Chapter 4
Rose rode beside Jacob in the buggy, hoping she didn’t look as nervous as she felt. Taking care of him the previous day hadn’t been difficult. She was good in an emergency, and she was good at managing a crisis when she had tasks to perform. What she wasn’t good with was conversation. Being alone with someone like this. With a man. With Jacob, sitting close in the buggy, with only her lunch pail between them on the buggy bench.
He had been in a bad mood when she arrived at his farm with Junior. But she didn’t take his crankiness personally. She knew he was frustrated by his injury and probably a little embarrassed by his fall. After all, he had just given her a lecture about how she’d fall if she climbed the ladder.
She sneaked a glance at him. He looked handsome this morning in his denim coat and wide-brimmed wool hat. He had shaved; unmarried Amish men didn’t have beards. And he smelled of Ivory soap, fresh and clean. She liked a man who didn’t smell of the barn.
Rose had offered to drive the buggy, but after awkwardly managing to get in without bending his knee, he’d taken the reins from her without a response. And now they were almost to Bluebird. She’d meant what she said the previous evening when she told him she thought they could still make the fudge for the orders, but this morning she was having second thoughts. Not so much because she didn’t think she could learn to make it, but because she wasn’t sure she wanted to work so closely with Jacob. The previous day, while waiting for X-rays, he had been so nice that she’d thought maybe his interest in her went beyond the attention of an employer with an employee. But by his behavior this morning, she’d been mistaken; he clearly didn’t like her.
She glanced at him to find he was watching her. She looked straight ahead.
Or maybe he did . . .
Jacob cleared his throat. “I, um . . . I’ve been thinking about what you said.” He nodded as an Amish man in an orange hunter’s beanie passed them in a wagon full of grain, going in the opposite direction. “About trying to fill the orders. See . . . it’s important to . . .” He stopped and started. “There’s talk of those big stores opening not far from Bluebird. It may be that people start buying there instead of at Beechy’s and I’d lose my foot traffic. These wholesale orders might be what makes or breaks me by next year.”
There was something in his tone of voice, a vulnerability that Rose appreciated. She liked the idea that he felt he could share his concerns with her. She took a breath. “I know you didn’t want Clara to hire me, Jacob, but I think . . .” She glanced up at him. “I think maybe it was God’s intention . . . for me to be here. To help you.”
He tightened his grip on the reins and guided the horse up the snowy driveway that ran along the sweet shop, toward the single-stall barn in the back. It was a clear, cold day, but the sun was shining. “I don’t know about that, but . . .” He exhaled. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that . . .” He looked at her. “I’m grateful you’re here and I think maybe . . . just maybe we can get those orders made.”
She smiled, clasping her gloved hands together. “I know we can do it. Of course, I don’t know that I can work in the back and see to customers.” She went on quickly before she lost her nerve. “So, I asked my cousin Mary’s niece to come in today. She’s a nice girl: modest, friendly, and she knows how to deal with Englishers because her family has a big vegetable stand, summers.” The look on Jacob’s face made Rose wonder if she’d overstepped her bounds. “Just to help midmorning to early afternoon,” she added, trying to soften the blow. “Our busy time.”
He stared at her. “You hired an employee?” He turned on the bench seat of the buggy so that his good knee brushed hers. “For my shop?”
“No, I . . .” She pressed her lips together, wondering if she had pushed him too far. But it was too late now. Taking a breath, she made herself meet his gaze. “Ya, ya, I did, Jacob, and when you see how many pounds of fudge we’re going to make today while Lydie runs the cash register, you’ll be glad I did.”
* * *
“Rose, that’s not how you stir it,” Jacob directed from where he sat on a stool in the shop kitchen.
She had arrived on her own before him that morning and had already started a pot of peanut butter fudge. After resting for a few days, he’d felt stronger physically and had declined her offer to come hitch up for him. The funny thing was, he discovered he missed her smile at his back door this morning. And he didn’t like the idea of her coming to town on her push scooter, not with the icy roads. A car could slide just a little and then what? When he’d found her here this morning, he’d made it clear that Monday morning, he would pick her up in his buggy. And he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Her cousin’s farm was only another mile from his. It wouldn’t take any time at all to fetch her.
