The Calling (17 page)

T
obe fed hay to Silver Queen and her colt as Bethany filled their buckets with water. Caring for the animals had always been his job when he was growing up. She and Tobe had many good conversations while they worked, side by side. She smiled to herself, thinking how wonderful it was to have him here and how easily they settled into their old routines.

“Tobe, I want to know more about Mom. No, I don’t. Yes. I do.”

He straightened up, startled by her question.

“You couldn’t have taken me with you to see her?”

“It never crossed my mind.” He pitched some hay into the stall. “One thing I will tell you, Bethany, she’s not what you’d think.”

“I don’t think anything. I have no idea what she’s like. I hardly remember her.” She gave him a sideways look. “Do you? Remember her, that is.”

Tobe leaned against the stall door. “Probably more than you do. I remember once or twice when she and Mammi Vera had words. Mom seemed to feel poorly, and slept a lot.”

“Tobe, why did she leave?”

He turned and held his hand out to the colt to sniff. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. Why won’t you tell me the truth?”

He didn’t look at her. “Some things are best left alone. This is one of them.”

“Did you even ask her why she left?”

He shook his head. “We didn’t talk much.”

“Did she ask about me?”

He shook his head.

“I want to see her. I want to meet her for myself.”

He tilted his head, shaking it. “Bethany, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Shootfire! Why not? You got to be with her. How’d you find her, anyway?”

“Jake Hertzler. He knew where she was.”

“But . . . how?”

“I guess he poked around Dad’s old records. He showed me their divorce certificate, and I copied down the return address on the envelope.”

“Was she glad to see you?”

“I wouldn’t say . . . glad.”

“What would you say?”

“Let’s just say it gave me some peace of mind to see her.”

“That’s what I want too. Peace of mind.”

“Bethany . . . you can’t unsee a thing once it’s seen, or unknow it once it’s known.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just leave it alone. Remember her the way you want to remember her.”

Well, that was the problem right there. She couldn’t remember her mother. The images were so mixed up they
never made much sense, strange thoughts and feelings that flickered and were gone like moths darting at a lamp. She remembered someone humming a song. She remembered a black-and-white dog sleeping on her bed. She remembered playing checkers with another child—Tobe?—in a room that was dimly lit. She wanted to know more. “Would you at least give me her address?”

He shook his head. “I’m trying to protect you as best as I can.”

“I don’t need protecting. I need answers.” She put the water bucket down. “I just feel so mixed up inside. I’m trying to make peace with things—Jake, Dad’s death—but I feel like I can’t move forward, not in anything, until I get some things sorted out.”

Tobe was silent for a long, long time. “I’m sorry, Bethany. Like I said, some things are just best left alone.”

Shootfire!
Everybody seemed to think they knew what was best for her.

Mim had responded to Stuck’s letter by telling her just what Danny had said—that a life could be transformed by God, if a person were only willing to ask for help. The newspaper didn’t want to run something so overtly religious, Bethany said, after a brief meeting with the features editor, whom she thought was small minded and unimaginative, so Mim went ahead and mailed Mrs. Miracle’s response to Stuck to the return address on the envelope.

The features editor did tell Bethany one interesting thing: the column was getting a lot of attention and he was thinking about expanding it from once to twice a week. Bethany said
she smiled at him and took full credit. “Here’s this week’s mail pouch,” she said as she tossed the manila envelope on Mim’s bed.

It was twice the size of last week’s batch.

“I bought more stamps for you while I was downtown.” She handed Mim a roll of first-class stamps. “You’re not going to make any money if you mail letters to people. Just because the newspaper isn’t printing them, it doesn’t mean you have to answer them.”

“I know. I just want to.”

Bethany sat on the bed. “What are these poor saps writing to you?” She put a hand out to reach for the manila envelope, but Mim grabbed it.

“You’re being mean. Don’t call them poor saps. They’re just people. All kinds of people. And you can always read the column in the newspaper. It’s not a secret.”

Bethany tilted her head. “Isn’t it?” She jumped off the bed and crossed the room to the door. “Sure hope you know what you’re doing, Mim. You could get into a heap of trouble for this if anyone catches on that you’re masquerading as Mrs. Miracle.” She closed the door behind her.

Masquerading? How insulting. People needed to write to Mrs. Miracle and she felt compelled to write back. She turned the manila envelope upside down on her bed and let the letters spill out. She picked up a letter and opened it:

Dear Mrs. Miracle,

My name is Peter and I am in the sixth grade. When I talk, I stutter. Yesterday I tried to order a large coke at the movies. I said to the counter guy I would like a lllllllllllllllllarge coke. He looked at me as if he thought I was mental. It was very embarrassing. That kind of thing happens a lot to me and I take a lot of teasing.

Sometimes it feels that my mouth is stuck in a traffic jam and nothing can move.

Will my stutter ever go away?

