wrote, till he was tuckered out and decided to return to his grandparents’ cottage-like residence to write to her.
Dawdi sure found a
gut
deal on this
rental
cottage
. He didn’t admit to being homesick after only a few days away, but she could read between the lines and knew he was lingering only because of his concern for his grandmother’s health. So very fond he was of her.

When she finished reading, she returned the letter to its envelope. It would be ever so difficult if she ended up alienating someone who had turned out to be such a caring friend.
If only Mamma
and Dat weren’t so aloof when I need them
most.
Still, if she was honest with herself, she knew the distance between them was largely her doing. After all, she’d made her choice to marry Marcus, unknown to her family.

Tessie made her way back through the large front room, where in June they were scheduled to host Preaching service.
When I’m great with child.

In the kitchen, she perused her mother’s shelves of inspirational novels and pulled out one she hadn’t read,
Love
Comes Softly.
She returned to the front room with it and the flashlight and read nearly the whole first third of the book while lying on the floor near the heater stove. She connected at once to the young and desperate main character.

Hours later, when Tessie at last headed off to her room, her thoughts were still captured by the compelling prairie love story. And for the first time since Marcus’s deadly fall, she found herself thinking about something other than her own sorrow.

T
essie felt a faint moistness in the air the next morning, a promise of approaching spring—still a few weeks away but present all the same. When she and her sisters and Dat and Mamma were still living in the big farmhouse up the road, there had been Saturday mornings similar to this when she’d gotten up before dawn. She would often awaken to the sounds of the goats bleating and their raucous rooster, Wilder, crowing like his lungs might rupture.

This was truly the best time of day, so fresh and new and filled with hope. She typically liked going around next door to cook breakfast for her grandfather. This day, however, she prayed Dawdi Dave would not bring up the effect her child might have on the family, as her father had at the table yesterday.

“How would ya like your eggs cooked?” she asked Dawdi after she’d greeted him and hung up her coat and scarf.

“Over easy—all three of ’em.” He was grinning, wide awake
and sitting over on his rocking chair in the rather dark house. Was he also conserving gas? The thought crossed her mind, but she doubted her father had requested that of Dawdi.

“
Three
eggs, ya say?”

Dawdi nodded enthusiastically. “For some reason, I’m mighty hungry this mornin’.”

“All right, then.” She asked if he wanted toast or pancakes, and he smiled, choosing the latter. Moving over from the small sitting area with the help of his cane, he urged Tessie to cook enough for her, too, saying he preferred not to eat alone if he didn’t have to. “I’ll be happy to stay for breakfast,” she told him, observing him as he slowly pulled out a chair and eased himself into it.

Once settled, his attention turned back to Tessie. His scrutiny didn’t bother her, nor did it make her feel uncomfortable, though she guessed that something was heavy on his mind. And, while they sat together, sharing the meal, he asked her a shocking question that set her back.

“Did ya know your Mamma lost two little girls ’tween Mandy’s birth and yours?”

She gasped as the truth clamped down on her. She shook her head. “No, I never heard this.”

“Your mother took it awful hard, I can tell ya that.” He moved his graying head up and down, eyes blinking repeatedly. “Not sure she’d ever want me to say a peep, though.” He drew a slow breath. “Even so . . .”

Tessie said she understood.

“Might just be the reason your Dat was so worried ’bout you and Marcus King getting hitched up. One of your stillborn sisters had a terrible disease. Your mother told Mammi Rosanna
as much.” Dawdi’s shoulders rose and fell at the mention of Tessie’s deceased grandmother. He looked away, toward the window and the rising sun. “The Good Lord knew ’twas best. We can trust in that.”

Trust.

Tessie could only agree by nodding—she wasn’t up to discussing any of this. Oh, the worry she already had for this tiny soul she was carrying . . . yet she must trust her babe was completely in God’s hands, at His mercy.

“Don’t mean to upset ya.” Dawdi reached for his coffee cup. “Thought someone oughta tell ya, though.”

“Jah,” she whispered. Things began to make even more sense in that moment. No wonder Mamma had been vexed earlier, when Tessie first told of her own pregnancy.

She simply could not hold back the tears and excused herself to get some more maple syrup warming on the stove, where she managed to compose herself without being seen by Dawdi. Bless his heart; he’d only wanted to be helpful.

When Dawdi had eaten his fill, Tessie cleared the table, did the dishes, and swept the kitchen floor.

“Mamma will come over and strip your bed like always early Monday mornin’,” she told him. “Now I must get ready to go to work at Mandy’s little shop.”

He frowned and suggested she’d done enough for one morning. “Aw, must ya?”

“You don’t need to coddle me, Dawdi,” she said, leaning down to pat his shoulder. “I’m a healthy young woman.”

He smiled with his eyes. “You’ll keep to yourself what I told ya, jah?”

“You can trust me,” Tessie said, then headed to get her coat
and scarf. It struck her just then; did he also trust that she’d told the whole truth last Sunday at church? Thankfully, none of that had come up.

Tessie made her way up the snow-swept walkway into the darling shop in Bird-in-Hand, thinking how to make the new one Sylvan wanted to build just as pretty. She could help Mandy plant a small front garden on either side of the entrance with box shrubs and bright blue morning glories on a white trellis. Perhaps add some yellow tea roses to round things out.
If Mandy
likes the idea . . .

The tiny bell on the door rang as she entered the shop. Right away, Tessie noticed the fragrant potpourri. Cousin Emmalyn had been making a variety of packets with different scents and reported to Tessie when last she’d come to work that already sixty-some packets had sold. Evidently it was all Emmalyn could do to keep up with customer demand.

