An Amish Christmas (24 page)

Meg and James found themselves at loose ends. Everyone around them was occupied. “Want to go get some air?” he asked her.

She nodded. Grabbing jackets, they headed out. It was bitingly cold.

“Freezing,” James remarked. “Feels like it’ll snow tonight.”

Meg laughed. “You’re beginning to sound like a farmer, speculating
about the weather. Boy, that was something I don’t think I ever heard you do in Charlotte.”

At the mention of the city, they both fell silent. They stood on the porch, surveying the stars in the night sky.

“Charlotte feels very far away,” James finally said. “Everything feels very far away.” He moved off the porch, then turned to her. “The moon is pretty bright. Want to walk a bit?”

“Okay.”

They set off toward the road.

When James spoke again, it was so hushed, Meg wasn’t sure she heard him correctly. “I’ve never really apologized for what I did. I know that.”

She didn’t say anything, just kept walking, her eyes on the ground ahead of her.

“I guess,” he went on, “I didn’t know how to. But that’s not an excuse.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I was so angry at myself. There was just no way a guy as smart as I am could be as stupid as that. I couldn’t handle it.”

There was another silence before James spoke again.

“The first problem was getting fired. It isn’t the end of the world, I know that, but it was for me. In a million years—I was just
not
a guy who got fired. Impossible. Yeah, there were financial problems at the firm, things that had nothing to do with me, but we were in a bad position. Still, the ones who were getting laid off weren’t gonna be me.”

He didn’t say anything for another few minutes. They walked along, ice and snow crunching beneath their boots.

He sighed. “It’s hard to be the kind of jerk who can’t handle
life when he isn’t the alpha dog anymore. That’s what led to the next step and the next, until the whole thing exploded in my face.”

“Not just in
your
face,” Meg pointed out. “All of our faces.”

“Yeah, that’s the part I didn’t get until it was too late.” He shook his head. “But by then I couldn’t admit what I’d done. Not even to myself.”

“And now?”

“If we had gone straight to your parents’ house, I really have to wonder if you and I would have made it. The tension between us was too much. I don’t think we could have survived. But here, we’ve been removed from everything that defined us, good
and
bad. To tell you the truth, this feels like the first time I’ve been able to breathe in months—hell, in years.”

Able to breathe, Meg thought. Exactly. Here, she was able to breathe again.

He stopped and turned to her. “I don’t know if you’ll forgive me or not. But I am sorry from the bottom of my heart. You have every right to leave me and every right to hate my guts. I understand that you don’t trust me anymore. I wouldn’t trust me, either. Frankly, I have no idea what it would take for me to win your trust back.” He took a deep breath. “But I do want to win it back. I want us to go on together.”

“I’m not sure I know what to say. I can’t tell you, ‘Okay, thanks for saying sorry, everything’s fine again.’ ”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure I
can
ever trust you again, or how you could make that happen. Right now I’m more worried about how we’re going to survive,
literally
survive, once we leave here.
And going to live with my parents is a sorry answer to our problems. It’s not an answer at all. The more I think about it, the worse I know it’s going to be. It’s not like we’re nineteen and have to put up with staying in the basement for a few months. This is going to be a nightmare for all of us.”

There was no need for him to comment. She knew he agreed with her.

“We’ll be at each other’s throats again in no time,” she added.

“I wish I could come up with another solution.” He kicked at a small rock in the road.

“For a minute there, I thought I had one,” she said. “Remember the woman who drove us to the hospital when Amanda hurt her leg? She runs an inn, and she bought some of my brownies and cookies to serve to her customers. She really liked them.”

James looked at her in surprise. “You’re kidding! That’s great. You didn’t tell me that.”

Her tone was wry. “Well, it’s not like we’re sharing a whole lot lately, is it? Anyway, Catherine got me thinking about starting my own little business. You know, like they sell their homemade pies and breads to stores and restaurants here? I could sell the things I do best—the sweets.”

“Really? I wouldn’t have guessed you’d have an interest in something like that.”

“I didn’t,” Meg admitted, “until I started baking here every day. I used to do it a lot more when the kids were little, remember? I forgot how much I liked it.”

“Wow. I have to admit, this is all news to me. But I guess it makes sense.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s a ridiculous idea. You need a kitchen with decent equipment, more than one oven. You need money to invest. Most important, you need customers. I’m not going to find any of those things in Homer.”

“Hmm. Unfortunately, I see what you mean,” he said.

“Worse, what I
am
going to find there are Harlan and Frances. Killers of dreams. Destroyers of spirits.”

He picked up the theme. “Experts at extinguishing the fires of hope. Stompers-on of hearts.”

They looked at each other and burst out laughing.

When they had quieted down, he looked at her seriously. “Meg, I promise we’ll come up with something. I don’t know what it’ll be, but something.”

“There’s a promise to hang my hat on,” she said.

He smiled. “You mean your bonnet?”

“My bonnet, yeah.” Her tone turned wistful. “If only we could just stay here. You think we’d make good Amish farmers?”

He sighed briefly. “No, we wouldn’t. We’d make terrible Amish farmers. And we can’t stay here.”

“I know.” She straightened up. “We’d better be getting back.”

As she started walking toward the house, she heard his voice behind her.

“I love you, Meg.”

She stopped, not turning around. She wasn’t sure what to say. In the end, she said nothing but just kept going.

James’s prediction turned out to be correct, and several inches of fresh snow covered the ground by the next day. Everyone gathered around the breakfast table to eat before setting out together for the school’s annual Christmas pageant. Meg knew that Rachel and Aaron had been working hard on learning their parts. They were practically bursting with excitement and anticipation, especially since they were rarely allowed to perform in front of people this way.

