An Amish Gift (18 page)

He shrugged.

“That sounds like fun.” She smiled as she turned the key in the ignition.

The four of them had dinner together that evening, a rare event. Shep and Tim had pretty much given up talking to each other rather than arguing any further. It may have been preferable to shouting, but it hurt Jennie to see; they didn’t make a point of it, yet somehow they managed to avoid addressing each other except when absolutely necessary. Willa, though, seemed to have gained a grudging respect in her brother’s eyes, and he had abandoned his usual custom of giving her a hard time. Jennie found herself reverting to her habit of filling the uncomfortable quiet with chatter. It was funny, she thought: The Fishers didn’t talk much during meals, yet their silences were comfortable and without tension.

After cleaning up, Willa retreated to her room, and Tim went out to meet Peter. Jennie did a quick check of the food
supplies for both the house and the business in anticipation of the week ahead, then got into bed with a magazine, amazed by the luxury of having time to read. Within fifteen minutes, she had fallen asleep. The ringing of the telephone woke her up. The room was dark, and Shep was beside her, also awakened by the insistent sound. It must be late at night, she realized.

He picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

There seemed to be a lot of talking on the other end, as he didn’t say anything else for a long while, but swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. At last he spoke. “Okay, calm down, Tim. Did you call an ambulance? Or the police?”

“
What?
” Jennie bolted up and moved closer to her husband, trying to hear what their son was saying on his end of the phone. “Shep, what is it? Is he all right?”

Shep turned and nodded, mouthing,
He’s fine
.

“Why does he need an ambulance?” she asked, frantic.

He held up a finger, indicating to her to wait a moment. “Exactly where are you two?” He got his answer. “We’re on our way over. Call for an ambulance, but don’t move, either of you, literally, do not move.”

“Shep, what’s going on?”

“He and Peter got into a car accident. Sounds like Peter got hurt, but I couldn’t make out from Tim if it’s serious.”

Jennie was already out of bed, throwing on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. The two of them raced out and into Shep’s truck.

“It’s only a mile and a half from here.” He sped out of their driveway.

“What were they doing there?”

“No idea.”

They didn’t say anything else, and Jennie pointed when she spotted them ahead, illuminated by their headlights. There was her car on the side of the road, the front on the driver’s side smashed in, both boys on the ground behind it.

“Ambulance isn’t here yet,” Shep muttered, pulling off the road and stopping short of the boys.

Jennie jumped out. “Tim, Peter, are you okay?” Tim got up and came over to her. She grabbed him in a hug, and he didn’t resist. “Oh, honey, what happened?”

“Why are you walking?” Shep asked in annoyance as he joined them. “You could be injured.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Peter’s the one who got hurt.”

Jennie hurried over and dropped to her knees. Peter was sitting on the ground, bent over, cradling his right arm. He was hurt, yes, but something else about him seemed not right, different somehow. Then it hit her: He wasn’t wearing his Amish clothes. The black pants and light short-sleeved shirt and suspenders had been replaced by faded blue jeans and a T-shirt. He looked like he could be any boy who went to school with Tim. It was almost shocking to see him this way. The Amish clothes were an enormous part of who they were. Still, Jennie doubted he could shed his Amish identity just by changing a few garments.

“Where do you hurt?” she asked.

“Just my shoulder,” Peter said through clenched teeth.

“Did you call the ambulance?” Shep asked Tim.

“I’m not an idiot,” he snapped. “Yes.”

“Did you let your mother know?” Jennie asked Peter. “Should my husband or I drive over there?”

“No!”

She was startled by the sharpness of his response. “She has to be told, Peter. The sooner the better.”

He shook his head, wincing at the pain it caused him. “It will just worry her. This is my right shoulder, so I won’t be able to do any work with it now.”

“You don’t honestly think that’s what she’ll be worried about, do you?” Jennie asked.

“No, but she needs to be worried about it. My uncle and everybody were going to leave soon. Now …” He dropped his head.

Shep came over and knelt on Peter’s other side. “You know it will work out. Besides, it’s not like you can hide this. And soon it’ll heal, and you’ll be ready to run the farm again.”

