Rachel raised her eyebrows at Lavinia as she descended the stairs the next morning and walked into the kitchen with her work tote. She set it on the bench by the kitchen door.
“What’s in that?” she asked, looking over as she stood at the stove.
“Finished the rug I was working on last night,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep.”
She walked over and kissed her mudder’s cheek before pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Mmm, pancakes.”
Rachel flipped two pancakes onto a plate and handed it to her. Amos came in, sniffed the air, and grinned.
“Mmm. Pancakes.” He washed his hands quickly, grabbed a cup of coffee, and sat at the head of the table.
Lavinia pushed the little pitcher of maple syrup toward him and watched as he buttered his pancakes before lavishly pouring the syrup over them. Simple pleasures, she thought. Coffee and pancakes at a big wooden table. Dawn sending pink fingers of light in the window. A day of work you loved to look forward to. New people to greet and regulars to see again. Seemingly ordinary days that had a quiet satisfaction to them.
She was looking forward to no longer visiting the hospital. Those days had never been quite without worry, no matter how much she tried.
Rachel settled herself at the table with her own plate of pancakes and a cup of coffee. When Lavinia saw that her dat had finished his stack and looked hopefully at the stove, she rose and took his plate over to add more from the sheet pan piled with pancakes that her mudder had kept warming in the oven.
“I made a pitcher of tea and sandwiches and left them in the refrigerator for you for lunch,” Rachel told him. “Don’t get so busy you forget to get out of the sun and take a break.”
“Now there’s no need to talk to me like I’m your kind,” he said, but Lavinia saw him give his fraa a fond look.
“I know you.”
He squeezed her hand and set about demolishing his second helping of pancakes.
They left for work a little while later. Lavinia carried her purse, her lunch, and the tote bag with the new rug as well. At least she had something tangible to show for the hours she hadn’t been able to sleep.
“Another rug?” Liz asked when they climbed into the van for the ride to the shop. “Can I see it?”
Lavinia took it out and held it up for her to see. She’d made an oval rug with fabric scraps in pastel colors.
“So pretty. I can just see that in a girl’s bedroom.” She checked for traffic and pulled out onto the road. “I have to find time to drop by your shop soon. I have lots of family to buy Christmas gifts for this year.”
“Never too early to start,” Rachel said.
Lavinia helped open up and set about unpacking and pricing new crafts before displaying them on the shelves and in the front shop window. This was the part of the job she had always enjoyed the most. Working on displays in the shop was a wunderbaar way to be creative.
Remembering what Liz had said about the rug looking like something that belonged in a girl’s room, she took one of the cloth Amish dolls that Sarah, one of their vendors, made and set it on top of the rug.
“That looks pretty,” her mudder said as she came to stand beside her.
“I just need a few things,” Lavinia murmured. “Things aren’t quite the way I want them yet.”
“I can just see those wheels spinning around in your head. Why don’t you take a break, get some air?”
“I’ve taken too much time away lately. You and Sadie have had to take on more so that I could be with Abe.”
“Life isn’t just about familye and work and community, Lavinia,” Rachel said gently. “We need to find time to renew ourselves, to fill the well inside us, or we have nothing left to give to others.”
Lavinia sighed. “You’re right. But after I come back, then you have to do the same.”
Rachel smiled. “I will.”
So Lavinia took her purse and went for a walk.
It was already warm, but not as muggy as it had been the day before. She cast a glance at the sky and, with the skill of a farmer’s daughter, judged the day would get hotter but there would be no rain—gut for farmers harvesting their crops.
She found herself heading toward the quilt shop owned by her friend Hannah to see what she was doing.
Hannah looked up from sewing a quilt as Lavinia walked into the shop and greeted her with a smile. A loud shriek came from the crib in the corner. Hannah’s new boppli looked up and waved a chubby fist at her.
Lavinia detoured to pick her up and give her a hug. “She’s getting so big.”
“Had her six-month checkup yesterday. The doctor says she’s doing very well.”
She hugged her close. How wunderbaar it felt to hold such a sweet little boppli.
Hannah got up to ring up a purchase for a customer, then returned to her seat at the quilting table. “So did Abe go home yesterday as planned?”
“He did.”
“I wish I could have attended his welcome-home party.”
“Danki for sending over so many cookies for the refreshment table. It couldn’t have been easy to make them after a long day of work and with a kind.”
“Gideon helped.” She grinned. “Of course, he ate a number of them while he helped. Said he was quality control.”
Lavinia laughed. She glanced around at the shop. It was so cheerful with all the colorful bolts of fabric and completed quilts hung on the walls and displayed on tables.