They all piled into buggies and set out for the small schoolhouse. Leaving their outerwear on the porch, parents filed into the classroom to sit on desks and benches around the room. The Hobarts split up, and Meg and Sam found a spot for themselves in a corner. She was charmed by the children’s colorful drawings of farm and winter scenes she saw hung up around the room. She studied the handwritten program, enjoying the whispers and rustling of the children preparing to start.

Meg sat entranced throughout the pageant. The children studied English in school and spoke mostly in English during the program, welcoming their guests, performing religious poems, skits, and songs, all from memory. Their parents smiled and laughed where appropriate, but Meg noticed they did not applaud. Sam had helped Aaron practice his poem and was so thrilled to see his friend get through it flawlessly, he started to clap at the end. When he realized he was the only one doing so, his face turned beet red. Meg put an arm around him. “No big deal,” she whispered in his ear. “I’m sure Aaron appreciated that you were glad for him.”

Afterward the parents presented the finished quilt to Sarah, the teacher, who accepted it with warm thanks. She, in turn, handed out gifts of a pencil and small notepad to each student.

Back at the house the children were in high spirits. They had lunch, and most of the household took advantage of the snow to go back outside for hours of play. Catherine and David even joined Meg and James for some snowball tossing.

Later, when Jonathan brought a sleigh around front, James, Meg, and Sam hopped in with Aaron and Rachel. As she settled in, Meg spotted a car pull up and park some thirty feet away. Two heavyset strangers, a man and a woman, got out and stood there, staring at the Lutz family. The man began taking pictures of them. Meg watched in annoyance. She believed most tourists were aware that photography was not welcomed by the Amish, although they may not have known the reason was that pictures represented a forbidden graven image. Even if they didn’t know, she thought, frowning, what kind of people
felt it was all right to park in a family’s front yard—
any
family’s front yard—and shoot pictures of them?

She wondered how the Amish could bear being gawked at this way. With a guilty start, she recalled that she and her family had originally come here to learn something about these supposedly quaint people.

We were only going to see a film about them, she halfheartedly reassured herself, not park outside their houses as if they were animals in a zoo. Still, she could envision her own family on the road, driving by Catherine and David in their buggy as she or James pointed out to the children the novelty of the clothing and transportation. She was embarrassed by the memory of her own ignorance.

Meg saw the woman tilt her head as if puzzled, then lean toward the man and say something as she pointed in Meg’s direction. Meg tapped James, who sat beside her, on the shoulder.

“Look,” she said. “Those tourists over there. They’re watching the show, the Amish-at-Play. But now they see these crazy English people in the middle of all of them. They’re wondering what the heck we’re doing here.”

James looked over to see. He grinned and gave the people a huge wave. “We’re the real Amish,” he shouted to them. “The rest of these people are just phonies in costumes. They’ve kidnapped us. Please help!”

“James!” Meg’s reprimand dissolved into laughter.

Her husband laughed, too. They could hear David chuckling up front. The onlookers appeared disgusted before they got in their car and drove away.

Meg and James continued to laugh a few seconds past the
point when their amusement wore off—only because they were both enjoying the now-rare sound of their laughter together.

After everyone had come back in for hot chocolate and cookies, Meg and Lizzie found themselves cleaning up alone in the kitchen. Meg washed the dishes while Lizzie filled a small bucket with water and fetched a mop for the floor.

“Why is it,” Lizzie asked her mother, wringing out the mop, “that the men and women here have such incredibly stereotypical roles? I mean, talk about so-called women’s work and men’s work—they’ve got it covered.”

Meg didn’t answer immediately. “That’s a tough one,” she said finally, “because you and I are looking at it from our perspective. We can’t really understand their perspective.”

“What difference does that make?” Lizzie said, pulling chairs away from the table so she could clean underneath it. “Don’t the women ever want to do anything else?”

“Well, wait. Some of them run businesses, right? Like restaurants and stores. The women in this house have a business with the food they sell. You’re just looking at the housework part.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that.”

“When you think about it, didn’t we have a traditional arrangement in our house? Dad went to the office and I ran the house.”

“Yeah, but this seems way more intense.”

“I think it’s more complicated than that. But I guess I prefer to admire how many skills the women have. Also, they have this calm approach to whatever they do, you know, this steadiness about things. It’s as if they have this special strength in their body and their spirit.”

Lizzie mulled this over. “That’s a good way to put it.” She stood up and stretched out her back. “And they do know how to do a ton of things.”

They worked in silence for a few minutes more.

“You know,” Lizzie said, “what’s cool is that they can make things they need. They know how to work stuff. It’s like they do
real
things. I hope when I’m older, I’ll be good at doing real things.”

Amazed by these words, Meg stared at her daughter, but Lizzie was too engrossed in pushing the mop back and forth across the floor to notice.

Meg hadn’t wanted the day to end, knowing that the next day was Christmas—the day they would be leaving for good. Later that night, after taking a shower, she put on a robe and sat on the side of the bed, rubbing her wet hair with a towel. Idly, she wondered if she would bother going back to using a hair dryer when they left.

James entered the room. “Ah, you’re here.”

“Hi. What’ve you been up to? Did you say good night to the kids?”

“Yes, I just stopped by their rooms. I was downstairs talking to Catherine.”

Feeling the chill of the night air in the room, Meg rubbed her hair more briskly. “Oh?”

“We were on the phone outside with Nina.”