Love’s Journey Home (18 page)

“It’s delicious, Emma. No one makes pie like Annie,” Catherine added. She chewed,
her eyes closed, her expression blissful. “I’ve missed this. You can’t get pie like
this in Wichita.”

“There’s a lot you can’t find in Wichita that you’ll find here.” Helen leaned back
in her chair and clasped her hands primly in her ample lap. She’d eaten two pieces
of pie and drank two glasses of sweet tea. No one ever accused her of having a puny
appetite. “Like your family and your church.”

Annie held up a hand. She wanted a little time with her sister, a little time to enjoy
her company. To forget—or at least ignore—the chasm that separated them. “Helen, let’s
not get into that right now.”

“Catherine, how does it feel to go around with your hair uncovered?” Helen had that
stubborn look on her face Annie recognized, like Noah at bedtime. “Doesn’t it bother
you to know men are looking at you?”

“Nee.” Catherine’s voice dropped to a whisper. She leaned forward. “I’ll let y’all
in on a secret. It’s only hair.”

She giggled. Annie exchanged glances with Emma and Helen. Helen looked shocked, Emma,
sad. Annie turned back to her sister. “Mudder would be so ashamed.”

“Don’t tell me what Mudder would be.” Catherine slapped a hand on her notebook. “If
she were here, I would be a different person. If she hadn’t died, we’d all be different.”

“But she did die,” Helen said, her tone troubled. “Don’t disrespect her by disrespecting
her beliefs, our beliefs.”

“I don’t mean to disrespect. I was…I wanted to give you some perspective. You’re so
isolated in your beliefs, you have no idea what a big, wide world it is out there.”
Catherine sighed. She ran her hand across the notebook. “Did you tell everyone why
I’m here, Annie?”

“I didn’t…not yet.” She saw Emma’s curious look and shook her head. “It’s your project.
You need to tell everyone and let them decide for themselves if they want to be a
part of it. But you should know that I won’t be.”

“A part of what?” Emma glanced from Annie to Catherine and back. “Why are you here,
Catherine?”

Catherine began to explain. Annie watched Emma’s face. Her eyes widened. She toyed
with the fork she’d used to play with the pie she hadn’t eaten. Then she began to
shake her head.

“Please, think about it.” Catherine leaned forward. “It costs you nothing. You don’t
have to read the memoir or even see it in a bookstore. You’re isolated here. No one
will know it’s you. How does that hurt you in any way?”

“How? Our job is to keep ourselves apart from the world. To not draw attention to
ourselves.” Annie jumped into the fray before Emma could respond. She couldn’t help
herself. How could Catherine have forgotten all this? “We don’t hold ourselves up
as examples of anything. We don’t want graven images taken, let alone printed in a
book for others to gawk at.”

“It will help them to understand.”

“No, it will help you to understand,” Helen piped up.

Annie turned to stare at her, as did Emma and Catherine.

“I’m sorry. I know this is a family matter.” Helen’s plump cheeks reddened. “I can’t
help it. I feel like I should stand in, where your mother can’t.”

“Say what you think.” Annie needed another perspective. Helen, despite her youthful
awkwardness, was older and wiser. She had trouble expressing herself, but she had
a grounding in the Ordnung that Annie respected. “We value your thoughts.”

“Catherine wants to put on a piece of paper everything that has happened to her.”
Helen’s face darkened to a brick red. She stumbled over the words, but to her credit,
she kept going. “Those things involve the people who are important to her. Like her
sisters and brothers. She thinks writing it down will make her feel better.”

“So write it down. Feel better. But don’t tell the world.” Annie stood and began picking
up the plates from the table. She didn’t want Catherine to see how sick the idea made
her. “Don’t show them the inside of our family and our community. Don’t use us as
show and tell.”

“I’m not using you.”

“Jah, you are. To make yourself bigger in your career, whatever it is you plan to
do with all this education, all this book learning you’re getting.”

“Nee, I’m only trying to understand what happened to me, why it happened.” Catherine
shook her head, her eyes suddenly wet with tears. “I only want to stop feeling like
this. Can’t you understand that? I don’t want to feel like this anymore!”