“Say, would you be willing to loan us a few skeins of yarn and some knitting needles? I want to use them for a display. I’ll put your business card in with it.”
“Schur. Pick out what you want.” Hannah picked up her boppli and walked with her around the shop.
Lavinia grabbed a wicker shopping basket and walked over to the shelves of yarn, determinedly looking away from the table of fine fabrics prominently displayed for Amish brides this time of year.
“I’m thinking of stopping at Gideon’s shop, too.” She selected several skeins and put them in the basket.
“Eli and Emma are there today while Gideon is working on some Christmas orders.”
She picked up two sets of knitting needles and carried her basket to the checkout counter. “I want to fill a big wooden bowl Naiman made with these, and another with fruit.”
“Clever.” Hannah put the items in a shopping bag and added her card.
They chatted for a few minutes more, and then Lavinia left to visit the toy shop. There John sat in a corner, playing with some cars his onkel had carved from wood, making zoom-zoom noises as he raced them along the floor.
Eli, Gideon’s zwillingboppli bruder, was on the phone. He waved at Lavinia as she walked down the aisles to look at the toys.
How quickly time passed, she thought. It seemed like it was only yesterday when Emma Graber had come back to town with her boppli John, wanting Eli, his dat, to take responsibility for him, give him a home. Eli hadn’t been ready to be a dat when Emma told him she was pregnant. So Emma had done the only thing she thought she could do and moved away.
When she came back, Eli had realized what he’d missed, and they’d worked things out. Now he and Emma and John were a familye living in the familye farmhouse, with Gideon and his fraa Hannah in their own home nearby on the property.
She sighed. It helped to remember that things could turn out well. It was such a bad time for Abe right now. She understood that. She needed to be a friend to him, and maybe one day they could be more. And maybe they’d have their own happy ending.
Yesterday, after the party, had felt like a setback. But it was natural to have setbacks in this…whatever this relationship was. She had to take it one day at a time. With a sigh, she chose two cloth dolls and took them up to Eli at the counter.
* * *
Abe’s first day at home started out so differently from those in the hospital. He woke up surprised to see sunlight coming in his window. He’d slept through the night. It took a minute for him to realize he was in the downstairs bedroom of his home. And that he’d slept soundly because a nurse hadn’t come in to take his blood pressure—and sometimes vials of his blood—in the middle of the night.
The clock on the bedside table said eight o’clock. While he was in the hospital, he’d gotten out of the habit of waking before the sun came up to do his chores. He needed to get back on that schedule, even if he couldn’t do the chores for a while.
He smelled coffee. Levering himself up, he reached for his wheelchair and pulled it closer. The therapists at the hospital had worked with him on transferring safely from bed to chair. He locked the wheels and worked at maneuvering himself into the chair. It wasn’t easy. He had most of the feeling back in his legs, but they still were like rubber, and he had to be careful not to use the arm in the cast. But he was determined to do it without calling for his mudder.
By the time he was seated in the chair and rolling out the door, his face was damp with perspiration. He grabbed a washcloth in the bathroom, dampened it and wiped his face, ran a comb through his hair, and decided he needed coffee before he tried changing from pajamas to regular clothes.
“Well, look who decided to finally get up.” His dat grinned at him. “If it isn’t Rip Van Winkle.”
“Very funny.” He pushed his wheelchair over to the end of the table where he usually sat and noticed his regular chair had been removed so that he could pull up to it.
“I looked in earlier and you were sleeping, so I decided to let you be,” his mudder said as she put a mug of coffee in front of him.
“Danki. You don’t get much sleep in the hospital.”
He noticed his dat had pushed his empty plate aside and was drinking coffee. Abe had a funny feeling his dat had gotten a later start to his morning than back when he’d had to be up early to milk the cows.
Waneta set a plate of bacon, dippy eggs, and fried potatoes in front of him. He thanked her and began eating, thinking how the day seemed so ordinary, so much like so many other days he’d started in this old farmhouse.
And yet it was so very different. He sat here feeling trapped in his chair, needing to ask his mudder for more coffee instead of jumping up to pour it himself, for a cloth when he spilled his coffee and had to wipe it up. He wouldn’t be out milking his cows and doing his morning chores.
Wayne came in, hung his straw hat on a peg by the door, then nodded at him as he washed his hands. Waneta rose to fix him a plate, and it felt as if they were a familye enjoying a meal instead of Wayne being an employee. It had always been so. Wayne’s familye owned a farm that raised vegetables, but one day after schul, he’d stopped by and watched Abe and his dat working with the dairy cows and asked for a job. He’d started off working after schul, and now, in his early twenties like Abe, was a tall, lanky man who Abe had come to feel was a friend, not just a helper.