“Hullo, Emmalyn,” she called, pushing her woolen mittens into her coat pockets before hanging her coat, along with her scarf, in the narrow closet behind the main door.

“
Gut
to see ya, cousin.” Emmalyn’s smile had an extra lift.

“Feels nice getting out of the house.”

“That’s what Mandy says, nearly every time she comes to work.”

“Oh?”

Shrugging, Emmalyn went to open the curtains, letting the sunshine in to slant across the old floorboards. “I daresay havin’ the shop is a godsend.” She made her way to the next window.

“For me, too,” Tessie said before thinking.

“I’ve wondered . . . well,
hoped
so.” Emmalyn stepped back to see if the ties on the draped curtains were even, then went to Tessie, took her hand, and led her to sit on one of the two chairs near the counter. “No need standin’ when no one’s here just yet.”

Tessie Ann was grateful to sit down, still absorbing her grandfather’s surprising family news as she was. She looked at Cousin Emmalyn, realizing again how very caring she’d always been. “Seems like an especially long week since I saw ya last.”

“No doubt.” Emmalyn sat next to her, glancing up at the little black-and-white wall clock behind the counter. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a few minutes before the customers arrive. They tend to swish right in on the weekend, ya know.”

Tessie smiled, glad for the quiet. Such peace here!

Emmalyn leaned nearer. “I hope ya won’t mind, but I had the opportunity to talk privately with some of my Mennonite cousins this week—an older couple over in New Holland. I didn’t mention names or many details, mind you, only that someone I love dearly might need a place to stay . . . just maybe.”

“How kind,” Tessie said. “’Tween you and me, I just don’t know what’s going to happen anymore.” It was possible things might heat up between her and Dat again, especially after next Preaching Sunday. And Mamma certainly wasn’t as cordial or agreeable as Tessie had always known her to be; clearly her mother believed she was making a serious spiritual error in not confessing completely. Things were just becoming plain awkward at home. Well, everywhere, really.

By the look of compassion in her cousin’s eyes, she didn’t
need to tell Emmalyn more of this. “This means so much to me,” Tessie said.

“I won’t let you be an outcast with no place to go,” her cousin said, touching her hand again, patting it like Ella Mae Zook sometimes did.

A few minutes later, the door opened and a half dozen or so Englisch ladies came inside chattering, carrying stylish purses over their shoulders, their coats and brightly colored scarves bringing in the cold dampness.
The promise of
springtime
, Tessie preferred to think, wanting to grasp the positive side of things, although right now it was nearly impossible.

As Tessie rode home from the shop in their driver’s van, a smattering of birds flew in a perfect line across Nate Kurtz’s meadow, a little ways from her father’s house.
Another sign of coming spring,
she thought, aware of her ever-expanding stomach.
And my
little one has been growing inside me all this time.
She wondered what might be suggested at her consultation this Monday at the Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg. She’d already lined up this same driver to take her there but hadn’t said a word to anyone, not even Mamma, who’d have to manage the laundry alone.

Turning away from the window, Tessie realized her lips were pressed together, as if deep in thought. Thanks to Dawdi’s revelation this morning, she was seeing her mother in a completely different light, one that reflected great loss.
Mamma lost two babies . . . were there more?

It was excruciating to dwell on such things. No wonder
Mamma hadn’t felt comfortable telling her. Tessie’s older sisters, if they knew, had never breathed a word to her about it, either. Surely, the Wise Woman knew, but she was a keeper of secrets and could be trusted implicitly.

Tessie Ann shifted in her seat as the driver pulled into the lane. Looking over at the front porch, she gasped softly. Bishop John and her father were standing together, their collective breath turning wispy white as they talked. She shivered at the sight, but they were seemingly so caught up with whatever they were discussing that they didn’t even look her way when she quickly paid the driver and hurried toward the house.

“Did ya have a nice day?” Mamma asked as Tessie came in the back door, even before she had a chance to hang up her outer garments. This seemed peculiar, and Tessie waited till she went into the kitchen to say that she’d had a fine day, indeed. “Did
you
, Mamma?”

“S’pose so.” Mamma looked befuddled. “Till just now.”

“I hope the bishop’s visit hasn’t upset you.” Tessie reached for a warm chocolate chip cookie on the plate situated in the center of the counter.

Mamma craned her neck toward the front room, gawking for a moment. “Ach, looks like they’re still at it out there.”

Still at it . . .

Tessie wasn’t sure she wanted to know what was going on.

“Seems the bishop has changed his mind.”

“Oh?”

“He says since ya started to confess last time and didn’t finish that you oughta do so before the brethren mete out discipline. He’s not forcin’ you, though. That wouldn’t be right.”

Bowing her head, Tessie remembered all too clearly, last Sunday rushing back to her on wings of sadness. She’d started to lie and say she was sorry for making love with Marcus, to give the bishop what he’d asked for. But the way things ended up was far better in the sight of God than confessing to the wrong thing.

“Mamma, I tried tellin’ Dat the whole truth.”

“Tessie Ann . . .”

“And I’m sorry for disobeying you and Dat in following my heart with Marcus,” Tessie said, her voice rising. “But Dat has discouraged me from revealing all that I told him. He forbade it, actually.”

“Ach, the things you say make me feel
verlegge—
troubled, daughter. I see with my eyes you’re going to have a baby, yet you haven’t confessed as much to the membership. How can you be with child without having sinned?”

“Mamma,
please
.”