A Rose Revealed (6 page)

She watched as I suddenly became incredibly focused on my work. She grinned. “No, you don’t. You can’t escape that easily.”

I pretended I’d suddenly gone deaf.

“You know how important a patient’s mental outlook is in her struggle with her illness,” Sophie said in her best rich matron voice. “Well, my mental health today depends on you trying on that monstrosity.” I looked at her askance. “You just want to laugh at me,” I said.

“It’s better than laughing at me.” She pushed herself up against her pillows, leaned over, and dropped her swatch of real hair in the wastebasket. “Lots better.”

I lay the cuff on the night table and walked reluctantly to the bureau. I picked up the blonde ringlets, amazed at how heavy it was.

“This thing weighs enough to give me a permanent headache.” I held it as far away as my arm would reach, my lip curling in disdain.

“Then I’ll give you an aspirin,” Sophie said. “Try it on.”

“It’ll mess up my hair,” I said in a last ditch effort to avoid the inevitable.

“So comb it,” she said unsympathetically. “And if you don’t have a comb or brush with you,” she hurried on when I opened my mouth to offer just that excuse, “you can use one of mine. Or your fingers if you’re too fastidious to share a comb.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not the nurse,” I grumped. “You have no compassion.”

She grinned unrepentantly. “But I love a good laugh.”

“At my expense,” I groused as I lowered the mass of blonde curls onto my head.

Immediately Rose Martin, BSN, EMT, familiar person with a no-nonsense, short cut to her everyday curly, brown hair disappeared, and a brassy blonde with ringlets over my shoulders materialized. I shuddered as I studied my reflection.

“Cute,” said a voice from the door, and Peter walked in.

I grabbed the thing and threw it back on the bureau. It lay there like a small alien beast ready to pounce. I could swear I saw the hair rise and fall as it breathed. “If it’s so cute, why are you smirking?”

“I always take my social cues from my mother.”

I spun to Sophie and saw her unabashed grin. Then she made a big deal of trying to look contrite. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“Like I believe that. But I’ll get the last laugh. I use needles.”

Sophie eyed the wig. “If you don’t want to wear the thing, I think I’ll breed it. It’ll be the latest fad. I’ll call it the Ammonopolus in honor of my elder son. After all, Ammon’s a blond.”

Ammon was tall, fair, and blue eyed like his father had been. In fact, he looked amazingly like the pictures of Tom Hostetter that sat in marvelous ornate frames all over the house.

Sadly, I often suspected that this physical resemblance was the extent of Ammon’s similarity to his brilliant and principled father. Not that Ammon was weak or unintelligent. He was just…ordinary. A regular person. Someone most families would be proud of, even boast about, but who didn’t hold a candle to his clever, inventive father.

But Sophie saw him as his father’s equal in spite of the plastic cars. Even as I disagreed with her estimation, I appreciated her mother’s heart.

Peter, in contrast to his brother, was Sophie’s image: short, dark, and intense though he didn’t have her God-heart. He was handsome, but her fine aristocratic features were blurred a bit in him, like he was a poor copy in which all the colors ran a bit at the edges. Her great, almost black eyes gleamed with life; Peter’s merely saw things. Her quick mind made her conversation lively; Peter merely talked.

But again Sophie never saw her son as less than wonderful. Her mother’s love wouldn’t let her.

“Ammon is the older son, and his path has always been to become CEO of Hostetter Inc.,” Sophie told me one day.

“Sort of like primogeniture in Olde England?” I asked.

“It’s what Tom always wanted. Besides, no company can have two men in charge. Someone has to be the one who calls the shots. First it was Tom. Now it’s Ammon.”

“So what’s Peter supposed to do?” I asked. “Go into the military or the clergy like younger sons used to?”

“Whatever he wants.” Sophie said. “Whatever he wants.”

But what if he wants Hostetter Inc. and Pockets?
I wondered.

It appeared that Peter wanted many things. I was with Sophie one day when he visited her and shared a wild and difficult-to-follow investment opportunity in which he had just sunk a staggeringly large amount of money.

“Mom, you won’t believe the potential!” His face glowed.

“I’m proud of you, Peter,” Sophie said, her voice warm with encouragement as she patted his hand.

He grinned back, pleased to make her pleased.

