The Revealing (38 page)

Brooke looked at her aunt, with her spiky red hair and determined chin, then at her easel and paints, which she hadn’t touched since she had reproduced the Corot, then out at the soft, gentle hills, dotted with cows. “Could you head toward Stoney Ridge? There’s someone I need to see first.”

For the first time all morning, her aunt cracked a smile.

Mim had finished putting fresh sheets on the beds in the guest flat. Two women were coming this afternoon, all the way from Georgia. She thought that might be the farthest distance a guest had traveled to stay at the Inn at Eagle Hill.

She heard a door open and walked into the living room, a pillow tucked under her chin as she struggled to get the case onto it. There, at the door, was Brooke Snyder, the woman who had taken away her newspaper column, merely because she was an ambitious woman.

Mim put the pillow on the small kitchen table. “Is there something you forgot? Or something else you want to take?” She was not rude, but she was very, very cool.

Brooke took a step inside. “I owe you an apology. I stole something from you.”

“Yes, you did . . .” Mim stopped and shook her head. No. She didn’t, she thought. And once thought, it had to be said. “You didn’t steal it. I’m giving it to you.” She picked up the pillow to finish stuffing it in the case. “I hope Mrs. Miracle will help you find what you’re looking for, just like she did for me.”

She turned and went back to the bedroom to fluff the pillow and set it on the bed, ready for the new guests. When she returned to the living room, Brooke Snyder was gone.

The potatoes spattered as they hit the melted butter in the pan and Rose hardly noticed. Her mind was on those new guests who had arrived at the inn this afternoon, stayed ten minutes, and promptly departed. Such an odd pair! They were two cousins, from Georgia, who were going to research their family ancestry.

“Do you have Amish relatives?” Rose asked them.

“No,” the taller one said. “Quakers.”

Rose looked at them, tilting her head. “You realize, of course, that Quakers came from England, started by George Fox. The Amish came from Europe. Their history is completely separate.”

The cousins looked at each other, astounded by that information. “But the Quakers dress like you do.”

Rose looked down at her plum-colored dress and black
apron. “Not really.” Her hand went to her head. “I suppose they do wear bonnets. The Quakers and the Amish share some beliefs, like pacifism, but very little else.”

The two cousins were astounded. “Where should we go to learn about the Quakers? Our great-great-great-grandfather was a whaling captain. Ebenezer Folger was his name.”

“Then . . . Nantucket Island, I suppose.”

And so the two lady cousins left. The guest flat was, once again, empty.

Tomorrow, Rose would need to go talk to the deacon about the pile of unpaid bills that were stacking up on her desk. More bills than money.

She had hoped that she might have that pigpen plowed and extra vegetables already planted to sell at a roadside stand this summer, but David Stoltzfus hadn’t gotten back to it after he was interrupted on the day the nearly-falling-down barn had fallen down, and she didn’t feel comfortable asking him after their awkward conversation earlier today.

Rose and David happened to be picking up their mail from the mailbox at the same time and he walked across the road. She could tell at once that he had something on his mind to say to her.

“Jesse is going to go stay with my sister, Peter’s mother, and her husband for the summer. They need a little extra help on the farm and Jesse, well, he’s been . . . missing his mother quite a lot. More than I realized. Seems he needs more than I can give him right now. It’s hard, you know . . .” David took his hat off, turning it in his hands. “Rose, we don’t know each other well, but I can see that you love God and you love children. It seems like we are both in a similar situation, needing a spouse, needing a parent for our children.”

She looked at him, puzzled.

“The problem is, I don’t quite know . . . where I stand.”

She still couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.

“I’m aware, you see, that you are very friendly with Galen King . . . but I don’t know how . . .”

Now
she had a sense of where he was going.

“You see, I don’t want to be foolish and hope that you might be interested in me, if there’s something . . . so I hoped you might tell me what you think. I’ve grown very fond of you, Anna, and I hoped you might be growing fond of me too.”

“I am.” And she was. But her name wasn’t Anna.

“Would you consider me?” He looked so hopeful and eager, and almost dreading her reply.

“David,” she said gently, “how long ago did your wife pass?”

“It’ll be a year on July 9th.”

“You must have loved her very much.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.” He looked at his hat in his hands.

“Do you have any idea how many times you have called me Anna?”

He looked at her, horrified. “I’m so sorry. I . . . didn’t realize.”

“Don’t be. You’re still grieving for her. You need time.” She looked across Eagle Hill’s front yard to see Galen working a new horse in the round training pen near his barn. She was flooded with a vague sense of loss. “Yes,” she said softly, “there is something between Galen and me.”

David nodded silently, fingering the brim of his hat as if anxious to put it back on. His glance lifted. “Thank you, Rose, for not making me feel like a fool. You’re a very special woman.” He turned and walked back up the driveway.

