Big Decisions (2 page)

Suddenly there was a decided rustling in the underbrush. Stephen’s head turned slowly, and he brought his bow up to a more ready position. The rustling continued. Lizzie listened with bated breath, watching carefully in the direction the sounds were coming from. Would they actually see an honest-to-goodness deer? She didn’t know if she could stand to see Stephen put an arrow into the poor, innocent animal.

She didn’t know if she wanted to be disappointed or relieved when a busy gray squirrel emerged and raced across the thick pine needles.

“There’s your deer!” Lizzie mouthed.

“Shh!” Stephen warned.

What was the use of holding so perfectly still? It was getting dark, and there was no possible way he could shoot a deer now. She was getting very tired and impatient, wishing with all her heart that the night would be over. If Stephen didn’t soon come down out of this tree, if he kept up this stupidity of sitting in a tree when it was almost dark, she was going to say no if he asked her to marry him.

What about returning to the van? How would they get through those dreaded brambles again?

“Stephen!” she whispered.

“Shh!”

This time he was serious. Turning his head slowly, he peered intently into the semi-darkness as, much to Lizzie’s disbelief, two deer stepped out of the thicket. How could they be so quiet? Lizzie’s heart rate increased, but mostly out of fear for the deer’s safety. She so definitely did not want them to be killed with arrows stuck into their hearts. They were such beautiful creatures, completely at ease roaming their mountain, so why did anyone have to kill them?

Then as Stephen started to raise his bow to the proper position, they walked just as silently back into the forest. When Stephen finally turned to Lizzie and spoke to her in a normal tone, she knew the whole hunting ordeal was over. Carefully, with aching limbs, she made her way out of the pine tree. Rubbing her back, stretching, and sighing, she regained a sense of normalcy, grateful to be standing on solid ground and able to move at free will.

Lizzie stared at Stephen in disbelief when he turned to her and said cheerily, “That was fun, wasn’t it? I bet you really enjoyed it.”

“It … it, yes, well, it was all right. Mmm-hmm.” That was the closest thing she could say that was honest and still not hurt his feelings. She couldn’t say just how tedious her evening was, but he must have known because he laughed out loud quite suddenly.

“Not exactly a hunter, are you?” he said, smiling mischievously.

“Just get me off this mountain safely, and I’ll be fine,” Lizzie said.

They took a detour under a barbed wire fence, which Stephen held so Lizzie could easily slip through, before walking across a nicely cropped pasture until they came to the old house. Lizzie stared up at the attic windows in spite of herself, wondering who had built this huge three-story house and why it had been left to rot away, the wind and rain and snow all taking its toll on the sturdy structure. Probably the squirrels and the rats had a grand time gnawing at the lumber that held it together.

Ryan appeared shortly and shared his story with Stephen about having spotted a few deer but too far in the distance to have a decent shot. They stowed their hunting gear in the back of the van before climbing in. Finally, Lizzie was on her way home, away from the pine tree, the dark forest, and the creepy, sad, old house.

They turned into a little restaurant, Ryan saying he was starved because he hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime.

Lizzie was only too happy to sit in the tiny booth, eating French fries with plenty of salt and slathered with ketchup. They were the most fattening, most unhealthy thing, Mam said, but one of the most delicious foods in the world. Lizzie enjoyed every one, and then ate her way down the entire length of a tall chocolate sundae topped with whipped cream and nuts.

“Mmm!” she said, smiling genuinely at Stephen.

“Better than hunting?” Stephen asked.

“Much better,” she grinned back at him.

That evening, she decided marriage was probably a lot like hunting. You had to take the good with the bad, because God himself knew circumstances would not always be as pleasant as French fries and sundaes. There would be times of sitting in pine trees, but that was only normal. If the good was balanced with the bad, life could be leveled off into happiness. Maybe a mature, quiet kind of happiness, if you learned to care about each other’s feelings enough not to always say exactly what you thought.

