16

In less than a week, Bethany’s missing brother had returned and was being investigated by a big city lawyer, her church had built a community garden, she had discovered that her mother was mentally ill, and to top it all off, the brand-new community garden had been trashed . . . and rebuilt.

Still, the sun rose on Wednesday morning and Harold the Rooster crowed and new guests were due at the inn this afternoon. It was strange how time moved along, like a river rushing to meet the ocean. Nothing could stop it.

Right after breakfast, Mim and Bethany scrubbed and cleaned the guest flat, washed the windows, changed the sheets and towels, and prepared the rooms for new arrivals. Now the sisters were expecting Bethany to help serve lunch at the Grange Hall. As she put on her bonnet to walk to the Sisters’ House, Chase greeted her at the door, barking his big, deep bark, wagging the whole back half of his body. “You want to come with me, don’t you?” Chase tilted his head toward her for a nuzzle. She scratched his back, rubbed his ears. “You’re the best.” She didn’t know how anybody could get along without a good old dog.

The rain from last night had stopped, but the air was thick with it, dense to breathe, smelling of damp soil. Now and then a slight whiff of horses wafted through. Geena invited herself along and they walked to the Sisters’ House, Chase trailing behind, sniffing and baptizing every bush along the way.

On the way, Geena asked how she was processing through all of yesterday’s events. “As I thought about it last night, I realized you probably have more questions than answers. And most likely, the sisters have the answers. Some of them, anyway.”

“I’ve thought of little else.” Bethany blew out a puff of air. “I had to bite my tongue last night when I saw the sisters at the garden—I wanted to ask them what they knew about my mother. Wanted to but didn’t. I’m not sure I can handle knowing anything more. I doubt it’s good.”

“Wait for God’s timing on this, Bethany.”

Bethany glanced at her, a little annoyed. “I told you—I didn’t say anything.”

“Waiting on God doesn’t mean forgetting or ignoring. It means you pray for God’s timing. Ask him to let you know when the time is right. Don’t act until you sense God’s leading. Waiting on God isn’t passive. It’s very active.”

“Then what happens? Should I be on the lookout for a burning bush or something?”

Geena laughed. “I don’t think you’ll need something quite that dramatic. For me, it’s more like a knowing, deep inside. The more I pray, the more familiar I’ve become with getting direction from God. I try not to act until I get his prompting.”

It never crossed Bethany’s mind to pray the way Geena prayed—asking and expecting and asking some more. She had no idea a person could talk to God like that. No idea at all. She’d been in church all her life—different churches too. Amish and Mennonite. Never had she heard that prayer was a two-way conversation. Was it that her churches didn’t encourage that kind of praying? Or had she just not paid attention?

As they turned onto the road that led to the Sisters’ House, Geena brought up Naomi’s warning. “Does she get those . . . presentiments . . . often?”

“She thinks of them as intuition. Gut feelings. And she thinks everyone has intuition but people don’t listen to it enough. But I’ve noticed they seem to be related to her migraine headaches.” Bethany kicked a stone off the sidewalk. “Naomi is an interesting person.”

“Her voice reminds me of a librarian, hushed and refined. She seems like a gentle soul.”

“That she is. She does generous and loving things without even a second thought. But she’s stronger inside than she might seem on the outside.”

Geena grinned. “That’s the opposite of the girls from the Group Home. They look tough on the outside, but inside, they’re still little girls.”

“Why do you like those girls so much?”

“I’ve always been partial to teens,” Geena said. “That’s why I love being a youth pastor. If I were running that Group Home, I’d start a weekly Bible study for the girls. And I’d try to organize a mentoring program for them, so they could be matched with people—” she held her palm out to Bethany “—people like you, who have so much to teach these girls.”

Oh no. No thank you.

“I guess the thing I like about teens is that they’re less jaded than adults, more vulnerable, more willing to believe.”

“But you’re going to look for another youth pastor job?”

“Oh yes. I like supporting teens during their impressionable years—to make them feel part of the church, to listen without lecturing them, all while pointing them toward God’s highest and best.”

“But what if a church wasn’t in a building?”

Geena opened her mouth to say something, closed it, opened it again, closed it. She seemed flustered by the question, yet it seemed so obvious to Bethany.

