Читать книгу Return to Paradise - Barbara Cameron - Страница 11

Chapter 4

4

Tell us all about the quilt class,” Mary Elizabeth said the minute the three of them gathered in the sewing room the next day. “How was it? Did you enjoy it?”

Lavina thought about it as she threaded a needle. “I did. The shelter is a big old house just outside town. You can’t tell it’s a shelter from the outside because they have to keep it secret that it’s where these women and children live to keep them safe.”

“That’s sad,” Rose Anna said, her forehead puckering as she thought about it. “I can’t imagine having to be afraid of my boyfriend or my husband when I have one.”

“Or having to worry about having a place to live or clothes and food for myself and my kinner,” Lavina said.

“Kate said sometimes the women have to leave their home with only the clothes on their back. Some of the women looked like they had so little.”

She remembered the worn jeans and faded shirt Carrie had worn and how she’d wondered what she’d wear to a job interview.

“But when I walked in the door it looked like a home,” she told them. “A group of women were sitting in the living room talking and a mother was feeding her boppli a bottle. Several kinner were watching television. A big yellow bird was talking about the alphabet and a blue puppet kept asking for cookies. It was called Sesame Street and the kinner were laughing and looking happy.”

She knotted the thread. “It looked very much like a home, a regular Englisch home. And the sewing room where we taught the class—well, where Kate taught it and I tried to help—was very much like this one.”

Picking up the quilt she’d been sewing, she smiled. “It made me feel good that the women and the kinner had a home after what Kate said they’d been through.”

Rose Anna frowned. “Is there anything we can do?”

“You want to help with the quilting classes?”

“Well, that wasn’t what I was thinking.” She turned as their mother came into the room and took a seat. “Mamm, I was wondering if we had some things we could donate to the shelter Lavina visited yesterday. You know how places like that always need things.”

“You mean some quilts?”

“I was thinking more like that fold-up trundle bed we haven’t used in years.”

“We could do that,” Linda said, looking thoughtful. “There might be some other things we can donate. Ask the person who runs the shelter what they need, and then we can let people at church know.”

“Allrecht.”

There was a knock on the front door. Linda went to see who it was.

“I guess it makes you thankful for what we have, doesn’t it?” Mary Elizabeth asked. “We have our parents, a warm home and good food, and our church.”

Lavina nodded. She started to speak but stopped when her mother returned to the room.

“David’s here to see you.”

“Danki.” She set the quilt she’d been sewing aside and hurried from the room.

She found David sitting on the sofa in the living room. He stood when she walked into the room.

“Could we go for a ride so we can talk?” He looked so serious.

“Allrecht,” she said. “I’ll get my jacket.” She grabbed up her jacket and bonnet and let her mother know she was leaving the house. When she walked outside with David she was surprised to see the Stoltzfus family buggy.

“Did you get rid of your truck?” she asked as she climbed into the buggy.

“Nee. Nellie needed exercising.”

She studied him as he checked traffic and pulled out onto the road. She wondered if the horse really needed exercise or if he’d taken the buggy because he missed the old family horse.

They rode for a time without speaking, the only sound the clip-clop of Nellie’s hooves on the road. The air was chilly, but she was warm enough in the buggy.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said finally, not looking at her.

Another long pause followed. He found a place to pull over and turned to look at her. “I wanted to ask your forgiveness. I shouldn’t have left without seeing you first.”

“Nee, you shouldn’t have,” she said, trying to stay calm. “How could you?”

Before he could speak, the words poured out of her. “Do you know how I felt? I thought we meant something to each other.”

“We did.” He stared down at his hands, then looked up and stared at her. “Can you forgive me?”

“I’ve tried,” she admitted, tearing her gaze from his to stare out the window. “You don’t know how hard I’ve tried. A year, David. You were gone a year, and you couldn’t even write to me. I didn’t know where you were, if you were allrecht, anything.”

She heard the pain and accusation in her voice and bit her lip. What good did it do to say these things now? But emotions—pain and anger and feelings of rejection—were welling up, boiling over. She didn’t know she felt so strongly. She’d been taught to believe in extending forgiveness to those who wronged her all her life, and the one time she’d been given the opportunity to practice what she believed she failed miserably.