She watched out her window that day as he climbed into his BMW convertible. “He’s so smart. He’s going to do very well making his own way.” She smiled sweetly as he turned out of the drive and roared away.

I must have looked skeptical because she hastened to explain. “Tom owned three-quarters of Hostetter Inc. His younger brother Ernie, the company’s chief financial officer, owns the other quarter. When Tom died, he left me fifty-one percent of the company. The boys split the other twenty-four evenly.”

So Sophie owned the majority of the shares and thus the power at Hostetter Inc. I wondered how Ernie felt about being dependent on a woman. Some men still resented such a situation with all that was in them.

“Ernie doesn’t mind the younger Ammon being CEO?”

She smiled briefly. “Ernie doesn’t have a choice. He tried a takeover after Tom died. I guess he thought I would be too grief-stricken or too dumb to realize what he was trying to do. He offered me a pittance for my shares ‘to spare me the pain of having to think at a time like this.’”

I almost choked. “He actually said that?”

She looked grim. “That’s when Ammon took to calling him Evil Ernie.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

“It is funny,” she agreed. “But unfortunately there’s truth there too. I told Tom twenty-five years ago not to take him into the company, but Tom was a softy.” She sighed. “We’ve all had to put up with the man ever since.”

“You almost make me glad I don’t have a brother.”

“We’ll give you Ernie,” she said. “For free.”

I stowed my supplies and prepared to leave. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“So you don’t need to worry about Peter.” She patted my hand. “He may not get to run the company, but there’s more than enough income from his stock for him to try his hand at making his own fortune however he chooses.” She spoke with total confidence in her son’s abilities.

He could make that fortune, I thought, if he was clever enough and if his income from the stock continued to provide seed funding. And the income continued only if Ammon was savvy enough to keep the business going, which I wondered about in light of the plastic car fiasco. And what if a new company came along and knocked Pockets from its pedestal? So many what ifs.

But now Ammon’s ability to run the company was moot. At least Sophie wouldn’t be disappointed in her son. I wondered what would happen to both Sophie’s and Ammon’s shares now. Would they transfer to Peter or Ernie? Or someone else entirely? Someone I knew nothing about?

I sighed. “I’m going to miss you, Sophie,” I whispered and actually saw my breath feather into the frosty room.

I pushed back the quilt and hurried to turn up the electric strip heating. I ran to the bathroom and turned on the shower as hot as I could get it. By the time I finally climbed out, slightly pruney, the room was warm. I pulled on jeans and a thick red sweater over a plaid shirt. I tied my sneakers on and clipped my pager at my waist. I was part of the secondary on-call first response team for the weekend. If more than one thing at a time went wrong or if there was a major catastrophe, I’d get buzzed.

Oh, Lord
, I prayed.
I could use a quiet weekend if it’s okay with You
.

I went into the living room with its overstuffed chairs, big old-fashioned desk, and wonderful view of the patchwork countryside from each of the windows. I’d always loved the way the small, family-sized Amish farms quilted the countryside with squares of plowed and fallow fields, great barns, and white houses. Just miles to the south, great expanses of rolling green fields heralded the large horse farms and Olympic training centers of southern Chester County, but here in Lancaster County, the vistas were close and cozy and somehow comforting.

As I watched, Jake’s van drove down the road and disappeared. I noted the disappointment I felt at his going. I guess I had expected—hoped, really, that he’d entertain me all weekend since my staying here was his idea. So much for the dependability of assumptions.

Stifling a sigh, I went downstairs where Mary and Esther insisted on making me a breakfast of eggs, fried potatoes, and toast. They tried to foist scrapple on me, that mixture of cornmeal and unthinkable ground animal parts, but I managed to convince them not to bother. Esther made me another cup of tea that she served in a mug that advertised International Harvester.

I passed the day reading, napping, and taking a walk down the road to the Stoltzfus farm. I had been to that farm as a home health nurse, caring for a newborn infant with the improbable name of Trevor Stoltzfus. Not that either Trevor or Stoltzfus was unusual. It was just that the combination in an Amish household was far from common.

“What a lovely name,” I told his young mother Becky as I weighed the baby.

She grinned. “Not very Amish, is it?”

“How did you decide on it?” I asked.

“I read it once in a novel and liked it. The hero was Trevor.”