“You don’t understand …” Peter shut his eyes as his words trailed off.

Tim came to stand beside them. “It’s okay,” he said to his friend. “You can tell them. It’s going to come out now anyway.”

Peter raised anguished eyes to Shep. “I don’t want to run the farm. I never wanted to. I’ve been thinking about leaving.”

“Leaving? To go where?” Jennie asked.

“I mean leaving our faith.”

“Is that what you were doing tonight?” Shep turned to look at Tim. “Were you driving him away somewhere?”

Before he could answer, Peter responded. “No, we were out partying.”

Jennie inhaled sharply. “What does that mean?”

“We met up with some kids at a house a few miles down the road.” He gestured with his left hand. “It’s empty. Being renovated, so nobody’s there at night.”

“We just wanted a place to hang out, you know,” Tim offered, biting his thumbnail.

“A house under renovation is still someone’s property,” Shep said, “so that would be breaking and entering.”

“We weren’t doing anything. Just drinking beer and stuff.”

There was a momentary silence as the unspoken offense of underage drinking hung in the air.

“And then?” Jennie prompted.

“Some idiot called on his cell phone to order a pizza. So we got out of there. We knew once they saw us in that empty house, the police would come.”

“He ordered a pizza,” Shep echoed in amazement. “That would be funny if this situation weren’t so horrible.”

“Go on,” Jennie said. “You’d had some beers and decided to drive away. Tim, did you think you should get behind the wheel in that condition?”

“It wasn’t Tim,” Peter said quietly. “I was driving.”

“You?” Jennie was shocked. “Do you even know how?”

“Yes.” His voice grew softer. “I don’t have a license or anything, but I can drive. Except I guess I had a little too much to drink, because I lost control. The car went off the road, and we hit this rock. It’s pretty big, so that was that. The airbags deployed, but somehow I wrenched my shoulder.”

“I don’t believe this.” She got up and brushed herself off, walking a few steps away to make sure she stayed calm.

Her son had been drinking illegally, having a party in someone else’s house, then he’d allowed a drunken boy without a license to drive her car. Which had led to this accident. There were about a dozen ways in which she was furious, horrified, and bewildered by his deception and poor judgment. She groaned aloud as another thought hit her: She could never face Mattie again, not after the way Tim had influenced Peter.

As if reading her thoughts, Peter called out to her. “It wasn’t Tim’s fault. This was my friend’s party, and I made him come.”

“All that aside, Tim is responsible for my car,” she answered.

“Okay, wait a second here.” Shep sat down on the ground and looked Peter in the eye. “Let’s go back to the other stuff about leaving.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

“You knew this?” Shep asked his son.

Tim nodded. “We’ve talked about it a lot.”

Shep turned back to Peter. “Makes sense. So, how do you go about making that final decision?”

“It’s a terrible decision to make. My mother would be so upset. But she also wouldn’t have anyone to run the farm. So I haven’t been able to leave.” Peter shook his head in misery. “I’m not sure I even want to do it. I don’t know.”

Shep’s tone was respectful. “Would you mind if I asked why you want to leave?”

Peter stared at the ground. “I feel bad telling you.” There
was a long pause before he spoke again. “Like I said before, I don’t want to farm. We respect farming, and it’s a very good thing to have your own farm. But I don’t want to do it, and that’s the worst thing. And I have no brothers who really help. I used to help my father, and it was a lot of work then, but it was okay. Now he’s gone, and there’s no one to help me when my uncle leaves.”

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Shep said.

“Everyone expects me to do it, and I should want to do it. They believe I can manage it all. But I can’t!” His tone grew more agitated. “I can’t live up to these expectations, to be a farmer and take care of everybody else in the family. I’m not ready, and I may never be ready!”

No one spoke.

“I feel bad about my mother. But it’s too soon. I don’t know if I want to be baptized. I’ve always done what I was supposed to do, so they expect me to keep doing it. But it’s getting harder without my father, and I’m afraid I’m failing at it. I can’t tell anybody. That’s not our way, and it would be wrong to worry my mother even more. But what if I wreck the farm? They’ll know I failed and have to live with that.”

