The Christmas Quilt: Quilts of Love Series (5 page)

BOOK: The Christmas Quilt: Quilts of Love Series
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Setting aside the basket, she lowered herself to the floor carefully. She wasn’t yet in the fifth month of her pregnancy, barely even showing, but she’d promised her husband and her
mamm
she’d stop hopping around like a jackrabbit. As a nurse, she knew exercise was good for her baby. It was easier to appease her
mamm
than argue though. Once on the floor, she proceeded to crawl around on her hands and knees, searching under the table for the fabric.

“Lose something?”

“Samuel!” Annie popped up, knocking her
kapp
nearly off her head and releasing a cascade of curls.

“Let me help. What are you searching for down there?” Samuel’s tone was scolding. After nearly two years of marriage Annie recognized it, but his eyes were laughing with her.

“Fabric. I seem to have lost some, but . . .” spying a splash of blue in the back corner, she snatched at it and stood up. “Found it.”

“I could pull the table away from the windows. Then you’d be able to see behind your treadle machine.”


Nein
. I love the view and the light is
gut
here.”

“Usually
gut
, when there aren’t so many shadows.”

They both looked out the upstairs window of the farmhouse. A giant maple tree blazed with red, gold, and brown leaves winked in the last of the winter sunlight.


Ya
, the afternoon slipped away from me,” she agreed. “But I’d rather the machine stay where it is.”

“All right, but next time let me hunt for any lost fabric.”

“Agreed.”

Samuel studied the pieces she’d laid out—lavender, purple, two greens, two blues, black, and white. “Let me think. The colors suggest a manly sort of quilt.”

“Manly? Did you see the purple?”

“You’re adding that dark blue.”

“You know it’s the baby quilt for one of Leah’s babies. I told you I was working on it before you went to the barn.”

“What type of pattern?” Samuel asked, combing his fingers through his beard.

“A nine-patch crib quilt. I wish I had started earlier.”

“So I shouldn’t expect it for my Christmas gift?”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Annie’s cheeks reddened in spite of herself. Samuel’s gift was finished and hidden already—a slate gray sweater she’d spent all of October knitting.

“Leah’s babies are due—”

“December 28th,” Annie finished for him. “We talked about my tardiness today and she laughed. Everyone says I’m a fast quilter.”

“Twins often make an early appearance, it’s true, but I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s only a quilt,
mi lieb
.”

“I know. I’d like to have it finished before they’re born though.” Annie began stacking the fabric carefully.

“And I know you’ll do your best.” Samuel peered at her pattern as if it were a book on herbs, but she knew he was thinking of something else. “No worries, Nurse Annie. Soon enough your project will be done and our midwife will call for your help delivering your niece and nephew.”

“How do you know they will be a girl and a boy?”

“She’s carrying them low. I’ve seen it before.” Samuel winked as he shifted closer to her, lacing his fingers with hers. “Once you start on something you tend to focus on it wholeheartedly. I suspect you will finish your quilt for the
bopplin
early.”

“I do have plenty of time, at least six weeks. I was there when Leah went for her prenatal visit last week.”

“And everything’s
gut
? Because I spoke with Belinda earlier today and she seemed to think—”

“The doctor told Leah there’s nothing to worry about. I’m glad she agreed to see the doctor, even though she plans on using Belinda to deliver the
bopplin
.” Annie started to tell him about her and Leah’s conversation in the buggy. Was this the right time though? It wasn’t actually about Leah’s physical condition.


Wunderbaar
.” Samuel patted his stomach. “Would you like me to help you with dinner?”

“Dinner! Samuel, I forgot about the casserole.” Annie attempted to pull her hand from his, to hurry past him and out of the room, but he caught her in his arms.

“No need to rush. I checked it when I came inside. Smelled burned, so I took a peek.”

“Burned?” Her voice rose like a screech owl.

“Appeared mostly black. I think you’ll have to leave it all for me.”

Annie ran her palm along his cheek, then leaned forward and kissed him once. “It wasn’t burned,” she whispered. “I would have smelled it.”