I cuddled little Trevor, praising him to Becky as a fine boy, but he was so ill that I secretly doubted that he’d ever grow up to be anyone’s hero.

As I passed the house, I wondered how the little guy was doing. Indeed, as I thought of the tiny chest with the great red wound from palliative heart surgery, I wondered if he was even alive. I hoped so for Becky’s sake. Being a single mother at her age was hard enough even when there were no health complications.

I heard the clop of hoofs and moved to the side of the road as a buggy pulled from the Stoltzfus lane. I smiled at the driver, an old man with a wondrous white beard, but he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead though I knew he must have seen me. I thought of Becky and Trevor, having to live with him every day and shivered.

I turned and walked back to Zooks’.

It was mid-afternoon when Mary, Esther, and I sat down at the kitchen table for a cup of tea. We had just begun a conversation about the best way to put up pumpkin, something about which I knew very little and had no desire to learn more, when there was a knock at the door.

Esther answered and welcomed Becky Stoltzfus in. She was bundled against the weather, little Trevor wrapped in so many blankets that he resembled a roll of batting.

Esther immediately took the baby and began unwinding. Mary rose and took Becky’s coat. I got another mug from the cupboard, this one reading John Deere, and poured Becky some tea.

When we sat back down at the table, Esther kept little Trevor, smiling at him as she hand-brushed his sparse hair. The baby smiled back, and Esther melted.

“He’s so wonderful, Becky.” She bent and kissed his cheek.
“Du bischt an scheeni bubbli
.”

He might be a nice baby, I thought, but he was still a very sick one. He should weigh more than he did, and he had the coloring of someone whose system wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

“How is he, Becky?” I kept my voice casual.

“He’s doing fine,” she said, eyes shining. “We were at the doctor’s last week.”

I didn’t know what the doctor told Becky, but my instinct and training didn’t say fine.

Oh, Lord, it doesn’t look good. A miracle here would be much appreciated
.

Esther’s tea grew cold as she played with the baby. She rocked him, cuddled him, offered him her finger to grasp. She lifted her hand with his fist clamped about her index finger to her mouth and kissed his thin little hand. He giggled.

“Scheeni botchi,”
she said, stroking his hand.
“Scheeni botchi.”

“Some days with a baby is hard, ain’t?” Mary asked the young mother.

Becky nodded. “But he’s not really any trouble.”

“Does he sleep
gut?”

“He sleeps
gut
but not long.” She smiled. “I’m always tired.”

“Does your grandmother watch him sometimes so you can get some sleep?” I asked, setting down my almost empty mug. The tea spiced with spearmint Mary had grown was both delicious and refreshing.

Becky hesitated a minute. “No. My grandfather has told her not to touch Trevor.”

I was stunned. Such action was not at all the typical attitude of the Amish toward babies and little children. They were loving and indulgent toward their offspring for the first two or three years of their lives, giving them unlimited love and lots of attention. Whenever I went into an Amish household for home health reasons, I enjoyed watching how the whole family doted on the babies and toddlers.

“Why ever not?” I asked. “Certainly they don’t think that Trevor’s illness is contagious.” But I knew that wasn’t the issue.

Esther and Mary suddenly looked uncomfortable, but Becky merely smiled sadly.

“It isn’t Trevor they have a problem with,” she said, fiddling with the ribbon hanging loose from her
kapp
. “It’s me.”

“They are very strict,” Esther said neutrally. “They have always taken the
Ordnung
and applied it strictly.”

“Not because they are mean,” Mary hastened to tell me. “They do not want to hurt Becky. They want to obey
Herr Gott.”

“I’m here because my mother begged them to take me in,” Becky said. “They feed me and keep a warm roof over our heads. I’m not complaining. They know I confessed my sin before the church as is right, but I am an embarrassment.”

“Here,” said Mary. “Let me get us all some warm tea. If your cup is like mine, it is lukewarm. We don’t want lukewarm. The Lord will spew us out of his mouth.”

And that quickly, the topic was changed. Shortly afterward Becky wrapped Trevor again and they walked down the road to her grandfather’s farm. Mary and Esther began preparing supper and refused to let me help. I went to my rooms and pondered the anomaly of Amish great-grandparents not touching their great-grandson. I thought about the wealth of forgiveness the Amish had shown the world after the murders at the Nickel Mines school and the lack of forgiveness I saw toward Becky.