14

Early Monday morning, Teacher M.K. stood by the schoolhouse door, waiting for the scholars, smiling and talking with everyone in her mile-a-minute way. As hard as Jenny tried not to, she found herself growing increasingly intrigued by Teacher M.K.’s unique teaching style. And Teacher M.K. wouldn’t let Jenny fade into the background like she usually did. She simply wouldn’t allow it. She would call on Jenny in class even when she didn’t raise her hand. She would read parts of her story out loud as if she thought they were any good. And they weren’t. Jenny was sure they weren’t. Anna Mae Glick told her so.

With Teacher M.K., the world got bigger and then it got smaller. Jenny was amazed. She was starting to notice things she had never noticed before.

First, Teacher M.K. taught them about the stars in the sky, and how the ancient mariners could find their way across the oceans by charting the stars. She brought in seashells and pieces of coral that she had found at a garage sale. She pointed out how a conch seashell looked like the inside of a person’s ear, and that coral looked like veins and arteries.

Next, she brought in an old microscope she had bought for $5 at that same garage sale. She had the class look at things that were too small to see. She said there were much stronger microscopes that could see things even smaller than they could see with the garage sale microscope. A drop from the water pump became a regular sideshow of squirming cells. Jenny hadn’t taken a sip of water from that pump since.

Today, Teacher M.K. had brought in fern leaves and put one on every single desk. “Tell me what you see,” she said.

The room went very still as the scholars counted the leaves. Even the rowdy boys who usually whispered and snickered throughout the lesson sat as still as mannequins.

“The lines on the leaf are like blood vessels,” Danny Riehl said. He adjusted his spectacles for a better look. Danny had this way of looking at things very carefully, even little things. He was always taking things apart and putting them back together. Anything he was curious about. Jenny was a little sorry that Danny was younger than she was, and even more sorry that Anna Mae had dibbs on him. Jenny thought he showed great promise. “And would that be the nervure?”

“He’s always making up them big words,” Eugene Miller sputtered. “He talks like he’s playing Scrabble and is looking for points.”

“Nervure is a word for the rib of a leaf,” Teacher M.K. said. “It’s just a more precise way of explaining something.”

Danny looked at Teacher M.K. and smiled that smile of his, like when she told him about black holes in the sky and stuff like that. In a strange way, Jenny thought they understood each other.

Teacher M.K. said that there were all kinds of illustrations in nature that pointed to the Creator of the universe. God’s handprint was on all of his work, just like when we sign our drawings. Just like that.

Gazing at the fern leaf, Jenny blurted out, “Count the little leaves! They come out just right! Look. On each row there’s just one more leaf less, until it gets to the top.”

Teacher M.K. looked pleased. “You, Jenny Yoder, just figured out today’s arithmetic problem.”

Imagine that, Jenny thought. Me. Arithmetic.

Mary Kate had been teaching for nearly ten weeks now. She had good days and she had bad days, but she wasn’t thinking quite as often about running off to Borneo. Last week, she had a terrible, awful day and promptly sent off her passport application in the mail. Eugene Miller had gone too far, yet again, and put a snake in her pencil drawer. She hated snakes! Always had. She blamed Jimmy Fisher and a certain black racer snake.

Getting her picture taken for the passport made her feel as exposed as if she had run through Main Street in her underwear. She waited at the post office until she was sure no one was around whom she might recognize. Then she quickly had her picture taken by the postal clerk. As soon as it was ready, she signed the application, stuck the money order in the envelope with the application, and handed it to the clerk without allowing herself a second thought. It was a weak moment, one she wasn’t proud of, but knowing it was a done deal gave her a feeling of satisfaction.

In the meantime, she had taken Erma Yutzy’s advice to heart. She tried to find ways to connect to each pupil, to look for that golden moment. Teaching had become strangely satisfying, though winning the affection of the pupils was proving to be harder than she had expected. Not with the little ones, like Barbara Jean, or the bright ones, like Danny Riehl. But some of the older boys and girls were harder to convince, like there was Jenny Yoder. Jenny remained cool and distant. A bright spot occurred today when Jenny started to notice the patterns in the leaf and connected it to math patterns. That was good. Very good.

