Like his church in Lancaster, the Indiana community here in Shipshe met twice a month. There were church Sundays and there were off-Sundays. Zeb wasn’t sure which weekend he dreaded most.
Sundays when they held church services had begun to feel like a job interview. Various women approached him, asking him a myriad of questions. Was he adjusting to life in Shipshe? How was Josh doing since his grandparents had moved? Was he planning to stay in the area? Their interest was obvious, and he felt as if he should warn them away but never could quite find the words. Worse, sometimes their parents approached as if they were trying to decide whether he was a worthy suitor.
He wasn’t worthy, and he wasn’t a suitor.
He had no intention of dating, let alone marrying.
Not now. Maybe not ever.
Weekends when they had an off-Sunday should have been better, but somehow the smaller groups only increased the pressure he felt.
This Sunday, they had been invited to the Yoder home. With Amos’s five daughters, four sons-in-law and five grandkinner, it was a big group. Add to that mix Zeb, Samuel, Josh, plus two other families that had been invited, and it felt like a crowd.
It didn’t escape his notice that both of the other families—the Gingerichs and the Lapps—had unmarried daughters. The third time he was cornered to answer questions about his job, his prospects and his son, he snagged Josh’s hand and said, “Let’s go to the barn.”
Actually they went behind the barn, where the horses had been set loose. Josh clamored to the top of the wooden fence and perched on the top rung. Zeb stayed close to make sure the boy didn’t fall.
He wasn’t exactly surprised when Eunice stepped out of the barn.
“You’re hiding too?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “Who would I be hiding from?”
Zeb jerked his head back toward the group.
Eunice’s smile was affirmation enough. “I wouldn’t call it hiding—not exactly.”
“I want to hide.” Josh scrambled down from the fence. “Bet you can’t find me.”
“Bet we can,” Eunice said. “And don’t think I’ll go easy on you because you’re short.”
“I’m not short.”
“Okay, I won’t go easy on you because you’re young.”
“I’m five, Eunice.” He held up his hand, fingers splayed. “That isn’t young. And I can count to twenty. Don’t look until I say twenty. I’ll say it real loud.”
Then he dashed into the barn, shouting, “One, two, three...”
“Anything in there he can hurt himself on?”
“Probably.”
Zeb had been staring out at the horses. Now he jerked his head toward Eunice only to see her smiling.
“I’m kidding. He’s been coming here for two weeks. He knows what tools are off-limits. You sure are jumpy.”
“Ya. Five-year-old boys can do that to you.”
They both glanced toward the barn as Josh continued to shout numbers. “Twelve, thirteen...”
“He counts well.”
“That he does.” Zeb turned away from the field and the horses which only made him wish he could be out there instead of stuck in a crowd of people. Crossing his arms, he leaned against the fence, studying Eunice.
She waited.
Eunice was like that. She didn’t push a guy to talk if he didn’t want to. It was one of the many reasons they’d been friends for so long.
“What are you hiding from?” he finally asked.
“Are you kidding? Both the Gingerich family and the Lapps have unmarried sons.”
Zeb couldn’t help laughing. It started small like a grunt and grew until he was clutching his side.
“What’s so funny?”
He pointed a finger at her while he tried to catch his breath.
“Are you laughing at me?”
He could tell she was trying to sound offended. In truth, Eunice didn’t offend easily. She was very even-tempered unless you misplaced one of her tools or didn’t return one you’d borrowed. He’d only made that mistake once.
“What’s so funny?”
“Both families also have unmarried daughters.”
Understanding dawned on her face. “You think my dat is setting you up?”
“Do you think he’s setting you up?”
“I wouldn’t put either one past him.” Eunice worked some dirt from under her nail. “After marrying off four of his daughters, he thinks he’s an expert at matchmaking. The fact that he’d had no success was one of the reasons he nearly sent me to Kentucky. Now that I’m staying, seems he’s back to his old tricks.”
