The Amish Groom ~ Men of Lancaster County Book 1 (4 page)

Now that he was going to become a blacksmith, he’d be the first of the Millers to leave the buggy trade. His older brothers, Thom, Eli, and Peter, all worked in the buggy shop, as did some of their sons. On a busy day, there could be a dozen of us in there. Now it would be eleven.

“So I suppose you’re all packed,” I said, clearing my throat.

He smiled at me. “Just about.”

“You probably won’t want to come home,” I said, pretending that wouldn’t bother me in the least.

We both knew it would, though. Low-key guys like me didn’t have a lot of close friends. But since the day I’d come to live here seventeen years ago, I’d had Jake, the best friend of all.

“Are you kidding? Of course I’m coming back. You might forget me, but the horses in Lancaster County won’t. They need me.”

“At least the horses, if not the ladies,” I teased.

Before he could respond, we both heard the distinct clip-clop of hooves behind us. Turning, I spotted a familiar market wagon coming our way, a sight that always filled me with inexplicable warmth. I watched until it rolled to a stop nearby. My eyes met those of the driver, and then she softly said my name. Hers was the sweetest voice I knew beyond that of my mother’s echoes.

Rachel.

She climbed down from the wagon, a casserole dish tucked under one arm.

“
Guder mariye
, Tyler.
Guder mariye
, Jake,” she said. She smelled like a summer morning, like sweet pea blossoms. The ties of her
kapp
flitted in the slight breeze like butterflies.

We tipped our hats, and she and I shared a smile. As Anna’s closest friend, Rachel was one of her two
newehockers
, or attendants, so I wasn’t surprised that she had come early.

“
Mariye
, Rachel,” I said. “You’re looking pretty today.”

Blushing, she was about to respond when Jake interrupted.

“Got a full load here?” he asked, moving to the back of the wagon and peeling up a corner of the tarp to peek underneath.

“
Ya
. The last of the dishes and table linens.”

“Okay. We’ll get them into the barn once we’re done here.”

“
Danke
, Jake.”

He took over with the horse, leading it toward the hitching post nearest the barn as Rachel turned back to me and spoke in a softer voice.

“How’s Anna?” she asked, her eyes sparkling. “Excited, I bet.”

I glanced toward the house and admitted I didn’t know, that we hadn’t really taken the time to speak—other than a quick hello—since I’d arrived.

“
Ach
, well, she’s probably busy in the kitchen. Guess I’d better get in there too.”

“Guess you’d better,” I said, but then neither of us made a move to go. Instead, we just stood there, our eyes locked. Rachel really did look especially beautiful today, her cheekbones a rosy pink, her skin perfect cream, her lips soft and full.

“What?” she whispered, giving me a sexy smile, as if she could read my mind.

“Nothing,” I said, a twinkle in my own eye. She and I both knew that what I wanted more than anything in that moment was to give her a kiss.

“All right you two, enough with the googly-eyes,” Jake said, returning to the woodpile. “Tyler, get over here. We’re not done yet.”

I tipped my hat again and Rachel gave me a wink before she turned and headed for the house.

Jake was right: Rachel really was the perfect woman for me. So why did I keep putting things off?

I returned to my work—lift, place,
thwack
, split—my mind racing despite the calming scent of fresh-cut wood that wafted up from every chop. Rachel had been so patient with me thus far, but how much longer would she wait before giving up on me—on us—for good?

Reaching for another log, I thought again of that time long ago, back when we were children in school. After the “twins” incident and our teacher told her that Jake was my uncle, not my brother, I had expected Rachel to be mad and to keep her distance.

Instead, it seemed our deception had only fueled her curiosity. That night she must have put two and two together and begun to wonder that if I was being raised by my grandparents, then where were my
real
parents?

She came to me in the schoolyard after lunch the very next day, concern etched into her face. “Do you not have a mother and father?” She was practically crying.

“Everybody has a mother and father,” I said, pretending I was not moved by her concern for me. “You can’t be born without parents.”

She was unfazed. “Are they…are you an orphan?”

I frowned. “No, I’m not an orphan.”

“So where are they?” Her eyes glistened.

Even then, I hadn’t known how to explain. What could I say? My mother had died. She was gone for good, living now in a place very far away, as she had since the moment she’d passed. But what of my dad? I had seen him just twice in the past three years. At the time Rachel asked me that question, he was in Japan, by choice, on an extended tour that would keep him gone until I turned eleven. And even though I knew he was very much alive, most days he seemed just as far from me as my mother was.

“They’re not here,” was all I said. Then I’d walked off in search of someone to play with who already knew my story and didn’t need to ask stupid questions.

But Rachel wasn’t giving up that easily. The next day, she tried again, this time taking a seat on the swing beside mine and saying, “Tell me about your mother. What was she like?” Obviously, someone had filled her in, at least a little bit. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have put it quite that way.

I wanted to rebuff her, but again, her question left me silent and confused. What
had
my mother been like? Did I even know anymore? I still had some memories of her, of course, but Rachel had asked me not for memories but for a description.

