"Hero, shmero," I mumbled, feeling my face turn red. "Agnes, dear, I
am
going to miss you."
"Nah, you won't. Not on the trip you're going on. A three-month cruise through the South Pacific; I can't imagine how wonderful that would be."
"Let's not forget the extended land portions in New Zealand and Australia. Little Jacob will be staying with his father and grandmother in Manhattan, so I know he'll be well taken care of."
I paused to blink back some tears. It had been two years since the divorce was final, but there was still a part of me that wished Gabe could share this great experience. At least we were still friends.
Our marriage, which had always been rocky, never recovered from the Melfia's invasion into our lives and my husband's inability to protect us. Once again it was Magdalena to the rescue, and that was once too many for him. Soon after Little Jacob's safe return to the PennDutch, Gabe moved across the road to the kooky convent, and six months later he was back in his native Manhattan. But enough of those thoughts.
"Anyway," I said, "I decided to hike the Southern Alps and see Milford Sound. And I've always had a thing for Ayers Rock. Isn't that odd?"
"Forgive me, Magdalena, but nothing's odd when it comes to you."
"Hmm, I think I'll choose to take that as a compliment."
"As well you should." Agnes found room for three butter cookies simultaneously in her mouth.
"And you, dear," I said, "you utterly gobsmacked us with your performance on
America's Most Talented
. Who knew you had the pipes? Is that the word?"
"Yeth."
"I mean, I knew you sang in your church choir, but not like
that
! Agnes, I'm not just flattering you when I say that you sang "Memory" better than Babs, and I heard her sing it in person. Right here at the inn. And then you kept winning every week--all of Hernia was agog. Oh, and the final performance, when you sang "Time to Say Goodbye"--I don't mind telling you, dear, that I wept."
"You did not," Agnes protested, spraying me with cookie crumbs.
"I most certainly did; I wept that it wasn't me winning the million-dollar prize."
"Now
that
I believe. But what I still can't believe is that humongous flat-screen TV in your bedroom."
I sighed. "As you know, I never used to watch TV until Gabe made me watch your first performance on YouTube on his computer. That's when the Devil got into me."
"It's not a sin to watch TV, Magdalena. There are even special channels devoted exclusively to religion."
I glanced around the kitchen. We were alone, except for our consciences.
"Monday night," I whispered, "I watched a rerun of
Two and a Half Men
. What a potty mouth Charlie Sheen's character has!"
"Why didn't you turn it off, then?" she said. "Or, better yet, change the channel to something more uplifting?"
"Are you kidding?" I said. "I enjoyed every moment of it."
Without warning my very best friend in the whole wide world threw her arms around me and gave me a buttery kiss on the forehead. When she released me, it took a couple of seconds for me to regain my equilibrium.
"Magdalena," she gushed, "I'm going to miss you more than I'd miss white bread if it were taken away. Will you write?"
"You know I get writer's cramp easily; how about I call instead?"
"Okay," she said, and fled outside. It was the last I would see of her for a very long time.
I took the plate that held the butter cookies into the adjacent dining room. The cookies themselves didn't even make it as far as the table. No doubt about it they wouldn't have made it out of the kitchen, had there not been a sign on the door that read: KEEP OUT.
The cookie culprits were a pack of teenage boys, but the crowd that filled the public rooms of my inn was composed of a wide mix of the friends, neighbors, and relations of Doc Shafor. It was officially the old geezer 's ninetieth birthday, and the party was my present to him.
To say that Doc was a lech is a bit like calling Mozart musically inclined. The old coot lived to seduce the fairer sex,
moi
in particular. If I had a dollar for every time he'd proposed to me, I wouldn't be envious of Agnes for winning
America's Most Talented
(although the truth is, I have plenty of money). Doc has even dated and, in fact, almost married Ida. I heard from the horse's mouth that they even consummated said relationship, which I think is just too icky to contemplate. The only thing commendable about the old goat's lifestyle is that he is interested only in mature women. Silly little things with nary a dimple of cellulite, or sign of a crow's-foot, need not apply.
Not seeing Doc in the dining room, I pushed through the throng until I got to the den. And voila! There he was, holding court whilst sitting in Great-great-great-granny Yoder's hand-carved rocker. Frankly, a person has to be slightly off his, or her, rocker to spend any time in this chair, because it is terribly uncomfortable, built as it was back in the days when to enjoy oneself was considered a sin. Mankind was meant to suffer (it's all there in the Book of Genesis).
"Doc," I said happily.
"Ah, Magdalena, the fairest maiden in all the land."
There followed a chorus of protests from the assembled spinsters, but I held up a silencing hand. "Doc, I believe that I no longer qualify as a maiden, given that I am fifty-six years old and the mother of an eight-year-old child."
"Magdalena, you will always be an honorary maiden in my eyes. Come, sit with me." At that, the flirt-
meister
pulled me onto his lap. His
lap
.
"Doc!"
"Relax, Magdalena. This will be the last time I'll ever get to see you."
"No, it won't; I'm only going to be gone three months--unless I take a yen to living in Japan. We'll be stopping in Osaka on the way back to San Diego. That was a little joke, by the way."
"Got it. But even if you come straight back, you're going to have to share your travel stories with me up at Settler 's Cemetery."
I stiffened. "Doc, are you sick?"
"I'm old. My time has come, and I know it. Some folks are just blessed that way."
"That's crazy talk, Doc. Only God knows when we're going to die."
"Animals know, Magdalena. Sometimes days ahead. I was a veterinarian for sixty-two years, remember?"