“Wow,” Shep said.

Peter looked at him. “You think I’m failing my family?”

“Oh, no, that’s not it at all.” Shep ran a hand through his hair. He lowered his voice to a whisper, though it was clear that his wife and son were listening. “It’s because I hear so much of my own story in yours.”

“What do you mean?”

Shep gathered his thoughts. “I played football in high school. I was good at it. But it turned out that was the only thing I was good at. When I got married, I wanted to be a good husband and provider. But I wasn’t. I failed at everything I ever tried.”

Jennie listened, afraid to breathe. She had never heard her husband talk about his past with anyone. Certainly, she had never heard him explain the way he felt about how things had gone for him when he was no longer the star quarterback.

“The point is,” he went on, “that I wanted to run away, like you do. Things weren’t working out, and everybody was counting on me. I felt like I had let everyone down, and I continued to do that for years. I couldn’t succeed, no matter what I tried. I just wanted things to go back the way they were, like when I played ball. Like you want to go back to when your dad was running the farm. But that doesn’t happen. No matter how much we want it.”

He was quiet, and everyone waited for what felt like an eternity. At last he spoke again.

“I took it out on my family. I didn’t let my wife bail us out because I was too ashamed to let anyone know she might have to be the one to support us. I
sort of
encouraged my son at football, but not nearly as much as I could have, because it caused me so much pain to be around the game. I guess I felt like, if I was a failure in every way, we were all going to be failures. It’s only now that I see if I hadn’t been such a jerk, if I had only asked for some help along the way, things could have gone very differently.”

“Dad …” Tim started to speak, then hesitated.

Shep continued to address Peter. “You need to get this out on the table with your mother and your uncle. They should be involved in figuring out how to handle the farm. There isn’t a rule that you have to farm, is there? Don’t you think something else could be worked out short of you running away? If you choose not to get baptized, that’s a different issue, but I hate to see you leave because you’re too embarrassed to admit you don’t want to run the farm.”

“Personal stuff is not something I ever talk about to my parents … or did, I mean,” Peter said.

“The farm isn’t personal stuff,” Shep said. “It’s the family’s business, their livelihood.”

Peter nodded slowly, as if to himself. “I’ve been thinking about it as my private problem. Because I feel as if I’ve failed.”

“Like I did,” Shep said. “It’s taken me years to see it’s not my personal problem. It became everyone’s problem, but I didn’t let anyone do anything to solve it. Your running away without working it out first is going to create far more problems than it solves.”

All four of them turned at the far-off sound of an approaching siren. The ambulance or the police, Jennie thought.

“When the authorities get here, let me talk to them, boys,” Shep said, standing up. “We’re going to tell the truth, but we’ll get through this together.”

Tim walked over to stand beside his father. “Thanks, Dad.”

Shep looked at him, his son so tall they were eye to eye. “No problem,” he said, putting an arm around Tim.

Jennie and Willa drove on ahead in her car, leaving Shep and Tim to secure the tree in the back of Shep’s truck. This year’s tree was full and healthy, and Jennie couldn’t wait to decorate it. Unpleasant memories of last year’s Christmas still chafed enough to justify a small splurge for a nicer one this time around. Besides, she reassured herself, they could afford it. Her business was growing, slowly but steadily, and the holiday should bring them new customers. She and Willa had already started shipping decorated Christmas lollipops. Along with the traditional decorations they had some delicate and unusual ones as well: a patterned mitten, two tiny presents, sparkling tree ornaments. Jennie was proud of their creations and the way they kept edging their designs further into the unusual and humorous. Customers loved the offbeat humor and artwork that came with the sweets. In January, Got To Candy would be offering caramel popcorn, assuming, Jennie thought, that the
marketing department—Willa—was ready with a clever idea for the packaging. Eventually, they hoped to offer candies geared to holidays throughout the year, but for now they were happy to have gotten their Christmas pops ready to go in November.