Samuel rushed forward in an attempt to catch her, and they went down together in a crash of wood, entwined arms and legs, and what seemed like gallons of blue paint. Samuel slid rather than fell to the floor and ended up with Anna in his lap, his arms securely around her middle. Somewhere in the jumble, the paint can hit the wall and bounced, spraying paint everywhere.
Samuel peered into Anna’s startled face. Her eyes were wide, her mouth gaped, but the only sound she made was a small, “Oh, no.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked, letting go of her when he realized he still held his arms tightly around her. He tried to rise, slipped in the river of paint and sat down hard, a splat rising from around his britches. As they fell a second time, Anna’s arms instinctively went around his neck, bringing her face only inches from his. She was so close, he could have kissed her full, rosy lips.
“Anna?” he said, out of breath. “Are you all right?”
She gave a gasp, wiggled out of his embrace and scrambled up, her back foot slipping. Throwing both arms out for balance, she caught herself before she went down again.
Samuel knew he had to say something. But what? Anna sucked in a gulp of air, threw her apron up over her blue-streaked face and ran through the doorway, nearly running into Susanna and Mae, and out of the room.
“Anna,” he called, trying to get to his feet again, but having less luck than she had. “Come back. It’s all right.” He dropped onto all fours and used his hands to push himself up. “It’s only paint. Anna!”
But Anna was gone, and the only evidence that she’d been there was the warm feeling in his chest, and a trail of bright blue footprints across the wide, red floorboards.
“You spilled the paint.” Susanna began to giggle, then pointed at him. “And you have paint in your beard.”
“Beard,” Mae echoed, standing solemnly beside her newfound friend.
Samuel looked down at his blue hands and up at the two girls, and he began to laugh, too. Great belly laughs rolled up from the pit of his stomach. “We did spill the paint, didn’t we?” he managed to say as he looked around the room at the mess they’d made. “We spilled a lot of paint.”
“A lot,” Susanna agreed.
Mae stared at him with her mother’s bright blue eyes and clutched the older girl’s hand. The fearful expression in his daughter’s wide-eyed gaze made him want to gather her up in his arms and hug her, but in his state, that was out of the question. Two painted scarecrows in one house was enough; the hugs would have to wait until later.
“Susanna, could you go and see if your sister is hurt?” Samuel asked. His first instinct was to follow Anna to see for himself that she was okay and to assure her that she had no need to be embarrassed. Anyone could have an accident, and the wooden ladder had obviously seen better days. But he’d heard her run up the stairs, and it wouldn’t be seemly for him to intrude on her. With her mother out of the house, he had to show respect and maintain proper behavior. If he was going to court Anna, he was going to do it right and behave the way any man courting her would be expected to.
“Ya,” Susanna agreed. Still giggling, she trotted off with Mae glued to her skirts.
Turning in a circle, Samuel exhaled and wiped his hands on his pants. The way he’d been swimming in the paint, they were a total loss anyway. He rubbed a bruised elbow and the back of his head as he studied the floor, the wall, and the broken ladder. How, he wondered, had so much paint come from one gallon?
This was a fine barrel of pickles.
After putting it off for so long and practicing his proposal of marriage to Anna over and over in his head, it had gone all wrong. It couldn’t have gone worse. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but he certainly hadn’t thought the statement of his intentions would frighten her so badly that she’d fall off a ladder, or drop into his arms—although that had been a pleasant interlude. He didn’t know why sweet Anna had been so surprised, or why she’d run away from him. He hoped that it wasn’t because the idea of marrying him and instantly becoming the mother of five children was so preposterous.
Samuel picked up the paint can and set it upright—there couldn’t have been more than half a cup of paint left in the bottom. The room was a disaster. He decided he’d better get a start on cleaning it up before the paint began to dry. If he was lucky, maybe Anna would come down and join him and they could talk. He would need rags, a mop and maybe even a shovel to start wiping up the excess paint, but he didn’t have the faintest idea where to find them.
The first thing he needed to do, before he went looking for the supplies, was to take his shoes off so he didn’t track paint through the house. Setting the ladder upright, he sat down on the lower rung and began to unlace his brogans.
Samuel wondered if he’d gone about this all wrong. The custom was for the suitor to ask a go-between to talk to the girl’s family before a proposal of marriage was formally offered. But with Anna’s father dead and not a single brother, that left Hannah as the sole parent. Samuel supposed he could have approached Anna’s uncle by marriage, Reuben Coblentz, but that would have involved Reuben’s wife, Martha. Reuben didn’t scratch until Martha told him where he itched. Plus, Hannah and Martha didn’t always see eye to eye, and Hannah had made it clear that she didn’t care for her late husband’s sister interfering in her personal family matters.
That left speaking directly to Hannah before he approached Anna, but he’d decided against that because he was afraid that Hannah might have misconstrued his previous regular visits to the Yoder farm. There wasn’t any doubt in Samuel’s mind that most of the community thought that he was courting Hannah, or at least testing the waters. It could well be that Hannah thought so, too, and he didn’t want to make matters worse by embarrassing her, maybe even hurting her feelings. Samuel liked Hannah, and he always enjoyed her company, but there was no comparing the warm friendship that he felt for her to his keen attraction to Anna.
What Samuel and his late wife, Frieda, had had was a comfortable marriage, but his father and her family had arranged the match. Samuel had been willing because it seemed such a sensible arrangement. He thought Frieda would make a good wife, and he’d always been reluctant to go against his father’s wishes.
He’d been just nineteen to Frieda’s twenty-three when they wed. Everyone said that it was a good match, and he could remember the excitement of their wedding day. Neither of them had expected romance, but they’d come to respect and care for each other, and they both adored the children the Lord sent them.
When Frieda’s heart had failed and he’d lost her, he’d genuinely mourned her passing. But Frieda had been gone a long time, so long that he sometimes had trouble remembering her face. And he was lonely, not just for a helpmate, not just for a mother for his children, but for someone with whom he could open his heart.
If he was honest with himself, Samuel reckoned he’d been attracted to Anna for at least two years. Just seeing her across a room gave him a breathless, shivery thrill that he’d never experienced before. Oh, he wasn’t blind. He knew what the other young men in the community thought about Anna. She wasn’t small or trim, and she didn’t have delicate features. Some fellows went so far as to make fun of her size. Not where Anna could hear, of course, or him either. He would have never stood by and allowed such a fine woman to be insulted by foolish boys who couldn’t see how special she was.
In his heart, Samuel had always admired strong women. Other than Frieda, who’d been the exception, every girl he’d ever driven home from a singing or
