Accidentally Amish (13 page)

Mo made it clear the previous afternoon that she was not looking for bids on the work she had in mind. She wanted Rufus. He had done enough odd jobs to prove he was dependable and honest, she said, and she had seen his cabinetry craftsmanship in the home of a friend. Mo was finished repairing falling shelves. She wanted new ones. A new reception desk. New cubbies behind the desk. Perhaps a new look for the small lobby that would appeal to more upscale customers.

In his workshop across the yard from the barn, Rufus sketched the lobby from memory before breakfast. A vision emerged as his pencil skittered across the page, shading in cabinetry and a desk with rounded, welcoming edges. The day before, Mo gestured widely with her own ideas, but they were vague. Rufus’s sketch would accomplish her objectives and improve the traffic flow through the lobby as well.

Engrossed in the task of putting his vision on paper, Rufus did not hear Annalise approach the open door of his workshop.

“Hi, Rufus.”

He turned toward her approaching brightness as he ripped the page from the pad in satisfaction. “
Guder mariye
, Annalise. Are you hungry for breakfast?”

“Famished,” Annalise said. She looked around. “So, this is where you work?”

Her shoulders and back looked less tentative. Her hair hung loose, cradling her face in softness before draping her shoulders with its sheen. Rufus turned his gaze away, abruptly aware of the effect she was having on him.

“I am a simple cabinetmaker and carpenter.”

She touched a small chest awaiting its lid. “It’s beautiful.”

Suddenly he wanted to give it to her, but he had promised it to Sophie.

“I’m missing the gold chain I always wear,” Annalise said, her hand at her unadorned neck. “I wonder if you’ve seen it.”

Rufus slapped his own head. “It’s not lost. They removed it at the clinic when they were doing X-rays. Sophie found it in the bag when she washed your things. She was afraid of losing it, so she brought to me.” Rufus suppressed the warmth that came with thinking about holding the chain in his hand.

“You have my chain?”

“It’s in the buggy,” Rufus said, “in a box under the bench. It did not seem right to have it in the house. Our women do not wear jewelry. I’m sorry I forgot about it.”

“Can I go get it?”

“I will get it. Just wait here.”

Rufus dropped his pencil and sketch into his toolbox and disappeared out the front of the building, leaving Annie standing alone in the workshop. She buzzed her lips and looked around for a place to sit down, settling on a low, rugged bench beside the door.

Curious, Annie tilted her head to try to look at Rufus’s sketch, but he had laid it facedown. All she could see were the impressions of the heaviest lines making slight ridges in the back of the paper. An envelope obscured the bottom of the page. Annie did not have to look too hard to read the writing on the sealed message. The top left corner clearly said “Ruth Beiler” with an address in Colorado Springs. Annie recognized the street name. It was just off a major intersection she drove through several times a week.

Rufus came through the door. Annie stood and moved toward him. He opened a small plastic envelope and poured the gold chain into her open hand. She closed her fist around the gold, brushing his fingers in the process. Was it her imagination, or did his hand quiver just once?

“Thank you!” She opened the clasp and raised the chain to her neck. Her hands met at the back of her neck and buoyed her hair for a moment while she fastened the clasp.

“You’re welcome.” Rufus closed his own hand over the small plastic bag, now empty. “I’m sorry I didn’t remember sooner. It seems to mean something to you.”

“It’s twenty-four-karat gold. I bought it when—” Annie stopped herself. Rufus would not be interested in how she celebrated making her fortune. “Never mind. Just thank you.”

“We should go have breakfast.”

“Yes.” Annie paused. “I do have one question, though.”

“Of course.”

“Why haven’t you opened that letter from your sister?”

Ruth Beiler flipped back to the beginning of the chapter in her textbook. After reading for forty minutes, she would be hard pressed to write a paragraph identifying the chapter’s main themes. In four hours she had to be in class ready to take a quiz. Starting over was the obvious choice.

Thinking coffee might help her concentrate, she rose from the chair and moved to the wide ledge under the window that held a small coffeemaker and an electric kettle. Ruth’s dorm room was compact, but it was private. When she first arrived, she tried living with a roommate, with disastrous results. The young woman assigned to share a room with her did not know what to make of someone with such conservative views and habits. Though they were both nursing students at the University of Colorado, they found little common ground.

In those days Ruth still wore her
kapp.
Now it hung on a hook by the door, and she had traded in her aproned dress for simple long skirts and high-necked solid-colored tops. Her hair was still in braids coiled against the back of her head. She stood out when she walked across campus or boarded a bus to go to her job at the nursing home, but becoming modern had never been Ruth’s intention when she left Westcliffe.