If she had told Stephen how horrible her evening really was, he would have been hurt. And if Stephen had been as impatient with her as he seemed to be when she struggled through the briars, she would have been terribly insulted.

So it definitely paid to keep your mouth closed when you would love to air your grievances loud and long. After all, Stephen knew hunting was not her favorite thing to do, but she bet anything he admired her for sitting in that tree so long. She had proven to him that she could keep quiet for a good long time. And that was amazing.

L
IZZIE MISSED HER OLDER
sister, Emma, a great deal, mostly because she thought about marriage so much herself. She wished Emma was in her bedroom down the hall, ready to talk whenever Lizzie had important questions that needed answers. But Emma had married Joshua last year and moved to Allen County.

Mam and Dat were all right to talk to about such matters. But they were so old, it seemed that when they talked about being newly wed, it was like they had gotten married in the 1800s. You couldn’t really compare things, like homes and furniture or anything like that, because things were so different after their wedding than now.

What really alarmed Lizzie is how Mam would throw her hands in the air and laugh about the fact that they had to borrow 50 dollars to buy a kitchen table for their first house. Dat would join in and relate how old and freezing cold their first rented home was, and they would laugh together, as if it was all one big hilarious joke to be so poor and not care one teeny bit about it.

Lizzie wondered everyday when Stephen would ask her to marry him. She needed to talk to someone who got married in this day and age, like Emma. She had nice furniture that Dat and Mam had provided, things like a new hutch cupboard which held the set of china Joshua had given her before their wedding day. She had a brand-new table you could pull apart and put leaves in until you had a table spread clear across the kitchen, and as many as 18 or 20 people could sit around it at one time. Emma even had a new sofa and rocking chairs and a really pretty bookcase with sliding glass doors.

Lizzie didn’t know if Stephen had any money or not, so she worried a great deal. For one thing, she hated being poor or having to make do with cheap or broken things, like a torn, wrinkled plastic tablecloth. She wanted a nice new house with new linoleum on the floor and varnished, wooden cabinets with a pretty canister set perched on the Formica counter top. She daydreamed for hours about her new house, and the closer a marriage proposal seemed to be, the more she wondered about Stephen’s finances.

Mandy told her airily, in quite a lofty manner actually, that she cared more about her classy new home than she cared about Stephen. “You need to remember, Lizzie, that a nice new house doesn’t make a happy home,” she repeated.

Sometimes Mandy could be so infuriating with her wisdom and knowledge and always being right, that Lizzie found it easier to talk to Emma about these things.

So when Lizzie came home from school, and there was a long letter from Emma in the mail holder, she was ecstatic. Her excitement increased as she read how they wanted Mandy and John and Stephen and Lizzie to come on Saturday evening.

“Oh, good, good,
goody
!” Lizzie yelled exultantly, waving the letter in the air as she marched around the kitchen.

Mam smiled, and Dat drew his eyebrows down in displeasure. He shook his head and mumbled something about acting your age, before his head disappeared behind his paper again. Lizzie stopped to look at Dat, or rather at the paper he was holding. Dat just was not the same since he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was often tired and, of late, irritable and short with his children. He would have laughed in the past, his blue eyes twinkling at them, but now he often frowned or showed his displeasure with a sharp word. Most of the time the girls shrugged it off, but sometimes it hurt, even though they realized he struggled to accept this disease more than they would ever know.

So they hired a driver and traveled to Allen County. Lizzie could hardly wait to see Emma and Joshua, the old farm, and especially their new baby, Mark. Stephen wore a light, cream-colored shirt that made his skin look very tan. His hair was always bleached to a lighter color by the fall after a long summer of working in the sun. Lizzie thought he looked very handsome and wondered if Emma would think so, too.

After you dated awhile, it was much easier to relax and fully accept the fact that your boyfriend really did like you the way you were. It was no longer quite as big an issue for Lizzie to be a bit overweight, because Stephen certainly didn’t seem to mind.