But later in the day, she had asked Jenny and Anna Mae Glick if they might like to stay after school and help her set up the art project for the next day. She had hoped that if Anna Mae could get to know Jenny, she might start including her with the other girls. But Anna Mae wrinkled her nose and scrunched up her face so tightly that M.K. thought she might suddenly be in pain. “Danny likes me to walk home with him from school.” She swiftly made her escape without a word of farewell.

M.K. knew that wasn’t true. Danny usually burst out of the schoolhouse as soon as she rang the dismissal bell and disappeared into the cornfield before Anna Mae had time to gather her things.

Jenny watched Anna Mae flounce out of the schoolhouse. And then she said, almost in a whisper, “She acts like I’m invisible.”

“You’re not, you know,” M.K. pressed.

Jenny hesitated, her intense eyes searching M.K.’s face. “Not what?”

“Invisible.”

Jenny looked at M.K., then looked away, but not before M.K. saw the way her eyes narrowed and two lines formed between her thin little eyebrows. “Fern is expecting me.” She turned and hurried out the door.

M.K. could have kicked herself. Why did she always seem to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing when she was around those Yoders? Just when they started to open up, she had to say something that scared them off. A turtle in its shell.

Wouldn’t it be nice, Jenny thought as she walked to school, if you could shorten the bad days and save up the time to make a good day even longer? This morning, for example, she would like to swap out for two Christmas mornings.

She knew the entire day was headed in the wrong direction when she overcooked the scrambled eggs for breakfast. Fern had warned her to cook eggs slowly, but Chris was in a hurry, so Jenny turned up the flame on the stove. She burnt her finger on the hot pan handle and couldn’t find a bandage. Then the eggs ended up looking like rubber cement. They tasted worse. Chris didn’t complain, but Jenny was disappointed. Yesterday, Fern had given Jenny those brown eggs, still warm from Windmill Farm’s henhouse, and Jenny had wasted them. Eggs were precious.

Chris hurried off to work and Jenny got ready for school. She heard a knock at the door and ran to get it, thinking it was Chris. But no! Rodney Gladstone, that overeager real estate agent who was always dropping by, stood at the door with that greasy smile on his face. He held out a handful of mail to Jenny. Her mail. On top was a thin gray envelope with her mother’s familiar handwriting on it.

“I bumped into the mailman just a few minutes ago,” Rodney said, still smiling. “Thought I’d save you a trip.”

Jenny grabbed the mail from him and closed the door, but Rodney stuck the toe of his shoe in the threshold, leaving two inches of space to talk through. “I happened to be at the county clerk’s office. Happened to discover that the legal owner of this house is a woman named Grace Mitchell. No one seems to know where she might be.”

Jenny squeezed the door harder on his foot.

“I happened to notice the letter you just received is from a Grace Mitchell.” Rodney’s voice rose a few notes from pain inflicted on his foot. “The return address says Marysville, Ohio.”

Jenny leaned against the door and pushed as hard as she could, and Rodney finally yelped. He pulled his foot out of the threshold and Jenny closed the door tight.

“Any chance that Grace Mitchell is the daughter of Colonel Mitchell?” Rodney called through the closed door. “Any chance Grace Mitchell is your mother?”

Jenny locked the door behind him. She tore open her mother’s letter:

Hi sugar! How ya doing? Listen, Jennygirl, I could sure use some extra cash right now. Would you believe they make us buy our own toothpaste here? I’ll bet Chris has some moola tucked away. Check under his mattress—that’s where he keeps it. SHHHHhhhhh! Just our secret, you and me. Thanks, babygirl! Never forget your mama loves you! XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

Jenny folded the letter and put it in her pocket as she heard Rodney Gladstone’s car start up and drive down the driveway.

She had a very bad feeling about today. She often had bad feelings about days, especially Mondays, but this was different. This was worse.