“It’s not how you stir it.” She turned on the little step stool she’d set in front of the stove, his big wooden paddle in her hand, and flashed him a smile. “Clockwise, counterclockwise, it really makes no difference to the sugar.” Her brows suddenly furrowed with concern. “Or does it?”
“I wasn’t talking about—” The look on her face registered and he realized she was teasing him. No one ever teased him. His mother sometimes, but no one in his church community, or his neighbors. Not even the couple of male friends he had. It was probably his own fault, at least partially. He’d gained a reputation for being serious, even stern at times and he’d let people go on believing that. It was easier. Then they didn’t get too close. They didn’t get close to him and then die on him.
“You’re not funny,” he told her, unable to resist a chuckle.
“No? Then what are you laughing about?” She kept stirring the fudge.
“It’s going to burn,” he warned. “You stirring it that way, without a pattern. A plan.”
Her cheeks were rosy from the heat of the gas flame and bits of reddish-brown hair had fallen from her prayer kapp to frame her face in curls. “It’s not going to burn.” She reached across the stove to retrieve a tiny, half-pint jelly jar from the counter.
“What’s that?” he asked her. He started to rise from the stool, but he had his leg elevated on another stool and the moment he tried to stand, he found himself off balance. He sat down before he fell down and made a fool of himself again. “Rose, what are you putting in my peanut butter fudge.”
“Secret ingredient,” she said, blocking his view as she removed the lid of the container. “It’s just an experiment.”
“No. Absolutely not. We don’t experiment with my recipes. We don’t change the recipes ten days before Valentine’s Day.”
“This isn’t going to be sent to the shops in Lancaster. It’s a recipe for here. A small batch for me to practice with,” she told him as she dropped lumps of something from the container into the kettle of fudge. “It probably won’t even make it out front. That’s what you said.”
“We don’t change the recipe,” he repeated. He tried to look stern, pointing at the jar. “What’s in there?”
She pursed her lips, clearly put out with him, but not angry. She never got angry with him, not even when he tested her patience. “I’m not going to tell you.” She screwed the lid back on the jar and returned her attention to the bubbling pot of fudge. “Is the pan ready? Another minute and—”
“Rose! Do we have pink salt water taffy?” Lydie hollered, pushing open the swinging doors between the shop and the kitchen. She was a plain girl, thin, long-faced, and always seemed to struggle to speak. At least around him, but she’d already lasted almost two days, which was two days longer than the two girls his mother had tried to hire the previous year.
It wasn’t until Lydie entered the kitchen that she spotted Jacob and then her eyes got big. She looked to Rose. “Salt water taffy,” she repeated. “Pink,” she choked out.
“There’s plenty of taffy in the bin on the table,” Rose told her.
“Who wants salt water taffy in February?” Jacob leaned back against the butcher block counter, directing his comment to no one in particular.
“Those, those are mixed. She wants just pink. It’s . . . it’s for a baby shower. Whatever that is,” Lydie said, keeping her gaze fixed on Rose.
“Look under the counter. If we have any, it will be in one of those plastic bins.” Rose stirred with one hand while talking over her shoulder. “I think there’s a couple of dozen pieces of the pink still there. It’s double wrapped so it will be fresh.”
“Under the counter,” Lydie repeated, backing out of the kitchen. “Under the counter. Pink.”
Jacob waited until she was gone. “Are you sure she’s able to work the cash register?” He lowered his voice. He didn’t want to hurt the girl’s feelings, but he did have a livelihood to protect. “Can she count money? She seems . . . slow.”
Rose made a face as if that were the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “Yes, she can count money and run the register. You just startled her.” She turned off the flame beneath the pot. “She wasn’t expecting you. And you scare her.”
“I scare her?”
“When you use that voice,” Rose pointed out calmly. She grabbed two hot mitts from a nearby drawer and lifted the pot of fudge.
He started to rise awkwardly. “You should let me—”
“Sit,” she ordered. “You told me your knee was swollen last night.”