That night, Rose tossed and turned, thinking over that
conversation with David. She dangled her hand over the edge of the bed to touch the dog’s head and stared out the windows at the stars. Suddenly there was a streak across the sky in a flash of light. Seeing a shooting star always made her feel honored, as if God had staged a show just for her. “O the mighty works of the heavens,” she whispered. Galen always said that whenever they were outside at night.

Uninvited thoughts of Galen came to Rose at the oddest moments. She’d be pinning up her long hair and would remember him in his barn, running his fingers through a horse’s mane to draw out the tangles. She’d be sitting in church, watching the women take turns holding baby Sarah, and she’d remember the tender way he’d held the baby on the porch swing. She’d fill her coffee cup in the morning and remember the way he’d worked so patiently with Luke and Sammy despite how exasperating those two could be.

She sorely missed him.

It had become a schoolhouse tradition, started years ago by Jimmy Fisher. On the last day of school, before the families arrived for the end-of-year program, the eighth graders carved their names in the oak tree that sheltered the schoolhouse with its canopy. The younger students, who would have to return to school after the summer, looked on enviously. The boys had brought pocketknives and were busy digging into the wood of the old tree.

Jesse Stoltzfus had been planning for weeks where he would put his name. Mim wished she could enjoy this moment the way the eighth grade boys did. They acted as if they were being set free from jail. She wasn’t sure what it would feel like
to not go to school, ever again. She borrowed Luke’s knife and scratched out “M. S. was here.” She felt there was more to say, but she didn’t know what it was.

Danny told the class that he’d accepted the school board’s offer to teach another term, so he was no longer the permanent substitute teacher. Instead, he was the permanent teacher. But she wouldn’t be there next year. And Jesse was being sent off for the summer. Exiled, he told her, for being a bad influence on younger boys. He said it with that devilish grin of his, not looking at all sorry for his misdeeds, and she thought whoever decided to banish him—probably the deacon—was pretty smart. She wouldn’t miss Jesse Stoltzfus and his sticky-up hair and torrent of nonsense. Not one bit. All of Stoney Ridge could breathe a sigh of relief that he would be gone this summer.

She wondered if he’d be back in August or September.

After the barbecue lunch had been eaten, the softball game between the eighth graders and the sixth and seventh graders started off. Jesse didn’t want Mim to pitch to the sixth graders because they were too athletic, but he did let her pitch to the seventh graders because they were unusually uncoordinated. Then a boy tripped over his feet on the way to bat and twisted his ankle, so Danny stepped in to take his place at bat.

That was unfortunate, and Jesse Stoltzfus was beside himself at the unfairness of it all, but Mim was ready. She thought of all the crummy B- grades Danny Riehl had given her on her excellent essays this year, just to be mean and spiteful, and how often he treated her like she was just another student. She tried to remember the exact details of how to release the knuckleball. She wound her arm, flicked her wrist, released. The ball flew slow and Danny was ready for it—except it
dropped unexpectedly at the last instant, and his bat met nothing but air.

Everyone looked at Mim, stunned. Why, she had thrown a strike at Danny Riehl! She would always be known as the girl who threw a knuckleball! She tried, without success, not to grin with delight.

An hour or so later, everyone packed up to head home. Luke and Sammy had started down the road when Mim remembered she had left her sweater in the schoolhouse and hurried back to get it. As she pulled open the door, she realized, with a heavy heart, this was the last time she would walk into the school.

Starting on Monday, she was going to take over Bethany’s two-days-a-week job at the Sisters’ House—organizing the rooms—because the deacon kept urging the sisters to prepare to host church one day. She would also be Ella’s companion when the sisters had to leave the house on their many errands. Ella had declined enough that the sisters needed someone to shadow her. What the old sisters didn’t know was, on Ella’s good days, she was dictating the story of her life to Mim. Ella might not remember what she had for breakfast that day, but she did recall every detail of her childhood in Stoney Ridge, nearly a century ago.

It was all Bethany’s handiwork—all except the dictation of Ella’s life part. That was Mim’s brainchild. But the job switch—Bethany said she was tired of trying to keep those sisters organized and she wanted to work someplace where she’d meet more people. She applied for an opening at the Bent N’ Dent, available because Jesse wouldn’t be working there this summer. Privately—something Mim would never dare voice aloud—she wondered if her sister might have an
interest in working at the Bent N’ Dent because Peter Stoltzfus worked there. For weeks now, Bethany had been very quick to offer to go on errands to the grocery store, when once she would have avoided it.

Danny was wiping down the chalkboard and turned when he heard the door open. The schoolhouse was empty. She yanked her sweater off the wall hook and started toward the door.

“Mim?”

She stopped and turned toward him. “Miriam. I want everyone to call me Miriam now.”

He walked down the aisle of the schoolhouse toward her. “You threw quite a pitch, Miriam. A perfect knuckleball.”

“But not the next pitch. You hit a double.”

He took a step toward her. “Miriam, the reason I gave you B’s instead of A’s on your English essays was because I believe you could have done better.”