Yours truly,
Peter

Mim remembered a boy with a stutter from her old school. She could still see the pain on his face as he tried to get some words out, with children snickering all around him. This boy grew quieter and quieter, until a new teacher arrived in the middle of the year and put a stop to the teasing. She came up with all kinds of strategies to help this boy. Mim remembered a book report he read on the last day of school . . . without a single stutter. She would never forget the look on that boy’s face when he finished the report—like he had scaled Mt. Everest. Mim tapped her chin with her pencil . . . what were those strategies the teacher gave to that boy? Oh yes! She remembered.

She pulled the typewriter out from under her bed and set it up on her desk. Then she took a fresh sheet of paper and fit it into the roller.

Dear Peter,

I have some tips that might help the next time you are in a situation that makes you feel anxious, like ordering a large coke at the movies or giving a book report in school.

1) Say the words in your mind before you say them out loud.

2) If you have to give a talk in front of your class, avoid looking at any one particular person. Look above the heads of the other students and focus on something in the back of the room.

3) Take up singing. Stutterers normally don’t stutter while singing. It will help you build confidence.

4) Try not to put pressure on yourself. One of the things that makes stuttering worse is anxiety.

I hope those ideas might help you, Peter. And I also hope you will not let anyone’s teasing cause you to stop talking.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Miracle

Mim pulled the letter from the typewriter and scanned it for typos. She was a stickler for typos. Satisfied, she carefully folded the paper in three sections and placed it in the folder to be returned to the
Stoney Ridge Times
.

Being Mrs. Miracle was a wonderful job.

Mim glanced at the alarm clock on her night table. She had time for one more letter before she needed to go to bed. She was waking up extra early this summer so she could join her mom on pre-dawn walks up in the hills. It was their special time together, just the two of them, and she loved to have those moments with her. She flipped through the pile of new letters and saw one with Stuck’s unique scrawl. She ripped it open.

Dear Mrs. Miracle,

It was nice of you to send a letter to me but I am sorry to say you are dead wrong about God. He doesn’t exist. If he did, my mother would not have killed my father. She would not be spending her life in jail. If there were a God then someone on this earth would care about me.

Don’t bother praying on my account. It’s just hot air hitting the ceiling.

Signed,
Stuck

Oh, boy. Being Mrs. Miracle was a difficult job.

When Sammy and Luke galloped past Bethany as she hung laundry on the clothesline, she hollered at them to stop. “Where’s Tobe?”

“In the barn!” Sammy said.

“Hunting for something,” Luke added. Then they both vanished through the hole in the privet.

Galen King, she thought, was a saint to put up with those boys underfoot.

Bethany finished hanging her dress on the clothesline—a blue one—and she stopped for a moment, watching the dress flutter in the gentle breeze. She was always drawn to the color blue and she couldn’t say why. The color gave her a feeling of calm and safety. One of the eagles flew overhead and caught her attention, silhouetted against the sky. Maybe she loved the color blue because it had something to do with the vastness of the sky. Endless, permanent, predictable.

She still had bedsheets to wash and hang on the line to dry, but she wanted to talk to Tobe while no one was around. She walked down to the barn and, once inside, was hit with
a blast of pungent moist air: hay and horses and manure. She blinked; it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness and she heard footsteps above her head. She found Tobe in the hayloft, amidst a sea of opened boxes, dusty old trunks, broken furniture waiting to be repaired. “Tobe, I’ve given this a lot of thought. I want the address for Mom.”

He looked up at her. “You’re not going to get it from me.”

Bethany crossed her arms over her chest, furious. “Shootfire! You seem to be keeping a lot of information to yourself these days!”

“My thoughts exactly,” Rose said, as she emerged up the hayloft ladder. “I have two questions for you, Tobe, and I’d like the answers.” She climbed to the top and leaned against a haystack. “Why did you run off last year, and why did you come back?”

Tobe didn’t answer her, but his eyes looked a little frightened when Rose asked him those questions, or perhaps only surprised. Like a cottontail caught in a sudden beam of a flashlight.

Rose walked closer to Bethany and Tobe. “Tell me what you’re looking for.”

He kept his eyes fixed on the ground. His hands were clasped together; Bethany saw them tighten involuntarily. “Just something I left behind. Bethany said that most of the things in the basement got moved up here when you started the inn.”

Rose looked around the dusty hayloft. “That’s right. The inn has kept me so busy, I haven’t had time to organize anything. It’s on my to-do list.” She brushed some hay off a barrel top. “Tobe, are you looking for something that has to do with Schrock Investments?”

“Maybe I should leave,” Bethany said.

“No,” Rose said firmly. “Bethany, it’s time you understood
the bigger picture.” She turned to Tobe, who had turned his attention back to the barrel. “I want an answer: are you looking for something that has to do with Schrock Investments?”

Head down, he stilled. “There’s nothing more to be done with the business.”

“No, that’s not true.”

He snapped his head up to look at Rose. “The Amish Committee is paying people back. The other investors have already gotten their money from claims. It’s going to be okay.”

“But that doesn’t answer the question of why the business started to fail in such a fast and furious way.”