The Letters (20 page)

As Saturday evening wore on at the Stoney Ridge Bar & Grill, Bethany felt more and more uncomfortable. First, she had told Rose she would be home by eleven and she wasn’t entirely truthful to her about where she would be. She said she was taking a book over to M.K. Lapp’s, which was the truth, though Rose gave her a funny look. Bethany should have thought of something besides a book. Everyone knew she didn’t read much. And she certainly couldn’t add on that she was working a late shift at the Grill.

What bothered her more than telling a half-truth was the group of men hanging out by the bar, drinking steadily, playing darts. Barflies, her friend Ivy called them. The Grill had a different clientele at night than during the day. On the wall
was taped a full-page, full-length newspaper page of Osama bin Laden. “Go for the eyes,” she heard them say as they threw the silver-tipped, evil-looking darts at the portrait. How awful!

Bethany steered clear of the bar as much as she could, but she had to walk past it to get in and out of the kitchen. One fellow, in particular, kept calling out to her in a slurry voice, “Hey, dollface, what’s your hurry?” He sidled over to the end of the bar by the swinging kitchen door, trying to get her to talk to him as she passed by with a giant tray loaded with food for her table. “What time you get off tonight, sugar?” His comments took a turn for the worse as the evening progressed and his beer glasses emptied, and so did Bethany’s temper. She had one more table to serve coffee, dessert, and collect the tab, then she would be done with her shift and could go home. But Slurry Voice made a critical mistake. He pinched her bottom as she walked out with a trayful of hot coffee mugs.

“Shootfire!” Bethany spun around, sending her tray toppling onto Slurry Voice. Hot coffee spilled over his shirt and pants.

“HEY!” Slurry Voice screamed, jumping back. He knocked into the man standing behind him, who shoved him away. Slurry Voice slipped on the hot coffee puddled on the ground and bumped into the back of someone else standing at the bar. A chain began of irritated barflies, overreacting, almost like a game of dominos—but it all seemed to be happening in slow motion.

At least, it seemed like slow motion to Bethany. Mouth agape, she stood frozen in the middle of the mess, staring at what was going on around her.

Someone approached Bethany from behind. Hard fingers dug into her arm and she was spun around abruptly, steered to the door. As she tried to slip out of this person’s grip, he only hung on tighter. “You need to get out of here,” an unpleasantly familiar male voice said. “I’ve got my buggy outside.”

It was Jimmy Fisher, telling her what to do! What’s he doing here, anyway? Outside by the buggy, she yanked her arm out of his grasp.

“I’m taking you home.”

She glared at him. “What are you doing here?”

“I stopped in earlier today and found out you were working the late shift tonight. Had a hunch you might not realize what a Saturday night looked like at the Grill, so I decided to drop by.”

She scowled. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough to see what was going to happen after your shift ended.”

“It hasn’t ended! I still have customers in there.”

“Doubt it.” People were pouring out of the restaurant, eager to leave the chaos.

Bethany turned to him with a scowl. “You had no right to do what you did.”

“What
I
did? How about pouring hot coffee down the pants of a customer and starting a brawl?”

She ignored that. “I could have handled the situation myself.”

“Goodness, you’re sassy. You beat any woman for taking the starch out of a man.”

“I’m merely honest,” Bethany said.

Jimmy practically lifted her into the buggy, then climbed in on the other side and snapped the horse’s reins.

When a car passed by them, the headlights lit up the interior
of the buggy. Her clothes! She was wearing her English clothes. She didn’t even have on a prayer cap. Her Plain clothing was tucked in her cubby back in the restaurant. She would have to be as silent as snow as she entered the house. It was late, past midnight, but Mammi Vera was often awake during the night, prowling around the downstairs, fretting. Bethany hoped she might be sound asleep. Some things, she knew, were best left unexplained.

“Bethany, listen to me. I like excitement as much as anyone, maybe more than most. But you’re way in over your head here. You need to quit.”

In that instant, all her aggravation at Jimmy Fisher tumbled back. Here he was, telling her what to do again. She didn’t speak to him the rest of the way home. Too furious. Too embarrassed, mortified at the thought of a creepy drunken man pinching her bottom. Too mad at herself. She never saw those things coming. They happened too fast. One minute, she’s serving coffee, the next, she started a small riot.

If Jimmy hadn’t been there . . . well, who knew how the evening might have turned out? She shuddered.

That was the thing about Jimmy Fisher. He had a way of making her feel as if her bonnet was on backward.

Jimmy Fisher was looking forward to church this morning as never before. He wanted to tell Galen that he was dead wrong about Jonah Hershberger. Lodestar was in a locked stall in the latched barn. And when he had stopped by the Stoney Ridge Bar & Grill and learned that Bethany would be working the late shift that night, he returned at the end of her shift . . . sensing she would need a little extra help. And
he had been right—she was facing a very dicey moment. Best of all, he was sure she might be talked into going out with him sometime, if he ever had a little extra cash.

