A Summer Amish Courtship (Love Inspired) Page 5

  He smiled at her. “Excellent!” He stood to his full height. “So Hannah is correct, Liz.” He slid the piece of paper and a pencil to Mary. “Why don’t you label them?”

  The timid girl took the pencil and immediately began to neatly print the names of the states in the proper places.

  Ethan looked to Hannah’s little sister Lettice who sat quietly in her seat, hands folded, watching Mary. Lettice was one of his two students who had Down’s Syndrome. While families often chose not to send children with disabilities to school, Ethan thought the Grubers had made a wise choice in allowing Lettice and her twin brother, Esau, to begin the previous September. He often put Lettice with the younger girls. She’d already learned to write her name and could count to fifty. But she was more comfortable being with her big sister, so Ethan allowed her to divide her day between the two groups. He didn’t know how much geography and science she was learning, but she seemed content. And she never misbehaved, which was more than he could say for some of his students.

  “Ethan?”

  He felt a tug on his sleeve and looked over his shoulder to see his stepbrother Jesse standing beside him. Jesse was an average student, but a good kid. “Jamie,” Jesse said under his breath.

  Ethan exhaled, trying to keep his patience intact, said something encouraging to the girls and then turned to his brother. “What is it?”

  “I know we’re not supposed to tattle, but...” He nervously tugged at a forelock of his hair.

  “Yes?”

  “He won’t leave us alone. We’re trying to take that division quiz you gave us, but he keeps hitting us with...stuff.”

  Ethan arched his eyebrow. “Stuff?”

  “Spitballs,” Jesse whispered, looking down. “He got me right here.” He pointed to his cheek. There was a distinct red mark.

  Ethan glanced at Jamie who appeared to be concentrating on his reader. He looked back at his brother. “Go back to your seat. Finish your quiz.” He gave Jesse’s shoulder a squeeze and then crossed the room to where Jamie sat alone at a desk. Earlier in the day he’d been with the first and second graders, but he’d scribbled all over his neighbor’s book and then tried to lie his way out of it.

  Jamie spotted Ethan coming toward him and immediately tucked something into the back of his pants. The boy picked up his pencil and stared at the worksheet in front of him intently.

  “Spitballs again?” Ethan asked him quietly.

  Jamie didn’t respond, which Ethan supposed was a step in the right direction. At least he hadn’t flat-out lied to him this time.

  Ethan stood over the boy’s desk, looking down at the worksheet. Jamie was supposed to have read the next chapter in his reading book and then answered the questions. Had he been able to behave himself, he could have done the assignment with a partner. Instead, he was doing it alone.

  Jamie hadn’t filled in a single answer. And the answers weren’t that difficult. Their reader was a simple one from the 1940s that he’d found six copies of at Spence’s Bazaar. The story Jamie was supposed to have read was one about a boy and a dog going fishing. All Jamie had to do was answer questions like what color the dog was and what he had done earlier in the day.

  “You haven’t answered a single question,” Ethan said, pointing at the blank page. The corner of the paper was conspicuously missing.

  Jamie said nothing.

  “Did you read the story?” Ethan asked. Technically, Jamie was a third grader. The story was written on a first-grade level. By Ethan’s calculation, the boy should have been done with the assignment half an hour ago.

  Jamie stared at the paper on his desk. He hadn’t even written his name on it.

  Ethan took a deep breath. “Okay.” He placed his finger beside the first question. “What was the dog’s name in the story?”

  Jamie was quiet.

  “What was its name?” Ethan repeated. “Easy question.”

  “I don’t remember,” the boy answered softly.

  “Okay...” Ethan opened the book to the first page of the story. “Right here, second line.” He pointed at the word. Waited.

  Jamie lowered his head. “I don’t know,” he said under his breath.

  “So read it out loud.” Ethan tapped on the word.

  “F...” The boy made the sound of the first letter. “F...” he repeated. He squirmed in his seat. “Fred!” he declared.

