The Revealing (24 page)

It was nearly time. The bus would be in at three p.m., he said. Only four hours to go. Three. Two. It was time.

Today, fortune was in her favor. Mr. Kurtz was due to arrive at the house at two o’clock during the exact time when Galen happened to have gone to town to buy supplies.
No lies were told and none were needed. By three o’clock, Naomi was waiting at the crowded and noisy bus station in Lancaster—so crowded she felt like a hen being crated off to market, so noisy she couldn’t hear herself think. She tried to push her way to the front of the crowd as she watched Tobe’s bus pull in and stop. She felt a nervous quiver in her belly and unconsciously smoothed her apron again and again.

At the top of the bus steps, his hand clutching the door handle, Tobe paused and his eyes roamed the crowd. The sight of him filled Naomi’s eyes with tears. He was so . . . beautiful. Tall, broad, handsome, and he was hers.

She could tell, from the frown on his face, he couldn’t find her in the crowd. He stepped down from the bus and started to make his way through the cluster of people. She hurried to catch him and pulled at his sleeve.

“Tobe?” she said, almost hesitatingly.

Tobe spun around.

Their eyes met immediately, but neither of them moved. It was as if words and greetings and reactions had been blown out of them like air after a kick in the stomach. Then words tumbled out.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming—”

“How could I not—”

“For hundreds of reasons,” he said. Then he gave a quick scan around the bus station to see if he recognized anyone, and satisfied there was no one, he reached out to engulf her in a hug. They left the station with arms linked together and went across the street to a coffee shop to talk. The discreet Mr. Kurtz said he had an errand to run and would return in an hour.

Over coffee, Naomi told Tobe about the baby’s arrival, and then about Paisley’s midnight disappearance.

He was speechless at the turn of events. Delighted, even. “It proves it, then, doesn’t it? I’m not the father. She couldn’t face me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. She didn’t seem the same after the baby was born. I’m not exactly sure why. Bethany thinks it’s because the baby is a special child. Rose thinks Paisley was under the impression that you came from a well-off family and was not happy to find out that wasn’t exactly so—”

“No kidding.” He made a scoffing sound. “So why do you think she left?”

“I truly don’t know. I hardly traded more than a few words with her while she was at Eagle Hill. After the baby was born, she stayed in bed. She just seemed unhappy and disappointed.”

They stopped talking while the waitress brought two mugs, one of coffee, one of tea, and set them on the table.

Tobe poured cream into his coffee and stirred it. “Naomi, I hope you can forgive me.” His eyes probed hers as though looking for answers to unasked questions. “Do you?”

She was careful to answer as honestly as possible. “I don’t believe that all things that happen are good, but I do believe the Lord can make good come from even the worst things.”

He kept his eyes on the brim of his coffee cup. “Even Paisley? Even leaving a baby without a mother? Is there any good in that?”

“A new baby is always a blessing. God wants us to celebrate that.”

“I don’t know what Paisley told you.” She saw his muscles tense as he said the woman’s name. “It doesn’t matter. No one
knows the truth about Paisley. Not even me, but I’ll tell you what I do know. Then you’ll have to decide who to believe.”

She met his gaze. “That decision has already been made.”

“Some decisions have to be made over and over.” He pulled his eyes away from hers and stared at a bee buzzing against the window of the coffee shop.

Naomi waited for him to elaborate, her hands in her lap, twisting and turning the paper napkin.

“I had met Paisley, years ago. She had worked as a waitress at a restaurant near the office of Schrock Investments. Jake and I used to grab lunch there. During that year when I took off, I stayed at her apartment a few nights while I was trying to find work. Now and then . . . well, we would have too much to drink and get carried away.”

Naomi’s cheeks reddened, but her grip on the napkin loosened.

With great tenderness he lifted her face up. “Naomi, nine months ago, if I had known what was waiting for me with you . . . I never would’ve . . . I never imagined I’d fall in love with an Amish girl who lived next door to my grandmother. I never dreamed of the consequences, that I would be hurting someone I loved.” She started to say something, but he put his fingers softly on her lips. “Do you have regrets?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Nothing could ever change the way I feel about you, Tobe. Or that we belong together.”

Tobe’s mouth began quivering and his face crumpled as tears filled his eyes. He brushed the back of his hand across his eyes and drew in a shaky breath before he was able to go on. “Truly? No regrets? Because now is the time to say so.” He asked with a kind of stillness in his eyes as if her answer was especially important.

She smiled, feeling light-headed all of a sudden. Feeling lighthearted. “None. Not a one.”

Rose kept glancing at the kitchen clock—it was after five—then looked out the window. The table had been laid with more than usual care. All of Tobe’s favorite foods had been prepared.

