“I’m afraid it would only damage your reputation as well.”
“That sort of thing is very important around here.”
Didn’t she know it. Yes, she did. She knew it when she left and she knew it when she came home. But she had foolishly allowed herself to be molded by Melvin into what he thought they needed to be. He wanted to be a young and hip English couple. Amish-turned-English couple, rather. But to look at him no one would ever suspect that he was Amish. Unless they were Amish too. He wore ripped blue jeans and sneakers, T-shirts with a button-down thrown over it and the sleeves rolled up. His hair was cut in a more English style, shaggy around his eyes and ears, a little too long in the back. He thought it ridiculous for them to have to get married in order to live together. They’d run away together. And she was his girl.
Well, she had been for a while.
“Are you having a good time?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.
Levi looked down into the plastic cup he held. “Would it be terrible of me to say no?”
“You’re talking to the resident pariah,” she said, once again making light of it all.
“Mims insisted I come.”
Tillie gave him a sympathetic smile. “I understand.” She understood that Levi was still healing, something that Mims seemed to have trouble identifying. “Maybe since I was at your house and you’ve been coming over to see the baby, Mims thinks you’re ready to really socialize. That’s why she insisted you come tonight.”
Levi drained his cup of green punch and swallowed before answering. “Mims just likes bossing people around.”
Tillie couldn’t help the laughter that spilled from her. It drew a couple of looks, and she immediately sobered. “I like Mims,” she said. “I always have.”
“She likes you as well,” he said.
She almost asked Levi what had happened between Mims and David, but he spoke again before she could.
“You’re dressed very . . . English tonight.”
She picked at an invisible spot on her skirt. “I thought I’d better get used to it again.”
“There’s no chance of Melvin moving back?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“You called him . . . Told him about the baby.”
“Jah. Yes. I had to leave a message. Hopefully he got it today.” But he hadn’t tried to call or get her a message in any way. And that could only mean one thing: he wasn’t overly concerned that she’d had the baby.
She tried to soften the thought, even in her own head, but it was still harsh. She had known Melvin for so many years, and never would she have thought he would forget what was important. He just wasn’t like that. Yet the only answers were that he didn’t get the message or he didn’t care.
“Maybe he didn’t get the message,” Levi said, echoing her thoughts.
Tillie’s eyes filled with tears, and she blinked them back. No good crying at a Christmas party. No good at all. “I suppose.” You hope, you mean.
“Do you think he’ll come here for you?” Levi shook his head. “What am I saying? Of course he will come here for you. Surely you know that.”
She would like to think that he would. But the Melvin she had fallen in love with was very different than the Melvin she had left in Columbus. This new Melvin . . . she didn’t feel like she knew him at all.
Whose fault is that?
It was no one’s fault; both of their faults. Or maybe it simply was what it was. She had heard her mammi say that from time to time. It is what it is. An easy way of saying God’s will, she supposed. Sometimes things were a certain way because they were that way.
She wondered if she and Melvin were one of those things.
“So I guess I won’t see you if you move back,” he said.
“When,” she corrected.
“Pardon?” he asked.
“When I move back, not if,” she said.
He frowned. “Will you be able to come visit?”
“I doubt it,” she said. Then she shook her head. What was she expecting? A change in the Ordnung just so her mamm could visit with her grandchild? “I mean, no.” There, she had said it. And the world hadn’t collapsed. It even continued on as if she hadn’t said a thing. “You know the rules as well as I do.”
He nodded.
“I’m sure Mamm will come when she can, but . . .” Who knew how often that would be and how long it would take before someone tried to put a stop to that as well? Dear Lord, what a mess she had made of things.
“Then I suppose I should tell you now,” he said. “Merry Christmas, and I wish you well.”
“Merry Christmas,” she echoed.
He looked as if he wanted to say more, but he didn’t. He just stood awkwardly and stretched his legs. “I’ll just go get some punch. You want something?”
She shook her head. Her stomach was in such knots that she wasn’t sure she could keep anything down.
She watched Levi cross the room and wondered if it would be the last time she would ever see him. And she knew; the chances of that were great.
* * *
“Who could that be?” Eunice asked no one in particular when a knock sounded on her door. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Tillie was gone to the Christmas party, Libby was with Mammi, and she was coloring a picture with chatty Peter.
“Just a minute, and I’ll be right back,” she told Peter, who barely stopped his own rattling speech to acknowledge her words. It seemed to Eunice that he was making up for all the words he had missed saying in those first years after his family had died.
That wasn’t it, of course, but sometimes she wondered.
“Coming,” she said as the person knocked again. It had to be someone they knew. They sat too far off the road for anyone in trouble to wander down for help.
She wrenched open
