The Christmas Courtship. Emma Miller
“How’d you know?” he asked.
“Ours is Lettice Litwiller. I think they look alike,” she teased. “She and Eunice.”
He laughed and slapped his hand on the edge of the cart. Then he grabbed a bag of flour from the cart and lifted it out with ease.
“What are you doing?” Phoebe asked, watching him return the bag to the shelf.
“Putting it back. We don’t need flour.” He reached for another bag.
Phoebe picked up the third and pushed it onto the shelf. “Why did you put it in the cart, then?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He returned the bag of chocolate chips, too. “Just because I know it annoys Eunice to no end that Rosemary has no problem getting us boys to sweep a porch or pick up some milk on the way home from town and she can’t get her own sons to pick up their dirty clothes from the floor.” He grabbed the cart and started forward, then halted again. He curled his finger to draw her closer again.
Phoebe knew their behavior bordered on inappropriate. Amish men and women were not generally so friendly with each other and certainly not in public. They didn’t laugh and whisper to each other. And a woman like her, a woman who’d nearly been shunned, definitely had no business carrying on with a man this way.
“That,” Joshua said, his tone conspiratorial, “and I want to see how long it takes to get around the neighborhood that Rosemary had one of her stepsons buy thirty pounds of whole wheat flour and a huge bag of chocolate chips.” He laughed. “Bet she’ll have Rosemary baking cookies for the whole county.” He raised his eyebrows. “Something new for the Amish telegraph.”
Phoebe met Joshua’s gaze over the grocery cart and smiled, not just because she liked his silliness, but because she was pretty certain she’d made her first friend in a very long time.
Her cousin Rosemary’s home looked just like Phoebe thought it would. It was a rambling white clapboard farmhouse, two stories with multiple additions, rooflines running in several directions and two red chimneys to anchor the proportions. The land was flat, no hills and valleys like home, but beautiful in its own way even in the dry bareness of autumn. There were barns, sheds and small outbuildings galore, painted red, all dwarfed by the enormous old dairy barn that Joshua explained housed Benjamin’s harness shop. There, the family not only made and repaired leather goods like bridles and harnesses, but also sold items like axle grease, horse liniments and other items Amish and English customers were in need of.
“We sell eggs, too,” Joshua said as they drove up the crushed oyster shell driveway, past the parking lot, where there were two black buggies tied to a hitching post, an old pickup and a little blue sedan parked. “My sister Bay—” He glanced at Phoebe, the reins in his gloved hands. “I’m just going to tell you now, we dropped the step part ages ago. So, when you hear one of us say brother or sister or daughter or son, we might mean that we’re not actually related by blood, but we’re all family now.”
“Got it.” She nodded and smiled to herself, happy for them, a little sad for herself. In the home where she’d grown up, her stepfather had never let her forget that she was a stepchild, which had somehow translated to mean she was something less than his own children. Phoebe’s father had taken ill when she was just a baby and died. Her mother had remarried a year later and Phoebe had become the stepdaughter of Edom Wickey, an authoritarian, dogmatic man who easily saw all of the ills of the world but never the good.
“So, anyway,” Joshua went on, pulling Phoebe back into the conversation. “My sister Bay Laurel, we call her Bay, sells eggs and sometimes frying chickens out of the shop. I think they’re adding jams and such. Oh, and she sells our sister Nettie’s quilts, too. Only Nettie doesn’t just do quilts. She makes these hanging things.” He gestured in the air with one gloved hand. “I guess Englishers put them on their walls? Like for—” He seemed to search for the right word in Pennsylvania Deutsch, then switched to English. “Decoration?” He clamped the reins with both hands again. “Don’t get me wrong. They’re beautiful, but I don’t get having something that just hangs there and serves no purpose. They can be beautiful on a bed and more useful, right? She does all kinds of patterns—the old ones like Garden of Eden, Jacob’s ladder, Joseph’s coat. But she’s made some of her own patterns, too. She made this one that looked like a nest but was made of tree limbs that—” He went quiet and lowered his head. “I’m talking too much again.”
“You’re not. Ne, you’re not,” Phoebe insisted, reaching over and touching his arm. The moment she felt his warmth through the thick denim of his homemade coat, she snatched her hand back and gazed out the side window of the buggy.
Amish men and women didn’t whisper and laugh together in grocery stores, and they certainly didn’t touch casually. She could almost hear her stepfather’s angry scolding ringing in her ears.
Suddenly tears welled in her eyes. Hoping Joshua didn’t see them, she blinked them away. She didn’t know why she was suddenly so emotional. She was here in Hickory Grove because she wanted to be. She was here because she knew it was the right thing for her. And for John-John.
“Here we are,” Joshua announced as he reined in the bay and the buggy rolled to a halt. If he noticed she had touched him, or her response, he didn’t show it.
Phoebe glanced up to see two half-grown puppies that were a rich chestnut color bounding down the front porch steps, barking excitedly.
“That would be Silas and Adah. Chesapeake Bay retrievers. My brother Jacob raises and sells them,” Joshua explained.
As the dogs ran around the front of the buggy, Phoebe realized each was missing one rear leg. They appeared to have been born that way. She took in her breath sharply, not because she had never seen an animal with a disability, but because it didn’t seem to hinder their speed or frivolity one bit.
“Ya, only three legs apiece. That’s why Jacob couldn’t sell them. Or wouldn’t.” He wrapped the reins around the brake lever, and the bay danced in its traces. “And he couldn’t stand the idea of seeing them put down, even though our vet said he wouldn’t be unwarranted to do it.” He glanced at her. “My brother named them after these neighbors we had in New York. Silas and Adah Snitzer. They were brother and sister. One was blind, the other deaf. They took care of each other. Led a full, good, Godly life.”
Phoebe knitted her brow. “You don’t think your neighbors would mind having dogs named after them?”
“They passed away a few years ago. Were in their nineties. Died within a day of each other.” He smiled, seeming lost in the memory of them. “But I think they would have liked the idea that Jacob named his dogs after them.” He chuckled and then slammed his thigh. “Well, guess we best go inside and get you settled. That’s my brother Jesse there on the porch. Rosemary’s boy.” He pointed. “Waiting for us, I suspect.”
Phoebe looked over to see a boy of ten or so with neatly trimmed brown hair and a sweet, lopsided smile hurrying across the covered porch toward them.
“I’m warning you now,” Joshua said as he opened the buggy door and climbed down. “He’ll talk your ear off if you let him.” He chuckled. “Not unlike me, I guess.”
Phoebe smiled but didn’t say anything as she opened her door.
“Want to take Toby up to the barn?” Joshua called to his little brother.
Jesse bounded down the porch steps and across the driveway, pulling a black wool watch cap down over his head.
On Phoebe’s side of the buggy, Joshua offered his hand to help her out of the buggy, but instead of taking it, she handed him her canvas bag. “If you could take this? Danke,” she said, feeling as if she needed to avoid making physical contact with