“Then write it all down, but don’t publish it.” The look on Catherine’s face made
Annie feel like a mean, ugly person. If her sister needed to do this in order to heal
after three years, shouldn’t she be allowed to do that? Torn between her faith and
her love for her sister, Annie felt ripped apart. She had to stand with her faith.
She had to stand with her community. Didn’t she? There had to be another way for Catherine
to get better. “Don’t take pictures of me and Noah and Caleb and Lillie and Mary.
Write your story and let that be your therapy. Don’t make us part of your therapy.”

“What do you know about therapy?” Catherine dabbed at the corner of her eyes with
a napkin. Her nose turned red, like Annie’s did when she cried. “You didn’t see what
I saw. Besides, you’re stronger. You have more faith. I can’t help it I’m so messed
up.”

“I’m not stronger. I question. I question all the time. I question why I had to lose
David.” Her voice cracked and Annie forced herself to shut her mouth. She would not
break down now. Not now. David asked so little of her. To take care of their son and
to stay strong. That was it. She thought of Charisma and the dough punching. “I make
bread. That’s my therapy. I make bread every day. Day after day. I let it rise and
I punch it down. I don’t write books or take pictures and publish them for the whole
world to see how I lost the person I love the most.”

“You make bread?”

“Stop, please.” Emma gasped and gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “Please
stop arguing.”

“I’m sorry, Emma. We’re not arguing. We’re talking.” Annie laid the plate on the counter
and rushed to her sister’s side. “We didn’t mean to upset you. It’s okay. We’ll work
it out.”

“It’s not you.” Emma’s mouth widened, with it, her eyes. She gasped. Grimacing, she
clutched both hands to her stomach. “The baby…oh, oh.”

Annie’s anger with Catherine dissipated in the rush of memories that deluged her.
She remembered that enormous, grand feeling of having another human being growing
inside her. That sensation of being exactly who God intended her to be. Wife and mother.
She had relished those sharp kicks that said her baby thrived. An ache as sharp as
any labor pain pierced her heart. Would she ever experience that feeling again? Hold
her newborn child in her arms? She heaved those thoughts, those questions, into the
box in the corner of her mind where she kept all things related to her murky, unfathomable
future and padlocked it shut. “The baby’s kicking. That’s
gut
, right?”

Emma stood, knocking her chair back, and took two tottering steps away from the table.
“No, not kicking.” She grabbed the back of the chair and leaned forward, panting.
“Pain.”

“
Ach
, is it time?” A thrill ran through Annie. Her heart began to pound like a hammer
against nails. Her legs shook. Thrill mixed with an aching, bittersweet remembrance.
The excitement of it. The doubts that crept in and then dissipated when she heard
Noah cry for the first time. Could she do it? Would the baby be fine, with all ten
fingers and toes? “I know you intended to do this at home, but maybe we should go
to the clinic since you’re here in town.”

“No, no, I need to go home. I need Thomas. He’s working on the roof.” Emma straightened,
inhaled again, and staggered toward the door. “Tell Josiah to find Mariah Stockton.
She’s the midwife I’m using.”

“Are you sure you have time to get all the way to the farm?” Annie grabbed Emma’s
canvas bag. “The clinic’s two blocks away. We don’t even have to hitch the buggy.”

“It took Caleb ten hours to get here.” Emma waved a hand, but her lips tightened and
her face went white. She paused for a second and inhaled deeply. “I’ll be fine. I
don’t want the expense of the clinic. We need to save our money…in case…well, you
know.”

She groaned and panted.

“Those pains are awfully close together.” Catherine shot from her chair. She grabbed
Emma’s elbow. “Help her, Annie. Come on. Let’s get to my car. It’s parked across the
street. We can be at the farm in twenty minutes, less if I speed.”

