The Keeper (16 page)

Cordially,
Roman Troyer

9

E
ven though the May heat was thick enough to make the brim on M.K.’s bonnet curl and her sweaty legs stick to the buggy seat, she was happy. Happy to not be in school, happy to be headed to Sunday church, happy and excited because she would see her friends today.

A fly buzzed a lazy figure eight in front of M.K. She sat in the place that she always occupied with her sisters, in the middle of the room and at the end of a bench. A good spot from which to observe the congregation. She saw a mouse scamper along the edges of the kitchen. She stole a glance at Jimmy Fisher, who caught her looking at him and stuck out his tongue at her. She wished she had her peashooter with her so she could send a pea flying right into that boy’s open mouth. Maybe he would choke to death, she thought wryly, and then immediately took back the uncharitable thought, remembering where she was. People were singing the second hymn, the
Lob Lied
, slow and mournful. She had been thinking, allowing her mind to wander, and had not noticed that the ministers had come in. She bolted to her feet and made an effort to follow the service once it began, but there seemed to be so much to distract her, and after a while she abandoned her attempt.

Fern jabbed her in the ribs and M.K. straightened up, stiff as a rod.

“Hmmm,” Fern said, in that way of hers.

Fern. So everpresent. She was putting a crimp into M.K.’s life. Friday noon, Fern had shown up, out of the blue, at the schoolhouse. She found M.K. playing her shell game behind the backstop. Fern had the nerve to put her hands on the two outside shells and held on tight, staring M.K. down. Somehow she knew that the pea had been dropped in M.K.’s lap. M.K. quietly packed up her game. Fern led her to a big shade tree, far from the schoolhouse. Then Fern told her that gambling was wrong, wrong, wrong.

“I didn’t know it was gambling!” M.K. told her. “I just thought it was a game.”

Fern sighed. “When money is at stake, it’s always gambling.” She raised an eyebrow. “It seems to me that somebody as smart as you would have enough sense to figure that out for herself.”

It seemed that way to M.K. too.

“Where’d you learn that game, anyway?”

“A man at the library taught me while you were busy looking for cookbooks. He never said anything about it being a gambling game!”

There was a slight twitching at the corner of Fern’s lips. Her expression softened a little. After a long pause she spoke. “Don’t tell me anything more. I don’t even want to know.”

Surprisingly, Fern never told Amos that M.K. had been gambling. Of course, she also didn’t offer up how she knew about it in the first place, but Fern seemed to have a disturbing knack for knowing things.

The morning sun beat down on her head. Julia was placing produce from the garden out on the shelf at the roadside stand. She put the carrots on a plate, then in a mason jar, then stood back to look at it, frowning. This was the hardest part for her, the presentation. She had no idea how to display the produce so it looked appetizing. She knew it was important to create an eye-catching display to entice those who stopped by, so each day she tried something new. But it never looked the way she wanted it to look. She couldn’t get it right and she hated anything that made her feel incompetent. She heard a deep sigh behind her, an exasperated soughing sound that was becoming all too familiar.

Fern.

“What?” Julia said.

“Seems like a girl who spends hours ironing her clothes and prayer cap, and another hour getting her hair pinned just right . . . could figure out how to put together a good-looking produce table.”

Julia crossed her arms against her chest, defensive, then dropped them with a sigh. “I know. I can do it with quilt tops, but I just have no imagination for a produce table.”

“You don’t say.” Fern shook her head, then pulled out a roll of twine and scissors. She grabbed a bundle of carrots and tied them gently with the twine, making a neat little bow. Then she placed the bundles in the basket.

She handed the twine and scissors to Julia and turned to leave.

That one little thing looked . . . charming. Absolutely charming. “Wait! Any other ideas?” She waved a hand in front of the shelf. “I’m open to suggestions.”

Fern sighed. “I have to do everything around here.” She squinted at the table, seeing something Julia couldn’t see. “Run to the house and get a checkered tablecloth.” By the time Julia returned, the table had been transformed. Mason jars were filled with flowers. One with sweet-smelling roses, another with brightly colored zinnias. A small chalkboard was propped up against the honor jar, left in the center of the table. In colored chalk, the prices for the day’s offerings were listed, and a note:
Everything picked fresh today. Please leave the money in the jar. Thanks and blessings from Windmill Farm.
Even the scripted handwriting was neat, elegant.

It looked exactly the way Julia had hoped it would look but could never actually create it. “Fern, you are a wonder!” Julia was truly astounded. “What would we ever do without you?” She reached over and gave Fern a loud buss on her cheek.

