“What about you, Ezra?” she asked, keeping her voice light. “I don’t see another shop here. What keeps you busy?”
“I took over the farm.”
“As you planned to. Have you started your cheese-making business yet?”
His gaze darted away. Had she said too much? Or was he simply unsettled by each reminder of how differently her life had turned out from what she’d talked about while his had followed exactly the path he wanted?
He bent to pat the head of the little dog, who had inched over to smell his boots, but Shep shied away.
“Shep is skittish around people he doesn’t know,” she said. “He usually stayed inside except for his walks when we were in Philadelphia.”
“Is that where you’ve been? Philadelphia? So close?”
She nodded, picking up the dog and holding him between her and Ezra like a furry shield. She was astonished by that thought. When they were growing up, she had never felt she needed to protect herself from Ezra. They’d been open about everything they felt and thought.
“Philadelphia is only fifty or sixty miles from here, and buses run from there to here regularly. Why haven’t you come back to Paradise Springs?” he asked, and she noticed how much deeper his voice was than when they’d last spoken. Or maybe she’d forgotten its rich baritone. “Why didn’t you come back for a visit?”
She gave him the answer she had perfected through the years, the answer that was partly the truth but left out much of what she felt in her heart. “I wanted to wait for my brother to come back with me.”
“Did he?” Ezra glanced around the parking lot. “Is he here?”
Tears welled in her eyes, even though she’d been sure she had cried herself dry in recent days. “No. Johnny died two weeks ago.” She regretted blurting out the news about her brother. How could Ezra have guessed when she wasn’t wearing black? She was unsure how to explain that she had only a single plain dress until she and Mamm finished sewing a black one for her.
Ezra’s face turned gray beneath his tan, and she recalled how Johnny and Ezra had been inseparable as small boys. That changed when they were around twelve or thirteen years old. Neither of them ever explained why, though she had pestered both of them to tell her.
“What happened?” he asked.
She crooked a finger for him to come away from the buggy. Even though the accident had happened shortly after Mandy was born, she didn’t want to upset the kind by having her listen to the story again. Mandy was already distressed and desperate to return to Philadelphia and the life and friends she had there, but Leah hadn’t considered—even for a second—leaving her niece behind with Mandy’s best friend’s family, who offered to take her in and rear her along with their kinder.
Mandy and she needed each other, because they had both lost the person at the center of their lives. Now they needed to go on alone. Not completely alone because they had each other and her parents and her two older sisters and their spouses and their extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles in Paradise Springs. And God, who had listened to Leah’s prayers for the strength to live a plain life in the Englisch world.
Leah paused out of earshot of the sleeping girl and faced Ezra. The sunlight turned his brown hair to the shade of spun caramel that made his brown eyes look even darker. How many times she had teased him about his long lashes she had secretly envied! Then his eyes had crinkled with laughter, but now when she looked into those once-familiar eyes, she saw nothing but questions.
“Johnny was hurt in a really bad construction accident, and he never fully recovered.” She looked down at Shep, who was whining at the mention of his master’s name. The poor dog had been in mourning since her twin brother’s death, and she had no idea how to comfort him. “In fact, Shep was his service dog.” She stroked the dog’s silken head.
“Why didn’t you come home after Johnny was hurt?”
“He said he didn’t want to be a burden on the community.” She thought of the horrendous medical bills that had piled up and how she had struggled to pay what the insurance didn’t cover. Johnny’s friends told her that they should sue the construction company, but she had no idea how to hire an attorney. Instead, she had focused on her quilts, taking them to shops to sell them on consignment or to nearby craft fairs.
“No one is a burden in a time of need.” Ezra frowned. “Both of you know that because you lived here when Ben Lee Chupp got his arm caught in the baler, and the doctors had to sew it back on. Everyone in our district and in his wife’s district helped raise money to pay for his expenses. We would have gladly done the same for Johnny.”
“I know, but Johnny didn’t feel the same.” She bit her lip to keep from adding she was sure the financial obligations were not the main reason behind her brother’s refusal. He had told her once, when he was in a deep melancholy, that he had vowed never to return home until their daed apologized to him for what Daed had said the night Johnny decided to leave.
That had never happened, and she had known it wouldn’t. Johnny had inherited his stubbornness from Daed.
Ezra looked past her, and she turned to see Mandy standing behind her. Her niece was the image of Johnny, right down to the sprinkling of freckles across her apple-round cheeks. There might be something of Mandy’s mamm in her looks, but Leah didn’t remember much about the young Englisch woman who had never exchanged marriage vows with Johnny.
Leah knew her mamm had been pleased to see her granddaughter dressed in plain clothes at breakfast, and the dark green dress and white kapp did suit Mandy. However, Leah sensed Mandy viewed the clothing as dressing up, in the same way she had enjoyed wearing costumes and pretending to be a princess when she went to her best friend Isabella’s house. Mandy seemed outwardly accepting of the abrupt changes in her life, but Leah couldn’t forget the trails of tears on her niece’s cheeks that morning.
Motioning for Mandy to come forward, she said with a smile, “This is Amanda, Johnny’s daughter. We call her Mandy, and she is my favorite nine-year-old niece.”
“I am your only nine-year-old niece, Aunt Leah.” Mandy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of a preteen.
“Ja, you are, but you’re my favorite one.” She put her arm around Mandy’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “This is Ezra Stoltzfus. He lives on the farm on the other side of our fields.”
“I spoke with your daed the day before yesterday,” Ezra said as he looked from Mandy to Leah, “and he didn’t say anything about you coming to visit.”
“Coming home,” Leah corrected in little more than a whisper.
“I see. Then I guess I should say welcome home, Leah.” He didn’t add anything else as he strode away.
She stood where she was and watched him go into his brother’s buggy shop. When he did not look back, she sighed. She might have come home, but her journey back to the life she once had taken for granted had only begun.
Ezra walked between the two rows of cows on the lower level of the white barn. He checked the ones being milked. The sound of the diesel generator from the small lean-to beyond the main barn rumbled through the concrete floor beneath his feet. It ran the refrigeration unit on the bulk tank where the milk was kept until it could be picked up by a trucker from the local processing plant.
He drew in a deep breath of the comforting scents of hay and grain and the cows.