Assaulted Pretzel (29 page)

S
he was tossing the day’s trash into the Dumpster behind the shop when she heard the approaching
clip-clop
of a buggy in the alley. The telltale sound, coupled with the noon hour, meant one of the Miller brothers had arrived to check on Ruth and the bake shop next door.

On one hand, she hoped for Esther’s sake it was Eli. Maybe then, she could take comfort in the Eli-induced smile Esther would surely wear in response. And then, with any luck, that same smile would help rid Claire—at least temporarily—of the guilt she felt where her friend’s continued and needless worry over Martha was concerned.

On the other hand, though, she couldn’t help but hope it was Benjamin. Her own heart, if not her psyche as a whole, needed that.

“Good afternoon, Claire.”

She sucked in her breath at the indisputable effect Benjamin’s
voice had on her demeanor and turned around, raising a hand in greeting as she did. “Benjamin…hi.”

He reached behind his seat and retrieved a hand-tied bouquet of wildflowers before stepping down out of the buggy.

“Oh, Ruth will love those,” she gushed. “I always love looking out the side window of my shop and seeing the flowers she likes to put in her own window. They brighten my day. Esther’s, too.”

“I hope that is true.” With an uncertainty that was unfamiliar to Benjamin’s gait, he stepped forward and held the flowers in Claire’s direction. “These are not for Ruth. They are for you.”

She looked from Benjamin to the flowers and back again before waving his words away. “No. I wasn’t hinting for you to give them to me when I said that about Ruth. I was just admiring how pretty her flowers always are.”

The bouquet did not move. Nor did Benjamin’s steadfast focus on her face. “I do not bring flowers to Ruth. She makes Eli stop the buggy each morning and she gets down and picks them herself.” He took a step closer, his arm still outstretched. “I picked these. For you.”

Feeling her hands begin to tremble, she clasped them behind her back only to unlink them again and reach for the bouquet. “I…I don’t know what to say. They’re…beautiful.”

A slow smile started at the left corner of Benjamin’s mouth and grew until it encompassed his large blue eyes, as well. “I am glad.”

There was so much she wanted to know. From Benjamin and from herself. Why had he brought flowers? Did he have feelings for her the way she suspected he did? And how
could she go from feeling so blue over Jakob to being so elated over a gesture that could go no further?

Pushing the pointless questions from her thoughts, she brought the bouquet to her nose and sniffed. “Mmmm…they smell wonderful.”

He scrunched up his face and shrugged. “I know they bring bees. Two, actually.”

She had to laugh at his honesty. “I’ll keep them inside, where only I can smell them. Well, and Esther, I guess.”

“Is Esther inside?” he asked.

“She is.” She inhaled the sweet smell of her unexpected bouquet one more time and then beckoned him to follow her to the shop’s back door. “Would you like to talk to her?”

He remained rooted where he stood, glancing between Heavenly Treasures and the Shoo Fly Bake Shoppe as she waited for him to follow. “I would like to talk to you, Claire, if I may.”

Again she waved him over. “Sure. C’mon inside. That way I can put these in water and you don’t have to keep standing there with the sun in your eyes.”

“In private. Please.”

She paused her hand on the handle of the screen door and searched his face for anything that might indicate what he wanted to talk about, but there was nothing. Nothing beyond the fidgety hands that hung by his sides, anyway. “Is everything okay?”

When he didn’t offer an immediate answer, she let go of the door and retraced her steps back to where she’d been standing when he offered her the flowers. “Something came up with Daniel or Isaac, didn’t it?”

“No.”

“Is Eli okay?” She heard the panic in her voice and
followed it up with a silent prayer that everything was alright. Esther didn’t need anything else on her plate.

“Yah. Eli is fine.”

“Ruth?”

“Ruth is fine, as well.”

She’d run out of reasons for Benjamin’s request and was left with nothing to do but wait. After a moment or two, he pointed to the line of trees beyond Claire’s shop.

“You want to talk back there?”