Zeb managed to wrangle his laughter under control. It felt good to laugh though. It had been a long time. Why was that? Why was he determined to be so dour? Even he felt it—the unnaturalness of his moods, but it had become a habit now, and habits were difficult to change. He shook off that thought, cocked his head and asked, “So? Is that so bad? I mean all of your schweschdern seem happy. Maybe Amos is good at matchmaking.”
“No, thank you.”
“No, thank you because...”
“And now you sound like Dat.”
He was about to answer when he heard Josh holler from the barn, “Did you hear me say twenty? Are you looking yet?”
Zeb pushed away from the fence. “I guess we should go look for him.”
“Or we could leave him there, grab some desserts and hide on the back porch.”
He wasn’t usually a laugh-behind-the-barn, touchy-feely kind of person, but this was Eunice. She’d watched Josh seven times now, and nothing terrible had happened. Zeb was starting to think this arrangement just might work out.
So he snagged her arm and pulled her with him into the barn. “See, that’s something a person who doesn’t have a child would say. Once you have a child, you’re blessed with an enormous sense of guilt that won’t allow you to do such things.”
“Sounds terrible.”
“Some days it is.”
It was pretty easy to find Josh, and true to her word, Eunice didn’t cut him any breaks. She walked over to the workbench, bent down and said, “Want to try again?”
“Yes. This time I’ll hide outside. One, two, three...” And he was gone, running back out into the sunlight.
“Lots of energy,” Eunice noted.
“You have no idea.”
“How are you doing?” Eunice asked. She waited, studying him, and then added, “I mean how are you really doing?”
From anyone else, that question would have produced an odd resentment that he’d been nurturing for just about two years now. Coming from Eunice though, he couldn’t work up any indignation. “Terrible.”
“Ya?”
“Every day is...hard.”
She didn’t respond right away to that. Didn’t say it would get better. Didn’t lecture him that it was time to move on. Instead she swiped at a clean workspace with a rag. “I don’t understand why life has to be so hard. Why did my mamm die? Why did your fraa die? Why is life like this?”
“Hey. It’s not all bad.” Zeb realized the irony of him saying that. He was trying to cheer up Eunice versus the other way around. That was backward. Wasn’t it? What did she have to feel blue about? Sure, she’d lost her mamm, but that had been so many years ago.
“What? What did you just think of?”
He gulped but knew there was no use in denying it. “That you’re my age, and you’re still grieving the loss of your mamm.”
“So?”
“So, will Josh carry around that burden all of his life? Will he still be missing his mamm when he’s twenty-five?”
“Maybe it’ll be different, because he’s a guy.”
“Meaning?”
“You all tend to ignore your feelings, right? I mean... I think I read that in some Englisch magazine. Ten ways to find out what your man is really feeling.”
“You read Englisch magazines?”
“What else are you supposed to do while you’re waiting in the checkout line?”
“Fair enough.”
She nodded toward the area outside the barn. “Your son yelled twenty like five minutes ago.”
“Right.” Zeb squared his shoulders and walked outside.
Eunice reached for his arm. “Don’t worry about Josh. I mean, I know you are going to worry about him, but don’t worry about that. What you just said—I don’t think he’ll be grieving until he’s twenty-five.”
“But you still miss your mamm.”
“Of course I do, same as you’d always miss an arm if you lost it, but that’s not...” She glanced away, a rosiness creeping into her cheeks. “I’m just in a funk. It’s not all about Mamm. It’s more about the mess I’ve made of my life.”
“You have?”
Josh’s voice interrupted whatever Eunice might have said when he shouted, “Are you guys even looking?”
“He’s over behind the water trough,” Eunice said. “You want to find him this time, or should I?”
“How about we do it together?”
“Deal.”
“And then we’ll get dessert.”
“Dessert does make most situations seem better.”
“Never makes things worse.”