Sylvia was in front of her house and called out to them when she saw them coming up the road. “Turkey Rice Soup on the menu today.” She was filling a little red wagon with jars of homemade turkey stock.

“It’s the first time all summer that serving a hot meal sounds good,” Bethany said. She and Geena took the wagons on ahead to the Grange Hall while Sylvia gathered her sisters.

Chase wasn’t allowed in the Grange Hall kitchen, so he moseyed over to the community garden to visit with a few gardeners working on their plots. Geena unlocked the kitchen and started to unload a wagon. Bethany stopped for a moment to gaze at the gardens. It was amazing to see that the garden didn’t look all that different today from how it looked on Saturday afternoon—neat and tidy and full of promise.

“REMARKABLE SIGHT, AIN’T IT?”

Bethany flinched at the loud sound and spun around to find Hank Lapp standing a few feet away from her. “Morning, Hank. What are you doing here?”

“Thought I’d give some help to the gardeners.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Well, some of them are new at this. That family there—” he pointed to a mother with two little girls—“they’re planting onions next to beans. That’ll stunt the growth of the beans.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If you haven’t been raised Plain, you don’t know about gardens.”

Well, that might be stretching things a little, but it was true that the Amish passed their know-how from generation to generation. Bethany picked up a sack of flour, glad to see it. She’d ask Sylvia to see if she could get some flour so she could start making biscuits for lunches. That store-bought white bread had no taste at all. She glanced at the Group Home. She wondered if those girls ever had a homemade biscuit before, hot from the oven, topped with a pat of cold butter. Maybe today, if she could get started soon.

Hank shielded his eyes, looking over the garden plots. “You’d never know this place had been such a mess.”

In her other hand, Bethany picked up a big jar of broth. “When I think of what happened last night to the gardens—yes, it is remarkable.”

“I wasn’t talking about last night. I was thinking about how it looked just a week ago. The whole lot was a mess.”

She smiled and handed Hank the jar of broth, then another. If he had time on his hands, she had things for him to do. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Takes a pretty determined woman to have seen all that through.”

She looked at him in surprise. “You mean me? Oh no. I was just a small part of it. These gardens were a community effort.”

“Look at this,” he said, spreading his free hand to encompass the garden. “Do you remember what a wreck this was? A less determined woman . . . a less stubborn woman would have given up before she even started. Not Bethany Schrock.”

She grinned. “Stubborn—now that label most of my family would agree with.”

“There are worse things than being stubborn.”

Chase noticed a few girls from the Group Home in the garden before Bethany did. He went flying over to greet them. To her surprise, Rusty bent down and rubbed his head all over.

Hank was watching the interaction too. “I think we should call it ‘The Second Chance Gardens.’” He handed the jars of broth back to Bethany and sauntered off to help the mother and her children in their garden plot.

She watched him walk down the garden path. When she first became acquainted with Hank Lapp, she thought of him just like everybody else did: an odd fellow who made church a little more interesting. She remembered countless Sundays when Hank would fall asleep during the sermons, snore loudly, then jerk awake. He would look around the room, startled, blinking rapidly like a newborn owl, oblivious to the disruption he had caused. Another time, his stomach growled so loud that the minister stopped preaching and looked right at him. “Die Bauern haben gern kurze Predigten und lange Bratwürste,” Hank told him in his usual loud voice. The belly hates a long sermon.

Hank Lapp had always been amusing to Bethany, but that was all.

After Jimmy started to work for Galen, Hank dropped by Eagle Hill and the King farm often and she discovered other sides to him: his kindness, his good intentions, and his love for the Plain life despite his stubborn streak. He had a good heart, Hank Lapp did. She held the kitchen door open with her foot and motioned to Geena to start the assembly line to unload the little red wagons.

By the time the sisters arrived, the wagons were unloaded, the biscuit dough was resting, and Bethany was chopping vegetables for the soup. Geena stood next to her, staring at the cutting board as Bethany took the last onion, made six quick, deep cuts into the flesh, another six crossways, then chopped through the onion.

“The speed that you cut an onion is amazing,” Geena said.

“No man is his craft’s master the first day. That’s a saying my grandmother likes to quote. In other words: do enough of anything and you’ll get good at it.”

“Except for preaching,” Geena said with a grin.