He lowered himself back onto his stool. She was so pretty today he could barely take his eyes off her. He thought the heat from the stove and the tiny beads of perspiration at her temple actually made her even prettier. He liked a woman who was a hard worker. He liked a woman who enjoyed her work. “You take a man’s dignity away, telling him he can’t milk his own cow or carry a pot of hot fudge to the counter.”
“Nonsense.” She stepped off the step stool and carried the pot toward him. She was surprisingly strong for her size. “There will still be plenty of milkings and batches of fudge after your knee has healed properly.”
He was ready with another one of his homemade walnut wood spatulas, this one shorter and made for spreading. He narrowed his gaze. “You know, I saw those little hearts you’ve been putting on the chocolate truffles.” He pointed at her with the spatula. “You use white chocolate and color it with food coloring?”
“Mm-hmm.” She tipped the pot and he pushed the hot peanut butter concoction into the buttered pan.
“I don’t usually put hearts and such on my candy. It’s not Plain. Not very Amish.”
“Good thing we’re not making the truffles for the Amish, then. They look nice in the little white boxes inside the mini cupcake papers, though, don’t they?”
“Inside boxes with hearts and curly thingies drawn on them.”
“You saw my boxes, too?” She looked up at him.
“I did.” Scooping the last of the fudge out of the pot, he began to spread it. “And you’re right, they do look nice,” he admitted. “Very . . . English.”
“And most of your customers are Englishers, so maybe they’ll like them and buy more, ya?”
She carried the pot to the deep restaurant-grade stainless steel sink he’d bought at an auction. Their backs were to each other, which gave him the opportunity to ask the question he’d been wanting to ask since the night they came home from the hospital.
“Rose?”
“Hmmm?” She turned on the water spigot.
“Could I ask you a question?”
“Of course.” He heard her pump dish soap into the dirty pot.
“Were you . . .” He exhaled, feeling uncomfortable. But the question had been on his mind; he’d lain in bed the previous night wondering. He turned on the stool so that he could face her. “Mam said you’re thirty. That’s old for a—I didn’t mean that you’re old.” He exhaled again, frustrated that he couldn’t figure out how to say what he wanted to say. “Rose, were you—” He pushed the fudge around the pan. If he didn’t hurry, it was going to start to harden and he wouldn’t get the shiny look on the top he liked. “Were you married?”
“I was,” she said softly.
When she didn’t say anymore, he considered letting the conversation go. But he couldn’t. He didn’t want to. “What you said . . . about a disaster, about a husband and son dying in a buggy accident.” Ignoring the fudge, he watched her at the sink. She was wearing a blue dress today, cornflower blue, like the flowers in his mother’s summer garden. Like the blue of Rose’s eyes. “Is that what happened to you? To your family?”
She leaned over the sink, scrubbing hard with a plastic dish brush. “Two years ago. Someone driving a pickup swerved to miss a deer and hit the buggy and . . . they died. Our Isaac was five. His name was Karl, my husband.”
“Rose . . .” Jacob felt a lump in his throat and a sort of melting in his chest, like sugar melting in a hot pan. He had the craziest urge to get off the stool, hobble over, and hug her. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Ya . . .” This time she was the one who exhaled. She turned off the water, lowering the pot upside down on the wooden dish rack on the counter. “So we’ve both had loss, you and I. I’m sorry, too. For you.” She grabbed a dishtowel from a hook and turned to him, drying her hands. “Clara told me about your fiancée. That she had died. Could I ask what happened?”
He looked down at the pan of fudge. It wasn’t going to look as good as most of his batches did. He’d let it go too long and it was already beginning to crystalize along the edges. “Adel was her name. She had epilepsy. We thought her medicine was controlling the seizures, but . . .” He hesitated, wondering how long it had been since he had talked about Adel. Years. “She had a seizure while sleeping and . . . died.”
Rose was watching him and he saw tears gather in the corners of her eyes. For his loss.
