An Amish Gift (3 page)

Jennie retreated to the kitchen, setting out bowls, spoons,
and a gallon of milk. Eventually, Tim appeared in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair uncombed. He said nothing, just yanked open the cabinet where he knew he would find cereal and slammed the box down on the table as he collapsed into a chair.

“Good morning.”

He didn’t respond to his mother’s voice, only hunched down even farther as he poured cereal into a bowl.

“You’ll take the bus home after school?”

He reached for the milk, shooting her a look that indicated the answer was obvious.

“Well, maybe there’s a team or a club or something after school,” she said. “Something that might interest you.”

“Not only is there nothing in this stupid school that interests me, but I’d like to know how I could get home, since there’s nobody to drive me.” He began hurriedly gulping down big spoonfuls.

“Maybe ask someone …” Her voice trailed off. He was right, of course. He barely knew anyone at the school, and it would be tough to find someone willing to give him a ride. She was also forgetting that the houses were more spread apart around here than in Lawrence; there, it was easier to find someone who lived nearby.

She gave him an encouraging smile. “After today it’ll be different. Dad’ll have his truck, and I’ll have the car all day, so I can get you.”

“Oh, goody,” he said, getting up and grabbing his books. “I can get my mommy to drive me around.”

He stomped out of the room, and she heard the front door slam, hard. As if on cue, Willa entered the kitchen.

“What’s his problem?” She slid into a chair, reaching for the cereal box. “Like there was ever a minute when he didn’t have one.”

Jennie stood there, watching Willa repeat the same procedure as her brother. Why was it, she wondered, that with her family, breakfast was always something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

“So what’s on tap today at school?” Jennie asked in a hopeful voice.

Her daughter gave a mirthless laugh. “More boring classes, more boring kids. More boredom, basically.”

“It will improve, you know. Please just give it some time and keep an open mind.”

“ ‘
Keep an open mind
.’ Do you hear yourself?” She reached into her backpack and pulled out a brush, which she pulled through her long dark hair with one hand as she continued to eat with the other. “Mom, this school is the worst. You’re making us go to this horrible place, so we are. Don’t pretend it’s going to be good. It’s not.” She stood, slung her backpack over one shoulder, and started out.

“Have a great day, honey. I love you,” Jennie called to her retreating back.

A desultory wave was the reply.

She cleared the table. Shep was asleep, planning to get up at eight; he hadn’t come home from the shop until after midnight.
This morning they were going together to buy him a small used truck. He had been taking the car, unless she needed it. On those days, she would drop him off at the store and pick him up at the end of the day. They had known it would be impossible to exist here with one car and had decided it made more sense to get him something with room to transport bikes and other equipment if necessary. They hadn’t expected to put off buying the truck for this long, but Howland’s Bicycles and Repairs was taking up every minute that Shep didn’t spend working on the house.

Jennie had yet to see the inside of the shop. He had allowed her to drop him outside, claiming he wanted to organize a bit first. From inside the car, she would try to peer into the store’s darkened windows, hoping to see beyond the few bicycles there, but her attempts were useless. The windows needed cleaning, and there were boards of some kind behind the display bikes, blocking what was behind them. It all made her very nervous. She knew full well that being organized wasn’t something her husband particularly cared about; it meant that he didn’t want to upset her with the reality of whatever he had found there. Given Shep’s sensitivity to his work problems over the years, however, she kept her fears to herself. Her goal, as she reminded herself numerous times a day, was to support his efforts at this endeavor. So far, all she knew was that he was utterly exhausted and in no way looked like an excited new business owner.

This kind of thinking won’t lead anywhere good, she told
herself. She grabbed the dog’s leash from a hook near the front door. “Come on, boy, let’s go.”

Scout was already by her side, barking and jumping up and down in excitement at the sight of the leash. They set off at a brisk pace in the warm September morning. Jennie had always taken Scout for a long morning walk. Here, they went to the end of the street and turned back onto the main road so they could go past the beautiful fields of the Amish farms. She enjoyed the peace of the cows and horses scattered about, the dogs and chickens, the occasional passing buggy.

