The Amish Groom ~ Men of Lancaster County Book 1 (16 page)

“It took you a while to figure it all out. I called you that Christmas and asked if you were happy, and you told me you were. You even sounded happy. So obviously you weren’t feeling mixed up about it anymore. That’s what I mean. Brady is no different than you were. He’s doing what he loves, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”

As I considered this, it occurred to me that maybe Brady had decided I was only there to enforce our father’s will. That I had become Dad’s ally, not his.

“Maybe he thinks I’m here just to keep him from quitting the team,” I ventured.

“That’s not the only reason,” Dad shot back quickly. “You’re his brother, Ty. Who better than you to stay with him while Liz and I are gone?”

“But it is a reason.”

“So?”

“So if this is a source of conflict between you two, then it will seem that I am not here as his brother but for your sake, to keep him on the team whether he wants to be there or not.”

Dad shook his head. “That is not a source of conflict between Brady and me. He loves football. He loves being on the team. He’s just feeling the pressure of being in such a visible spot. It’s scary to have so many eyes watching him all the time. He just needs to settle in to being in the spotlight. You settled in when your teenage life took an abrupt turn. That’s what he needs to see.”

I took a drink of the soda. It was tangy and sweet at the same time. And highly carbonated. “I’ll do my best, but I’m only human, Dad.”

“That’s all anyone can do, Ty. I just want Brady to give this his best. I don’t want him to look back ten, twenty years from now and wish he’d made different choices.”

We were silent as his words settled over us.

“So. Think you’ll end up marrying Rachel?” he asked, after a long thoughtful pause.

“Maybe. Probably.”

“How long have you been dating? Five years?”

I smiled. “Six, actually.”

“Six. Wow. I envy your long courtship. Isn’t that what you call it? Courtship? I married your mother less than a month after meeting her.” He laughed. “Craziest thing I’ve ever done.”

I smiled and said nothing, wanting him to continue and hoping he would. He hardly ever talked about my mother.

“I’m not saying I have any regrets. She was drop-dead beautiful and the kindest person I’d ever met. And she was so ready to see the world. I guess we both were. She proposed to
me
, did I ever tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“We’d seen each other every night for three weeks and I was getting ready to head back to New York. I was just in Philly visiting a friend.” Dad raised his gaze to the starry horizon, almost as if he were looking through a glass back to the time before I was born. “I would be heading out to Germany soon, and we were both wondering if we would ever see each other again. I had fallen pretty fast for her, that’s for sure. She wasn’t like any of the girls I’d ever had my eye on. She was fun to be around, but she was innocent too. Everything was new and amazing to her. There wasn’t a jaded bone in her body. I was kind of awkward around girls, but never around her. With her, I felt wise and clever and experienced in the ways of the world.”

He glanced at me, a tad embarrassed. “I’ve never been a very affectionate guy,” he admitted, “and Liz says I’m still not. But your mother…she didn’t seem to mind that the only thing I knew how to talk about in romantic terms was my ’67 Mustang back home.” He laughed. “Anyway, it was my last night in Philly. We were at a club, dancing, which your mother loved, and I said something like, ‘What am I going to do without you,’ and she said, ‘Take me with you.’ I laughed but she didn’t. She just smiled and said, ‘Let’s get married.’ ”

Dad grinned at the memory and I continued to listen in spellbound silence.

“I wasn’t sure if she was serious, so I said something like, ‘And what would your Amish father say if I told him I wanted to marry you?’ And she said, ‘We won’t tell him, Duke. Not until after the fact, anyway.’ And you know what? The minute she said it, I knew that was what I wanted to do. There wasn’t one person in her family who would approve, and the only one left on my side by that point was my dad, who wouldn’t care either way. No one would be happy for us, but we’d be happy for ourselves.”

He flashed me a sheepish grin.

“Everybody knows you get married in Maryland if you’re in a hurry,” he continued, “so that’s what we did. Drove right down to Elkton and found us an available chapel. She wore a blue dress and carried some kind of flowers. Daisies, maybe. Anyway, after that, it was just two hours over to Cape May for our honeymoon. That was the first time she ever went in the ocean—first time she’d ever even seen the ocean, actually. I can’t tell you how much fun it was to be there with her on that beach, to see how excited she got. Just ran right into the water, blue dress and all.”

He lowered his gaze to the fire that danced before us, his grin fading to a more somber expression. “The next few weeks weren’t nearly as fun, though, I’ll tell you that. I was still stuck in bachelors’ quarters back at my post, so your mom had to stay with one of her friends in Philly for a couple of weeks since she’d already given up her sublet. While I finished things at the base, filling out the paperwork and such so she could come with me to Germany, she spent her time wrapping up her own affairs and trying to get a passport for herself.”

He grew silent, lost in thought, so I prodded him by asking if she was successful.

He seemed to snap back to attention. “Sure was. Now that was an act of God, I’ll tell you. She prayed every day that the passport would show up before we had to leave, and, to my astonishment, it did.” With a grunt, he added, “In fact, it was her getting that passport in time that made me think maybe someday I could have as much faith in the good Lord as she did, you know? She just
believed
, to her very core.”