  Ethan frowned. “Look again. Sound it out. F... I...”

  “Fireman?” Jamie asked.

  “Now you’re just guessing.” Ethan looked down at the boy. “Can you see that word?” he asked, wondering if the boy needed glasses. “What are the letters?”

  Jamie groaned and ran his finger under the word. “F... I... Um... D.” He exhaled loudly. “O?”

  “O, that’s right. Which spells what?” Ethan asked when the boy was quiet again.

  Jamie pressed his lips together staring at the page.

  “Fido,” Ethan said. Then he squatted down, looked into Jamie’s eyes and knew at once what was happening. “You can’t read, can you?” he asked softly.

  Still Jamie didn’t speak.

  How had Ethan missed this? He thought back to the times he’d believed Jamie was misbehaving for not being attentive to reading assignments. He’d attributed his lack of progress to mischievousness, his blank assignment papers as just more willful disobedience.

  Feeling guilty that he hadn’t been more attentive to the child, hadn’t recognized it sooner, Ethan stood and squeezed Jamie’s shoulder. “We’ll get back to this tomorrow. Why don’t you gather the erasers and pick a buddy to go outside with you and clean them?”

  Jamie popped out of his chair, needing no further encouragement.

  Ethan watched him go. They had only another twenty minutes until school was over. The erasers would keep Jamie busy until it was time to gather his things. And then Abigail would be there to pick up her son.

  And Ethan and Abigail were going to have to have a talk.

  Chapter Four

  Abigail stood off to the side of the driveway as children left on push scooters in groups of three or four. They had all hooked their lunch bags, baskets or pails on the handlebars and wore fluorescent orange vests so that motorists could spot them on the country road more easily. She could see that most of the students did have scooters, but not all of them. Some of the children left on foot by the road while others took a path through the woods behind the schoolhouse.

  As she waited for Jamie to come out, she thought about whether or not she should buy him a scooter, rather than holding it over his head as a reward for better behavior. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have money to buy one. Unlike many widows, her husband had left her with a tidy bank account, and after the sale of their house and one-hundred-acre farm, she had more money than she had the need for. But her father had cautioned her about spending too much on Jamie. He thought it would spoil him, making him feel as if he was in some way better than other children, isolating him from his community. Her father had even criticized her for making her son new clothing and buying him new boots. She’d reminded him that he was an only child and that she had no hand-me-downs to give Jamie, but he’d stubbornly maintained that a boy shouldn’t look so fancy.

  One by one, the students left the schoolyard and soon it was empty. But Jamie didn’t appear. Abigail had wanted to wait for him outside so she wouldn’t have to encounter Ethan again. She’d made her apology to him. She saw no need to speak with him again. But she supposed she was going to have to go into the school to retrieve her son. She hoped he wasn’t in trouble again. With a sigh, she walked along the oyster shell driveway, up the steps and pushed open the door to the cloakroom—almost running right into Ethan.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, backing down the steps. “I didn’t—I was waiting for Jamie. He hadn’t—”

  “Here I am,” Jamie piped up from behind the schoolmaster.

  She stood in the grass looking up, feeling flustered and she didn’t know why.

  Ethan held her basket in his hand. He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t seem angry either, so maybe her son wasn’t in trouble. “Jamie was helping me put some books away,” he said.

  “Was he?” Abigail asked, relieved his behavior wasn’t the issue.

  “Ya.” Ethan stood on the top step and let Jamie go by him, then locked the door with a key. “We thought we’d walk home together.” He shrugged, coming down the steps. “Since we’re going the same way. Right, Jamie?”

  Abigail looked at Jamie, finding it hard to believe her son had agreed to walk home with his schoolteacher, considering how he felt about him. Jamie hadn’t come right out and said he disliked Ethan, probably because he knew better than to say such a thing. But it was clear the schoolmaster was not her boy’s favorite person in Hickory Grove.

  “That okay with you?” Ethan asked Abigail, slipping the key ring into his pocket. “Your place is on the way to mine if I go by way of the road.”

