A Plain Love Song (39 page)

Charlene answered on the fourth ring, sounding sleepy and more than a little peeved. “Who’s this? Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s me.”

“Adah? What’s wrong?” She sounded wide awake now. “Why aren’t you home yet?”

“I’m sorry to bother you so late.”

“Where’s Jackson? Didn’t he pick you up?”

“He started to, but then he didn’t.”

“Drinking, was he?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on my way.”

Adah started to say she was sorry again, but it was too late. Charlene had already disconnected.

Twenty minutes later Charlene’s tiny red car—the one she called Ladybug—pulled up to the curb with a screech. Adah locked up and dashed through a now steady downpour and slid in on the passenger’s side.

“Girl, you’re a mess,” Charlene observed as she pulled from the curb. “Ever heard of an umbrella?”

“It’s just water and it cools a person off.”

“True. Maybe we should cool Jackson off with a hose when he comes home tonight.”

“I plan to be asleep when he comes home.” Adah instantly regretted her tart tone. “Sorry. I know you’re his aunt and all.”

“That don’t mean I don’t see what he’s doing to you.”

“He’s not doing anything to me. It’s my fault.”

“He took you away from your home and your family. You think I can’t see how miserable you are?”

“I shouldn’t have come, but I did, willingly. He can’t be blamed for my mistake. I came here with a dream, same as he did.”

“Or Jackson fed you a load of bull and made you think this was your dream.”

“I love writing songs.”

“Which you can do anywhere. It doesn’t have to be here. You don’t like to perform and people here have to perform.”

Charlene was a smart woman. Adah gazed at the streaks left by the windshield wipers. The
whop-whop
sound as they flashed back and forth against the glass lulled her. She was so tired. Daed would say she
had made her bed and she’d better be prepared to lie in it. She missed Daed with all his gruffness and his silly sayings and his certainty that theirs was the right way, the best way.

She wasn’t certain of much. Only that God had a plan for her and she’d taken matters into her own hands and gone off with her own plan. How could God forgive that? Her audacity. Her arrogance. “I don’t know what to do.” A shiver ran through Adah. She clutched her arms to her chest, trying to warm them. “I don’t want to hurt your nephew. He’s a good friend and he’s right about us having the same dream. It’s just not a dream I should have.”

“I came to Branson twenty years ago with my husband, Joe. I met him at a concert he played in Texas. I was a first grade teacher barely out of college. I’d gone down there following a guy in the Air Force stationed in San Antonio, who then dumped me when he got his orders. Joe eventually talked me into coming back to Missouri with him.” Charlene hunched over the steering wheel, her gaze glued to the road. The brake lights of the car in front of them served as beacons that helped keep them in their lane in the blinding sheets of rain. “He wanted to be a big time star of stage and screen too.”

“Stage and screen?”

“It’s an expression, honey. He had big aspirations.” Charlene leaned forward as if it would help her to see. “And a little more than average talent.”

“He made it?”

“He might have.” She shook her head as if disagreeing with her own statement. A bolt of lightning lit the sky directly overhead, followed by a crack of thunder that nearly drowned out her voice. “I don’t know. We’ll never know, because he drank himself to death before he had a chance to prove himself.”

“To death?”

“Some people can drink now and again. Or have one or two drinks and then stop. Joe wasn’t like that. Once he started, he drank like there was no tomorrow. Until there was no tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry.” How did a person know when it became a problem? It seemed Jackson did a lot of drinking these days. “Very sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. I guess this situation with you and Jackson reminded me of how I felt. It’s hard to be in love with someone who’s crazy in love with something he can’t wrap his arms around, something that’s always just beyond his reach. This town digs its claws into a kid like Jackson and never lets go. The music will always come first. If he’s like his daddy, the drinking will ease up as he gets a little older. He’s just sowing wild oats because he’s twenty-one and he can. But the hunger for the music—that will never let up.”

“I’m not in love with Jackson.”

“I figured as much. If you loved him like I loved my Joe, you wouldn’t be here with me now. You’d be with him.”

“I don’t understand the feelings I have for him, but I know they’re not love. Not the kind that lasts.”

“Jackson is a good-looking, charming, sweet-talking, sweetheart of a young man. Attention from him is bound to make a girl’s heart flutter and get her all flustered so she doesn’t know what to think. So she’d walk off a cliff for him.”

That was Adah’s situation summed up all neat and tidy. “We’re too much alike. If we go on like this, we’ll walk off that cliff together.”

“You’re a smart girl.”

“A smart girl would’ve figured it out sooner.”

“This love stuff isn’t easy.” Charlene maneuvered around a slow-moving truck, her fingernails tapping out her impatience on the wheel. “I loved Joe so much, I gave up everything for him. I moved to this town, put up with his running around and his drinking and his never-ending certainty that his big hit was just around the corner. I put up with it right up until the moment I found him lying on the bathroom floor one morning, dead, choked on his own vomit.”

The ugly image made bitter bile rise in Adah’s throat. The ham and cheese sandwich she’d eaten for supper at the coffeehouse roiled in her stomach. She breathed and let the sound of the rain on the windshield soothe her. The memory of Charlene’s expression when Jackson’s father asked her if she had experience raising children rose up in Adah’s mind. “You never had children?”

“No. We lost two babies before they were born.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Again, a long time ago. After Joe died, I went back to teaching school. I have my little ones I teach to read every year. I love them.” Charlene flipped the windshield wiper lever. They sped up, but didn’t do much good in the driving rain. “But I still wonder if things would’ve been different if our babies had lived. Maybe Joe wouldn’t have felt the need to drink so much. His heart was broken.”

“He had you, didn’t he?”

“Sometimes a person isn’t enough.”

Adah was learning that lesson. She didn’t like it. “But you never left Branson after your husband died.”