“Could you live on a farm like these people?” she asked Scout, who trotted along beside her. “Nah, you’re not really a farm kind of dog.” She paused. “I
do
give you the benefit of the doubt, but you’ve never shown any interest.”

As usual, she started out with the intention of walking fast enough to get her heart rate up, hoping it would help her shed those ten pounds she had been battling for as long as she could remember. Invariably, she would quickly get tired and give up on her resolution so she could enjoy the scenery. Now she slowed her pace, and Scout slowed as well.

“So, when are the kids going to settle into school?” she asked him. “I figured they wouldn’t like it just on principle. Please tell me I’m right and they’ll stop hating it at some point.”

Silence.

“That’s true—it’s not as if I’m sending them to prison. These are perfectly nice schools. I only hope they find some friends. Even one friend each would be fine.”

When the children had been little, she recalled, they’d had many friends, all those children in the neighborhood. She thought of them playing ball, riding bicycles along the narrow sidewalks. Tim had been born a year after she and Shep got married, and Willa two years after that, so, she calculated, she was remembering a time when Shep was probably done selling cars and had moved into selling insurance. They didn’t have much money, but they were able to manage. Despite the seeds of doubt, there had been plenty of promise in her husband’s career. How long had it taken them to realize that insurance wasn’t going to work out for him, either?

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t worked hard at his jobs. He had. He was just ill suited to them. No one could blame him for that, considering they were practically handed to him after high school graduation. She thought about how eventful June of that year had been, the most exciting time of their life together. They had just gotten married and moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment. Plus, everyone in town was only too happy to hire Shep Davis, hero of the school football team. He was the biggest deal to come along in many years. No job interviews or résumé writing for the star quarterback to bother with; local business owners made it clear they would welcome him with open arms. The job selling cars with Able Motors had seemed the most promising initially, with Leon Able arguing that, between his contacts and Shep’s celebrity, the sky was the limit. She had been so proud of her handsome young husband that first week, wearing a new suit, sitting behind his own desk
in the showroom, surrounded by shining cars. Success had seemed inevitable.

The problem was that no one had looked past his football-hero status to notice how shy he was around people he didn’t know well. People loved coming in to meet him, talking about his winning seasons and dozens of game-changing plays. For the first year, it was as Leon Able said, and sales were strong. Then it seemed that everyone who wanted to buy a car from the local celebrity had done so. Customers who didn’t know his story were polite when they saw the photos and awards Leon had prominently displayed, but that didn’t mean they wanted to take the next step of plunking down thousands of dollars for a car. Shep didn’t have any idea how to get them to take that next step, either. He did his best, but he was completely tongue-tied when it came to making small talk about anything other than football, and far too polite to push a product on someone.

Jennie had gotten pregnant with Tim only two months after their wedding, and any suggestion she made about getting a job herself was met with an instant refusal. There was no point, Shep insisted, because she needed to be at home with the baby. They were able to live on what he brought home for a few years, but the embarrassment of being the lowest producer in the showroom caught up with him. He changed companies, to get away from the disappointment in Leon Able’s eyes. The result was the same at the next place.

At some point, he got the idea to sell insurance. He was fired up by the plan, convinced it was a product he would be
more comfortable selling. He tried with three companies. His successes, which Jennie always fussed over and celebrated, were few and far between. When she tried to suggest he find a job in something other than sales, he would explode that he wasn’t qualified to do anything at all, and he’d usually end up storming out of the house for several hours, getting as far away as he could from the argument and her pitying eyes.