But as they ambled over to the trough, where he could see his son’s straw hat peeking out from the corner, Zeb couldn’t help wondering why Eunice thought she’d made a mess of her life. As far as he could see, she’d made some pretty good choices. Never falling in love might have its advantages—at least he assumed she’d never fallen in love. She’d never mentioned anyone that she cared about.
He admired that.
If you never put your heart out there, then it couldn’t get broken.
And at that moment, Eunice’s decision to be alone sounded like a very wise choice indeed. Perhaps he could borrow a page from her book. Maybe he could guard his heart against ever caring for anyone again—in a romantic way. Of course he cared for Josh and his parents and even his older brother who frustrated him to the point of distraction most days. But romance? Uh-uh. He didn’t think he’d ever do that again. Even Amos couldn’t set up a match that would break his resolve.
As they walked back to the dessert table, then found a place to sit on a blanket under the maple tree, Zeb couldn’t help noticing something else. Josh was very comfortable around Eunice. He sat close to her. Offered her one of his brownies. Pulled a folded-up piece of paper from his pocket and showed her his most recent drawing. This time it was an old barn, with a stick girl beside it wielding a hammer in one hand and what might have been a bottle of linseed oil in the other.
His son was growing attached to Eunice Yoder. Maybe it was due to the lack of any other motherly figure in his life. Zeb could only hope that Eunice wasn’t planning on going anywhere because he did not want to see his son experience another loss.
As for Amos’s matchmaking attempts—if that was what today was—he should save his efforts for someone interested. There was an assumption in Amish communities that widows and widowers would remarry. They’d wait an appropriate amount of time. Find a partner who fit the description. Build a life together.
But Zeb had been there and done that. He had absolutely no intention of doing it again.
Eunice was surprised to find that she was enjoying watching Josh three afternoons a week. The kid was easy to be around. He reminded her of Zeb when they’d been young. Zeb had possessed the same energy and impish grin. Caring for Josh felt much more natural than she thought it would. What had she been so worried about?
Her other job—at the yarn shop job—was proving a little more difficult. Mrs. Lancaster had opened The Stitch & Skein two years earlier, and she was very particular about how things should be done. Eunice didn’t blame her. She, herself, was meticulous about where her tools went in the barn.
The problem was that she knew nothing about knitting or crocheting. She’d thought the word stitch always referred to quilting. And the word skein? She’d never heard of it.
“A skein is yarn in an oblong shape, dear.”
“What other shape would yarn possibly be in?”
“A ball or a hank, of course. If you went to a craft store in a large city, you’d find a good many of the yarns are wound in balls, which can make knitting with them a bit difficult, unless they’re a center pull.”
The conversation went on like that until Eunice lost interest, which honestly didn’t take very long. Just when she thought she’d caught on to the lingo, she realized there was a lot more to yarn work than talking about it. There was texture and thickness and color. There was any number of ways for her to make mistakes when trying to help shoppers.
When a customer walked into the store and asked where their hanks of yarn were, Eunice could point them in the right direction. But when they wanted opinions on what colors went with what other colors, she might as well have been color blind.
She’d recently convinced a woman that pink, red and orange would make a lovely sweater. Mrs. Lancaster intervened before the woman actually purchased the yarn, which was a good thing because Eunice was not clear on the return policy. In this case, her boss walked off muttering, “Those colors together could have given that poor woman a migraine.”
Eunice had never suffered a migraine, but she thought she might start if she had to hear yet another conversation about the benefits of alpaca over angora. Ugh. Who would even notice?
She longed to be in her barn, staring into the heart of a windmill.
But she’d made a deal, and she planned to stick with it. The alternative was Kentucky, and she was not ready to take that step. Still—yarn shop? She would have been a better fit for almost any other job. Actually, she would have been better fit for a man’s job. Sometimes the gender stereotypes in their community scraped against her heart. Was it her fault that she enjoyed engines and grease more than baking and sewing?
“I can’t remember what the point of my having this job is,” she’d complained to Zeb the next Wednesday when he’d come to pick up Joshua. “I’m not making enough money to support myself, and it’s not as if I’m going to meet a man in a yarn shop.”
