14

It was a beautiful afternoon in the first week of April, touched with a hint of spring. After Rose had helped Vera eat her lunch, she desperately needed some fresh air. It was strange how one person could change the mood of a room. Some could fill a room with excitement and energy. Jimmy Fisher was like that. Whenever he joined the family for dinner, which was happening more and more often, Rose noticed that everyone laughed more, ate more, lingered longer.

Then there were others, like Vera, who could drain off energy and joy, like siphoning sap from a maple tree. Her mother-in-law had a way of turning a sunny day into a dismally gray one. Well, she wasn’t going to let Vera spoil this beautiful day.

Rose went out to the flower garden to pour clean water into the birdbath. Chase trotted behind her and ran off to chase a cottontail through the privet, the poor fool. He never caught a blessed thing, though he did his best. She noticed the “Inn at Eagle Hill” sign standing tall and stately at the end of the driveway. Galen had built it, Mim had painted it with her careful, deliberate penmanship, and Jimmy Fisher helped install it. It seemed so official to hang a shingle and the very sight of it brought delight to her.

She glanced over at the guest flat and noticed the curtains were still drawn. On Sunday, Delia Stoltz had a little spark back in her, but now, Wednesday, she seemed to be withdrawing into sadness again. Rose tried to ignore that spike of worry—the last thing she wanted to do was to grow attached to the guests.

But she just couldn’t help it. She knew that Delia Stoltz needed Eagle Hill.

A few days ago, Rose saw Delia take a walk into the hills behind the farmhouse in the late afternoon. An unexplainable pity touched her heart as she watched Delia head up the path, head down, shoulders rounded, fragile and defeated. Yesterday, Rose walked next door to fetch the boys home for supper and couldn’t pull them away until Galen had finished working with a jumpy horse. Galen displayed utter calm—a wonderful example for her sons to observe, especially Luke. When she returned home, Mim and Vera had informed her that Delia Stoltz had entertained a visitor in the guest flat. The male type—but he didn’t stay long, they said. Vera commented on how fine looking the man happened to be, despite being English. Twice, she said it.

Rose had a hunch that fine-looking man might have been the doctor looking for his lost wife. She thought she should check on Delia, but the evening got away from her. Here it was a day later, nearly three, and she still hadn’t had a moment to tend to Delia. Once the boys returned from school, the day was over.

Rose knocked gently on the guest flat door. When there was no answer, she opened the door and softly called Delia’s name. The blinds were drawn to keep out the daylight, and it took a moment for Rose’s eyes to adjust to the dimness. She found Delia curled up in a corner of the sofa, surrounded by a litter of crumpled, damp tissues.

Rose walked across the room to the window and pulled the cord on the window blind. Delia’s eyes blinked rapidly as the bright noonday light streamed through the glass directly into her eyes. Rose’s heart went out to her; she was a pitiable sight. “Delia Stoltz, you don’t seem to me to be a woman without a backbone.”

Delia remained still, facing her for a very long time, and then Rose saw tears well in her eyes and spill over onto her cheeks. “I know you want to help, but you don’t know what I’m going through.”

“You’re right. I don’t.” Rose sat on the sofa, uninvited. “So tell me.”

Delia felt uncomfortable confiding in Rose, wondering if, behind that wide smile and those thoughtful gray eyes, she might be secretly judging her. But if she was, she gave no sign of it. After a few minutes, Delia felt more relaxed in her presence. She thought she might start crying again, but curiously, finally, she was out of tears.

Soon, everything spilled out. Drained and exhausted, she covered her eyes with one hand. “I’m alive. The cancer is gone, I hope and pray. I know I should be grateful for that, but I don’t feel grateful. I feel completely lost.” She opened her eyes, looking for answers in Rose’s patient gaze.

Rose stood. For a moment, Delia thought she was going to put her arms around her and tell her it would be all right, and that would have made Delia furious. It wasn’t going to be all right.

Instead Rose went to the little kitchen, picked up the trashcan, and started to fill it up with tissues. Then she went into the bedroom and made up the bed, tucking the sheets in so tightly Delia would have to pry them loose to get back into bed.