“I hurt you. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t need to look at him to know he meant it. She heard the regret in his voice.

“Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?” she asked quietly.

When he didn’t respond she summoned the courage to look at him. She’d never spoken to him like this. But she wanted answers.

“What could I offer you?” he said finally. “I had practically no money. No property. No job.” He sighed. “No future.”

She stared at him. “You had yourself. You had your two hands and a strong back to make your future with me by your side.” She paused. “You had your heart that I thought held love for me. What more could I want?”

Turning, she stared out the window, not seeing the landscape outside. “I would have gone with you.”

“Like Ruth in the Bible?”

“Ya.”

“I didn’t want you to give up your family.”

Confused, she turned back to him. “What?”

“They would have shunned you if you’d left the community.”

“You said you hadn’t decided to become Englisch.”

“I haven’t.”

“So you haven’t decided to leave the church?”

“I hadn’t joined the church so there was nothing to leave. You know that.”

“What I don’t know is why you asked to talk to me today.”

She watched him sit there staring ahead. Then he took a deep breath and turned to her. “I’m coming back to do what I can to help Mamm since Daed’s sick. But I’m coming back for more than that, Lavina. I came back for you. Will you give me another chance?”

***

Lavina wasn’t the most talkative person, but he could tell he’d shocked her speechless.

When silence stretched between them he felt a sickening lurch in his stomach. What had he been thinking? He should have waited, let her get used to seeing him for a while before he asked her to give him another chance.

Then an awful thought struck him: what if she was seeing someone? For all he knew she was engaged to be married. It was that time of year when Amish couples were getting married. Sometimes there were several weddings each week during the fall months . . .

Maybe he’d returned too late. Maybe too much time had passed, and she was too angry with him for abandoning him. Maybe—

“You want another chance,” she said slowly. “After all this time, you came back and you want another chance.”

“Ya,” he said, carefully watching her expression. He couldn’t read it.

“You want me to trust you after you betrayed my trust.”

“Ya,” he said.

“After what I just said to you?”

“Lavina—”

She held up her hand. “Nee, I can’t think of such a thing. Not so suddenly. You’ve been out of my life for a year and suddenly you’re not only back, but you’re wanting us to go back to what we used to be.”

A tear trickled down her cheek, and she angrily swiped at it with her hand. “I don’t know if I can go back to that, David. I don’t know if I should—if we should.”

“We were gut together,” he told her, reaching for her hand. “You know that.”

She sighed and nodded. “Ya, we were. But that was then. This is now. We’re different people now.”

“I haven’t changed,” he said earnestly. “I haven’t.”

“But I have.” She lifted her chin. “I learned to live without you. I learned I had to think about life without you. I had to learn to survive without you in my future.”

David felt a wave of panic wash over him. He’d told himself that she could turn him down, but he’d forced that thought from his mind. He hadn’t been able to think it could happen. She’d been part of his life for so many years. The Amish usually lived in the same community all their lives—generation after generation. They went to schul together, attended church together. Participated in work frolics and community activities. Their lives were so entwined. They became friends and married the boy or girl they’d known all their lives.

But she was saying he’d ruined things by abruptly leaving and not contacting her for a year. He’d been the biggest fool ever thinking it would be easy to just come back, apologize, and everything would be allrecht.

And he still didn’t have anything to offer her. Despite what she said, he felt any woman would want to know he could provide for her.

He pulled the hand he’d offered back, picked up the reins and jerked them. Nellie stepped back onto the road and began pulling the buggy down the road.

“David—”

He held up his hand. “Nee, I understand.”

“Do you? If I let you that close again and you left, I don’t think I could survive. Nee, David, you ask too much.”

She’d just broken his heart again so he knew what she meant. She probably didn’t know how he’d felt when he walked away from her—when he’d felt forced to leave his home, his community, everything he knew and cared about a year ago. He’d been so angry with his dat he hadn’t even been aware of how he’d felt when he woke up the day after and it really hit him what he’d walked away from. He’d lost the church and community he’d grown up in, but most importantly, it had hit him that he might never see Lavina again.

