A Secret Identity (10 page)

I refused to be comforted. “Yeah, but you didn’t see your face just now. I did.”

“My face?” he repeated, looking alarmed and confused.

“Watching her walk away.”

He cocked his head. “I’m sorry. I’m not following you.”

“You looked like you were dying inside.”

He pulled back. “Nuh uh. No way. I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t that.”

“Deep longing,” I said stubbornly. He was right. I did like to pick scabs.

“Not for her,” Todd said. Perplexed, he ran his hands through his hair, disturbing his curls. One fell over his forehead just like Superman, and I itched to push it back. I watched him try to figure out what I was talking about and thought he was treating my paranoia more kindly than it deserved.

“Let’s forget I said anything,” I said, turning toward the car. “I was out of line. What you felt or feel for her is really none of my business, is it? I spoke out of turn.”

Todd put a restraining hand on my arm. “Stay here. We need to figure this out.”

“No, we don’t.” But I waited as he stared off into space.

Finally he looked at me. “When I think of Clarke and Kristie, mostly I think of how suited they are for each other and how great it was that the Lord brought them together. That’s what accounts for any look of longing you saw on my face. I only hope that someday I’ll have what they’ve found. I haven’t seen it all that much in my life, but it’s what I want and pray I’ll find.”

I stared at him, overwhelmed and terrified. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say except hallelujah, and I didn’t think that was quite appropriate right now.

Dear God, it’s too good to be true. He’s too good to be true. I’m scared to death! But I’m going to enjoy every moment I get before he disappears
.

“Come on,” he said, ignoring the sudden onset of my being struck dumb…or perhaps he was enjoying it. He guided me toward the car, his hand on the small of my back. “Let’s eat so I can get you to the farm.”

When Todd drove me back to the Horse and Buggy after I met Jake and saw the farm, I thanked him earnestly for telling me about the rooms.

“It will be so wonderful living there,” I said as we pulled up in front of my motel room.

Todd looked at me and grinned. “You’re vibrating again.”

“I am not.”

“Vibrating,” he said.

“I do
not
vibrate. I’m quiet and reserved.”

“You don’t know yourself very well, do you?”

“I
do not
vibrate.”

“Just like you don’t ask impertinent questions?”

“Oh, I do that. It’s a Bentley curse. I just don’t vibrate.”

I climbed out of the car with great dignity. I took my key from my purse with ladylike grace. I lifted my hand in a slow-motion farewell.

“Phony!” Todd called.

“Critic!” I responded.

He threw his car in reverse. As he looked over his shoulder to back out, I gave in to my excitement about the farm and bounced a couple of times on my toes.

“I saw that!” Todd called out his window as he straightened the car out. “Definitely vibrating.”

I was all smiles as I collected my things. I was downright giddy when I turned in my key and left the Horse and Buggy.

“Wait till you see it, Rainbow,” I told the unhappy animal as she lay in her travel cage yelling for help. “You’ll love it! Lots of yard to romp in, and lots of barn cats to give you a run for your money. In fact, you almost soured the deal, my friend. These farm folk aren’t used to house cats. I had to promise that you’d be the best cat in the world, that when you’re in our rooms, you’d use the litter box with never an accident.”

“Elp!” pleaded Rainbow.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Help is right, given your feelings about a litter box. Just do your best, okay?”

I loved the Zook farmhouse. It was white with green trim and had a great front porch with a blooming wisteria climbing one end, dripping fragrant lavender clusters like soft bunches of grapes among the gray-green leaves. A great maple tree shaded much of the front yard, and the side yard was filled with a large vegetable garden edged with cyclamen petunias.

“Their smell helps keep the rabbits out,” Jake explained.

My rooms were on the second floor, and I had to walk through the Zooks’ living room to get to the stairs. Jake shared the ability to get to his rooms via the living room, but he also had a separate entrance to his apartment with a ramp for his wheelchair.

My rooms weren’t large, but they were airy and open. The living room had a motley collection of secondhand furniture that somehow looked just right. A large blond-colored desk sat by a window. I put my laptop on it, and knew I’d enjoy sitting there to write, provided I didn’t keep staring at the pastoral scene before me.

Fields of tilled brown and verdant green swept to the horizon over gentle swells of land. A white farmhouse, barn, and silo lay in the humid-hazy distance to my right. To my left was a farm pond fed by a stream that flowed briskly from a small, dense wood. Around the pond stood several black-and-white speckled cows, but I liked best the one that stood knee deep in the water mooing. If I were a painter like Kristie or the as-yet-unmet Mary, I’d paint her.

The vegetable garden was directly below me with beans and peas scaling stakes, celadon lettuce waving vitamin-laden fronds, and carrots fluttering delicate and ferny leaves.

My bedroom had an ancient sleigh bed with great curved head and foot boards and wore a beautiful handmade quilt in calico prints of royal blue, cream, and crimson. A handmade braided rug covered the floor by the bed. There was no closet in the room, but wall pegs were available for my clothes. I hung my beige silk pantsuit on a peg beside the door to the new bathroom, which was small but complete, every surface in it a blinding white. I put Rainbow’s litter box in the space between the pedestal sink and the toilet. I put her in the box several times as I unpacked my meager belongings.

“You get the idea?” I asked as I held her in the litter, petting her and telling her how wonderful she was. She murped and jumped out, shaking her feet fastidiously to get rid of any granules caught in her pads. She stalked to the bedroom window and, in that marvelous liquid motion cats have, leapt to the windowsill. She settled down to chatter through the screen at the barn swallows that dipped and soared after the late-afternoon insects and at the purple martins that lived in the miniature white apartment on a pole in the middle of the garden.

“I’m going to Silver Spring tomorrow to collect some more clothes,” I told Rainbow. “Will you be all right here alone?”