"But you're not an animal!"
"My mama died when she was ninety. She predicted her own death a full nineteen days beforehand."
I jumped to my feet and fluffed my skirt. "You're not your mother," I said angrily. "You're the most randy man in of all of Pennsylvania. Why, you're supposed to ask me to marry you! That's the tradition, or don't you remember?"
And that
was
the tradition. Doc had been begging me to marry him for decades--and yes, shame on him, he did it even when I was married.
"Sorry, Magdalena, but all traditions have to come to an end. If you like, you can sit back down on my lap, and we can try to end this party on a high note."
"Doc!"
He winked. But despite his pretense at virility, the dear man died that night in his sleep. I joined the cruise two days late because of Doc's funeral, but considering it was a three-month cruise, a couple of days was no big deal.
Incidentally, approximately two hundred people mobbed the open house in honor of Doc's ninetieth birthday, but only ten people showed up at his funeral--and that included me.
I am not a sentimental person. Still, saying good-bye to Freni hurt about us much as giving birth. I thought I'd said my final good-byes after she and her husband, Mose, had helped me clean up after Doc's party, but of course I saw her again at the funeral. Afterward I walked her to the family buggy.
"If something happens to me on this cruise, Freni, I have written instructions for them to plant me wherever I am. If I'm at sea, they're to toss me overboard."
"Ach!"
"Well, there's no use spending any of Little Jacob's inheritance on shipping me back in a box. I don't want to have an open-casket funeral in any case. I think the Jews have it right."
"Stop this talk of dying. You will return from this cruise and drive me to attraction."
"That's not quite the vernacular, but hey, if it works, I might have a second career."
"Riddles. Always the riddles."
"Hmm. In that case, since I'm famous for asking them, let me ask you another: which high school English teacher married a doctor in December, but despite her promise to call her poor lonely mother at least once a week, doesn't live up to her obligation?"
Freni shook her head, and as she lacks a neck, her smocked black travel bonnet jerked eerily from side to side atop her stout torso. "It is indeed a shame that you cannot call all the way to California on your cell phone," she said.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"Have you tried calling Alison from the kitchen phone?" Freni said. The nerve of her for being so practical!
"That's not the point," I wailed (and this is truly the last time). "A daughter should call her mother, not the other way around."
"Yah, perhaps. But times are changing." She attempted a shrug. "Maybe it is not so important--this who calls who."
"It's easy for you to say that times are changing. You're Amish, for Pete's sake. Nothing changes for you."
We'd reached the buggy, and from that vantage point, we had a fabulous view over the picnic area and the little town of Hernia. Straight ahead was Lover's Leap, over which the Maniacal Mantis had tried to toss me. Fortunately my sturdy Christian underwear had saved that day.
Farther out I could see the rooftops of some of the Victorian homes in the older part of town, and an indentation through the trees that most certainly demarked Main Street. I'd spent a lot of time on Main Street, particularly in the police station--both inside the holding cells as a prisoner, and in my official function as mayor. Across the street from the station is Yoder 's Corner Market. It was there that I gave birth to Little Jacob, with only the sleazy Sam to act as midwife. Sam! Now he was someone I was going to miss--in the sort of way one misses a splinter that has gradually worked its way out of one's skin.
"Magdalena, do you wander off in space again?"
"What?"
Freni had surprised me by stopping off on her way home from the cemetery. Her agenda was to make sure that I called Allison.
"Isn't that what the handsome Dr. Rosen used to say?"
"Something like that. What were you saying, dear?"
"I was saying that even for us Amish there is change."
"Is that so? Give me an example?"
"The bishop has decreed that we are to change our hemlines by one inch. Maybe this is not such a big change, but it is still a change, yah?"
"An inch? Woo-hoo, Freni, sexy-wexy." I know, it was dreadfully naughty of me, but sometimes I just can't help teasing her.
"No, no," she cried. "We do not make them shorter; we must all make our hemlines
longer
! The bishop thinks that our church has gotten too liberal from seeing all the tourists in their skrimpy clothes."
"
Skrimpy?
Do you mean--" My ringing phone gave me the perfect excuse to take my foot out of my mouth. "Hello?"
"Mom? It's me."
"Me who?" I was kidding, of course. The voice belonged to Alison, my ex-pseudo-stepdaughter, and now just plain daughter, one hundred percent, no adjectives needed or wanted.
"It's Marie Antoinette," Alison said without missing a beat. "I seem to have lost my head; you haven't chanced upon a strange one lying about, have you?"
"Hmm, is
that
what it was? I'm afraid I threw it on the compost heap."
"Mom, I want to share something with you before you leave on your trip. You'll be the first to know, but we don't want you to share it with anyone else right now, because it's a little early in the game. Can you keep a secret?"
"Is Barbara Hostetler the best daughter- in-law in the whole wide world?"
"Ach," Freni squawked in my other ear.
"Is Auntie Freni there now?"
"As big as life and twice as ugly."
"Mom, I hate that expression."
"Yah, me too," Freni said.
"Apparently, dear, your auntie Freni has the hearing of a serval cat--you know those big-eared, long-legged beauties one sees in films about Africa? Anyway, do you mind terribly if she listens in on the extension?"
Alison has turned into a genuinely kind young woman, despite the bad example I may have set for her. "Sure, Aunt Freni, you can listen in, but you can't tell anyone either. So, can
you
keep a secret?"
"Does your mother bleach her mustache?" Freni said without missing a beat.