A loud rumble made Leah scurry to peer around the barn. A large pickup truck was pulling in off the road, forming a dark gray silhouette against the pale sky of dawn. Its taillights burned red and its headlights sliced the horizon. Before the truck came to a complete stop, the doors on the passenger side opened and were slammed shut. The twins cried out in harsh voices.
“Jah, we heard you—loud and clear!”
“Don’t come back until you’ve gotten over yourselves!”
Leah sucked in her breath, wondering if Alice and Adeline would be safely out of the way before the truck shot backward. Its tires spun and sent dust flying up in a cloud before the driver reached the road and drove off with a loud squeal of rubber. The twins grasped each other’s hands as they ran across the yard, their long hair streaming behind them. Their agitation was palpable even from a distance, so Leah felt compelled to set down her buckets of goat’s milk. She sprinted across the lawn to meet them. “Girls—wait!” she cried out. “Are you all right?”
The three of them reached the big maple tree beside the house at about the same time. Alice and Adeline were crying, yet they glared at her.
“What do you care if we’re all right?” one of them blurted.
“Jah, are you happy now, hearing that we’ve sent those guys packing?” her sister retorted.
Leah was relieved that they stayed on the ground rather than clambering up the tree, because their vision was surely blurred by their tears. “What happened that made everyone so angry?” she asked in a concerned voice.
“None of your business!”
“It’s all Dat’s fault, for taking our cell phone!”
“Well, see, it’s not our phone—”
“And Dex—the guy who’s paying the phone bill,” the twin nearest Leah amended quickly, “is really mad that he can’t call us or text us.”
“So of course he wants the phone back.”
“And we don’t know where it is! Dat has it!”
Leah could anticipate her response being shot down, but she gave it anyway. “Seems the simplest thing would be to tell your dat whom he should return the phone to, and where this young man lives,” she said.
“Right, like that’s going to happen!”
“How stupid do you think we are? No way are we telling Dat where to take that phone!”
Leah smiled, shrugging as she went toward the back door of the house. “The next simplest thing would be for that young man to stop paying the bill—to shut off service to the phone. Ain’t so?”
The twins jogged in front of her, their faces turning deep pink with exasperation.
“You think this is really funny, don’t you, Leah?”
“Jah, and next you’re going to say that it’d be better if we never saw those guys again, anyway—that we should go back to being gut little Amish girls who don’t raise their voices or give their family any trouble!”
Leah stopped with her hand on the doorknob to look at them. She still had trouble telling them apart, and she couldn’t deny that they were attractive—downright enticing in their tight jeans and tops, with their long brown hair falling loose around their pretty faces and shapely bodies. Although she didn’t wish they were ugly, she realized that her plainer appearance during her teen years—her lackadaisical attitude toward the way she’d dressed, and her tomboyish activities—had probably kept her away from temptation and compromising situations.
“I’m very concerned about the places you go with those boys, and the lack of respect they show you—and your lack of respect for yourselves,” Leah said quietly. “The last thing I want is for you to get caught carrying babies those English boys won’t claim, and whom you’re not ready to raise as unmarried teenagers. Have you learned nothing from the desperation of the young woman who abandoned Betsy at our doorstep?”
Alice and Adeline sneered, their faces identical masks of disdain.
“What gives you any right to preach at us?”
“You’re not our mamm, so we don’t have to listen to you.”
With a sigh, Leah opened the door for them. As the twins hurried past her in a huff, she chided herself for believing she could make a difference in their attitudes, their lives. Even so, she’d felt compelled to drive home the reality they might be facing if they continued on their current collision course. Wearily Leah returned to the barn for the buckets of goat’s milk she’d left there.
When Leah stepped into the kitchen, Betsy was wiggling in her carrier basket, which sat on the kitchen table. Leah’s mother gazed at her sadly from her place at the stove. “My word, but those girls can suck the life out of a room with their negative attitudes,” Mama said as she turned the sizzling strips of bacon in the skillet. “I had no idea their situation had escalated to such an extreme. It’s a sad example of what happens when our young people pick up nasty habits from the English—not that English folks are all bad.”
Leah set her buckets on the mudroom floor and removed her barn coat. “I could be wrong, but I suspect the boys in the truck are drawn to Alice and Adeline more because it’s a novelty to date Amish girls than because they really care for them,” she mused aloud. “And the twins enjoy playing with fire, partly to defy their dat . . . and maybe as a reaction to me as well. I have no idea how to fix this situation.”
Mama concentrated on removing the bacon from the skillet to a platter covered with paper towels. “The twins remind me of this grease, so hot and unpredictable they might burn us—or themselves—without warning,” she remarked. “Truth be told, I wonder if they have thoughts about jumping the fence. I’ve never known Plain girls to speak and behave so rudely.”
Leah sighed as she poured the goat’s milk into a large soup kettle and lit the burner beneath it.