M.K. had been certain Chris might drop by the schoolhouse or accept Fern’s standing invitation to come to dinner. She thought she might bump into him somewhere. But she hadn’t seen him in nearly two weeks. Their friendship had been progressing, and then, boom, it just ended. M.K. wasn’t good at handling rejection. It had never happened to her.

It was a beautiful fall afternoon—slightly crisp, with the tangy smell of burning leaves in the air. Fern had planned to can garden-grown pumpkins all day, so M.K. was in no hurry to head home. No sir! Canning food in a steamy kitchen might be her least favorite activity. She took the long way and stopped at the cemetery where her mother and her brother, Menno, were buried. The tops of the trees swayed gently in the breeze. She walked up to her mother’s grave and dropped down to clear away the dandelions and brush a bit of moss off the gravestone. Her mother had been gone for most of M.K.’s life, and she couldn’t quite recall her like she wanted to. Sometimes, she thought she only remembered remembering her.

She closed her eyes, trying to think what life had been like before her mother died. The images were so mixed up they never made much sense. She remembered a time when her mother had lifted her into the air and laughed as they whirled breathlessly around the room. Her mother smelled like cookies. And she remembered her father coming into the room and wrapping his arms around the two of them. A sandwich hug, he called it, and his littlest girl was the filling.

That was it. That was about all she clearly remembered of her mother.

“Are you all right?”

M.K. lifted her face, and there stood Chris Yoder, his brow furrowed in concern.

“Are you all right?” he repeated.

She stumbled to her feet. “Where did you come from?”

“I was passing by and saw your red scooter by the fence, then I saw you drop like a stone—I thought maybe you’d . . . fainted or a crow was dive-bombing at you . . . something like that.”

“I’m fine,” she said, feeling oddly nervous, oddly pleased. Chris had been worried about her! She pointed to her mother’s grave. “I was just pulling weeds.”

Chris walked up to her and read the tombstone out loud. “Margaret Zook Lapp, beloved wife and mother.” When he read the date, his eyebrows lifted. “You must have been young when she died.”

She nodded. “Only five.”

He half smiled. His smile was soft. He inclined his head as if he was weighing how much to say. “You must miss her.”

Would she ever stop missing her mother? “I think about her every day. But you know what that’s like. Don’t you miss your folks?”

“Yeah, sure.” But Chris looked away when he spoke, and M.K. could tell that he was lying. Too late, she recalled how Jenny had evaded the question about her parents, or where she was from, just like Chris was doing.

But then he smiled at her and his eyes crinkled at the corners. A funny sensation flitted through her. She felt that peculiar moment of connection weave between them, as if they shared something. Then the moment passed. He was gazing deeply into her eyes with his bright spring-water blue ones and he began to have a mesmerizing effect on her, the same way he had in the barn on that rainy day. She couldn’t have moved away from him any more than the poles of two magnets could be pulled apart. “Are you coming from town?”

Chris nodded. “Your Uncle Hank needed a part for a buggy he’s working on.”

“You’re working as much for Uncle Hank’s buggy shop as you are for Dad’s orchards.”

“I don’t mind. I need the work.” Cayenne tossed her head and whinnied. Chris turned to look at her standing on the road, tied to a fence. “Your uncle is expecting me. I’d better get the part to him.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “Do you need a ride home?” A slight smirk covered his face. “Unless, I suppose, your boyfriend is coming to get you?” He started to walk toward the buggy.

What? “Wait!” she called. “Who’s my boyfriend?” She hurried to catch up with him.

Chris didn’t answer. He helped M.K. into the buggy, tossed her scooter on the backseat, and climbed up beside her. He gave a quick “tch-tch” to the horse and a light touch on the reins and they were on their way home. He whooshed past a slow-moving car as if in a hurry to deliver M.K. as quickly as possible.

M.K. tried once again. “Why do you think I have a boyfriend? Because I don’t. I don’t know who told you otherwise, but I do not have a boyfriend.”

“I see.” He was trying not to grin, but she thought the news pleased him. She hoped so.

“Are you going to tell me who is spreading rumors about me?”

Chris remained quiet for a moment, then gave her a sideways glance.

Right, M.K. thought. The information flowed only one way.