And suddenly he felt humbled by Rose’s pain, pain that he could only imagine, and by the smile she still managed. His Adel’s death had been a blow, but they’d not even wed yet. There had been no children. He had loved her, but not the way a man loves a wife of many years, a wife who has given him children. He wasn’t so naïve as not to realize that.
Jacob looked at Rose. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what to say. Instead, he just watched her. Waited for her to meet his gaze, and when she did, he said nothing, because nothing he could say would take away the pain he had seen flicker there.
And then she offered the smallest hint of a smile. A smile that made his heart swell, a smile that reminded him of the bible verse that said God would heal the brokenhearted and bind their wounds. He’d always liked that verse from Psalms.
“I’ll go check on Lydie,” she said, hanging the hand towel back where it went. “See if she found that taffy.”
Jacob watched her go and for the first time since he met Adel, he wanted to know a woman better. He wanted to know Rose better.
* * *
“Mam, why didn’t you tell me about Rose’s husband and child?”
Jacob tried to keep his voice down so Rose, out front in the shop, wouldn’t hear him. When his mother called, he could have hobbled to his office in the back. But then he would have risked Rose hearing something of the conversation if she didn’t hang up quickly enough after he picked up the other extension. Instead, he’d asked Rose to bring the phone to him in the kitchen, stretching the line to its full capacity. He was standing, his back to the wall, a crutch in one hand, the old avocado-green phone in the other. He’d gotten a good deal on the wall phone at a yard sale in nearby Bird in Hand. Englishers used fancy cordless phones now. A phone was necessary to run a business and their bishop had approved the installation, even though it connected the Beechy family to the outside world, but a fancy new cordless phone wasn’t a luxury Jacob needed or wanted.
“The accident,” he whispered when his mother didn’t reply.
“She told you?”
His mother sounded excited on the other end of the phone. It was a good connection. The fact that he could hear her so well when she was six hundred miles away still fascinated him, even though he knew the Englishers had had the technology for years.
“So you’ve been talking?” she went on. “She’s been talking to you? You’ve been talking together?”
“We talk.” He tried not to sound defensive. “We’re together every day.” Of course, not the previous day, because it had been the Sabbath. He’d gone to church at his neighbor’s home. The sermon had been about prayer, based on the scripture from John 17. Preacher Isiah went on a little too long; in Jacob’s mind the man always stretched an hour sermon into two and a half hours, but he’d still had some good points.
“How could we not talk, Mam?” Jacob went on in a bluster. “I have to tell her how much sugar to add to the pot. When the butter’s getting too brown. There’s a lot of talking.”
“I mean talking, talking,” she said. “Talking about personal things.”
The word personal made him feel slightly uncomfortable and yet . . . warm at the same time. It had been a long time since he had had that kind of conversation with a woman. If he was honest with himself, it was the first time he’d talked like that with anyone. Even Adel. But he had been so young then. Known so little about the world or himself.
“You should have told me her family died.” Jacob wanted to say like his Adel, but he didn’t because he and his mother never talked about her. He never talked about her with anyone. Until Rose.
And now he couldn’t get his mind off Rose’s tragedy. Ever since she told him, he’d been thinking about it. About her. She didn’t seem like a woman whose loss had been so great, such a short time ago. She seemed happy. Grateful for what the good Lord had given her, not angry over what she had lost. He didn’t understand how she could be that way, especially with her husband and child gone only two years. He still felt the pain of his Adel’s death every single day. The hole she had left inside was still there, big and gaping.
Jacob admired Rose for her resilience. Her strength. And a part of him felt a little guilty. What right did he have to still mourn Adel so deeply when Rose had lost so much more than a fiancé? Not that one could measure loss exactly, or categorize it, but it had really made him rethink his own feelings. Behavior.
“You should have told me,” he repeated.
“Wasn’t my tale to tell,” his mother replied. “That’s good that she’s telling you such things,” she went on. “She’s a nice girl, isn’t she? Not just pretty. But a good person. And fun. My cousin Mordecai knows her bishop from Delaware. Said he had nothing but good to say about her. A faithful woman. Properly Plain. And an excellent cook, I hear. Mordecai and his family stopped by on their way to Wisconsin to see the new . . .”
