Chapter 5
Rachel met Joseph at the door of the greenhouse the next morning. “I talked to my aenti Ruby about our plan. She said I can use her booth at the Bird-in-Hand Farmers Market the Saturday before Christmas. It’s one of their busiest days of the year, so we have to be ready by then. But it doesn’t give us much time to grow anything.” She glanced at the wall calendar. “We have six weeks to prove I can do this.”
Joseph gave a quick nod. “All right. Let’s prove it, then.”
Rachel smiled. “So you’re with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“Wonderful good!” Rachel’s smile exploded into a grin before she realized she might seem a little too eager. She had better clarify. “As business partners, I mean.”
“Right.” Joseph stepped aside to check the propane level in the heater, but Rachel thought she caught an impish glint in his eye before he turned away. She wished she could decipher him. Because that sure did seem like a friendly sort of glint—the kind of glint a boy might give a girl who caught his fancy. Rachel frowned. She had to stop these silly notions. She sighed and studied Joseph’s tall, muscular frame as he lifted a container of yarrow and moved it to the potting table.
“This one’s looking kind of bad. You might want to take a look.”
“What?” Rachel cleared her throat. She had been staring at the curve of his biceps beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his blue button-down shirt. The very idea! What had gotten into her? “Right. The yarrow.” She eased closer and made a show of focusing on the plant’s brown-tipped leaves. “Ya. Something’s not right.”
Joseph rested a hip against the potting table and looked down at her with an indulgent smile. Rachel worked harder to focus all attention on the yarrow. She had a sneaking suspicion that he was on to her.
Rachel worked very, very hard not to look at Joseph for the rest of the day. It was not easy. Especially when he asked about her feelings. She wanted to shout, “Really? You’re that good-looking and thoughtful too?” It just wasn’t fair. Who could resist a man like that?
When Joseph asked how she felt about the pushback from her parents, he was considerate enough to add, “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“No, it’s all right.” Rachel tried to get her thoughts together, but the sparkle in his brown eyes and the concern in his voice distracted her. “I don’t mind talking about it. I feel like no matter what I do it will never be enough to prove to Mamm and Daed that I can make it on my own.”
Joseph nodded. “Let’s see how the next few weeks go. I bet they’ll come around.”
Rachel let out a long, tired breath. “Maybe.”
Joseph grinned. “Why don’t you tell me about this plant. Yarrow, right?”
“Ya.” Rachel ran her fingers over the feathery leaves. They tickled in a soft, reassuring way. “You can make it into tea to bring down a fever. That’s what they say, anyway.”
Joseph broke off a leaf, rubbed it between his thumb and fingers, and smelled the crushed leaf. “Smells bitter. I bet it tastes terrible.” He glanced at Rachel. “You’ve never tried it?”
“No.” She laughed. “Aspirin works better.”
“Ya.” His mouth curled into a knowing half smile. “But aspirin comes from the bark of a tree, doesn’t it?”
“Willow.” Rachel’s brows knit together. “How’d you know that? I thought . . . ”
“That I didn’t know anything about plants?” He winked at her. “You should have asked.”
Rachel stared at him with a surprised look, then pointed to a nearby plant. “Okay, Mr. Smarty-Pants, what about Evening Primrose? What’s it good for?”
Joseph chuckled. “I didn’t say I knew everything about plants.”
“So you still have something to learn?” It was Rachel’s turn to smile.
“Ya.” Joseph shrugged and kept that endearing look on his face. “I guess you’ll have to teach me.”
Rachel’s face felt hot. She dropped her gaze to the yarrow and wondered if Joseph was trying to distract her from her troubles. If so, it was working. It was working too well!
Joseph scanned the greenhouse. “I know about this one.” He walked to a pot of redroot on the next shelf and smelled the clusters of tiny white flowers. “My grossmammi used to grow it and make tea with it. I haven’t had it since she died, but I remember it tasted like wintergreen gum.”
“I can’t believe you know about redroot.” Rachel flashed a competitive grin. “I bet you don’t know its other name.”
“You’ll have to try harder than that,” Joseph said as he returned the grin. “New Jersey Tea. My grossmammi said our family used to drink it when they ran out of tea and coffee. They came over from Germany really early, back when you couldn’t get that kind of stuff.”
Rachel straightened in her chair. “Mine came over on the Charming Nancy.”
“Huh. That’s pretty cool.” He grinned at Rachel. “I guess we both go way back. Grossmammi traced our family all the way back to a little settlement way out in the middle of nowhere. Well, not anymore. It’s probably full of strip malls and big-box stores now.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of sad when you think about it. Anyway, I think it was the first place the Amish went when they came to America.”