Fern had left Jenny in the kitchen at Windmill Farm, waiting for the oven buzzer to go off and remind her that the last few pies were done, while she took one pie over to a sick neighbor. Jenny and Fern had made six pies this afternoon—three apple, three pumpkin—and the kitchen was filled with spicy cinnamon. Fern had showed her how to roll out dough and how to keep a bottom crust from getting soggy in the middle.

Jenny found a piece of paper and an envelope and sat at the kitchen table to write her mother a letter.

Dear Mom,

I met a nice lady who is teaching me how to bake. First she taught me to bake sourdough bread rolls. The first batch could have chipped a tooth, but by batch four, they were tasting pretty good. Now she’s teaching me to make pies. Here’s a secret: adding a teaspoon of vinegar into the crust helps to make it flaky. Did you know that?

Of course she didn’t. Her mother had never baked a piecrust in her life.

Jenny didn’t know what else to write. She didn’t want to sound too happy, and she didn’t want to seem as if Fern was replacing her role as a mother. Her mom could be touchy about that kind of thing. She had never wanted to hear about what Jenny had learned from Old Deborah either, and she always made fun of their Amish clothing. She used to whisper to Jenny, “As soon as I get out of here, I am giving you a makeover. The works!”

The first time that she could remember her mom getting released from jail, they moved from Old Deborah’s into a halfway house. Her mom gave Jenny a short haircut and took her to a thrift shop for some new old clothes and plunked Chris and Jenny in a public school. Her mother stayed clean for a few months, but it didn’t last long. She had found some work cleaning houses for rich ladies and might have helped herself to their credit cards.

That time, her mother was sent to jail for a longer time. Something about having priors—whatever that meant. Chris and Jenny settled back comfortably at Old Deborah’s. They had made friends and quickly picked up the Pennsylvania Dutch language from Old Deborah and their friends. Three years later, when their mother was released, she yanked them away from Old Deborah and set up housekeeping in a grungy apartment with cockroaches. Chris and Jenny started yet another public school, but they hated it. They felt as if they were walking a tightrope between two worlds: Amish and English. Kids made fun of them for the way they talked or mocked them because they didn’t know television shows or video games. Just as they had finally made a friend or two and life was beginning to be tolerable, their mother started using drugs again. She bought some meth from an undercover police officer.

Back Chris and Jenny went to Old Deborah’s.

The third time Grace Mitchell was released from jail, Old Deborah convinced her to let the children stay at the farm and keep going to the Amish school. She offered to let Grace live with them too. Jenny’s mom complained the entire time that her children had been brainwashed, but Chris noted that she didn’t mind eating Old Deborah’s food or sleeping in a clean bed. She stayed off drugs longer that time—six whole months, but it didn’t last.

Jenny wanted her mom to get out of the rehab center, but she didn’t want another makeover. It took years to grow her hair out again. She liked being Amish and she doubted her mother would let her remain in the church. Chris said not to worry too much about that because he didn’t expect their mother to ever stay clean.

Jenny looked around the big kitchen at Windmill Farm. She loved being here. Everything was calm and predictable. Three meals were planned for, each day. Like right now she could open the cupboard and there would be cereal, and on the counter were some apples and pears, and there was milk in the fridge. It was the nicest family Jenny had ever known, and they were all so kind to her and Chris.

There were moments, like now, when she felt an overwhelming sadness. Why couldn’t she have been born a Lapp? Why couldn’t she have had a mother like Fern and a father like Amos? Not fair. It just wasn’t fair.

The oven timer went off and Jenny peeked inside. She thought the pies needed just a little more time, so she set the buzzer for another five minutes. She noticed Fern’s coffee can by the buzzer, the one where Fern kept cash. She peeked out the window to make sure no one was coming and opened the can. So much money! There must be hundreds of dollars in that can. What would it be like to have so much money that you could keep extra stored in a coffee can? For she and Chris, it seemed money was barely in their pockets, and it was gone. Whoosh.