When Rose finished, she came back into the main room. She leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms across her abdomen. “My husband had a knack for numbers and accounting. He started an investment company and, for quite a few years, he was very successful. More and more people heard about Schrock Investments. Dozens of our friends and relatives invested their life savings in the company. Then the recession hit and Dean had trouble keeping up those high returns. So he turned to riskier means to pay dividends. He was sure he could recoup the losses. But it all caught up with him. A year or two ago, everything started to fall apart. Everything.

“Dean had put our home up for collateral with bank loans and lost it. We had to move in here with his mother. The investors started to catch wind of Dean’s problems and tried to pull their money out—but there was no money to pull out. It wasn’t there. Dean declared bankruptcy. Not long after that, the police came to the house and told me Dean’s body was found drowned.”

Delia was stunned. “Your husband took his own life?”

Rose lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “We don’t know. We truly don’t. He’d been having some racing heart troubles over the last year and refused to see a doctor about it. It was a very hot day, but why had he gone swimming in an unfamiliar pond? He wasn’t much of a swimmer. The police declared it an accident—that he was a drowning victim, they said. I hope it was an accident.”

“Didn’t you have an autopsy? That might have answered your questions.”

Rose looked down at the ground. “I refused it. Maybe that was a mistake. I don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t want to have my questions answered.” She walked to the window and looked outside at the boys, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with hay toward the goat and sheep in the pen. “If Dean took his own life, our church believes he would lose his salvation. It’s the ultimate way of turning against God. Of saying that God couldn’t help a person out of a bad spot. I guess I felt it was better not to know why he died.” She spun around to face Delia. “But then there’s God’s mercy too. Dean was stressed to the breaking point. I can’t help but believe that God would understand. I pray so. I pray it every day.”

Delia wasn’t sure how to respond. She had never given suicide much thought other than pity. A terrible, terrible pity. She’d certainly never concerned herself about the afterlife.

“I was left to pick up all the pieces for Dean. I’m doing all I can to pay investors back what was owed to them. But this will follow me until the day I die. I want to make sure it doesn’t follow my children.” Delia saw her hands tighten into fists as she added quietly, “I will not let that happen.”

“You have every right to be angry.”

“Oh . . . believe me, I was. And I can be—it doesn’t take much to flare it all up again. Whenever I get a call from that Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer with another twist and complication, I churn with feelings of anger all day long. But I know I can’t live like that. I can’t live on the precipice of anger. Husband or no, the world keeps on turning. I have children who need raising and a mother-in-law who needs tending to.

“So on those days, when anger returns, I go back to the beginning. I ask God to help me forgive Dean for not being all I wanted him to be, to help me forgive him so I can move on.” Rose gathered a few dishes from the coffee table and put them in the kitchen sink. She turned on the hot water faucet and poured dish soap into the sink, swishing her hand to stir up bubbles. “Life doesn’t always turn out the way we wish it would. Maybe we all have to get to the point in our lives when we face that fact. But I do know that God brings good things out of bad events. I’ve seen it, over and over. God doesn’t waste anything. Not a thing.”

Delia closed her eyes. “I don’t know how to get there. How to get past the anger and disappointment. I wish I did, I wish I were more like you, but I just can’t seem to do it.”

Rose turned off the hot water and faced Delia. “For me, that’s when I pray the prayer that always works.”

“What’s that?”

She lifted her eyes toward the ceiling and raised her soapy hands, palms up. “Help.”

Two cars drove into the driveway, one right after the other. Rose rinsed off her hands and grabbed a towel as she went to the window. “The first car is our vet. She’s coming to look at the colt. He’s not eating enough. I don’t know who is in the second car. A young fellow.”

Curious, Delia rose from the sofa to join Rose at the window. “Why, that’s Will. That’s my son.” It was the first time in weeks that she felt a genuine smile tug at her lips.

“Would you look at that,” Luke said, excitement in his face. He had just arrived home from school and was delighted to see strange cars in the drive. He loved visitors.

The boys were standing in the doorway of the guest flat, watching Delia and her son embrace. Rose scowled fiercely at the boys until they backed off. She shooed them away to give Delia and her son a moment of privacy.

“Why’s he crying?” Luke asked, as they walked to the barn.

“He’s just unnerved—he’s come a long way and I imagine he’s just overcome at seeing his mother,” Rose said.

“But he’s a man,” Sammy said. “Men don’t cry.”

“Men have tears in them, same as you,” Rose said.