But he hadn’t gone back. He’d told himself he had nothing for her. He still didn’t, but he’d taken one look at her and knew he had to find some way to make things work. Maybe his father would realize that he was just so sick he had to retire and take it easy. Maybe . . .

Maybe he just needed to accept that he’d come back for two reasons—for his dat and for Lavina—and it appeared now that it wouldn’t be for Lavina. If he was honest, neither of them wanted him. He’d known his dat didn’t before he stepped back into his old home. He’d feared Lavina wouldn’t, either. But he’d had to take a chance on it.

How he wished she’d give him a chance.

He pulled up in front of Lavina’s house, and before he could get out she’d slipped from the buggy and was running toward the front door.

“Lavina!”

But she kept going. She raced up the steps to the porch and threw open the front door.

David stood there, debating going after her. Then he shook his head. She probably wouldn’t even answer the door if he knocked.

His shoulders slumped, he walked back to the buggy and got into his seat. “Take us home, Nellie,” he said. “Take us home.”

She began plodding toward the house down the road.

Usually he liked the relaxed travel a buggy provided. His mother had always said the Englisch rushed about so in their automobiles, and that they should slow down and learn to “smell the roses.”

Tonight he found himself wanting to hurry Nellie and get home quickly so he could lose himself in the oblivion of sleep. He’d had two bad days in a row—the first returning home to hear how sick his dat was and to have the man show him just how little he cared about his returning home.

And then today, hearing Lavina tell him how much he’d hurt her, how she couldn’t trust him not to do it again. Talk about rejection.

He drove down the long, dark road, feeling depressed and more than a little lonely. It wasn’t a new feeling . . . it had been the story of his life for the past year. Sometimes he didn’t think he’d have made it through without the friendship of Bill, his Englisch friend, and his bruders when they had left the Amish community and moved near him.

With Nellie in charge of getting them home and no need to concentrate on the road with no other vehicles on it, David’s thoughts wandered back through the years, back to memories of rosy-cheeked Lavina, her braids flying as she played tag on the school playground during recess. How he’d felt to know she’d sit with him for hours and listen as he poured out his pain at trying to get along with his father, and how her blue eyes would fill with warmth and compassion and she’d hold his hand. The happiness in those eyes when he asked her to accompany him to their first singing when she was a young maedel. Then utter joy years later when he asked her to marry him and the sweet taste of their kiss sealed the engagement.

Tonight he’d looked into the face of a young woman, not a maedel from his childhood, and seen how she’d turned away from him for the pain he’d caused, and he felt a soul-deep bleakness and despair.

An owl hooted in the woods lining the road, its call echoing in the silence. The wind grew colder and found crevices to creep into around the windshield and the doors of the buggy, seeping into his bones and making him feel old. It made him long for the comfort of his truck; watching the back of old Nellie, knowing she’d guide him home as she’d done for years and years, was a comfort he’d missed. She, the buggy, the family farm, the Amish way of life were such a part of him, just as much as his blood and bone and sinew.

He’d missed so much. He had to find a way back, not just to help his mudder with his dat and the farm, but to find himself again.

He told himself he couldn’t let himself get depressed over two bad days, rejection from two people who meant something to him. Gut things didn’t always come easy even when all came from God, from His plan for your life and according to His will.

There was something to be learned from every road He took you down, every hardship you faced, as well as every joy.

Maybe Lavina wasn’t the woman God had set aside for him. Maybe there was another he’d find joy in loving, find happiness in marrying, and having the kinner he hoped God would send. Who knew? He sighed. It was evident he wasn’t supposed to find out tonight. Maybe not for many nights.

He pulled into the drive of his home and got out of the buggy to unhitch Nellie. As he stood there giving her an affectionate hug, he told himself to be grateful for the moment, for the peace of the still night, for the safety and security of a home and a warm bed for the night. He said a prayer of thanks and asked for guidance, and then he led Nellie into her stall for the night before heading to his own solitary bed.