“Maybe not black,” he admitted.

She kissed him again.

“I confess. The chicken was brown and the potatoes seasoned perfectly. Would you like me to go down and finish things up?”

“I would not.” She slapped him on the arm and pushed past him. “I can prepare dinner for two.”

“Three soon enough,” he called after her.

“Yes, three.” She smiled to herself as she heard him running water in the bathroom sink. They would eat, then spend a quiet evening together.

She would tell him her worries about all Leah had said after they ate. Samuel would know what they should do, if anything. Quilting for the afternoon had been exactly what she needed to spend a few hours doing. Though she hadn’t started sewing yet, focusing on the fabric and the pattern had helped calm her nerves.

Now to feed her starving husband.

5

S
unday morning should have been relaxing. Since this was not their Sunday for church meeting, Leah didn’t have to hurry, which was a good thing. The babies felt as if they were fighting for space inside her stomach. Belinda had warned her these last few weeks would be even more uncomfortable. Leah hadn’t thought that would be possible. As she lay in bed, staring around her belly at her ankles, she decided they were definitely less swollen than the day before.

Maybe today would be better.

Maybe the worst was behind her.

And maybe she and Adam wouldn’t argue again.

Struggling out of the bed, she tried to picture the babies—healthy and sleeping in their crib.

With her hand, she caressed the mound that was her stomach. “You’re worth every minute of discomfort,” she whispered.

By eleven o’clock that morning she wasn’t so sure. Her body was rebelling against her. It felt like a buggy she couldn’t quite control as she tried to make her way around the house.

Soon she found herself seated beside Adam on the way to Annie’s—beside him but not next to him. He’d placed the casserole bowl on the seat between them. Had he done that on purpose? Less than a year ago he’d always insisted she sit right beside him, tucked up close.

Not anymore.

She stared down at her feet—or in the direction of her feet. Her ankles had begun swelling as soon as she’d started making breakfast, which he’d eaten standing at the kitchen counter. Adam had tried to help her put on her shoes, but they’d had no luck. That was when the first tears had started and when he’d first become frustrated with her. Who could blame him? She weighed nearly as much as the heifer in the barn, and she acted like a calf—bawling at the smallest thing.

“Think anyone will notice I’m wearing shoes with no laces?” she asked. They were halfway to Annie’s. She had wanted to stay home, but he’d insisted that she come to the family luncheon. Maybe, just maybe, he did want to spend the day with her.

“My family?” Adam snorted. “If there’s food on the table, chances are they won’t notice what’s underneath it.”

“Unless one of Reba’s animals gets loose.”

Adam smiled and some of the tension in Leah’s heart loosened. “It’s been a while since that happened. Once she started helping at the veterinary office in town, I believe she stopped placing critters in her apron pockets.”

Leah stared out over the fields they were passing. The weather had turned colder and it looked to her as if snow might be threatening. She was ready. Snow meant Thanksgiving and then Christmas. Soon after Christmas would be the arrival of their children.

“I should have made something else to bring. My bowl of pudding hardly seems enough considering all the people who will be there.”

“You worry too much.” The words came out sharply. “No one expects you to cook at all with the
bopplin
nearing their due date.”

Cooking was the one thing she could still do! Leah thought of mentioning that to Adam. She almost brought up the fact that long hours doing nothing but knitting weren’t necessarily a blessing, but she bit the words back. The last thing she wanted was to argue this morning. This was Sunday, and though Adam’s time in the barn had cut short their Bible study, she wanted the rest of the day to go perfectly.

Some days she found herself so bored she thought she might go crazy. She realized complaining about too little work was
narrisch
. In the old days—before she was pregnant, she’d go to the barn and help Adam. The last time she’d tried that, he’d shooed her away, telling her she might get hurt out there.

Leah cleared her throat. “I meant to say I should have prepared something more last night, since I had the time. If I had known you weren’t going to make it in to eat dinner, maybe I could have focused on baking a cake or—”

“Do not start on me again about last night.”

“Adam, I wasn’t.”