“Ah.” Zeb looked uncomfortable. It was the same expression he always wore anytime she brought up dating or women or marriage.
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? Ah?”
“It’s just that you’re not at the yarn shop to catch a man. You’re there to prove you can take care of yourself. Right? That you can earn a steady income. I thought that was your dat’s alternative to marrying you off.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What?”
“Marrying off. Makes me sound like a...” She decided to abandon that train of thought. “Okay. You’re right. I’m proving myself financially independent. Something no Amish woman has ever been.”
Zeb did that thing where he tried to hide a smile.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Say it.”
“Mrs. Lancaster, the woman you work for, is a financially independent Amish woman.”
“True. Guess I hadn’t thought of her that way.” Eunice attempted to rub a spot of engine oil off her left hand. She’d worked on a lawn mower. How did she manage to get so dirty working on small engines? That would be one advantage of being a knitter, you rarely had to deal with grease under your fingernails.
“We’re both in a funk,” Zeb admitted.
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“Maybe we should do something about it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something besides work and...”
“Work.” Eunice was nodding now. “Say. The antique tractor show is this weekend. My shift at the yarn place ends at three on Saturday. Want to meet me over there?”
“I guess it might be something Josh would like.”
“Are you kidding? Josh loves engines.”
Zeb pinned her with a glare.
She raised her hands in mock surrender. “Not that I’ve let him near one. I’m just saying. The boy is naturally curious.”
“Don’t forget the safety list.”
She rolled her eyes, then closed them, attempting to count to ten and making it halfway. “Great. We’ll meet at the entrance to the antique tractor show a bit after three.”
“Sounds gut.”
They were talking as they walked out of the barn. Josh was giving his customary goodbye hug to Gizmo. As they continued to talk about the tractor show, Josh launched himself at Eunice’s legs, wrapping her in a hug. He was an affectionate kid and did this at least twice a visit. Each time, something in Eunice’s heart thrummed. She’d never thought she wanted to marry and have children. She’d never really considered it because she’d always felt like the proverbial square peg that was supposed to fit in a round hole. But when Josh hugged her and smiled up at her, she wondered if perhaps she should have tried harder to have a conventional life. And then the bigger question always followed those thoughts—was it too late?
Eunice straightened the straw hat on his head, then said, “See you tomorrow, kid.”
“Yup. See you.”
Josh ran to the buggy, stopping to offer Beauty a piece of carrot that he pulled from his pocket.
“Now where did he get that?”
“Helped me in the garden earlier.”
“Ah.”
Eunice stopped halfway between the barn and Zeb’s buggy. “I just remembered what I meant to ask you. Dat needs me to help out at the market tomorrow—fall festival crowds and all that. I think I’ll be in the barnyard. Think I could watch Josh there?”
Zeb looked as if he didn’t like that idea at all, but he was apparently unable to come up with any valid reason to say no. “I guess. It’s just that—”
“We need to be careful. Ya. I know. I read the list every night,” she teased. “No sharp tools. Remember to feed him. Yada yada yada.”
Zeb attempted a laugh, but it fell pretty flat.
“Listen. If it bothers you, I’ll tell Dat I can’t do it. We can meet here as usual.”
“Nein. I’m being overprotective.”
Eunice could feel her eyebrows pop up.
“What?”
“I just thought...well, I thought you weren’t aware.”
“That I’m overprotective? Trust me. I’m aware.”
Which she thought might be a good thing. She stood there waving as he and Josh climbed into the buggy, then drove back down the lane. If she were truthful with herself—and what was the point in being anything but—she did enjoy the variety of her life now.
As for the little boy hanging one arm out of the buggy and waving at her, he was quickly claiming a large portion of her heart. She needed to be careful about that though. Zeb would marry again one day, and when he did, she would be replaced. No one needed a babysitter for a child when they had a wife.
Somehow that thought stole all the sunshine from her day.