In the last twenty-four hours, he had made significant strides toward maturity and long-term thinking—two areas that topped the list of Galen’s complaints about him.

He splashed cold water on his face and shaved so quickly that he nicked himself twice. He grabbed his shirt and took the stairs two at a time, stopping by the back door to jam his stocking feet into his boots. He hurried down to the barn, eager to check on Lodestar. As he came around the corner, he saw something that made his heart beat a little faster. The barn door was opened by about two feet. He gave it a push and walked inside. The sun was just rising on the horizon and cast a beam of light from the open door, down the interior aisle of the barn. Jimmy walked slowly down the aisle, holding his breath. When he got to Lodestar’s stall, the door was wide open. The stall was empty.

The rising sun crested the tops of the hills that surrounded Galen’s ranch. It had turned the clouds around it a coral pink and cast a pale yellow light over the fields that were just greening with the first shoots of spring.

Jimmy burst through the kitchen door of Galen’s house and found him seated at the kitchen table, sipping coffee. Naomi was dishing up scrambled eggs by the stove and offered him a plate. He shook his head. Too upset.

“It happened again, Galen. I found Lodestar. Then he ran away again. I woke up this morning and he was gone. The barn door was open.”

Galen chewed and swallowed a mouthful of scrambled eggs as if he had all the time in the world. “You latched the stall?”

He scowled at Galen. “Of course!” Of course he did. “I’m sure of it.” He remembered latching it, then double-checking it. Didn’t he? Could he have been so conscious of it that he neglected to actually do it?

“You’d be amazed at how wily some horses can be.” Galen finished off the rest of his scrambled eggs. They were just the way Jimmy liked them—buttery, sprinkled with salt and pepper. His stomach rumbled.

Naomi brought over a plate of steaming waffles. “Didn’t Dad have a buggy horse that could unlatch a gate with its lips?”

Galen laughed and helped himself to a waffle. “We had to get a combination lock, but that only worked until he learned his numbers. Finally wised up and got a key lock.”

Jimmy wasn’t listening. Deflated, he was in no mood for jokes. That must have been exactly what Lodestar had done. He should have spent the night in the barn, watching him. How could he have had that horse in his grip a second time, only to lose him? What were the chances he would get him back a third time?

“I’m going to get ready for church,” Naomi said. Before she left the room, she turned and said, “Jimmy, if you change your mind about breakfast, you just help yourself.”

Galen poured warm maple syrup over his waffle. “Where’d you find him?”

Jimmy watched the syrup run into the pockets of Galen’s waffle. Maybe he should reconsider breakfast. Naomi was a fine cook and it was hard for a man to think straight on an empty stomach. “The trader had him. Said the horse had made his way back to him.”

Galen froze, fork suspended in the air speared onto a bite of waffle. He put down his fork and made a small sighing sound, as if he’d heard this story before.

“What?” Jimmy took the plate of remaining waffles and poured maple syrup on top. Just the smell of the crisp waffle, smothered in melted butter and maple syrup, was lifting his spirits.

“Jimmy, you’re never going to find that horse again. Even if you do, you’ll never keep him.”

Jimmy finished swallowing his bite. “What makes you say such bleak and gloomy things? This is why folks are scared of you, Galen.”

Galen lifted his dark eyebrows. “You need to start thinking less like a man blinded by love and more like a horse trainer. There are plenty of other horses in the world.”

“None like Lodestar.”

“I’ll help. We’ll find another. Might take some time, but we’ll get you a stud.”

Jimmy finished off the waffles and eyed the bowl of scrambled eggs. He was definitely feeling more cheerful after eating something. If he had been smart enough to track Lodestar down a second time, surely he could find him a third time. “You are wrong, my friend, and I am going to prove it to you.”

It was strange, thought Bethany, that you could go to sleep thinking one way, and awake the following morning thinking quite another. And so it was with her opinion about working at the Sisters’ House. “I’ve changed my mind,” she would say to Jimmy Fisher after church later today, if she could talk to
him without anyone noticing. After all, she had her reputation to uphold. “I’ll work for those old ladies.”

Seated in a swept clean barn across from the men on wooden, backless benches, Bethany happened to steal a glimpse at Jimmy Fisher and was struck senseless by those blue, blue eyes. But as Bethany was here to worship God, she tried not to think about the color of Jimmy’s eyes, or how he had rescued her last night from near disaster at the Stoney Ridge Bar & Grill and then acted like he was a knight in shining armor, which he wasn’t. Then he caught sight of her peeking over at him a second time and gave her an audacious wink with a smile dipped in honey, which made her blush despite her best effort to keep her composure.

That Jimmy Fisher was no good and low down, with a bad character to boot.

He just sat across the room grinning like he always did, prouder than ever that he had made her flustered.

She lifted her chin a notch and turned her attention to the minister, who was preaching of days long ago, of a time when the Plain People suffered terribly for their faith. Sometimes Bethany listened to these old familiar stories. Sometimes she just let the words float around her while she drifted away on her thoughts. A barn swallow fluttered through a missing board to disappear into its nest in the rafters.