“I cannot help it if sometimes things don’t go as planned, Leah. The engines, they don’t always work once I put them back together, and you know we are barely making it with the money from the crops.”

Leah stared at him, stared at this man it seemed she didn’t even know anymore. Where was her Adam with his easy smile and carefree spirit? The Adam who had taken her for a picnic on the foundation of their home before the walls were even finished. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and though she knew she should let it go, she couldn’t help asking the question that had kept her tossing and turning until the wee hours of the morning.

The same question they had argued about last night.

The question he had yet to answer.

“And is that why you had to leave so late in the evening, Adam? Because of your engines?”

“Leah, I will not have your suspicions.”

“I’m asking, not accusing.” Worry, insecurity, and exhaustion caused the words to stick in her throat, but Leah pushed forward. She didn’t want to worry over this all day. “I’m asking because I didn’t know if I should keep your dinner warm or throw it out. I didn’t know if I should stay up or go to bed. What am I supposed to do when my husband hitches up the buggy and takes off late at night? Can you tell me that?”

They’d arrived at Annie’s, but Adam had stopped their buggy halfway down the lane.

“I don’t want to fight again today.” He picked up his hat, glanced at her, and resettled the hat on his head. “Please. It’s the Lord’s Day. I know carrying the twins is difficult—”

“Do not blame this on the
bopplin
.”

Adam closed his eyes, and she knew, absolutely knew then he couldn’t stand the sight of her. Did he need to shut out the image of her completely?

“Turn around,” she said, trying to sound firm, trying to sound like she wanted to spend the entire day at home alone.

“What?” His eyes opened and he gawked at her as if she’d sprouted corn out of the top of her head.

“Turn around. I want to go home.”


Nein.

“Yes. I want to go home.”

“Well, you will have to walk because I’m not taking you.” When it seemed they would glare at one another until the snow began to fall, Adam added, “You don’t always get what you want, and now is not the time to throw a tantrum like a child.”

She had been leaning forward, gesturing toward the reins to make her point. At the word
tantrum
, she pulled back as if he had slapped her.

Adam’s jaw clenched and he snapped the reins, signalling to their pretty black gelding to continue down the lane. “
Ya.
We’ll be staying and you’ll act like a happy
fraa
, whether you feel like it or not. I might not be able to satisfy you in any way Leah, but we won’t be upsetting our family over this. They have enough worries.”

She stared straight ahead as he directed the gelding around the bend and into view of Annie and Samuel’s home—a picture-perfect house with two stories. A garden bed neatly cleaned for the winter surrounded the front porch, and to the southwest, tucked behind the house, sat the traditional red barn.

Leah peered ahead. She could barely make out Annie and Samuel walking from the barn to the house, arm in arm like two young people still courting!

Annie, who had married a man over ten years her senior, a widow with a broken heart. Is that why they were still
in lieb
? Because he had suffered so much? And Annie had spent her time away, among the
Englisch
, earning her nursing certificate. It was a career she gave up to come home and nurse her father. That had led to her joining the church. She seemed so content now. Perhaps after her time away, she more fully appreciated being home.

Annie wasn’t the only Weaver child who had spent time away on a
rumspringa
. Adam had too, although he’d never spoken of it in detail. Sometimes Leah worried he would rather still be there, where life was easier, where he wouldn’t have three additional mouths to provide for.

Adam brought the buggy to a stop near the back door. When Samuel heard them, he turned with a smile, to help her out. For a moment, a fleeting second or less, she thought something passed between Samuel and her husband. It seemed they shared a look of concern, for the smile almost slipped off Samuel’s face. Or she could have imagined it.

Because then he was at her side of the buggy, helping her down, smiling and laughing as he accepted the casserole dish from Adam and helped her into the house. Pretending, as they were, there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong.

Leah tried not to grimace as she set her huckleberry pudding o
n the kitchen counter. Her dish was so small and insignificant among all the others. A sigh escaped before she could stop it, but Annie seemed not to notice, or pretended not to notice.

“Berry pudding? Are these from the patch in your south field?”