“Wait a minute. My ancestors lived there too. Was it at the base of the Blue Mountain—the place where most of the Charming Nancy passengers ended up?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.” Rachel shook her head. “Our ancestors were neighbors three hundred years ago?”
Joseph raised his eyebrows. “Small world.”
“I know most people around here have some kind of connection. We all came from the same place, pretty much. But still. This is pretty amazing.” She leaned forward and began to talk faster. “My family can trace all the way back to a man named Jacob Miller, who married a woman named Greta Scholtz.”
“Yeah? We go back to some guy named Eli Webber. He married a woman named Catrina, but we don’t know what her last name was before she married him.”
Rachel stared at Joseph as if seeing him for the first time. “I’m surprised you know this stuff. You never liked history in school.”
Joseph laughed. “I remember you were the best in the class.” He picked up the pot of redroot and studied the teardrop-shaped leaves. “I don’t care about history if I can’t relate to it. I like history that reminds me who I am.”
“Exactly!”
Joseph set down the pot and smiled down at Rachel. “I think we’re going to make a good team, ya?”
* * *
Joseph noticed that he was whistling as he switched off the milking machine and picked up the battery-operated Coleman lantern. He planned to hang out in Lancaster with Chrissy after he finished his chores, so he told himself that was why he was in a good mood. She had left three messages for him in the phone shanty that week, so he knew that she was looking forward to the evening too.
He thought about Chrissy as he trudged across the backyard and up the old wooden staircase to his bedroom. He needed to pack his English clothes before Abner arrived. As he stuffed a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt into a duffel bag, his mind drifted to Chrissy’s dyed-blond hair, gold earrings, and manicured fingernails. Her fancy styles had seemed so sophisticated and exotic when they met. But now—
Joseph realized that he wasn’t whistling anymore. Abner and the other guys were jealous—Chrissy was a perfect ten, they said. So why did Joseph feel a heaviness about the whole thing? Joseph frowned and tightened the drawstring on his bag. He looked around his plain bedroom and wondered what he was doing with his life. Everything here looked familiar and safe: the bare, whitewashed walls, the colorful quilt his grossmammi had sewed, the unadorned handmade chest of drawers, the black trousers and collared shirts that hung from a row of pegs. Chrissy would say that his room looked empty. But, for some reason, Joseph thought it felt very full.
Joseph sighed as he picked up the bag and hurried down the flight of wooden steps that led to the front door. They creaked under his weight the way they always did. The banister felt smooth and cool beneath his palm. As he passed through the entryway he heard the rattle of pots in the kitchen and his father’s deep laugh. The scent of rosemary and roast chicken followed Joseph out the door and onto the spacious porch. His footsteps echoed across the floorboards as he dashed toward Abner’s buggy.
“You’re late!” Abner shouted, and grinned.
“Ya.” Tonight would be fun. Most of his friends would be there, and Chrissy would hang on his arm and giggle at everything he said. So why did he feel a tug coming from the farmhouse behind him? He glanced back before he hauled himself into the buggy. He imagined the warmth of the woodstove and the whisper of paper as his father turned the pages of The Budget after dinner. He imagined the click of his mother’s knitting needles and the silence. It was that silence that he wanted to get away from, wasn’t it? Hadn’t he always wanted something louder? Something more exciting? Something . . . unexpected?
A disturbing thought ricocheted up Joseph’s spine. What was he really looking for? What would he find that he didn’t already have at home? He settled into the seat beside Amos and felt the buggy sink under his weight.
“What’s the matter?” Amos asked as he flicked the reins. The horse snorted and lunged forward. The buggy swayed and jerked down the driveway. The movement felt as familiar as breathing. So did the hard, rhythmic clomp of hooves against pavement.
“Nothing.”
“Still torn up about the accident? I told you not to worry about that. I didn’t have to race you, ain’t so?”
“Ya. Thanks.” Joseph ran his fingers through his hair. “But that’s not it. I was thinking.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
Joseph sighed and looked out over the countryside. The setting sun sent long, bright rays across the rolling hills, painting the grass yellow and making the world glow. The fields and pasturelands stretched to the horizon in colorful squares like the pattern on his grossmammi’s quilt. “I wonder if I would like it better here if I had been born English.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it’s easy to dismiss the familiar. What’s that expression the English have?”
“ . . .‘The grass is always greener on the other side’?”
“Ya. That one.”
Abner laughed. “When did you get so serious? You sound like my daed.”
Joseph grinned sheepishly and shook his head. “Ach, forget it. I don’t know what’s got into me.” But his grin dropped as soon as Abner looked away. Joseph knew exactly what had gotten to him. And it didn’t make sense at all.