Jennie once made the mistake of urging him to take the time to go to college. The look on his face made her drop the subject at once. His decision not to go to college was a subject he never talked about. He could have gone to any number of schools on a football scholarship, but he had been unwilling to leave his younger brother, Michael. Shep had been responsible for his brother ever since their mother died, when he was ten and Mike eight. Their father wasn’t at home much, working the night shift as a waiter at a diner. He would leave for his shift at five in the afternoon and get back by five the next morning. That meant he would be asleep when the boys got up for school and gone by the time they got home from after-school sports practices. Mostly, the two boys were alone. Shep took care of their meals, their laundry, and everything else a parent would have done. It wasn’t that their father didn’t love them. Losing his wife had left him broken inside, and it was only the desire to take care of his children that gave him a reason to get up and go to work every day. Unfortunately, the best job he could come up with was the one that kept him away from them most of the time. Shep would sometimes see him in the stands at his football games, still in his waiter’s white shirt
and black pants and shoes, looking tired but proud. When it came time to consider college, Shep wanted no part of leaving Michael home alone. He told Jennie that he was ready to marry her and get to work in the real world. College wasn’t important anyway, he said. If he had any resentment over the fact that Michael went to college, then on to law school and a lucrative career, he never showed it.

Shep rarely showed his feelings on any subject to anyone but Jennie. They had met in high school; she had been shocked when the handsome eleventh-grade football star expressed an interest in her. He could have had almost any girl in the school at that point. She never could understand what he saw in her, the unpopular girl who was so quiet in classes. Later, she found out that he didn’t like the parties or the fuss girls made over him, or the kids who just wanted to say they were pals with the best football player their school had ever produced. Jennie, he knew, didn’t care. The two of them could sit and just be together. Plus, he was pleasantly surprised to discover she was far more outgoing away from school. “I always knew you weren’t the quiet type,” he’d said with a grin. “Don’t know how I knew, but I just did.”

He also loved the way she made him laugh. But she hadn’t done that in a while, had she, she said to herself as she turned around to head home.

Of course, once they started dating, he quickly learned why she was so withdrawn at school. She didn’t want to provide the other kids any more gossip about her than they already had. Despite the fact that she hadn’t invited a single friend over to
her house since elementary school, they somehow all knew about her parents. Knew that her father had rarely been around when she and her older sister, Hope, were little, and that he had finally disappeared altogether. Knew that her mother, Tess, was an alcoholic who once got by on whatever money her husband sent her, and when it stopped coming, she depended on the men she dated to cover her liquor and expenses. Hope and Jennie had seen a parade of men over the years, most of whom lasted fewer than six months. They didn’t understand how their mother worked it out, but she always had enough money for their food and her alcohol, plus a new dress now and then. She was typically asleep during the day, so they would see her for a few hours in the early evening. That was Jennie’s favorite part of the day, because her mother would start out sober, able to converse with them. Some days, she would be interested in chatting with Jennie about her day, or encouraging her to talk about her biggest dreams in life; she could be cheerful, even funny. Most days, though, she would complain bitterly about her husband and the rotten hand that life had dealt her. Either way, as the hours passed, she would drink more and get less lucid, finally waving Jennie away altogether. Eventually, she would fall asleep on the living room couch, the television on.

Jennie never stopped hoping that her mother would quit drinking one day, and they would be a happy family again, like when her father used to come home and stay for a week or two. Each visit started out the same way: her mother laughing and happy, singing in the kitchen and nicely dressed. Jennie was always certain that, this time, things were going to get better.
The problem was the way the visits ended. Sooner or later, Tess would start getting drunk again every evening. From her bed, Jennie could hear her parents arguing late into the night, Tess accusing her husband of having girlfriends on the road, and not caring about her or their children. Both of them yelled, and when they started throwing things, Jennie buried her head beneath her pillow. After a few days of this, he invariably left. What puzzled Jennie was that, if he actually did care for them as he claimed, why did he disappear for months on end, and then, finally, forever? Jennie’s sister, Hope, told her she was a fool to think things would ever change, that their lives would stay miserable as long as they were there. Hope was furious at their mother for drinking and, as she saw it, driving their father away. She and Tess fought constantly. When Jennie was little, she would try to get in between them, hugging her mother’s legs, crying and begging the two of them to stop shouting.