She went out to the barn to find the vet, a young woman named Jackie Colombo. Silver Girl’s colt still wasn’t thriving, so Jackie had come up with a few other remedies to help the little horse gain weight.

“He’s just born a little too early,” Jackie said. “Like a premature baby. I’ll show you how to mix up some high-calorie meal for him.” She carried a sheaf of hay to a worktable and took a knife to it, cracking and chopping that hay into baby-size pieces, almost like grain. Then she mixed it with some oats and a little molasses and a chopped apple. She held a handful out to the colt and he snorted over it suspiciously, but nibbled at it. He dropped more than half of it as he tried to chew it, but he went after the stuff he’d dropped. By the time Jackie was packing up to leave, his little sides were starting to fill out.

Sammy came bursting back into the barn. “Mom, something’s wrong with the missus eagle!”

“What makes you say that?” Jackie asked.

Sammy turned to the vet. “She’s screeching and screeching.”

Rose’s heart stopped. “Sammy, where’s Luke?”

“He climbed a tree to get a close-up view of the eagles’ nest.”

The vet stuck her head over the stall door. “That nest must be forty feet high.”

“I know!” Sammy said, proud of his brother’s prowess. “He’s up there!”

“Why would he try to get near the nest?” Rose said. “You boys know how dangerous eagles can be.”

“We been watching them. They head up north during the day to hunt. They haven’t been coming back to the nest by the creek till the sun starts dropping.” Sammy’s eyes were as wide as a dinner dish. “Luke said the nest was at least six feet wide and made mostly of sticks. Some of the sticks are bigger than me, he said. In the center of the nest is a soft spot made of grass and wool. Wool—from our very own sheep!” He took off his black hat, looking sheepish. “I almost forgot. Luke said he was having a little bit of trouble figuring out how to get down.”

Even in the barn, they could hear the screeching sound of an eagle in distress.

“Something must be wrong with her.” Sammy waved his arm at the vet. “It’s good you’re here. You can fix her.”

“I wouldn’t have any idea what’s wrong with her,” Jackie said.

“I do,” said a man’s voice. “She’s defending her home. She’s trying to warn you off. We’d better go get your brother out of that tree before she starts making a run at him.”

They spun around and saw Delia’s son standing at the barn door.

From her window, Delia watched Will escort the attractive young veterinarian to her car after the little boy was rescued from the tree. The two stood by the car, lingering. If Delia wasn’t mistaken, she had noticed a spark or two between Will and the vet as they discussed the eagles. Of course, get Will on the topic of birds and he lit up like a Christmas tree. But wouldn’t that be something—to have him find a girlfriend here, on an Amish farm? She smiled and dismissed the thought. Will always had a girl or two buzzing around him. Never anything serious, except for that one Amish girl, Sadie something-or-other, who had broken his heart. Delia only knew that because Will wouldn’t discuss Sadie—he was pretty talkative about the other girls who had come and gone. Mostly gone. She hoped he would get serious about a girl someday. She was counting on grandchildren.

Earlier today, Will had finished a midterm exam and driven all afternoon to get here. For the first time, she saw not her son, full of boyish charm and mischief, but a competent and determined man.

Will told her he was going to stay with her until she was ready to return to civilization. “Even though you say you don’t need my help, I want to hang around until you’re back to your old self.” He said the next part so firmly that she wondered if he was as confident about her recovery as he sounded. “You’re going to get well, and I want to be there to help you do it. Is that such a terrible thing for a son to want to do? Help his mother, who’s spent her whole life helping him?”

“No,” she had said quietly. “Of course not, but I don’t want you sacrificing the final stretch of your education just because of me. You’re so close to the end. You need to finish and move on.”

They agreed to a bargain. He would stay with her until she received the results about her lumpectomy. If the margins were clear, nothing in her lymph nodes, he would return to school. If they weren’t, well, then they would decide together about next steps. She glanced at her watch. As soon as Will said goodbye to this lady vet, they should get into town so she could try to use her cell phone to call the doctor’s office before it closed for the day. She finally felt ready to hear the results. It helped to have Will by her side.

She saw Rose herd those two boys up to the house. Rose moved lightly and quickly, Delia noticed, whether in the yard or in the kitchen. Often, she sang.