Just then the girls from the Group Home slipped in early—something Sylvia didn’t normally allow. She thought Sylvia or Fannie might shoo them out but they were preoccupied with taking turkey meat off the carcass and chopping it up for the soup. Lena, Ada, and Ella, setting the tables, were too softhearted to ask them to wait outside.

Bethany would have liked to give those girls jobs to do to help get lunch ready—set places, sweep the floor, fill glasses with that sugary Dr Pepper and juice drink—but when she brought it up once, Sylvia disagreed. She said it wasn’t time yet. Bethany didn’t know what she meant by that—as far as she was concerned, there was work to be done and those girls needed to work.

Geena left the kitchen and went over to talk to the girls from the Group Home. She pulled out a chair and sat next to Rusty. They talked awhile—sadly out of Bethany’s earshot. Geena patted her on the shoulder. Why? Rusty didn’t seem like the type to pat much.

Bethany had been watching Rusty since she came in. Inside her battled a war: her basic nature was to be confrontational and she knew, she just knew, Rusty had something to do with the trashing of the community garden. But she also knew it was wrong to accuse others. Hadn’t it been drilled into her for as long as she could remember? What right did she have to accuse another of a sin when she was a sinner herself? And she was.

Still, wasn’t it important to be held accountable for one’s actions? To face consequences. Isn’t that what Rose was trying to get Tobe to understand? But then . . . Rose wanted Tobe to take responsibility for himself. That was the rub, right there. Bethany wanted someone else to hold Rusty accountable. She could feel the pointed finger of judgment brew within her, and that was where pride gained hold.

“It’s good of you to show interest in those girls,” Bethany said when Geena returned to the kitchen.

“It’s always illuminating to me,” Geena said. “It really boils down to the fact that the girls want to feel understood, accepted, and heard even while they struggle to understand, accept, and hear others. I guess it’s not that surprising when I stop to think about it. That’s what everybody wants and what everybody finds so hard to do.”

Bethany took a pan of biscuits out of the oven. “I guess that’s the difference between the Amish and the English. Being English means you struggle to find your place. Being Amish means you belong.”

Geena found a spatula in a drawer and scooped the hot biscuits into a basket. “Don’t forget these girls are on the extreme side of your definition of being ‘English.’ Most of them have never been wanted by their families; they’ve never belonged anywhere. I remember something one of my seminary professors had said: ‘Most people are in way more pain than anybody knows.’ That is so true.” Geena carried the dirty spatula to the sink and rinsed it off. She put the spatula away in a drawer.

Bethany started to ladle out the soup into empty bowls set on the countertop. “I guess I haven’t thought about why the girls were the way they were. I’ve only noticed how they act. Like they’re always pushing people away from them.”

Geena set the soup bowls on a tray. “What I’ve come to learn is that hurt people push others away because they want someone to come and get them, to say they haven’t forgotten about them, to show how much they’re wanted and needed.”

Bethany fit three more bowls on Geena’s tray. “Maybe if those girls made a little effort in the right direction, it might be easier for people to want and need them.” There it was again: judgment. It was gaining a foothold. “Don’t listen to me. I’m still frazzled from yesterday.”

“It’s been a big week for you, Bethany. It’s a lot to process. Give yourself time.” Geena squeezed her arm before she took the tray to the dining room.

Process. Geena had used that term before. She made it sound like thoughts and feelings were in motion and maybe they were. Bethany felt like she was trying to sort things through and put them where they belonged. It was as if her cluttered mind was a version of the Sisters’ House and she was trying to get it organized.

Bethany ladled out more bowls of turkey rice soup and put them on a tray to take to the table of Group Home girls. They always sat in the same place—the farthest table. One clump on one side, one clump on the other, as if they didn’t like each other and, probably, they didn’t. She tried to focus on what Geena had mentioned—that these girls, including Rusty, were hurt souls, longing to be loved and valued. Noticed.

With a sigh and a prayer, she took the tray over to the table and set it on the table. One by one, she served a bowl of soup to each girl. She forced herself to smile and make eye contact. Then she came to Rusty. The two of them locked eyes almost like clockwork.

As Bethany reached across the table to serve the bowl to Rusty, she slipped Bethany a note. She put it in her dress pocket. When she went back into the kitchen, she pulled it from her pocket and read it. A chill moved through her, tickling down her spine.

Yesterday was just a warning. Tell Tobe to leave it alone.

It was in Jake Hertzler’s handwriting.