Accidentally Amish (37 page)

“Did you really do it?” Jamie asked.

“I did.” Even with no one there to see her, Annie could not help smiling.

“It sounds empty.”

“I’ve got some serious shopping to do.” Annie looked around, visualizing furniture.

“How long are you going to stay?”

“Just a night or two. Or three. I’m not sure.”

“Mr. Solano called three times.”

“I’ll call him,” Annie said.

“He sounded agitated. Is everything all right?”

“I’m doing my best to make sure it is.” Annie looked around the room in satisfaction. “I’ll check in again tomorrow.”

She called Lee next.

“The papers are almost to the final draft stage,” he said. “Are you ready to review them?”

“Anytime.” Annie untangled herself to stand up and begin pacing through the house. “Are they pressing back on anything?”

“They’re asking questions about why Barrett left, considering the nature of the offer you want them to extend.”

“Make it work, Lee,” Annie said simply. “It’s a deal breaker.”

“Really? Of everything that’s on the table, hiring the guy who tried to rip you off is a deal breaker?”

“Yep.”

“I’ve only known you a few weeks,” Lee spoke through a sigh. “But I have to say, this is not where I thought we would end up when you first came to me.”

“Things change. People change.”

“You could ask for more money, you know. They would ante up.”

“The offer is fine.” She wasn’t going to use the money anyway. “When everything is final, I want to be the one to talk to Barrett.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“Make it so.”

Annie ended the call and leaned against the living room wall in the silence. Then she bent over to close her laptop and silence her phone. She did not even leave it set to vibrate or alarm. “Silent”—as close as she ever came to “off.” Her eyes scanned the room and found nothing to land on. No electronic green lights glowing with reassurance of the steady flow of power. No cords dredging life from outlets toward convenience. No gizmos beeping urgent summons. No stacks of books and magazines she never got around to reading. Slowly, she lowered herself to sit again on the bare floor. Beneath her, oak planks pushed against her with their stories. Annie spread her hands on the wooden floor on either side of her and closed her eyes, letting her fingers trace slight ridges her feet would not have noticed. A vague coating of dust stuck to the crevices of her palm, and in the mustiness that stirred, she inhaled questions of past and future.

When she opened her eyes, she saw the inch-long weak raised wallpaper seam on one wall. Yellow paint did not quite seal the history behind it. Annie got up and walked toward the spot then scraped at it gently with a fingernail and looked closely. She could discern four—no, five—distinct stubborn layers of wallpaper that had resisted efforts to smooth the seam over the decades. Even Annie, with all her domestic challenges, had seen enough home decorating television shows to know the right thing was to remove wallpaper rather than add layers of paint or paper. She had a hazy notion that the process involved steam. But at the moment, she was grateful for the painted wallpaper. The stories of the house were still there, not whitewashed into oblivion. She was strangely curious to know what they were.

The house was nearly a hundred years old—but young compared to the stories rattling around Annie’s brain. Jakob Byler and Elizabeth Kallen were an unlikely pair, as unlikely as Rufus Beiler and Annalise Friesen. Yet somehow they found a life together.
Were they happy?
she wondered.
Were they certain they made the right choice?

In silence, Annie wandered through the rooms. In the kitchen, the stove and refrigerator were at least thirty years old, one mustard yellow and the other avocado green. Make that forty years. The real estate agent said they worked, but it was difficult to believe they were efficient. Annie leaned against the refrigerator and pushed, moving it just far enough from the wall to find the power cord and plug it in. The prompt reward for her effort came in the whir of a motor.

The dining room asked for a narrow table to be settled under the window, leaving space to walk through and access the stairs. Under the stairs, the wall was made of dark paneling, and Annie realized a door opened to storage space.

Over the next hour, Annie carried loads from her car and inflated her mattress. She arranged a few dishes on shelves in the kitchen, swept the wood floors, satisfied herself that the refrigerator was indeed becoming cold, however slowly, and hung towels in the bathroom. Her mind’s eye saw furniture and window coverings and new kitchen cabinets.

She knew just who she would hire to build them. Surely Rufus would be willing. She would be a paying customer, after all, and she could pay him well.

Rufus. Ruth would hang like a curtain between them now. She couldn’t just ask Rufus to build cabinets without first asking,
Why didn’t you stay to see your sister?

It was a good thing he did not have Annalise’s phone number, Rufus decided, because he would be tempted to call it. Since the reason was neither business nor an emergency, it would be wrong. He had Ruth’s number, but he never called it. If something happened to
Mamm
or
Daed
, he would use it. A mix-up about a meeting time was not an emergency that justified using a phone.

The remodeling work in the motel lobby was finished, including installing the replacement face panels and a new desktop. Rufus was now working on custom cabinetry for two homes in the new subdivision. The deadline was far enough off that he could spend time teaching his employees some of his craft, giving them a chance to create cabinetry and woodwork, not simply install it. He had just sent his crew home for the day and was getting ready to work on the tables for David’s customer in Colorado Springs.