Ruth scooped coffee into a fresh filter and poured water through the small coffeemaker. In a few seconds, the familiar dripping began. She absently tapped the top of the pot while she pondered what really kept her from studying.

If Rufus had read her letter and answered it right away, she would have heard from him by now.

And what if he never read it?

Ruth wasn’t sorry. Her choice was not without consequence. She regretted the pain she caused. But she would choose the same again.

It was an impulse on his part to invite her, Annie was sure. And it was an impulse on her part to accept. Perhaps he regretted it. She would not blame him. Spiritual devotion had little to do with why she accepted, and neither did curiosity.

Little Jacob was glad to see her when Rufus brought the small buggy to pick her up on Sunday morning. The rest of the family would come in the larger buggy pulled by Brownie, the second Beiler horse. Jacob chattered away the miles between the motel and the farm where a cluster of six or eight Amish families would gather to worship.

Church, Amish-style.

Annie’s Protestant upbringing included more or less weekly church attendance. She carried fond memories of going to church and the people who cared for her there. In high school, though, training for track competitions dominated her schedule, and then she went away to college. As an adult, her churchgoing habit was a long way from regular. A few months earlier, though, she had attended a friend’s baptism. In her teen years, Annie always intended to be baptized, but the timing never seemed right.

She believed. Certainly she never decided
not
to believe. But getting an education and launching a career—and starting two companies—required focus. Time. Energy. Now she wondered if she had moved too far away from God for it to matter that she had not been baptized.

Supposing that God still spoke English, Annie decided to pray. After all, she was in church.
Please, God, make this mean something.

Annie now sat on a bench in the back on the women’s side of the room. Rufus gave her enough notice that she was able to rustle up a modest skirt among her thrift-store finds. People around her spoke German, including Rufus’s mother and two younger sisters. The idea of going to church with Rufus should have made her think twice. If she had known the service would be in German and she would not even be sitting with Rufus, she might have thought three times.

Sophie leaned over and whispered into Annie’s ear. Annie quickly tucked her gold chain under the top of her blouse. She had a lot to learn about Amish worship.

The women faced the men. Annie wanted to shift to one side and look for Rufus among the unmarried men—all of them younger than he was. Perhaps she could catch his eye. But she knew better than to wiggle in church. Rufus mentioned that the services tended to be long, but Annie never imagined he meant three hours and two sermons.

With no hint of modernity in the service, Annie supposed the Amish had always worshiped this way, even in the days of the first settlers to land in Pennsylvania. She made a mental note to do a fresh Internet search on “early Amish worship” as soon as it was appropriate to use her phone.

At last the final hymn began with a single male voice. Others gradually joined. Sophie shared a battered hymnal with Annie, but the page held only German words that meant nothing to Annie. Everyone seemed to know the tune.

Annie filed outside with the other women. It wasn’t long before the transformation was under way to accommodate a meal for sixty people. Annie just tried to stay out of the way as men rearranged benches and women arranged dishes on three serving tables. Sophie and Lydia greeted friends they only saw every two weeks at church before being prodded to help with the food. Annie watched the constant movement, but she was at a loss for how to step in and help. Instead, she wandered farther away, past the row where the horses were tied and out to a fence around a field. In a brief episode of English, someone had mentioned that the host family grew barley.

In the middle of the commotion, Annie was relieved to find Rufus walking toward her.

“You might have prepared me a bit more,” she said playfully.

“Would you have come if I had?” He looked over his shoulder, and she followed his eye toward men standing in a group.

She shrugged. “Now we’ll never know.”

“Was it torture?”

“Let’s just say my High German is not any better than my Pennsylvania Dutch.”

“When you learn one, you will no doubt learn the other.”

When.
He said “when.” Annie soaked up his countenance. These were his people. This was his life. And he had honored her by inviting her to share it for these few hours.

“Are you hungry?” His face crinkled.

“Let me guess,” Annie said. “Men eat separately from women.”

“You are learning our ways well.”

“The ways are new to me, but I have a feeling they are very old.”

Rufus adjusted his black felt hat. “We do not rush into change.”

“But you do change, don’t you?” Annie gestured toward the house. “Lights, hot running water. This is not exactly camping out.”

“We consider our choices carefully. Are they good for the family? For the community? Our old ways remind us that we live apart, separate from the ways of the world.”

Annie resisted the impulse to raise her fingers to her gold chain. “Yet when I blundered in bringing the twenty-first century with me, you welcomed me.”

“We welcome anyone who seeks truth.”

Annie’s reply caught in her throat. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she wanted more from Westcliffe than a place to hide from Rick Stebbins. She could have gone somewhere else when she had the chance. And yet she was here.

“Maybe after lunch you could give me the abbreviated English version of the sermon.”

“Which one?” He grinned.

“The one you think would do me the most good.”