She didn’t deign to answer.

I thought of pictures and plants and personal things I’d bring back with me to make these rooms my own. I wondered if the Zooks would mind if I hung some curtains. I’d noticed they didn’t have any in their living room. Maybe they thought curtains were too worldly or something, a decoration that defied their definition of simplicity.

“Would they mind?” I asked Jake when I found him out by his van in the drive. “I’ll use spring tension rods so I won’t make holes in the frames.”

“What you do to your rooms is up to you,” he hastened to tell me. “They understand that my tenants will be English, and that means things like curtains and TV.”

“I’m not English,” I said, though come to think of it, how did I know what nationality I was?

“You’re English in that you’re not Pennsylvania Dutch,” Jake explained. “It’s a colloquialism. German or English. Plain or Fancy.”

“Ah. Interesting.”

Jake said, “You’ll learn a lot more unusual stuff—at least it’ll seem unusual to you—before you’re finished. I’m going to go get a hoagie for dinner. Want me to pick up one for you?”

“Sure.” I said. I wasn’t all that hungry yet, but I knew I would be before the evening was over.

“Oil or mayonnaise?” he asked.

“What?”

“Oil or mayonnaise on your hoagie?”

“You can’t put mayonnaise on a hoagie,” I said, scandalized at the very idea.

Jake shrugged. “I do.”

“Then it’s not a hoagie. It’s a sandwich on a long roll.”

“You sound like Todd. He’s an oil man too.”

Forty-five minutes later Jake and I sat at his mother’s kitchen table and ate our hoagies. Jake was a dark man with heavy shoulders and a strong upper body. He had a powered wheelchair that he handled with great ease. He also had anger leaking from him like air from a latex balloon in spite of his efforts to keep it hidden.

“I met Kristie this morning,” I said. “She told me how much she loved it here.”

“Yes, she did,” Jake said. “She did a great watercolor of our barn.” He pointed through the window.

I looked at the swaybacked building. “That’s one of the pictures Todd has hanging in his office. That means the other one, the one of the quilt with a faceless Amish doll resting against it, is your mother’s.”

“Mom was so pleased when he bought one of her pictures, and when he showed it to her framed and ready to hang, she actually cried.”

I glanced at the walls around me, all empty of any hangings except a calendar with colorful nature pictures and Bible verses and an advertisement for Morton’s Funeral Home. What was it like for Mary to have this talent, this drive, this need to paint born in her and yet live in a culture that told her it was wrong? I tried to imagine what it would be like if I were told I couldn’t write.

“Old Todd’s come a long way,” Jake said. “He used to think Kristie’s painting was foolish, but he came around when he saw how much Clarke encouraged her and how well she was starting to sell. What he used to see as foolish, he now seems to admire.”

“I wonder what he thinks of writing romances.”

“Is that what you do?” He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe he was having an intelligent conversation with someone who did something so foolish.

I nodded. “It’s great fun. I love it.”

“Have you been published?”

Since the answer was yes, I loved answering that frequently asked question. “Nine books so far.”

“And you can make a living at it?”

“I’ve been blessed and I can. Most people can’t.”

“Huh,” he said. He looked at me like he couldn’t quite believe writing romances was an honorable way to earn a living. He wasn’t alone.

“Romances are about people and relationships, love and marriage and family,” I said, wanting to convince him how wonderful they could be when they weren’t obsessed with the physical side of love. “They’re also very big business, and inspirational romances have a strong market niche of their own. Lots of women enjoy reading them, and you can say some pretty important things in fiction.”

He still didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t pick a fight either. Instead he asked, “Why did you decide to move to Bird-in-Hand?”

“I’m looking for my grandfather’s family.” I picked up the sweet peppers that had fallen out of my hoagie and slid them back into the roll. “He was given up for adoption a long time ago, and I want to find out where he—and the rest of us—came from.”

Jake nodded as he wiped a glob of mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth. I refrained from telling him that if he used oil like he was supposed to, he wouldn’t have to worry about neatness. Unless, of course, there was too much oil and the hoagie dripped all over everything like mine was doing.

“I see adopted people on TV who are looking for their parents,” he said. “They all sound like such unhappy folks, like there’s a big hole or something in their lives. Is that how you feel?”

“No. At least I don’t think I do,” I said. “If I were adopted, maybe I’d feel that. I don’t know. I’m just curious to know where Pop came from. If he wasn’t a Bentley, then who was he? Who are we? Do I have family out there? Pop was an only child and so was Trey, so extended family would be nice.”

“Trey?”

“My father. And Caroline’s family, that’s my mother, they live so far away, they might as well not exist. I used to feel that when Caroline died, something in them died. They lost interest in Ward and me. Maybe seeing us was too painful or something. I don’t know. I just know they were never there for us. Maybe I can find some people my brother and I can belong to.”

“So belonging is why you’re doing this?”

“Part of it. There’s also tracing blood ties and all that implies.”

“DNA, genetics, inherited traits?”

“That’s what makes family.”

Jake looked thoughtfully at his empty hoagie wrapper. He balled it and one-handed it into the trash basket beside the propane refrigerator. “I don’t know about that. Take my family. There are six of us kids. Three of us have chosen to remain Plain and three of us haven’t. Sarah’s the oldest and she’s Plain. Andy’s next and he’s not. He left over the issue of works versus grace, saying he believed in salvation by grace, not by keeping the
Ordnung
.”

“What’s the
Ordnung
?”

“The unwritten laws that govern Amish life.”

“If they’re unwritten, how does everyone know them?”

“We’re taught them our whole lives. But some, like Zeke and me, want no part of all those rules. There was nothing religious about our choice to leave the community. We chose not to remain Plain because we wanted freedom and fun and speed.”