“There is a bench to sit on. Eli helped me make it two years ago when Mr. Snow first opened his shop here. It is not far.”

She fell into step behind him as he led the way to the tree line that ran along the back of each and every shop on the southern side of Lighted Way. When they reached the edge of the woods, he used his hand to tuck a few low-lying branches from her path. “See? It is there.”

“Oh, Benjamin, this is lovely,” she mused as she stepped through the opening he provided and stopped beside the sturdy wooden bench. Looking around, she couldn’t help but feel the quiet intimacy of their surroundings.

“Please. Sit.”

When she’d situated herself on the bench with the bouquet still clutched in her hands, he leaned against a tree that afforded the best view of Claire. “I do not think Ruth must worry any longer.”

“You mean Esther?”

“Esther does not worry. Ruth worries.”

She considered correcting him, but let it go when she realized she couldn’t. Not if she was going to keep Jakob and Martha’s secret from yet another person. “Why is Ruth worried?”

“She worries for me.”

And then she remembered. Ruth worried about Benjamin living out the rest of his life alone…

A sick feeling began to grow in her stomach as she realized what he’d just said. “And she doesn’t need to worry about you any longer?” she repeated even as her mind started cycling through the various Amish women who may have staked a claim on Benjamin’s heart. None of them, though, made any sense. Not when they’d been there all along and no one—not even Ruth or Esther—had ever mentioned them in relation to Benjamin.

“Seeing Jakob around town the past two months, I see such a life is possible. I do not know what I would do, but I am good with my hands. Because of that, I, too, can make a living.”

“A living?”

“I could even run the store when there are children, too.”

“Children?” she asked. “What children?”

“The ones we will have.”

She blinked once, twice. “We?”

“Yah.”

The flowers began to shake along with her hand as the reality of what Benjamin was saying finally began to seep into her thoughts, bringing with it a mixture of hope and dread as well as a reply she knew she had to give.

“Benjamin, you were baptized. You are Amish. You can’t change that.”

He pushed off the tree and came to sit beside her on the bench, his eyes wide as they focused on hers. “Jakob was Amish, too. He changed.”

She set the flowers on the bench between them and searched for a way to address Benjamin’s statement without giving away more of her tortured heart than she was ready
to reveal. “He did, but at a great personal cost that he can never recoup.”

Benjamin’s brows furrowed beneath the brim of his hat. “He is not happy being a policeman?”

That she couldn’t answer. She thought Jakob was happy, but now she wasn’t sure. “I think he is,” she said honestly, “but I can’t answer for Jakob. What I do know is that he misses his family terribly and that’s something he can never get back.”

“I would manage,” he said.

“You really think you’d be okay not talking to Eli ever again?” she challenged, even as her voice broke at the knowledge that she was deliberately trying to shut the door on the affections of a wonderful man. A man who listened when she spoke, a man who made her feel as if she was someone special, a man who brought a flutter to her heart she couldn’t deny. “Because…I don’t. And Eli needs you. He needs your direction, your support, your encouragement, your love.”

Benjamin bristled at her side. “Eli would manage.”

“And Ruth? What about Ruth?”

“She would not worry for me anymore.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But she’d ache from missing you. She’d ache not being able to be a part of your children’s lives. You know that as well as I do, Benjamin.”

For a long moment, he said nothing, the pain in his eyes filling in where he had no words. When he finally did speak, his voice quickly mirrored his tortured expression. “If I do not leave, we can not be together.”

“We can be friends. Like we are now.” Yet even as she uttered the sentiment aloud, she knew the easy relationship they’d shared over the past two months had been forever altered by a bouquet of flowers and an impossible dream.

*   *   *

C
laire was grateful when five o’clock brought both an end to Esther’s shift and the chance to finally ponder the way her world had changed in the blink of an eye.