How she envied Rose. Just a week or two ago, if someone were to tell her that she would find herself envying an Amish widow, she would have laughed at the thought. Charles didn’t speak much about his upbringing, but the truth of it was that she didn’t ask about it. She wasn’t interested. She didn’t even ask Will many details about his spring on an Amish farm. If anything, it had embarrassed her to think her husband had been raised Plain, that he had looked like one of those little boys with black hats on. But there was something to this life, to these people. Maybe that’s why Will had been so enamored with them. There was peace here.

Rose was a peaceable person. Delia repeated the word a few times. I like that word peaceable, she thought to herself. It’s what I would like to be. She would try to be more like Rose.

Husband or no, the world keeps on turning, Rose had said. Add cancer to that list, Delia thought. Cancer or no, husband or no, the world keeps on turning.

During the rescue, for a few minutes or even longer, Delia had forgotten she had cancer. Forgotten that her husband had betrayed her. Maybe that’s how emotional healing took place. Not all at once, but five minutes here and there. Hopefully, another minute each day. Perhaps by this time next year, she would hardly think about Charles.

As she pondered that, the strangest thing happened. A large news van with a satellite dish on top pulled into the driveway.

Will waved a hasty goodbye to the lady vet and came to the basement door. “That’s another reason I thought it would be best if I come. The newspeople are still on this story about the disappearance of the doctor’s wife. I saw a TV interview this morning with a scarlet-red-haired lady named Lois—she said you were tucked away at a charming new Amish inn in Stoney Ridge. She said you needed your peace and quiet, so everyone should leave you alone.” He looked over at the news van. “So, of course, they came.”

Vera sat at the kitchen window and watched Bethany hurry off to visit with that neighbor girl, Galen’s sister. What was her name? Vera couldn’t recall. She dismissed that hanging question and turned her attention back to her darling granddaughter. Even as a child, Bethany always did tend to flit through the house like a bird, too full of energy to sit still. Just like Dean had.

Vera adored Bethany, always had. She smiled, or at least she tried to smile. Her thoughts drifted to Rose, cruelly setting the washstand mirror near her bed this morning. Vera had turned and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The image of the droopy side of her face mocked her and she burst into tears. Rose quickly took away the mirror—but it didn’t lift the sadness weighing on Vera’s heart.

She couldn’t believe what Bethany—dear, dear Bethany—did next. She realized how upset Vera was. She rubbed Vera’s back and said it was the most precious smile in all the world, crooked or not. That’s what the sweet child said about her, right in front of those children and in front of that mean-spirited daughter-in-law.

The most precious smile in all the world.

Vera sat up straighter and sighed. “Nothing has worked out like I thought it would.” One little comment in a letter—inviting Dean to come live with her after she learned that his house had been foreclosed—and things had started to happen, things Vera couldn’t see the end of.

When Dean had told her they would accept her offer to move in, she thought it would mean no more worry. No more loneliness. Rose and Bethany and that feisty one could tend to her like daughters should tend to mothers and grandmothers.

But Rose and Bethany didn’t tend to her like she thought they would. Rose didn’t neglect her in any way that Vera could put her finger on, and the children were good to her, minding her when she asked, but there were many times when she felt left out of the life of her own household. Rose was completely absorbed with the constant demands of those children—and Vera didn’t particularly like children. They were noisy and messy. Sweet Bethany immediately started working at that farmers’ market. All day, nearly every day. She was sure that Rose was behind that. Rose worked those children too hard. Bethany, mostly.

When Bethany told her that she wouldn’t be working at her job any longer, Vera was thrilled. When she expressed delight that Bethany would have time to tend to her, Rose said no. She said Bethany needed to find a job outside the house. Insulting!

It was a worry that Vera’s tiniest suggestions were never appreciated. And then she had these awful strokes, and it seemed all she ever did was worry.

Rose would tell her there was nothing to worry about and then mangle Scripture in that way she had, quoting an English Bible when the Amish only used the Luther Bible: “‘Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’”

Each day had trouble enough of its own. You didn’t have to be a preacher to know that was true. But a thing may be as true as death and taxes and still be hard to put into practice.

But for today, Rose would remind her, they had enough. And enough was as good as a feast.

Enough. Enough to keep food on our table and a roof over our heads.

Wasn’t that what Rose was trying to do with this notion of turning the farm into a . . . what was it? What did you call a place where you rented out rooms? Oh . . . it didn’t matter.