“I was too old to run home to New Hope. I didn’t have any place else to go.” Charlene pulled into the drive in front of the house and killed the engine. She left the headlights on, letting them spotlight the dancing branches of the trees bending and lashing out in the wind. “You do.”

Adah wasn’t so sure of that. No one waited for her at home. As the weeks had gone by, she’d given up hope of getting an answer to her letters. She’d written two more to Mudder and another one to Molly, but no more to Matthew. His silence after the first one had been his answer. “It’s not that simple.”

“People tend to make it harder than it is.” Charlene patted Adah’s shoulder. “You’ll go home when you’re ready. And when you do, your folks will thank God and throw you a big party. Like the prodigal daughter.”

But Plain folks didn’t throw parties—not for wayward daughters who broke all the rules.

Chapter 36

M
atthew could almost feel the gazes boring into his back. Many people had come to watch him do the most important thing he’d ever do in his life. He tried to focus on Luke’s words. His breathing sounded loud in the silence of everyone watching, everyone waiting. A baby whimpered; a woman hushed him. Someone coughed, then quieted. The old barn creaked in a gusty wind that blew hay from the rafters and sent it showering down on him and the others who stood in front. Dust dried his throat and made it ache. Or more likely it ached because Adah didn’t stand on the other side, next to Elizabeth. He had always known he would be baptized, come what may. The fact that Adah wasn’t with him hurt. Scratch that, it agonized him.

One thing at a time. He would do this. Then he would go get her and bring her home. Her baptism would come in the spring. He’d waited and he’d prayed, doing exactly what Luke and Thomas had insisted he do. Ignore the letter. Wait. Let her learn.

He’d waited and he’d prayed and now, he’d made up his mind.

Luke fixed Matthew with a stern stare that surely saw his anger and his doubt as well as his bedrock certainty that this was where he belonged. “Do you renounce the devil?”

“Jah.”

“Do you renounce the world?”

“Jah.”

“Do you accept the Ordnung?”

“I do.”

The questions from the bishop came one by one, slow, deliberate, careful. Each time Matthew had the opportunity to step back, to say no, to wait. But he didn’t. This commitment to God and his community would carry him through. Just as it would Adah, when her time came.

The minutes picked up speed until they zoomed by. The questions were repeated to the others who stood, like him, legs trembling, hands slick with sweat.

Finally, the water from the tin cup soaked his hair and trickled down his forehead, his cheeks, and his neck. He raised his head and looked up at Luke. Now?

Luke nodded and smiled. “Welcome to God’s family.”

Matthew rose and accepted the traditional kiss on the cheek. He turned to face his community of faith. Some of the women had tears in their eyes. The men’s faces bore broad smiles. His family of faith. He had been born into a Plain community. Now, he had chosen to be Amish of his own free will. So would Adah. He would see to it.

It took a good half hour, but Matthew finally managed to tear himself away from Mudder, Daed, and the rest of the family, Groossmammi being the hardest. She kept squeezing his arm and making him lean over so she could give him one more peck on the cheek. Her own cheeks were wet with tears she kept swiping at with the back of a sleeve until it was soaked.

“I have to go.” He liked having his grandparents close on this important day. He liked that Groossdaadi’s mind seemed to be clear as a bell today. For this day. “But I’ll be back in a bit so we can eat together.”

“Let the boy go.” Groossdaadi patted his fraa’s arm. “He has rounds to make. People to see. Things to do.”

“Nee, this is a day for family.” Groossmammi tilted her head, eyes still bright with tears. “And girls, I reckon. Go on. But come back before all the food gets eaten.”

She tugged on his arm, he leaned down, and she planted one more peck on his cheek. He strode across Thomas’s yard and around the house, filled with yakking women preparing to serve the food. Sure
enough, Thomas, Silas, and Luke sat at a picnic table under a poplar tree in the backyard. Ben, Hiram, and Daniel sat across from them. He didn’t wait for them to speak. “Now. The time is now.”

Luke smoothed his beard. “If you’re talking about Adah, we were just discussing that situation.”

“Adah isn’t a situation—”

“Easy, Matthew.” Thomas held up his hand, long, callused fingers spread. “You’re a man now, a voting member of this district, but that brings with it responsibility to the entire community. It also doesn’t release you from showing respect.”

“I meant no disrespect. It’s time for her to come home.” He let his gaze fall to Ben, Hiram, and Daniel. The men of Adah’s family. Their agreement was critical in this. “It’s time for me to go talk to her and set her straight.”

“If anyone goes, it should be me and Hiram,” Daniel interrupted. “We’re her brothers.”

“I think she’ll listen to me.”

“Why?” Luke’s tone was abrupt but his expression kind. “What will you say to her?”

“Daniel and Hiram see Adah as their little sister, someone to be protected. Ben wants to protect her, but he also wants to teach her and punish her and make her do the right thing.” Matthew paced as he grappled for the right words. He had to make them understand without offending them. “What I have with Adah, at least what I had, is different. It’s more…equal.”

As Plain men they might not understand that word. Not when it came to speaking of women, but Matthew knew in his heart that each of the married men at the table loved his fraa and valued her opinion. They wanted to please their fraas, even if they would never, ever say it aloud. A man might be the head of the household, but his fraa was the heart. Neither could exist without the other. “I understand why she left. I know what she hungers for. I know why she struggles.”

“What makes you think she’ll listen to you?” Ben drummed his fingers on the table in an impatient rhythm. “She left you as much as she left her family.”

The words sliced through Matthew, sharp as any scythe. He couldn’t
say the words that pulsed in his head. It wasn’t done.
She loves me and I love her.
“She’ll come.”

Ben didn’t look convinced. “She left you much as she left us.”

“She’s Adah.”