DANIEL’S lone employee, Phedra Ayers, greeted Daniel when he stepped inside the shop. She was a Hutterite and, having retained the bashful disposition of a girl generations removed from her peasant origins, simpered at him under her soft brow. Peppered with an American improvisational style when the going got tough and Old World attention to detail when uneventful days trudged ahead, Daniel appreciated her more and more.
He hired Phedra in large part because she reminded him of his three sisters, Elisabeth, Grace, and Moriah. Three hardy girls who had never shied from difficult chores. Moriah especially, who demonstrated the legendary Amish reserve commingled with a cunning rebelliousness that had led her more out of trouble than into it. In other words, Phedra, like Moriah, was crafty as a crow.
Although they traced their roots to German-speaking people—Daniel’s ancestors came from Switzerland and Phedra’s from Austria—and maintained an unconventional communal lifestyle, the Hutterites yielded to modernization more than the Amish. Phedra’s father was a Flathead County paramedic and her mother worked as a dental hygienist in the nearby village of Somers. Phedra grasped the modern America that Daniel still struggled to comprehend.
A Brady Bunch house?
What did Conrad mean when he uttered those words after entering their home? Aiden, of course, understood fully.
Daniel was glad Conrad slept in and he hadn’t had to face him at breakfast. The evening with Nick went smoothly enough. Still, his resentment toward Conrad’s presence hadn’t diminished like he hoped.
He disliked being burdened with nursing a near stranger who saddled him and Aiden with uncertainty. Perhaps if Daniel hadn’t been so rash to move from their old tiny cabin, they could have refused Conrad on grounds they had no room.
That Conrad was Aiden’s old boyfriend made coping more difficult. He had tried the entire evening to set aside his selfishness, but found himself chewing his lips and averting his eyes more than he intended.
Daniel never liked intruders. He also at one time saw Aiden as an outsider, interrupting his family’s simple oat farm in Illinois. And look where that had led!
The couple had been through much since. Throughout their courtship, mountains of self-doubt, anger, disbelief, and terror stood before them. Until they found each other by chance at Glacier National Park, and all the misery seemed to have wavered behind.
“Did you have a pleasant Sunday?” Phedra said. As usual, she spoke to him in broken German. She was always eager to please, and used her German regularly around him. But hers was as spotty as Aiden’s. Still, far from his hometown in Illinois, he appreciated the chance to speak his first language.
She wore a long jean skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, the same outfit even in summer. Her Hutterite order permitted the women to go without head coverings. Daniel was glad because he did not want his shop to become a caricature of an Amish tourist attraction like the one he had run with his family.
He studied her for a second, long enough to dig deeper into her brown eyes, which reminded him of a horse’s. She never appeared to guess about his sexuality. Aiden was around often, and she seemed, if anything, to have a crush on him. He figured she knew they lived together. The Hutterites were so close-knit, collective living was a religious way of life, and perhaps she might have assumed he and Aiden cohabitated for the same reasons.
He considered telling her about Conrad’s staying at his home while he underwent cancer treatments, but decided against it. “My Sunday was nice and quiet,” he replied in Pennsylvania German. “And yours?”
“We worked on the books for our medical center,” she said in English, probably since she didn’t know the correct German words. “We’re thinking of building one of our own with community funds.” She added in German, “I think it is for the best of our people that we become more independent.”
And Daniel thought it likewise best that he and Aiden should too. “That’s a good plan,” he mumbled toward the wood floor.
Phedra slipped into English when he turned for his workshop in the back. “Should I dust today?”
Daniel stopped and looked at her over his shoulder. “No need to overdo yourself. It’s Monday. Watch the register. But if you want, later you can drag a rag around the shelves and sweep.”
He stepped inside his spacious workshop, already flooded with sunlight pouring through the southeast-facing windows on the garage that he used to remove larger furniture. In warmer weather, he could open the rolling doors and allow the outdoors to come inside.
He placed his lunch inside the small refrigerator where he and Phedra stowed their lunches and snacks, poured a glass of whole milk, swigged from it, and focused on finishing the console for the lobby of a high-end lodge in Columbia Falls just outside of Glacier National Park. Sometime that day he also needed to add finishing touches to the small dining table he was making for a family in Spokane. He had four more large items on his to-do list for clients from Houston to Los Angeles. And more orders came each week.