He ate quickly, not talking much. That was no surprise. He’d been up since before dawn, and this was his first meal of the day. Waneta poured him a second cup of coffee, resting a hand on his shoulder as comfortably as she had Abe’s, and asked if he wanted anything else. He shook his head, thanked her, and then looked at Abe.
“Do you want to go out and see how things are going?” he asked politely.
Abe felt his spirits rise. “If you don’t mind pushing the chair.”
Wayne rose and walked over. “Don’t mind a’tall.”
The cows were grazing in the pasture and didn’t pay him much mind. Wayne pushed the chair into the cow barn, and the sights and scents of it made Abe feel more at home than his house had. There had been times when he lay in the hospital and wondered if he’d ever see it again.
“Everything looks gut,” he told Wayne.
“Danki. Your dat helped a lot.”
He pushed the chair back outside, and Bessie wandered over to the fence. She gave Abe a glance, then returned to chewing her cud.
“I think she missed you,” Wayne said, giving her an affectionate pat.
“I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done while I was in the hospital.”
“Enjoyed it.” He pushed the wheelchair back toward the house. “Does it feel gut to be back?”
“It schur does.”
“No climbing on the roof for a while.”
“Nee.”
He would have said more, but he saw a car pull up in the drive. He sighed. “And the morning was going so well.”
“Visitor?”
“Torturer,” Abe muttered as a woman who looked to be in her forties got out of the car. “Quick, push me back in the barn.”
“Huh?”
Before Wayne could act, the woman, dressed in scrubs and carrying a folder in her hands, glanced over and saw them. “Abe Stoltzfus?”
He could hardly deny it. “That’s me.”
“Bess Thurman. Your at-home physical therapist.” She looked at Wayne. “I can push him into the house.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bess pushed Abe’s chair up the backdoor ramp and into the kitchen. Waneta stood at the sink, washing dishes. Bess introduced herself and turned down the offer of coffee.
“Where are we going to work?” she asked Abe.
“My bedroom’s in the front,” he said, and she pushed him in that direction.
Bess helped him go from the chair to the bed, which his mudder had come in and made up. She took a seat on the chair beside the bed and opened his file. She laid out what she called his therapy plan in a brisk, no-nonsense manner, and then proceeded to do the same type of manipulations on his legs that his hospital therapists had done, but with more vigor.
He was exhausted when she finished and barely able to thank her as she left—his mudder had taught him manners—before he felt himself conking out.
When he woke, the room felt warm in spite of the battery-operated fan his mudder must have come into the room to turn on. The muscles in his legs ached as he struggled into his chair again. When he wheeled through the living room, his dat looked up from his newspaper.
“Well, sleepyhead. Wondered when you’d stir.”
He folded the paper and got up, reaching for his cane. “Your mudder has your lunch waiting for you in the kitchen. I’ll have a glass of iced tea and keep you company while you eat.”
Abe had just finished his sandwich when he had a sudden thought. “Wayne. He hasn’t been paid.”
“I asked him if he’d been paid since you were in the hospital, and he said he could wait until you got home,” Faron told him.
Abe shook his head. “Grab my checkbook and my bill folder from the drawer there, would you, please?” Armed with it, he wheeled himself out onto the front porch and spent the next hour writing checks and balancing his checkbook.
When Wayne came to report that the afternoon milking had been done and asked if he needed anything else, Abe shook his head and handed him his check.
“I’m so sorry you had to wait for this.”
“I told your dat it was no problem.”
“Well, I appreciate that, but I’m sorry there was a delay. And thanks for the extra hours you’ve been putting in.”
Wayne nodded. “Glad to help. You just think about getting well and don’t worry about things.”
Ya, he was a friend, not an employee, Abe thought as Wayne left to go home.
Abe felt depression falling onto his shoulders as heavily as a blanket as he stared out at the road and felt life passing him by. Buggies rolled down it. Cars whizzed past. Everyone was going somewhere. And here he sat thinking about how empty his bank account was and how useless he felt.
His mudder came out with a glass of iced tea and a plate of cookies, and he thanked her for the snack. She sat in the rocking chair and rocked silently.
“What time is it?” he asked her.
“Just after three.”
Hours yet before Lavinia got off work. And he’d acted less friendly than he should have yesterday after the welcome-home party—who knew if she’d even stop by to see him?
“Well, you just gonna sit here and brood?” his mudder asked.
No sympathy for the pitiful here, he thought. “What else can I do?”
“You can help me with some canning in the kitchen,” she told him.
He took a deep breath and nodded. “Schur, I’ll help you.” As she pushed his chair inside, he figured doing something might make him feel a little more positive.