  “You...you didn’t bring your buggy?” she asked, feeling silly the moment the words came out of her mouth. Of course he hadn’t driven his buggy this morning. If he had, he’d be taking it home. And she’d certainly have seen his horse tied up at the hitching post. A horse that color couldn’t be missed. She groaned inwardly, wondering what on earth had gotten into her. She was usually so levelheaded. Never flighty.

  “I walked. Thought I’d enjoy the nice weather,” Ethan said, not seeming to think her question had been silly. “I like walking when the weather is decent. On the walk here in the morning, I get my lesson plans straight in my head. On the walk home, I... I think Englishers use the wor
d decompress.” He met her gaze, still solemn but not annoyed.

  She wondered what made him such a sober man. Was it his job as a schoolmaster? She thought not. But there was definitely a sadness in his eyes. She wondered if his marriage was an unhappy one and that thought saddened her. She and her husband, Egan, had married for love. Her parents, as well. But not all Amish couples had that luxury. Sometimes marriages were arranged by parents, sometimes they were made for financial reasons and sometimes women like her, often women like her, single with children, married a man suitable to be a husband and father. Their faith believed in the responsibility of all men and women to be married; romance was only a secondary consideration.

  “I think about whatever has gone on that day and then I try to let it go,” Ethan continued. “Helps me look at things fresh the next day.”

  She nodded, imagining taking that time to decompress, as he called it, helped him to be a better husband, a better father. If he had children. She didn’t know if he did. She’d not been in the community long enough to have knowledge of such details of her neighbors yet. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, but for some reason, she didn’t feel like she should. It somehow seemed too...personal to be asking such a question of her son’s teacher.

  Instead, she turned her attention to Jamie as the three of them set out for home. “What did you do in school today?”

  “Um.” Jamie held up his lunch pail for her to take. “We played softball during recess. I got out two times. But I made a good catch at third base,” he added, seeming pleased with himself.

  “Sounds like you had fun.” Abigail reached out to take his lunch pail, then pulled her hand back. “Carry it yourself.” She looked back at Ethan. “I can take my basket.”

  “I’ll carry it as far as your place. It was good, the lunch. And the whoopie pie?” Ethan made a sound that was very near to delight, which took her by surprise. “Delicious. Danke.”

  She couldn’t help but smile. So maybe he wasn’t always such a sour man. “I’m glad you liked it.” She almost blurted that her husband, Egan, had loved her whoopie pies, too, but she caught herself before she said it. She didn’t speak often about Egan, and never to strangers. At first, she was afraid it was because she hadn’t cared enough for him. It had been her mother who had pointed out that sometimes the deepest feelings are the ones that are the hardest to share.

  “Your timing was perfect,” Ethan continued. “The John Yoder twins both forgot their lunches. So they shared my bologna sandwich and potato chips and I had your chicken salad. I think I got the better deal for once. I like the little peppers in it. What were they?”

  “Pimento,” she said. “And I always add a pinch of cayenne pepper.”

  “Take it, Mam.” Jamie stubbornly bumped her hand with his pail. “Please?” He drew out the word.

  “Carry it yourself,” she said a little sternly. “You’re old enough to carry your own lunch, to and from school.”

  “But you used to always carry it for me when we lived in Wisconsin.”

  Jamie’s whining tone embarrassed her and she took a breath before she responded. “But now you’re older and you can do it yourself.” She glanced over her shoulder at Ethan again. The grassy patch that ran along the side of the road was wide enough for two to walk side by side, but not three so he had taken up the rear. She looked forward again. “What else did you do in school, sohn?”

  “Um... At lunch we watched a bunch of ants eat part of the crust of Jesse’s bologna sandwich. They took away little tiny pieces. To their house, Jesse told us. They leave something behind so they know their way back. Fair... Fair somethings.”

  “Pheromones,” Ethan put in. Then to Abigail he explained, “We’ve been talking about insects in our sixth-grade class. My brother Jesse is in that group.”