Jacob closed his eyes, only half hearing his mother as she rambled on. It had been sleeting this morning. He’d managed to get his buggy hitched up himself, climbed in with help of a milking stool, and fetched Rose. If he’d left five minutes later, he would have missed her. He found her on the road on her push scooter, headed for town. She’d been wet and cold and he’d chastised her for setting off in such weather when he’d told her he would pick her up from now on. She’d only laughed it off and said she wouldn’t melt or freeze. But as she was talking, she’d loaded her scooter into the back of the buggy and reached out to him for help climbing up to the seat. And at that instant when he’d taken her hand, he’d wished he hadn’t been wearing leather gloves and she her woolen ones.
In the close quarters of the buggy, Rose had smelled of wet wool and fresh fastnachts. Homemade donuts she’d brought to share with him for lunch. She’d packed sausage patties and biscuits, too. They’d shared tea and donuts in the little kitchen in the back, and she’d laughed at him when he’d split a donut in half and slid a piece of sausage between the two pieces. Jacob had been disappointed when she’d declared it was time to get to work and left him in the kitchen to finish his tea alone.
“So, Jacob, is it?” his mother asked, bringing him out of his thoughts.
“Is what—Sorry, Mam. What did you ask?”
“The fudge making. Is it going well? Dorcas Lapp wrote me to say she’d been in the shop the other day and the two of you were busy beavers, you and Rose. She said you hired another girl. Do you think you’ll have the orders together in time to deliver them to the Englishers?”
“I can’t say,” he admitted. “Rose says we will. But you know how she is.”
“How’s that?”
“You know . . .” He searched for the right words. “Optimistic.”
His mother laughed on the other end of the phone. He tried not to smile.
“And is that a bad thing?”
“Ne . . . yes. Can be if it’s not realistic.” He exhaled impatiently. He didn’t like the emotions bubbling up inside him. He didn’t like thinking so much about Rose and what she thought and what she said. He didn’t like caring what she thought. “I’m trying to be realistic. I think I should at least cancel the one big order for Amish market. They don’t just want fifteen pounds of fudge. There’s truffles, too. Twenty dozen. Boxed,” he added.
“I know you won’t make the fudge until you’re a week out, but you could start making the truffles now. Once they’re dipped, they’ll stay fresh in the walk-in.”
“That’s what Rose said,” he grumbled.
Again, his mother laughed. “How’s the knee?”
“Fine.”
“You staying off it?”
“I should go. Work to be done.”
“Ya, sohn, you have a lot of truffles to make.”
He wanted to tell her this was no joking matter. His was worried about his livelihood. About being able to take care of the farm, of her. And even his future. The previous night he’d dreamed he had a son. A little brown-haired boy with cornflower-blue eyes. He knew his mother’s greatest wish was to have grandchildren. His hope for children had died with Adel. But his dream had been so vivid. And he’d woke missing the little boy he’d held on his knee.
“Put Rose on the phone.”
“She has customers.”
“Ach, let Lydie wait on them. That was smart of you to hire her.”
“Take care of yourself, Mam. Don’t let Sadie overwork you.”
“Nonsense. Mostly I sit and rock that sweet baby. I’ll call again later in the week,” his mother said. “Take care of yourself. Now let me talk to Rose.”
Jacob tucked the phone under his arm and leaned against the wall for a moment. Then he called loudly, “Rose!”
A moment later, she stuck her head through the doorway. She had what looked suspiciously like a smudge of fudge at the corner of her mouth. “Ya?”
“My mother. She wants to speak to you. I told her you were busy, but—”
“Ne, I’ll take it. Lydie has everything under control. By the way, Mrs. Cranston, the lady down the street in the blue house, she said to tell you she loves the new peanut butter fudge recipe. She came back for another pound. We’ll have to make more.” She took the phone from him. “Clara!”
“What new peanut butter fudge recipe?” Jacob demanded. “You weren’t supposed to put that batch out.”
“Everything is just fine.” Rose turned and walked back into the shop, leaving Jacob to stand there watching the doors swing shut.