Rufus looked forward to times alone of careful, slow sanding, sensing the exquisite plane of pressure that would break open the beauty in the hardwood. Even a side table could reveal the artistry of the Creator through the grain of the wood. With each passing of sandpaper over the surface, Rufus breathed a prayer of thanksgiving for the blessing of work.

The workshop door opened and Jacob appeared. “
Mamm
says to ask you a favor.”

“What would that be?” Rufus’s hands hesitated to leave the rectangle of wood that would become the tabletop.

“She promised to take preserves to Mrs. Weichert’s shop. She wants to know if you have time to do it.”

Rufus carefully set aside the tabletop. It was a long way to town just to deliver preserves. But if his mother asked him to do an errand, she had a good reason. “Are the preserves ready to go?”

Jacob nodded. “Two dozen jars of peach preserves. I hope she saved some for us.”

Rufus smiled. “She always does. Go tell
Mamm
I can do it right now. I need to go to the new job site anyway.”

“I was planning to stay a few nights,” Annie said into her phone. “I already made sure I can access the server from here. I don’t need to come in.”

Sighing, she listened to the plea from one of her software writers and regretted checking her messages. The project was due to the client in two days, and he was stuck.

“All right,” she finally said. “I’ll drive back tonight and be there first thing in the morning.”

Before she left, she took some measurements of windows and room sizes. When she grew hungry, she reluctantly carried her denim bag out to the car and backed out of her driveway. She could stop somewhere for food on the way back to the condo.

Pulling onto Main Street, she saw Rufus’s horse and buggy outside Mrs. Weichert’s antiques shop. The buggies all looked alike to her, but Annie recognized the horse. When she saw the shadow in the door frame, she almost stopped.

Rufus looked at the passing Prius as it moved away from him. The car was unmistakable. Annalise had come to town and not tried to see him. Disappointment twisted into him.

But why should she see him? It was better that she didn’t. He would write to Ruth and explain what happened. He hefted the box of preserves and took it inside the store.

In the buggy a few minutes later, Rufus nudged Dolly into the street and toward the gleaming mountains that still made him draw a deep breath every day, even after five years of daily greetings. At the edge of town, he turned north and drove past the sign that announced Kramer Construction and into the next cul-de-sac. Rufus had been careful to make sure his new customers were using another builder and not Karl Kramer. It was the end of the day even for the construction crews that labored long into the evening, and he saw workers collecting tools, readying to leave the site for the night.

Rufus tucked Dolly’s reins in a crevice in the midst of a convenient pile of lumber. He crossed the dirt that might one day be a lawn or, given the climate, a Xeriscaped garden of rock and mulch and uncut natural grasses. Inside the front entrance, the stairs were roughed in and the downstairs space portioned by unfinished walls. Rufus had blueprints with specific measurements. Still, he liked to stand in a room and sense the life that might someday exist there.

“Hello, Rufus.” The site foreman emerged from the would-be kitchen. “Is Tom hauling something here for you?”

Rufus shook his head. “No. I just need to get a feel for the place. I’m doing wall-to-walls in the family room and the master bedroom.”

The foreman nodded. “Okay, then. You may be the last one out.”

“I’ll only be a few minutes. I promise.”

Rufus heard the grind of engines outside as the crew started their cars.

He was glad the others were gone. It would be easier to feel the place, to stand where the windows would be and judge the light falling into the room. In the silence, he would hear the rustle of clothes against furniture, the scuff of slippers against the floor. He would see hands reaching for the cabinet knobs he was yet to create, fingers closing around them in a habit of a thousand repetitions. Rufus slowly paced the family room, standing still and silent several times.

Then he moved up the stairs to the master bedroom. One wall opened out to a deck with a view of the mountains. Large windows on the opposite wall would no doubt reflect the vista. His cabinets would fill the far connecting wall. Rufus faced the wall now, his eyes closed.

A second too late, he realized he was not alone. He turned in time to see a pair of black work boots before he slumped into gooey murk.

July 1739

C
hristian Byler loved the fields. The smell of wet earth, the rustle of eager corn in July, the sweeping bow of wheat in the wind—it was as if he felt the farm coming to life as his own bones and ligaments stretched. He was sure he would never forget putting crops in for the first time. His father sometimes fretted over what might go wrong—not enough rain, too much rain, hungry insects—but Christian savored each turn of dirt, every furrow, the mystery of seed covered in darkness springing to light.

Holding his straw hat in place, he ran now through the shortcut in the cornfield to where he knew his father would be judging whether the plants were of sufficient height for their stage of growth. He found his
daed
sliding off his horse at the far end of the field.