He glanced at me, adding, “I know you’ve probably been told by your grandparents that she turned her back on God when she married me. I can tell you that she did not.”

Though that knowledge was deeply comforting to me, I said nothing. I wanted him to keep talking.

After a moment, he did. “We went to see her family before we left for Germany, to tell them we were married and to say goodbye. It was a disaster. You would have thought your mother had married a mafia warlord. Her sister Sarah wouldn’t even talk to her. And your grandparents? They wouldn’t look at me. Did you know that?”

I shrugged. The way Sarah had described it, that day hadn’t gone well for any of them.

Dad turned to face the fire again. “Your grandfather pulled me aside before we left and told me to be good to your mother, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he said it. At least what he did next was…well, he put a hand on my shoulder and mumbled out something about God protecting us. Your mother told me later he was reciting a Bible verse, but at the time it felt totally personal, you know? Like it was just to me.”

I nodded. How sad my father didn’t know that the Bible could speak personally to him all the time if he would bother to read it.

“It was really touching, in spite of the cold welcome. I still remember it. Nicest thing anyone had ever said to me, besides your mother, of course.”

“That sounds like
Daadi
.”

“It was doubly meaningful because I knew what he really wanted to do at that moment was wring my neck, not pray a blessing over me.”

We both chuckled. That definitely did
not
sound like
Daadi
, the gentlest person I’d ever known.

“They never forgave me for taking their daughter away.”

I glanced at him. “Not true.”

He raised his eyebrows at me.

“I mean, that’s not the Amish way. We always forgive. If we don’t forgive others, then God in turn will not forgive us. The Bible says so.”

He took a long sip of his drink, draining the bottle.

“Yeah, well, all I know is, they about broke her heart that day.”

“That wasn’t about forgiveness, Dad. That was…” My voice trailed off. How could I explain it to an outsider? She hadn’t been shunned, but they had sort of treated her that way when she ran off. It wasn’t meant to be hurtful. It was meant to be biblical, a way to bring a wandering sheep back into the fold. I doubted that was a concept my father could understand, much less appreciate, so instead I just told him about my long-ago conversation with her sister Sarah, how she’d described it as a day none of them had been ready for.

“Clearly,” my father said, shaking his head.

“She also said that if they had known what was going to happen, they would have handled things differently.”

“Yeah? Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. But I guess I’m glad to hear it. Trust me, I can relate.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“I will say this about your grandparents. They sure came to my rescue when your mother died. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t taken you in.”

I hesitated, grappling for a response. How different my life would have played out had he done back then what a great many widowed fathers managed to do: find a way to carry on as a single parent. At the very least, I wouldn’t be as torn as I was now, because there would be no question about which world I truly belonged in.

“They are good people,” I finally managed to say.

Dad nodded. “Yes. Yes, they are.”

A few minutes of silence stretched between us as we stared into the fire.

“If you love Rachel, you should marry her, Ty.”

“It’s not…it’s not that simple.”

“Of course it’s that simple. It’s love. Love isn’t complicated. You just ask her, son. I know you’re still young and all, but not in Amish years.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Amish years? Is that like dog years?”

He chuckled. “Sorry. You know what I mean. From what I understand, at your age, you should be married and a member of the church by now.”

I was surprised to hear him put it so bluntly. I was tempted to tell him the truth, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to know the internal burden I had brought with me or not. Would he be happy or surprised or alarmed that I didn’t know where I belonged? In his mind, he probably thought I had settled on that long ago.

I gathered my courage and then opened my mouth to tell him that Rachel was a member of the Amish church already and that
that’s
what made proposing to her complicated—because I wasn’t yet and didn’t know if I ever would be.

But he stood and clicked off the fire pit. “I need to finish packing, and we have to go over the last of the details. The airport shuttle is coming at the crack of dawn.”

The conversation about Rachel fizzled away.

We went inside.

I saw Brady for a few minutes before I turned in for the night. His attitude toward me was the same. Polite but reserved. I knew one of the first things I had to do after Dad left was have a heart-to-heart with my brother so that I could let him know I was on his side.

Back in the guest room, I hung up the pants and shirts from my suitcase, though I wondered why I had brought them. I probably wasn’t going to wear any of my Amish clothes while I was there. I set my hat on the shelf above and then laid my suspenders and the empty duffel next to it. Dad had told me to hang on to the UCLA hoodie to wear while I was here, and though he hadn’t had time to pull together any clothes for me from his closet, he said I was welcome to help myself once he was gone.

After I’d put my things away, I got the notebook out of my backpack and settled into the armchair that was positioned in a corner of the room. I began writing down the list of observations I had mentally made about living the non-Amish life. Then I added a few more:

Houses can be kept by little work on your part.

One man can own three cars.

A house can have rooms that are never even used.

I got ready for bed and knelt at the chair to say my prayers. I thanked God for getting me safely to California, and I asked Him to watch over
Daadi
,
Mammi
, Jake, and Rachel while I was gone. I asked that He give safe travel for my father the next day and safety for Liz, wherever she was in Honduras, and that He would show me how to reach out to my little brother.

And I asked for wisdom and clarity to see His path for me. At this point it felt foggier than ever.