  She nodded. She didn’t know that ants left a trail for themselves, but she had always wondered how they could wander so far from their anthills and still find their way home. She was impressed that Ethan knew such a fact and that he had shared it with his students. “That must have been interesting about the ants,” she said to her son. “But I meant in school. What did you do in class today?”

  “I don’t know.” He kicked at a tuft of dandelions and the fuzzy seeds blew away in the breeze. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I think if I asked your teacher, he might say you’d done something in school all day.”

  Neither her son nor Ethan responded, and Abigail let the subject drop. Instead, she walked in silence, enjoying the warm sunshine and the scent of freshly turned soil in the field they walked beside. Jamie slowly made his way forward until he was in front of her and the three of them walked single file.

  A buggy approached them from behind and Ethan waved. They slowed down. Abigail didn’t know the couple, but she smiled. The passenger door slid open and a woman who looked to be in her fifties smiled and nodded her head in greeting.

  “New neighbor, Abigail Stolz, daughter of June and Daniel King. Just moved here from Wisconsin. And my student Jamie—Abigail’s son,” Ethan introduced. He pointed to the buggy. “Hannah and Albert Hartman.”

  “Good to have you here, Abigail,” the woman called. “We need young families. Too many folks moving away. Will we see you at the Brubachers’ Saturday?”

  Abigail looked over her shoulder at Ethan questioningly.

  “I’m sure you will,” Ethan called to the older woman who Abigail took an immediate liking to. Hannah had a sparkle in her eyes that seemed mischievous and kind at the same time.

  “I’ll let her know all about it,” Ethan promised.

  “See you there!” Hannah waved enthusiastically and the buggy picked up its pace and pulled away.

  “They live over in Seven Poplars,” Ethan said when they had gone by. “North of here.” He pointed in the general direction. “Interesting man, Albert. He’s a veterinarian. Takes care of most Amish families’ livestock in the whole county.”

  “An Amish veterinarian?” Abigail asked in surprise, looking back at him.

  “They’re pretty amazing, the both of them.” Ethan caught up to her and walked beside her. “Second marriage for Hannah,” he explained. “Hannah’s husband died, leaving her with six girls to raise. She stayed single for years while she raised her girls. Taught school over at Seven Poplars. Albert was a bachelor. He was Mennonite but became Amish so he could marry Hannah. Funny thing is, Hannah was Mennonite, too, before she married her first husband.”

  “And their bishop allows him to continue to be a veterinarian?” she asked in wonder.

  “Sure does. With restrictions, of course.” Ethan slid his hand into his pocket as he walked beside her. “No work on Sundays. Not even for his Amish clients. He has someone on call for him on Sundays. But he’s allowed to drive his work truck because he just does large animals—cows, sheep, horses and such.” He pointed at her. “Oh, and alpacas.”

  Abigail laughed. “What’s an alpaca?”

  “Like a llama. Albert has a bunch of them.”

  She shook her head with a chuckle. It certainly didn’t sound very Amish. “Why does he have alpacas?”

  “Apparently their wool is worth something. I don’t know that he makes much profit off it, but he likes them. Likes the oddity of them, I think.”

  She nodded, thinking she might like to see these alpacas. And she imagined Jamie would, too.

  “Anyway, what Hannah was talking about,” Ethan went on, “is a barn raising going on Saturday. Everyone in the area is invited. It’s for the Brubachers. They live over toward Marydel, which is west of here. The family lost their main barn in the fall to a lightning strike. The whole thing went up so fast, Abner barely had time to get his horses and cows out. You and your parents and Jamie should come. Good way to meet more folks.”

  “I haven’t been to a barn raising in years,” Abigail mused aloud as they made a right-hand turn onto her road. “I bet my dat and mam would enjoy it.” She was learning that it was good for her mother to get out with people. Her mother’s head seemed clearer when she didn’t spend so much time alone with just their small family.