Sitting on the swing, my toes digging a rut into the dry, dusty ground at my feet, I tried to picture my mom. I could barely recall her face by that point, though I could still hear the faintest echoes of her voice, sometimes in English, sometimes in the Pennsylvania Dutch she’d grown up speaking.

What else?

I remembered her smile, from when we lived in Germany and I found three
pfennigs
in the street as she and I walked to the
backerei
to buy bread.

I remembered her eyes, from when she watched me blow out the candles on a cake she’d baked for my birthday—white frosting with sprinkles on top, just like I’d asked for.

I remembered her long brown hair, flowing out behind her as we pedaled down the street together on our bicycles.

Of course, that had been back when we still lived in Germany. I couldn’t remember moving out of our house in Heidelberg or the long airplane ride to the States, but I remembered my mother calling her parents once we were settled into our new home in Maryland to tell them we had returned from overseas at last. I remembered that conversation well, remembered hearing her say that we wanted to come for a visit. But then after she hung up the phone, she just cried for a long time. And that visit never happened. I never even met my grandparents, in fact, until the day of the funeral, the day they took me home and my old life came to an end and my new one began.

“My mother?” I said finally, turning to Rachel. “She was smart and funny and nice and everybody liked her.” Glancing her way, I couldn’t help but add, “She wasn’t
Amish
, you know. Neither is my dad.”

I could still see Rachel’s face in that moment, the hurt in her big blue eyes. I could still feel the shame burning my cheeks, shame at the way I had said the word “Amish,” as though it was something to be disdained, as though I wasn’t wearing Amish clothes myself or living an Amish life, day after day, in my grandparents’ Amish home.

Once again she had walked away without a word. That was on a Friday, and I felt bad all weekend long about what I’d said. When I saw her again that Monday at school, I was ready to apologize. But before I could, she simply came up to me and gestured across the playground toward the swings. We ran there together, and that time we didn’t just hang still but instead tried to get ourselves going. By pushing off with our feet and pumping our legs, over and over—leaning back, stretching out, leaning forward, curling under—we eventually went so high we were nearly perpendicular to the ground.

“We’re going to swing to the moon!” she cried.

“We’re going to swing to the sun!” I responded.

“We’re going to swing all the way to heaven!” she said. “All the way up to your mother!”

I glanced at her, but she wasn’t making fun. She wasn’t even pretending, really. She was just trying to make me feel better, to say something kind. That was the first I became aware of Rachel’s gift for compassion.

“All the way up to heaven,” I agreed, and in the look we shared as we soared toward the sky, I knew all would be well between us from that moment forward.

T
HREE

A
fter our tasks at the Bowmans’ were done, Jake and I had just enough time to go home to get cleaned up and dressed before coming back for the wedding. In our district, weddings were always held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from October to December. That seemed like a lot of time to fit all of them in, but in densely populated Lancaster County, getting that many young couples married off in such a short amount of time was nearly impossible. Jake had pulled out a calendar once and done the math, and those Tuesdays and Thursdays each fall added up to a total of less than thirty possible days per year on which to hold a wedding. For the people in our district, that meant running like crazy for three months, attending at least one or two weddings per week and struggling to decide between the numerous options that inevitably popped up. Having been through seventeen such seasons myself since coming to live with my grandparents, I’d seen many a couple take their marriage vows. But I was definitely more aware of the details at Anna and Tobias’s wedding ceremony than I had been at any of those in the past.

During the long service I sat with the men as usual, but my gaze kept wandering over to where Rachel sat on the women’s side, in the front row. Looking at her, I pondered the notion that this was most likely my last wedding season as a bachelor. If she and I became engaged soon, as everyone expected us to, then Jake was right. Next fall, I
would
be a groom.

For that to happen, though, I would also need to be a baptized member of the Amish church. While I embraced that idea in theory, in reality I wasn’t so sure. That would mean no more dawns spent gazing into my mother’s pond and wondering what was on the other side, no more sunsets spent thinking of Rachel and wondering if this really was the life I wanted. The time for wondering would be over. The time for commitment would begin.

Rachel had been done with her wondering a few years ago, taking her baptismal vows when she was nineteen. She’d had her
rumspringa
like the rest of us, but over time she had worked through all her questions and doubts about becoming Amish and decided to make that commitment for life. While my period of
rumpspringa
continued to drag on, she had slowly outgrown the youth gatherings and lost the itch to see movies or own a cell phone or wear
Englisch
clothing. When I was eighteen and wanted to get a driver’s license, she helped me study for the written test, but she had no desire to get one of her own. She never made me feel silly or sinful for wanting it, but she did ask me what was the draw in having something that, as an Amish man, I would never use. I’d told her I wanted to see what it was like to drive a motor vehicle, not just sit in one while someone else drove.

What I hadn’t added was that my dad was a collector of muscle cars—something that would have been foreign to her indeed. Though I didn’t visit him often, when I did he would always ask if I wanted to take out his latest acquisition for a spin. If I had a license, I could be the one behind the wheel. Besides, if I really was going to become Amish someday, that meant I would never own a car of my own, and I wanted to know what it was I would be turning my back on.