Don’t use choring as an excuse to hide, his aging father would say. It had always been Daniel’s way, whether God or his father approved. Daniel shrugged off his father’s sagacity and his people’s ultraorthodox dictums, and allowed work to bury his worries.
He’d already cut the legs and side frames for the console, but he needed to smooth the wood before attaching the legs. He pushed sandpaper into the hard pine. The scratching sound sung to him like warblers on a sunny summer morning. Noticing two or three discrepancies in the legs’ widths, he leveled them with his plane. Shavings curled from the blade and tickled his exposed wrists. He worked another fifteen minutes, and once satisfied with his efforts, he used holding glue to attach the legs and secured them with wood clamps. In another hour, he might add the slats.
He gazed out the garage windows. The blue sky, emerald trees, and rolling hills left him forlorn and empty for the first time since his coming to Montana, a place that had stood as a spiritual retreat for him.
He escaped to northwestern Montana before his first marriage to Esther, and then again days before he was to exchange wedding vows with Tara Hostetler. Two times venturing to Montana, both for the same reasons. His last journey led him into Aiden Cermak’s arms. The empty sensation deep in his gut convinced him their journey together faced yet one more mountain to climb.
Balls of nimbus clouds eased eastward across his view. Rain would come later in the day, perhaps sleet, and for sure more snow in the higher elevations. Winter clung fast, but warmer weather would soon sit upon them like a bear guarding its cache.
He returned to work, and spent the remaining morning sanding, assembling, and using his Swiss-made tools to fashion intricate designs on the feet of the table for the Spokane family. The wife insisted on rosettes.
The electronic door chimes rang several times throughout the morning, but neither time did Phedra come for him, which meant patrons had either bought items on display or were fantasy shopping. Before long his hand cramped and he set aside the gouge to shake blood back into his fingers.
Phedra stepped inside the workshop and said in English, “Okay if I break for lunch? I didn’t bring one today. I’m going to Beadsman’s.”
“Did we have many customers this morning?”
“You sold a toy box and a foot stool. One lady might return later to place an order for a pie chest.” In German, she repeated, “May I go to lunch?”
“Ya, du consht gese.”
After he heard the door chime behind Phedra, Daniel took a break himself. Often Aiden would come to the shop at lunchtime if he wasn’t there helping and bring him something fresh from a deli or leftovers from home. Daniel enjoyed their lunches together. But he figured Conrad would be filling his days for a while.
He warmed the leftover chicken and mushrooms in the microwave and spread his lunch on a desk that a customer never retrieved. He at least paid the down payment. Eating alone, he tried to find solace in the solitude. Outside, the south mountains, farther beyond the valley, stood clearer in the noontime sun. He and Aiden shared a love for such views, but what mattered now in their world was the ugly reality of heavy burdens.
The door chimed in the midst of his crumbling the lunch wrappers to toss them into the waste can. The sound met his ears with a different resonance than usual. Next came muted voices. He realized at that moment who had arrived.
“Surprise,” Aiden said, poking his head inside the workshop. “I wanted to show Conrad where you work.”
Conrad moved from behind Aiden and was the first to fully enter his workspace. “Nice place,” he said. “You make what you sell right here?”
Daniel nodded. “Here and sometimes at my workshop at home.”
“I showed him that too,” Aiden said, grinning. “He’s really impressed with your talent.”
Daniel’s face heated. When he was a boy, his parents and the elders warned him that hochmut, or haughtiness, would gain disfavor with God. Yet he could never stop himself from grinning with warmed cheeks whenever anyone complimented his craftsmanship. “I make it all,” he said. “Keeps me off the streets, as they say.”
Aiden escorted Conrad back into the main part of the shop. They looked quite a pair, Daniel thought, while he stayed planted by his worktable and stared at them through the open door. Nearly carbon copies of each other. One fair and blue eyed, the other darker with shocking bright-brown eyes. They walked shoulder to shoulder, mirroring each other’s casual strides as they made their way down the aisles.
Daniel considered joining them and explaining to Conrad some of his most prized creations like he had once with Aiden back in Henry, but he waited until they finished wandering the shop and Aiden returned to his work area.
“We’re heading out to get something to eat,” Aiden said. “Want to tag along?”
“Tag along? I had my lunch.” Daniel lowered his head to the console. “And I have a lot of work here.”
Aiden blew a kiss. Seconds later, the electronic door chimes echoed in Daniel’s head. He wandered up front and watched them climb into Aiden’s pickup. The patient must be pampered, Daniel thought, shaking his head.