Twenty-four hours earlier, she’d harbored feelings for two very different men—one she knew she could never be with, and one who seemed to be pushing her away without so much as a second thought or an explanation of any sort. Now, thanks to a roundabout reason guessed at by Diane and a suggestion that simply couldn’t happen, her friendship with those same two men was on shaky ground at best.

She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, that she was thriving in Heavenly long before either came into her life, but she knew it was a lie. Heavenly was special because of Diane and Esther. But it was
magical
because of Jakob and Benjamin.

“Miss Weatherly?”

She lifted her head from its resting spot atop her metal desk then sat up tall, the identity of the man standing in her office doorway sending an unexplained shiver down her spine. “Isaac?”

“Yah. It is me.” He hooked the thumb of his right hand toward the door. “I knocked. You did not come.”

“I’m sorry. I was lost in thought, I guess.” She scooted her chair back from the desk and stood, pointing at the leather-bound album in his left hand as she did. “What’s that?”

He looked down at the album and swallowed. “It is for my father’s wife. I think it might be best for her to have now that he is gone.”

She took the album from his outstretched hand and gently fingered the cover. “It’s a photo album.”

“Yah.”

“But the Amish don’t take photos,” she reminded.

“I did not take pictures. My Dat—I mean, my
father
sent them to me with his last letter.” Isaac’s gaze remained on the book even as Claire set it down on the desk and flipped the cover open. “They are pictures of his life. So I can know about him in a way I did not know.”

She directed him to a folding chair resting against her office wall and then sat back down in her own chair once again. “He made this for you?” she asked as she stared down at a black-and-white photograph of Robert Karble as a baby.

“He did. With Miss Simon’s help.” He opened the metal chair and positioned it alongside Claire’s. “I have looked at it many times since it arrived.”

Page by page she leafed through the pictures collected and arranged in a way to introduce a grown man to the father he never knew he had. “Why would you want to give this up, Isaac? I mean, he put this together for you. Don’t you think you should keep it?”

He kneaded his eyes with his fingertips then let his hands fall to his lap. “I lost a father I did not know I had until four weeks ago. His wife lost a husband she loved for years. These pictures should go to her, not me.”

She continued to flip her way through Robert’s life, stopping at a picture of a twentysomething version of the man who’d been murdered behind the Schnitz and Knepp stand at the annual Amish Food Festival. Beside him stood a young woman with light brown hair and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Here, like in all the
pictures before, Robert smiled out from the picture with emerald green eyes that twinkled and sparkled.

“That is Mamm. On the night I came to be.”

At the audible crack of the man’s voice, she rested her hand across his arm. “They look happy, Isaac.”

“Mamm’s life was hard because of me.”

“Your mother’s life was
wonderful
because of you, Isaac.”

His head bowed forward beneath his hat but he said nothing. Instead, she peeked at the next five or six pages in an effort to ease the sadness that hovered around the man like a heavy storm cloud. “Oh, these are pictures of him at work.” She pointed toward one on the right-hand side of the page that showed Robert attaching a set of wheels to a toy car. “I think it’s neat that you gravitated toward the same work your father was in and you didn’t even know it.”

At his nod, she turned the page, her gaze falling on a photograph that depicted a company milestone of some sort, based on the cake and balloons in the foreground. She leaned forward in an effort to make out the words on a framed certificate to the left of the cake but gave up when she realized the writing was too small.

“I wonder what they were celebrating,” she mumbled before turning the page to reveal even more pictures of the men and women behind the success of Karble Toys. The faces, of course, were unfamiliar except for Ann’s and—

She sat up tall, pulling the album closer to her face for confirmation. “Oh my gosh, Isaac! Do you know who that is?”

Isaac leaned across Claire’s arm for a closer look, the brim of his hat obscuring her own view. “That is Mr. Watson. The man who brings the tour bus to our workshop each
day.” Pulling back, he turned to look at Claire. “Why is Mr. Watson in my father’s picture book?”

She refrained from answering until she could study the picture more closely, the name tag the man sported providing the only words she could muster. “He worked for Karble Toys.”