“They are. We put them up in the summer, and I made the pudding after we got home from town yesterday.”

“You should have rested. I know everyone will love it though.” Annie scooted around her, placing her hands on her shoulders as the door opened again and her parents walked inside.

Jacob Weaver’s face lit up when he saw her. Leah knew that her father-in-law loved her. There was no faking some things, and the grin on his face was genuine.

“It smells
wunderbaar
in here,” he declared as he set his cane by the door and made his way across the room. He still walked with a slight limp from the buggy accident that had happened three years earlier, the disaster that had brought Annie home—and brought Annie and Samuel together. Leah supposed it was a case of what had been meant for evil, God had used for good.

Thinking back to that time caused her heart to ache.

She glanced up and across the room, saw Adam talking to Samuel and laughing at something he said. Things had been so natural between her and him then—before they wed, before the babies. She’d spent months looking forward to being a wife and a mother. Now she was learning that sometimes life was nothing like what you expected.

“You’re looking very
gut
. Both of you are.” Jacob hugged first Leah and then Annie. “How are my favorite girls?”


Dat.
I thought you said I was your favorite girl.” Reba stuck her bottom lip out in a pout as she set a plate of cold chicken on the counter.

She was still tall and awfully thin for a seventeen-year-old girl, but any outside markings of a tomboy were gone. Now the quietness and beauty about her was hard to ignore. Leah had noticed how she’d changed at church meeting last week. When Reba walked by a group of older boys, they had stopped talking and stared after her, as if she were new to their community. One had shaken his head and blushed all the way to the rim of his hat.

Reba, in keeping with her natural inclination to be clueless around two-footed beasts, had seemed oblivious.

“Didn’t you?” Reba teased, sneaking a piece of cheese from one of the plates. “Tell Annie you did call me your favorite last night.”


Ya.
I suppose I did,” Jacob admitted. “Just now I meant she and Leah are my favorite older girls.”

Reba laughed and moved to the living room, where she proceeded to corner Samuel. Leah heard the words
poultice
and
herbs
then
mare
. Samuel walked over to a shelf of books, selected one, and handed it to her.

The room filled with conversation as Charity described her latest buggy ride with David Hostetler and Rebekah remarked on the pudding Leah had brought.

The back door opened again and the gusting winter wind nearly tugged it out of
Onkel
Eli’s hand.
Onkel
Eli, Jacob’s brother, stepped inside with Rachel. She had apparently accepted a ride with Eli, though Annie confessed she had feared Rachel would change her mind and not come. After having been married to Adam over two years, Leah felt as if she knew Eli well, but she couldn’t have told anyone a lot of details about him. He was one of those people you seemed to have known all your life, and she probably had. He’d lived in their district for as long as she could remember, but she’d been a child and he’d been an adult.

After she’d joined the Weaver family, he’d become her
onkel
—plain and simple. He’d accepted her as if she’d always been part of the family. She still didn’t actually know anything about him though. He was merely
Onkel
Eli—a sweet old guy who loved to make toys, nearly always had a twinkle in his eyes, and didn’t seem to have a harsh bone in his body. She wondered for a moment if he could fix the problems in a marriage, if maybe she should go and talk to him next week.

That was ridiculous though. He’d never been in a relationship as far as she knew! She pushed the thought away.

Eli wasn’t as old as she had at first thought—maybe in his early forties. When she’d once asked Adam why he’d never married, Adam had shrugged and said, “Maybe he never met the right gal.”

The right gal was certainly not standing next to him, removing her coat. Rachel Zook might still be beautiful, and she couldn’t be over thirty, but she was not marriage material. How old was she? Leah would never even think of asking. She wasn’t exactly scared of her, but she wasn’t foolish either. Rachel had the prettiest skin of any woman she’d ever known, other than maybe the
Englisch
movie stars, and Leah hadn’t known any of them personally. She had seen them on the front of magazines as she waited in line to check out at the larger discount store.

BOOK: The Christmas Quilt: Quilts of Love Series
4.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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