by to check on one of Johanna’s ewes that got caught in a fence and Susanna caught me and...forced me to the table.”
Grace wanted to ask if he was a farmer; it sounded as if he knew something about animals. She liked animals, especially dogs, and she’d always felt more at ease around them than people. The best job she’d ever had was working at a kennel where she cleaned cages and took care of dogs boarded there while their families were on vacation. Trying not to say the wrong thing in front of her new family, though, she decided that the less she said to a strange man, the better.
Susanna laughed. “You’re silly, John. You said you were sooo hungry and Mam’s biscuits smelled sooo good.”
“I did and they do,” he agreed.
“He wanted to get married with Miriam,” Susanna happily explained, offering Dakota a cup of milk. “But she got married with Charley.”
John’s face flushed, but he shrugged, and looked right at Grace. “What can I say?” He grinned. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.”
The others were laughing, so Grace forced a polite smile. John seemed like a stand-up guy, a real gentleman. As she accepted the cup of coffee Hannah handed her, Grace couldn’t help wondering why her half
sister had turned John down. If a man as good-looking as John, who had a job he could work when it rained, asked her, she’d marry him in a second.
Chapter Three
John finished off two slices of scrapple, two biscuits and a mound of scrambled eggs, but as much as he normally enjoyed Hannah’s cooking, he may as well have been eating his uncle’s frozen-in-a-box sausage bagels. He couldn’t take his eyes off the attractive, almost-model-thin redhead, wearing the strangest Plain clothing he’d ever seen on a woman.
Her name was Grace. A pretty name for a pretty girl. He knew he would have remembered her if he’d ever seen her before. She was obviously related to the Yoders; she looked like Hannah’s girls. From the attention she was giving the boy, she was probably his mother or at least his aunt. He didn’t look like the Yoders, though. And the two of them sure didn’t look Amish. So why had they spent the night here?
John was Mennonite, and among his people, staying in the homes of total strangers who shared the same faith was commonplace. Mennonites could travel all over the world and always be certain of a warm welcome from friendly hosts, whether it was for a weekend or a month. But the Amish were a people apart and rarely mingled socially with outsiders, who they called Englishers.
“‘Come out from among them and be separate.’” 2 Corinthian 6:14. It was a verse that John had heard quoted many times since he’d come to join his uncle’s and grandfather’s veterinary practice. Because he specialized in large farm animals, many of his clients were Old Order Amish. Mennonites and Amish shared many of the same principles, and because he’d come close to marrying a Yoder daughter, he’d gotten to know the Amish in a way that few Englishers did.
Who was this mystery woman with such a haunting look of vulnerability? And what was so important about Grace’s visit that Hannah—who never missed school—had taken the day off from teaching? John couldn’t wait to get one of the Yoders alone and find out.
He lingered as long as he could at the table, having more coffee, eating when he wasn’t really hungry and trying his best to engage Grace in conversation. But either she didn’t answer or gave only one-word responses to his questions, intriguing him even further.
Eventually, he ran out of excuses to sit at Hannah’s table and glanced at his watch. “I hate to leave such good company,” he said, “but I have an appointment out at Rob Miller’s farm.” Repeating his thanks and wishing the others a good day, he gave Grace one last smile, and left the kitchen.
Hannah followed him out onto the porch, carefully closing the door behind her. “Well, what do you think?” she asked, drying her clean hands on her apron. “Of our visitor?”
He wondered whether to play it safe and be polite or to be himself. Himself won. “Um...she’s nice. Pretty.” He met her gaze. “But, Hannah, I’m confused. Grace isn’t Amish, is she?”
“Ne, John, that she isn’t.”
“A friend of the family from out of town?”
“None of us had ever laid eyes on her until last night. She came to us out of the storm, soaked to the skin and near to exhaustion. She’d been hitchhiking.”
“Pretty dangerous for a young woman,” he observed, not sure where the conversation was going.
John could tell that Hannah was pondering something, and that she wanted to talk, yet the Amish tradition of intense privacy remained strong. John waited. Either she would share her concerns or she wouldn’t. No amount of nudging would budge her if she wanted to be secretive.
But then Hannah blurted right out, “Grace is my late husband’s daughter.”
“Jonas’s daughter?” John stared at her in disbelief. He’d never heard that Jonas had been married before. “Jonas was married—”
“Jonas and Grace’s mother never married. She ran away from the church. Jonas never knew she was in the family way.”
John couldn’t have been more shocked if a steer had been sitting at Hannah’s table this morning. For a moment he didn’t know what to say. Jonas Yoder had been one of the most genuinely kind and decent men he had ever known. It just didn’t seem to fit that Jonas would... “You’re certain this isn’t a scam of some kind?” He couldn’t imagine that the young woman he’d met inside could do anything dishonest, but Uncle Albert had often told him that he was naive when it came to seeing who or what people truly were. “She’s not trying to get anything from you? Money or something?”
“She’s asked for nothing. She came here looking for Jonas and I had to tell her he’d passed.”
Poor Grace, he thought. How terrible for her. But how terrible for Hannah, too. Not just to hear this news, to learn the awful truth about her beloved husband, but to have to tell his child that he was dead.
“I...believe the girl is who she says she is,” Hannah admitted, going on slowly. “Jonas told me...confided to me his affection for her mother, Trudie. Jonas was under the impression they were courting, then Trudie left the church and her family and disappeared. Jonas never knew anything about a baby. I would suspect her family didn’t, either.”
“It’s possible, I suppose.” John glanced out into the farmyard, feeling so badly for Hannah. Not wanting her to feel uncomfortable. This kind of thing was a delicate matter. Unwed young Amish women occasionally got pregnant, but it didn’t happen often. And when it did, there was repentance, then a quick wedding and the matter was settled. “She has the same color hair as your girls.”
“And Jonas’s blue eyes.”
John glanced toward the kitchen door, picturing again the guarded expression in the young woman’s gaze. “I thought there was something familiar about her. She favors Johanna, not as tall, and she’s a lot thinner, but...”
“Too thin by my way of thinking, but Miriam was always slender, too.”
John nodded. It hadn’t been easy, coming to accept losing Miriam. But