Lizzie didn’t worry so much about her appearance like she had in the beginning of their relationship. It seemed as if dating for a year or so took care of the flutter of nervousness, the agony of indecision about which dress to wear, or, when you really thought about it, a lot of silly insecurities.

They no longer had strained silences. Instead, it was normal for them to have a good, healthy discussion about something they didn’t agree about. But the one thing they didn’t discuss was marriage. Of course, Lizzie wanted to get married now. She wasn’t really tired of being with the youth, but she wanted to go forward with her life.

For one thing, she was tired of teaching school, of helping Mam at home, and especially of the endless yard and garden work around the old farm. Lizzie wanted her own house, a nice new one, to be exact, with only Stephen to worry about.

The van turned into the farm lane. Emma greeted them from the porch of her brick farmhouse with a huge smile. As soon as they climbed down from the van, Joshua made John and Stephen feel at home with his warm manner as he showed them around the farm, pointing out where the pigs and steers were housed, and walking them to the pastures and the fields.

The sisters sat together in the living room and talked as fast as they could until they all stopped and admitted that no one was listening because all three of them were talking at once. There was just simply no one else on earth like a sister, they all agreed, and before they were aware of it, they were all talking at once again.

They fussed over Baby Mark, admiring the cute shirt and pants Emma had made for him. He was a big boy, toddling around on the glistening hardwood floor, pulling himself up with a mighty effort as he hung onto a sofa cushion. Emma said the best thing that ever happened to her was having a baby.

“I want lots and lots of children,” she said.

Lizzie eyed her a bit skeptically.

“Emma, now you know they won’t all be as good as Mark is right now. Suppose you’d have a baby that screams and cries like Jason used to? Or Aunt Becca’s baby girl?”

Emma leaned back on her glider rocker, gently massaging Baby Mark’s back as she tried to get him to sleep. She laughed easily as she looked at Lizzie in disbelief.

“Boy, you sure haven’t changed, have you? Worrying about a colicky baby before you’re even married!”

“Not
my
baby. Your next one!” Lizzie shot back.

Mandy laughed. “Oh, boy! Here we go. Sounds like home!”

“Don’t you ever long to be a single girl at home again, Emma?” Lizzie asked.

“No! Absolutely not. Never. I’d much, much rather be married to Joshua and have a baby boy. Right, Mark?” And Emma proceeded to hug and kiss her precious boy until he struggled to be put down on the floor.

“Come. I have to show you what I made for our snack tonight,” Emma said, as she led Lizzie and Mandy to the kitchen. Handing Mark to Mandy, she triumphantly produced two Tupperware containers and whisked the lids off, watching eagerly as Lizzie bent down to see what was inside.

“Emma! You didn’t make these. You bought them at a bakery!” Lizzie gasped.

“I made them! I absolutely did. I would never buy something like this at a bakery,” Emma laughed, beaming proudly.

Mandy oohed and aahed about the lemon jelly roll Emma held, while Lizzie said the chocolate one looked like a picture in a magazine. It did. Emma had made two perfect cake rolls. The lemon one was piped full of a light lemon filling that smelled so delicious Lizzie’s mouth watered. The other cake was a rich chocolate filled with creamy vanilla frosting. Emma had dusted both with confectioners’ sugar. The cakes were perfectly round without a crack or a burnt edge in sight.

“I just can’t believe you did that,” Lizzie said, absolutely impressed.

“Oh, Lizzie, you know how I always was. There’s nothing I’d rather do than spend hours in my kitchen, meticulously producing something like these jelly rolls.”

Emma’s eyes lit up, and she hurried back to the pantry. “Look at this,” she said, holding a perfect loaf of homemade bread. It looked exactly like the loaf of bread in the children’s book about the Little Red Hen who baked a beautiful loaf of bread with the wheat she raised.