Then she saw Fern’s buggy turn into the driveway. She put the lid on the coffee can and tucked it behind the timer. She hurried to the table and picked up the pencil. It was always so hard to know exactly what to say to her mom. Finally she added:

Here is a little more money. Sorry it can’t be more, but I have to be careful. Love you! Jenny

P.S. I’ve grown so tall you won’t believe it!

She smoothed out two five-dollar bills and put them in an envelope addressed to her mom. Everybody had someone to depend on—but Jenny’s mom only had Jenny. Even Chris didn’t want anything to do with their mother. Taking care of her was up to Jenny.

It was one of those days that made you feel happy to be alive. On a chilly Saturday morning in mid-November, M.K. decided it was high time to winterize the beehives. The weather this fall had been unseasonably warm. Maybe not warm, but not freezing. Still, she knew winter would arrive, fast and furious. She had spent the morning in the honey cabin, bottling the last of the season’s honey. Now she covered herself with netting and prepared the smoker. As she stapled fresh tarpaper on the outside of the hives, her mind wandered to the first time she had worked with her brother-in-law, Rome, to prepare the hives. It took months before he would let her come close to the hives—he said she had to learn how to be patient before she could be a beekeeper.

Had she learned to be patient?

In some areas. Wasn’t she patient with Eugene Miller’s fits-and-starts path to becoming a better reader? It was a slow, slow process, but just when she thought he would never make any progress, there was a breakthrough. Just this week, he had joined in recitations with the rest of his class. She hadn’t asked him to, but she had given him the reading assignment a few days ahead so he could prepare if he wanted to. She had been doing that for weeks now and he had always refused. But this time, he read out loud in a clear, steady voice. Nearly flawless. Her heart swelled with pride for him. As Eugene’s confidence grew, he was far less annoying to the other children. She couldn’t wait to fill Erma Yutzy in on the changes in Eugene. She only hoped that he would have the skills he needed by late May, when he would graduate. Should graduate.

Such a thought amazed her. She was actually thinking about the end of the term. Wouldn’t Rome be pleased? She was definitely becoming a woman of patience.

She stapled the last roll of tarpaper and stood back to examine her work. It had to be perfect. The cold weather would slow the bees’ activity, but they could survive by keeping the hive at a comfortable temperature. These bees came from a strain of brown bees that Rome’s mother had bequeathed to him, and he had bequeathed a hive to M.K.

A jolt shot through her—no one knew how to care for her bees like she did. When she thought about traveling to see a Maori village in New Zealand, she hadn’t taken into consideration what would happen to her bees. How in the world could she ever leave her bees?

Jimmy Fisher finally located Hank Lapp in the weeds behind the barn. He had his hands held out in front of him, holding onto dowsing rods, gazing at the ground with intent concentration.

“Looking for water?” Jimmy asked.

Hank startled and dropped the rods. “I was,” he groused.

“How do you know when you get close?”

“When I find it, the rods will move by themselves and cross in my hands.”

“Let me save you some trouble,” Jimmy said. He went over to the spigot and lifted the hose. “I’m pretty sure the water comes out of the faucets.”

Hank scowled at him. “For your information, dowsing is a very lucrative skill.”

“How so?”

“Let’s say you’re going to invest in a piece of land. Don’t you want to know what’s under the surface?”

“I’d probably hire a well company.”

“But who’s going to tell the well company where to dig, eh?” Hank picked up the dowsing rods, holding them lightly in his hands. In spite of the fact that the faucet and the pipes were just a few yards away, over by the barn, the rods did not jump in his hands or twitch or cross. Hank frowned.

“I just came to tell you that Bishop Elmo is over at the buggy shop. Mad as hops that his buggy isn’t repaired yet.”

Hank threw down the dowsing rods and pinned Jimmy with a look with his one good eye. “BOY, DON’T YOU HAVE SOMEPLACE YOU NEED TO BE?”

“I do, actually. I came over to look for M.K., but Fern said she’s off visiting her scholars’ homes.” Jimmy mulled that over. “Why would she bother to waste a perfectly good Saturday afternoon on that?”

Hank wasn’t listening. His good eye was peeled on an approaching figure. Bishop Elmo had spotted him from across the yard and was heading his way.