What worried her most was that Rose was disgracing the family and didn’t seem the least bit ashamed about it. And she just completely ignored all of those horrible reporters who wanted to know more about the doctor’s wife. She’d like a minute or two with those reporters and tell them what she had to say on the subject: that doctor’s wife should just scoot on home, that’s what Vera thought.

No one in Stoney Ridge had ever run a—what was it? . . . a boardinghouse?—from their home. She’d heard of such liberal Amish a few towns over, but never in Stoney Ridge. Vera shook her head. Dean’s memory deserved far more. He would never have allowed his family home to become a . . . way station for travelers.

Vera struggled to find the word that Rose now used for this farm—the very farm where Vera had lived since she was born. Where her parents had been born. Bed and Bath? Bed and Butter? It was hard for her to remember so many things at once. It never was before. She stared at her right hand. Useless thing. Come, now. Move. Open just a little. Just the fingers, could she make a fist? What good was she without her hands? She couldn’t roll out pie dough or make noodles. She couldn’t pin hair. Sew, knit, garden—those were all lost to her. Such simple, everyday activities and things. How many hundreds of pies had she baked? How she’d loved to brush Bethany’s long hair and pin it in a tight bun.

Vera stared at her right hand again. She noticed the half-done quilt tucked in a basket in the corner of the kitchen, where it had sat since she took sick. With that right hand, hadn’t she knotted comfort quilts for sick folks and prisoners and orphans?

Rose had left the Budget out for her to read, turned to scribe letters from friends in Ohio and Indiana. Trying to determine what the newspaper said had nearly driven Vera crazy. The letters were all jumbled up for her. She’d read stories to Dean as a child. Now she would have to be like a child and have others read to her. Terrible!

Vera did appreciate what Rose did for her. She did. She had messed her bed this morning and Rose didn’t say a word. She had brought her the mirror to distract her and quietly changed the sheets. Vera overreacted to the mirror because she was embarrassed about messing the bed. She knew that about herself.

She also knew that Rose was trying hard to find ways to keep the family together and solvent. But Vera couldn’t let emotions cancel out her common sense. She refused to go soft over this terrible idea of turning their home into a Bed and . . . Brothel? No, no, that didn’t sound right.

Besides, no one knew Rose like Vera knew her. They didn’t hear the roof-raising argument Rose had with Dean on the evening before he died. Poor, dear Dean. Vera came from a generation of women reticent to argue with men. Vera always felt Rose was hardest on Bethany and the other one—the boy, that one who looked just like Dean. The one who ran away. Tobe! That was his name. He ran to get away from Rose, Vera was convinced of that. Why else would the boy have run?

Speaking aloud to the empty kitchen, she declared, “Why won’t God heal me? Haven’t I been serving him right along? Why me?” She no longer had anything to offer. And even worse, Rose wasted time to have to tend to her as an invalid. Vera had to ring a bell and stop everything if she needed anything at all. It was a terrible thing to have to be such a burden to others. A terrible, terrible thing.

Vera picked up the bell with her left hand and rang it as loud as she could.

Chase seemed to be patiently waiting for Delia to return from town. He greeted Delia and Will’s car with his crooked dog smile, as if he knew what she knew. When Delia climbed out of the car, she reached down to pat Chase. The silly dog lifted his head to meet her hand and wagged his tail like a whirligig. Then he collapsed in a fury of friendliness.

Rose walked out on the porch of the farmhouse and waved.

Delia couldn’t hold back her news. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “The cancer is gone! They caught it in time. It hadn’t spread, not even to one single lymph node.”

Will was grinning from ear to ear. “Rose, I think that sign of yours is spot-on.”

Rose walked over to join them. “What do you mean?”

“That phrase, under ‘Inn at Eagle Hill,’” Will said.

“What phrase? I haven’t seen the sign close up yet—and now with those reporters, I don’t want to go anywhere near the road.” Rose turned to Mim, who had come outside to see what all the excitement was about. “Mim, what did you write underneath ‘Inn at Eagle Hill’?”

Mim started blinking rapidly. “A Latin phrase: Miracula fieri hic.”

“Do you have any idea what it means?” Will said.

“No,” Mim said, her face pinching with worry. “I read it in a book and liked how it looked.”

Will grinned. “It means ‘a place where miracles occur.’”