“No, no car!” Emma protested. “We can’t ride in a car, not with…”

“With me. The shunned sister.” Catherine tugged at Emma’s arm. “I don’t care about
the
meidung
. You’re my sister and you’re having a baby. Either you have it at the clinic or you
let me drive you to the farm. Otherwise you’ll have it in the back of a buggy. What’ll
it be?”

Emma bent over, hands on her knees. The gasp became a shuddering groan that reverberated
off the walls of the bakery. Then she breathed in and out. “Car.”

Annie grabbed her other elbow. “Helen, can you lock up and then go tell Josiah? He’ll
get the midwife.” She plucked the keys from under her counter and tossed them to her
friend. “Then come back here to wait for Mark and Mary Elizabeth to return. They can
run the bakery for the afternoon.”

Her face flushed, Helen nodded. “God bless you, Emma, and your new little one.” Tears
teetered in the corners of her brown eyes. “I’ll pray for a safe delivery.”

Emma managed a nod.

“Let’s go, let’s go.”

Annie, conscious of the stares of passersby, helped Catherine lead Emma across the
street. Catherine pushed a button on the little black thing in her hand, something
beeped, and then she nodded. “The doors are open, hop in.”

Annie helped Emma into the backseat and slid in next to her, enveloped in the smell
of leather and something else. Something elusive that she hadn’t smelled before. It
was a far cry from the starless night when she’d helped Emma into the back of a wagon
and ridden with her to the clinic in the cold and dark. That night Emma lost her first
baby, and David had sat with Annie in the waiting room, offering her comfort, taking
the first steps toward healing their relationship, toward a life together.

What she wouldn’t give to have David’s hand on hers right now, in this moment.

“I feel like I need to push.” Emma grunted. “I need to push.”

“No, no, don’t do that!” Catherine started the engine. “No having a baby on the leather
seats of my rental car.”

Not words Annie ever expected to come out of her sister’s mouth. Catherine driving
a car was hard enough to fathom. Catherine worried about leather seats in a car she’d
rented seemed even more unfathomable. She’d traveled a long road from cleaning Englischers’
houses and walking barefoot to the produce stand to sell Annie’s pies.

“Think about something else.” Annie needed to think about something else too. Catherine
would leave soon, and they would go back to being strangers living in different worlds.
She scrambled for another topic of conversation. “Have you picked out names? Do you
want a girl this time?”

“I’ll take whatever God gives us.” Emma panted. “Thomas likes Adam if it’s a boy,
Lilah if it’s a girl.”

“Nice names.”

“Jah. Nice names.” Emma grabbed Annie’s hand and squeezed hard. “I want this bobbeli
to grow up here. In our home. On our farm. Is that selfish of me?”

“Maybe it is, but it’s also human.” Annie forced herself to sound cheerful—far more
cheerful than she felt. “We can’t rid ourselves of our hopes and wants. We have to
set them aside for the greater good.”

“You sound like Aenti Louise.”

“I want to be like Aenti Louise, but I’m not.”

“Me neither,” Emma whispered, her grip tightening. “But she’s had more years to hone
her wisdom and her goodness.”

“You are good, Emma.”

“Nee. I want my way. I’ve always wanted my way. I’m selfish and unforgiving.”

“You’re the least selfish person I know.”

Emma’s hand tightened again. She cried out. “Lord, have mercy!”

Catherine glanced back, her face tight with tension and fear. “Is it…is she…we’re
almost there. You have to hang on, Emma!”

“Look at the road, Catherine!” Annie flashed to the day Emma and Thomas had come to
tell her of the accident that had taken her parents’ lives. “You must not look away
from the road.”

Catherine twisted back to face the front. The car shot forward as if Annie’s admonition
had caused Catherine’s foot to slam against the gas pedal.

“Hang on,” Annie whispered. “Hang on.”

The drive passed in a blur that alternated between seconds that crawled along in an
excruciatingly slow pace while Emma screamed in pain, then sped up as she sobbed,
her head on Annie’s lap. “It’s happening so fast this time,” she whispered between
contractions. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

“We will make it.” The car shot forward again as if to punctuate Catherine’s statement.
“You concentrate on not having that baby until we get to your house.”