“Something you can afford on your own? I thought you and Sam looked before he got married.”
“A friend of my boss has a caretaker’s cottage he hasn’t been using. It needs some fix-up so I’ll be doing that to reduce the rent.”
“Well, I guess that’s gut,” David said doubtfully.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I’d hoped you’d work out the problems with Daed if you stayed here.”
“Well, I couldn’t.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think it’s for the best. I appreciate you and Lavina having me here.”
“Anytime.” David laid a hand on his shoulder. “Anytime. I mean it. And I know Sam and Mary Elizabeth asked you to stay with them.”
“Yeah, just what a newly married couple needs. A brother hanging around so they have no privacy.”
“You’re forgetting Mamm and Daed live with us, and they don’t intrude on our privacy.”
John shuddered. People always said things could be worse. And they could. He could be an old married man like his brothers and have his parents living with him. He was just twenty-three. He wasn’t ready to be a married man anytime soon.
“Look, I’m glad you and Sam are happy being married. But I’m not ready. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready.”
David paused shoveling and regarded him. “I thought you were interested in Rose Anna for a long time.”
John shrugged and shoveled up more manure. “That was a long time ago. And I can safely say we’re not going to get back together now.”
“Now?” David straightened. “What happened?”
“You mean Dad didn’t tell you?”
“Nee.”
He stopped and propped his arm on the shovel handle. “She has quite a temper, that Rose Anna.” He told David about the snowball fight.
“You didn’t! Right there in the kitchen?”
“She started it!”
“Ya, and you didn’t have any trouble finishing it, did you?”
John looked hard at him, trying to see if David was judging him. But David was grinning.
“She’s sure holding a grudge,” John said as he went back to shoveling.
“The Zook maedels schur never held back on letting us know how they felt.”
“But Lavina forgave you. Mary Elizabeth forgave Sam.”
“Ya. But we met them halfway.”
“You know Rose Anna. She wants all the way—and everything her way.”
“She reminds me a lot of you.”
“I don’t have to have everything my way.”
“Nee?”
“No!”
They went back to shoveling and didn’t speak. When the wheelbarrow was full, David stood with his hands resting on his shovel. “Lavina forgave me. And then she saved my life. She persuaded me to come home. It was hard at first. Daed was as miserable as he ever was when I first came back. He’d always been hard. But he was angry at getting the cancer.”
“I know all this.”
“Ya. But maybe you’re forgetting that things changed for the better. And it’s because of Lavina leading me back home, back to church, back to God.”
“I’m happy for you,” John said quietly. “But I don’t need the same things.”
“Nee?”
“No. And I don’t need you trying to bring me back to the church. I know that’s what you and everyone in the church is supposed to do to save me. I don’t need saving.”
He propped the shovel against a wall, pushed the wheelbarrow outside, and dumped the contents. Turning, he started back and then stopped. He took a deep breath to steady himself, then another. It was no good getting mad at David. They’d both gone to church since they were babes in their mother’s arms. They were taught that if someone strayed from the church, you had to try to save them or they couldn’t go to heaven.
By the time he went back inside David had spread bedding in the stalls for the horses. “I gotta go,” he told him. “I promised to put in a couple hours with Peter.”
“Eat first. Please. Lavina will be so disappointed if you don’t.”
John hesitated.
“Please.”
He nodded. It was tough to say no when he brought up Lavina. “I can’t stay long.”
“I’ll tell her you have to eat and run.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound very gracious.”
“She knows how you are.” David grinned at him and slung an arm around his shoulders.
“Think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” John grabbed him in a headlock, and they tussled for a few minutes before David managed to throw him off.
“I’m not so soft, am I, bruder?” he asked, chuckling.
“I let you go,” John said. “I’m hungry.”
But just to make sure David didn’t try to prove him wrong, he took off to the house.
***
“How are the quilting classes going at the shelter?” Mary Elizabeth asked as they sat working on their quilts in the sewing room of the Zook home later that week. “I was so sorry to miss them the past two weeks.”
“We had some excitement the other day.”
“Not an angry ex-husband—”
“Nee, nothing like that.” Rose Anna knotted her thread, clipped it with scissors, and looked at her schweschder. “We have a new resident who came to the class and had an anxiety attack.”
“Quilting class made her anxious?”
“Kate says she has PTSD as well as being abused by her ex-husband. She hadn’t been out of her house in months, then she had to leave when he beat her.”
She frowned. “She came to the class and couldn’t handle sitting by the window. She was hiding under her table. It was so sad.”
“What’s PTSD?” their mudder asked.
“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Kate said Chris Matlock had it after he served in the military. You remember, he used to be Englisch before he came here and married Hannah, Matthew Bontrager’s schweschder.”
“So this woman was in the military?”
Rose Anna nodded. “Kate said she served in Afghanistan.”
“Imagine, women in the military,” Linda said.
“Kate was in the Army before she came here to work as a police officer,” Rose Anna reminded her.
“I forgot. Seems like she’s been here so long she’s always been a part of Paradise.” Linda got up and put another log on the fire.
“So what happened?” Mary Elizabeth sat, needle suspended over her quilt, looking at her. “Kate got under the table and talked to her awhile and got her to come out. Then they went downstairs. When Kate came back she told me that when Brooke returns we should find her a table away from the window.”
“Sad.”
“I think it’s time for a cup of tea,” their mudder announced