Patting her hair back in a satisfied way, Fern said, “You’d do exactly what you were doing, which wasn’t much.”

Sadie walked up to the stand to see what was going on. In her hand was a half-eaten blueberry muffin. “The table looks amazing!”

“Fern did it,” Julia said proudly. “Why, she’s got all kinds of talents we’re just finding out about.”

Fern didn’t pay her any mind. Instead, she took the muffin out of Sadie’s hand and replaced it with a carrot, top still on, from the produce table. Then she turned and walked to the house.

The weather turned unseasonably hot for the month of May. One afternoon, after Rome had finished a few chores from Julia’s endless to-do list, he sat in the shade of a tree near the barn, his arm draped across Lulu, who’d fallen asleep with her nose resting on his thigh. The dog didn’t stir as Menno approached.

“Lulu isn’t much of a watchdog,” Rome said.

Menno chuckled and lowered himself beside him. “No. I guess not. But she’s young still. She was only a pup when I found her rootin’ around in the alley behind the Sweet Tooth bakery.” Menno plucked a blade of grass and began to chew on it. “I’ve noticed you spend a lot of time with Lulu.”

“Lulu spends time with me, not the other way around.”

Menno removed the blade of grass from his mouth. “I was thinking that maybe you’d like to have one of Lulu’s pups for your very own. They’ll be ready for a home pretty soon.”

Rome shook his head. “Thank you, Menno, but no.”

Menno looked confused. “I won’t charge you. It would be a gift. You could have the pick of the litter. Well, Annie got first pick. But you could pick second.” There were only two pups.

Again, Rome shook his head, more vehemently than before. “I appreciate the offer, Menno. But I’m not a man who wants a traveling companion.”

Menno rose to his feet. “It’s just that . . . I think dogs have a way of knowing who they want to be with. Seems like Lulu thinks you’d be a good choice for her pups. She’s picked you.”

“I’m sorry.” He was too. Menno seemed hurt as he left. But Rome wasn’t about to waver from his “no attachments” policy. It had stead him well for six years. Why change it now?

Sadie came into the kitchen after working in the garden and saw that Fern had set hot fruit scones on a rack to cool by the window. She noticed one scone was a little larger than the others, so she broke off a corner. Then another corner to even it out, so Fern wouldn’t notice.

Her mind drifted off to church yesterday. Julia, Paul, Lizzie, Rome.

Love. It was all so complicated. That was probably why you didn’t get to the good kind of love until you were older.

She looked at the scone and realized it now seemed as if it had two bites taken out of it so she nibbled delicately around the edges and soon the fruit scone disappeared. She still felt a little hungry—after all, she had worked long and hard in the garden this morning. So she ate another. She slipped one more in her pocket, in case she got hungry before lunch, and she carefully spread the scones out so that it didn’t look as if three—or was it four?—were missing.

Tomorrow, for sure, she would stop eating sweets. That very morning, she had noticed that her apron seemed too small. She struggled briefly to pin it around the small paunch that, since her fourteen birthday, had begun to inflate like a rubber raft around her middle. She retrieved an apron from Julia’s laundry hamper, but it was too small around the waist. So she decided to skip an apron altogether yesterday.

She grabbed one more scone, for later, licked her lips, brushed crumbs off of her face, and hurried outside before Fern found her in the kitchen.

Later that afternoon, Sadie waited for M.K. to come home from school and met up with her at the Smuckers’ goat pasture. When she saw her, she waved her home so that M.K. would join her. “I need to borrow some money.”

M.K. looked at her suspiciously. “Why?”

“I need to get something from town.”

“What?”

Sadie frowned. “Why do you need to know?”

“Because you want my money! What makes you think I have extra to spare, anyway?”

“You always have money.”

“You tell me what you’ve got on your mind, first.”

Sadie crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin. “If you must know, it’s to buy a Spanx.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s . . . a body shaper. Something to help me hold my stomach in.”

M.K. looked puzzled. “Like a corset?” She made a face. “Does Dad know?”

“Do you need to know everything?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Fine. Yes, Dad said that if it was so important to me, go ahead and get one. So I need to borrow forty dollars.” She held out her palm. “I’ll pay you back in a week or two with an extra dollar thrown in.”

M.K. shook her head, but she pulled off her shoe, yanked out the lining, and pulled out two twenties. “Make it two dollars extra.”

Sadie snatched the money out of M.K.’s hands and ran to the horse standing hooked to the buggy.