The distraction was well-timed, and Patience pushed herself to her feet. She kicked off her shoes and went barefoot to the bank of the creek, and then stepped into the rippling water. Rue was right—it was warm, and she made her way slowly over the smooth rocks to where Rue stood.
“See?” Rue said, pointing down at a little stick.
“That’s not a fish, Rue,” Patience chuckled. “That’s a piece of stick.”
“Oh.” Rue straightened and looked around, but just then Patience saw a flash of silver, and then another one.
“Rue, look—” Patience pointed. “There. Do you see that flash? And there. Those are fish.”
Rue bent down to look, her dress drifting in the water, but then she shrieked with delight.
“It’s fishes, Daddy!” she hollered. “All sorts of them!”
Patience looked up to find Thomas sitting in the same position she’d left him, leaning back on his hands, his legs crossed at the ankles in front of him and his gaze locked on them. It wasn’t just Rue he was watching...
She’d better not get used to this. It wouldn’t last—it couldn’t! And if anyone spotted them, they’d assume they were courting, when they weren’t. Once a rumor like that started, it could be very uncomfortable.
“Are you hungry, Rue?” Patience asked.
Maybe it was better to keep things focused on the little girl who had tugged them together in the first place. Because whatever had started to develop between them could only end in someone getting hurt...and she suspected that someone would be her.
Chapter Nine
Thomas opened the picnic basket, and Rue sat on her knees on the blanket, bouncing while she waited for her food. She ate ravenously, much more than he thought a girl that size could consume. But then, when she’d finally eaten her second piece of pie, she seemed to fill up, and she laid herself down on the blanket with a deep sigh.
“Daddy,” Rue said quietly. “Do you know any more stories?”
“Yah,” he chuckled. “All sorts.”
“Tell me a story about when you were little,” she said. “Little like me.”
“Like you?” he said.
Patience looked over at him with a smile tickling the corners of her lips, and he suddenly felt shy. What kind of story could he tell that would both please his daughter and impress the teacher? That wasn’t going to be easy.
“I’m not sure Patience wants to hear stories,” he hedged.
“Oh, I do, though,” Patience said, breaking into a full smile. “Tell us a story, Daet. We want to hear one.”
Daet. The term warmed his heart, and there was something about how Patience said it—with warmth and familiarity. It almost felt like she could be the mamm here.
“Okay, you want a story,” Thomas said. He frowned to himself, sifting through his memories of childhood antics, punishments he’d received, his brother’s tricks and games... “All right, I have one.”
“Is it from when you were little like me?” Rue asked.
“I was a little bit bigger than you,” he replied. “But I was still a little boy.”
Rue fixed him with a direct stare, and then she yawned. “You can start.”
Patience seemed to sense Rue growing tired, too, because she reached out and started to stroke the girl’s blond hair in a slow, methodical way.
“One spring, when I was a little boy,” Thomas began, “my mamm got sick with a terrible flu. The flu turned into pneumonia, which meant that she was sick for a few weeks and had to stay inside. So she gave me a very special job to do—I had to plant the garden.”
His mind went back to those days, when his mamm and daet were the center of his world, and he’d never once suspected that they’d ever been anything other than exactly what they were—Amish. Life had been simple back then, and sweet.
“My mamm gave me very specific instructions,” Thomas said. “I was to plant three rows of carrots, three rows of peas, three rows of cabbage... But it all seemed very tiring. Mamm said I had to put three seeds in a little hole, and then move down a foot, and put three more seeds in a hole, move down another foot... We had a very, very big garden.”
Rue’s eyes started to drift shut, but she said, “You were helpful.”
“Yah, I was helpful,” Thomas agreed. “At least I intended to be. At first. But when I started planting, it was a very warm day, and I was tired and cranky, and all by myself out there. It was just me and the dirt. I started to get lazy. I started putting more than three seeds in each hole, and I started putting more space between the holes, just trying to finish up faster. And every time I got to a new row, it just seemed like it would take forever to finish up.”
Rue’s eyes were shut now, and her breath was coming slowly.
“Rue?” he said softly.
There was no reply. She’d fallen asleep. Just as well. He didn’t come out well in this story. Maybe he should have chosen a different one.
“So what happened?” Patience asked.
He looked up, then chuckled. “Oh... I did a terrible job of planting, and my parents found that out when it all came up a couple of weeks later. They got some advice from a neighbor about putting some more seeds in between the ones I’d planted too far apart, and I think they were also advised to give me extra chores for a while.”
“Did they?” she asked with a small smile.
“Yah. They did.” He still remembered that punishment, not because it was so painful, but because he’d known that he deeply deserved it. He’d been so ashamed of himself, not helping properly when his mamm had been so sick. “But the most important lesson I learned that day was that what you plant will eventually come up, in life as well as in gardens.”
“A good lesson,” she said softly.
“Yah, a good one.” He looked down at his daughter asleep on the blanket.