She had wanted to be sure that everything was perfect to welcome Tobe home. Instead, it was chaos. Rain had started and was now pummeling the farm. Baby Sarah seemed particularly fussy this afternoon, Luke was teasing Sammy, something was bothering Mim and she wouldn’t say what—she had the energy of a trapped bird. Mammi Vera truculent, Bethany in a mood . . . this would be no way to start a new life. She sighed. If only it would stop raining.

Her thoughts drifted to Paisley’s whereabouts. She teetered between relief that the girl was gone and concern that she would come back. What irked her more than anything was that Paisley had left with nothing settled. Nothing!

Rose glanced out the kitchen window again. And suddenly, there was Tobe, walking up the driveway with a satchel in his hand, rain running off the brim of his hat. Her big, handsome, restless son. His smile was tired. Her heart skipped with worry about him, as it so often did. A loud whoop sailed down from the upstairs, then a beat of footsteps clamored down the stairs as Luke and Sammy tried to beat each other out the door to greet their brother. They all rushed out to welcome home the prodigal and soon the farmhouse of Eagle Hill was filled with a happy chaos.

Tobe paid special attention to Mammi Vera, which made
her glow with happiness. After supper, which was wonderful and noisy, he admired all the improvements to the farm and said the blueberry cobbler was the best thing he’d eaten in years. But he never held the baby, Rose noticed, nor glanced in the baby’s direction when she fussed.

Before turning in, Tobe went to the barn to check on the animals and was gone for quite a while. When he came inside, he had such a pensive look on his face that Vera asked him what he was thinking. “It’s so quiet here—I’d forgotten what silence sounds like in the countryside.”

“That’s why we live here,” Mammi Vera said, delighted.

“That’s why we live here,” Tobe said flatly.

Mim had never felt so at sea. She shifted on the cot to try to get more comfortable. It had seemed to her when she went to bed that she could forget all her worries, that she could sleep and everything was going to be all right, but she awoke in the middle of the night with the horrible realization that two additional people knew she was Mrs. Miracle. Bethany and Ella didn’t worry her, they weren’t loose cannons. But these two . . . there was no telling what could happen. She tried to push that worry out of her head, but crazy thoughts kept shooting through her mind. Maybe she could go ask Bethany right now. Shake her awake and say, “That lady with the spiky blonde hair in the guest flat found out I’m Mrs. Miracle. Tell me what to do.”

Earlier this morning, she had delivered breakfast to the guest flat, like she usually did. Brooke Snyder had a strange look on her face, pinched and pleased. Mim asked if she were feeling well, and she answered her with, “Very well, thank
you.” She pointed to the newspaper. “So . . . perhaps you’d like to compose a Mrs. Miracle letter while you’re here?”

Mim gasped, too surprised to deny she wrote the letters. “You won’t tell, will you?”

Brooke turned to Mim, a smile as brittle as toffee fixed to her face. “Why would I tell?”

Mim squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of something else, or of nothing, but her mind kept circling back to the fact: two people knew she was Mrs. Miracle. She wasn’t sure whom she was more worried about: Jesse, whose father was a minister, or Brooke Snyder, who seemed oddly pleased to hold Mim’s secret. She got out of bed and looked at her face in the mirror. It was gray-white and there were shadows under her frightened eyes. The room grew gradually lighter, although no warmer. She was doomed.

The disturbing black cloud that came on the horizon for Galen and Rose with the arrival of Paisley was something that they danced around, carefully avoided, and tried to pretend wasn’t a problem between them. But when Tobe arrived at Eagle Hill, another storm came and settled on them. This gulf between them was growing huge.

Rose wanted to clear the atmosphere between them. When she discovered the woodpile had been chopped and stacked, she was touched beyond words. She had been so busy lately that she’d hardly had time for Galen. And yet . . . he had chopped a cord of wood for her. And she had forgotten to thank him! She hurried over to catch him when she saw him lead a horse from his barn to the round training pen.

He seemed to be thinking along the same lines of wanting
to clear the air. He put the horse in the pen and turned toward her with an eager look on his face.

“I heard Lodestar is back. How’s he doing?”

“Well, he’s not lacking for attention, I’ll tell you that much. Jimmy’s in the barn with him now, brushing and preening him like a mother hen fussing over a chick.”

“Think Lodestar will make a full recovery?”

“In time. God designed his creatures to heal.”

They fell silent then, and a full thirty seconds passed while their gazes held, the only sound was the horse shuffling around in the pen. At last, reaching for her hands, Galen said in a voice so low it was barely audible, “Rose, I want things between us to go back the way they were.”

Her face broke into a radiant smile. “I wanted to thank you for chopping all that wood. I . . . can’t tell you how . . . I hardly know what to say. It might seem like a small chore to you, but it meant so much to me.”

Galen stiffened. In a voice she hardly recognized, he said, “I didn’t chop wood for you.”