A Sister's Forgiveness (2 page)

“And have you seen Sadie this morning?” she asked her niece.

Tessa hesitated. “She went somewhere with Mom.”

“Wearing her clothes or yours?”

Tessa grinned. “Hers.” It was no secret that Sadie often longed for the more liberal traditions of the Mennonite faith practiced by her cousin’s family. To that end, she had been caught more than once borrowing Tessa’s clothes. The girls were a year apart in age but close in size. And it only made matters worse that Jeannie condoned this behavior.

“Give Sadie a break, Emma,” Jeannie would say. “She’s got to try her wings a little, test herself. Have a little faith in the way you and Lars have raised her. She’ll be fine.”

For generations, Emma and the rest of her family had dressed in the traditional garb of their conservative faith. The females wore small-print dresses with long or three-quarter sleeves and a skirt that reached at least midcalf. For males, it was a collarless shirt and black trousers held up by suspenders, sometimes with a jacket or vest.

As a girl, Jeannie had dressed as plain as Emma. Then she married Geoff Messner, a high school coach from Sarasota. When Geoff agreed to convert, the couple had joined a more liberal branch of the faith. Now Jeannie dressed in the same clothes worn by any respectable non-Mennonite woman seen shopping on Main Street. And Jeannie did love to shop. Just last spring she had given Sadie a denim jacket with colorful stitching that she’d only worn maybe half a dozen times. It had quickly become Sadie’s favorite item, and she rejoiced in any day or evening cool enough to wear it. Emma would not be surprised to see her daughter wearing it to the picnic despite predicted temperatures in the mideighties.

Emma and Tessa worked in tandem organizing the food into categories—salads, casseroles, meat dishes, and desserts—and Emma couldn’t help but reflect on the differences between her daughter and Jeannie’s. Tessa was quiet, reserved, and—in Emma’s son, Matt’s, words—a brainiac. A sweet girl and an honor student with a maturity that made others—including sixteen-year-old Sadie—turn to her for advice. It was impossible not to marvel at Tessa’s genuine selflessness and attention to others. She had inherited that from Jeannie, of course, but on a whole different level.

“Here they come,” Tessa said, nodding toward her mother and Sadie as the two of them crossed the park, arm in arm, whispering to each other like schoolgirls. “Looks like they have a secret,” she added without an ounce of envy. “Did you bring the pies, Mom?” she called, and Emma knew by the way Jeannie clapped a hand over her mouth that she had completely forgotten her one job—to pick up the pies their eighty-two-year-old grandmother had baked.

“I’ll go get them,” Emma said.

“On your bike? No, you stay,” Jeannie said. “Geoff can go.” She waved to her husband and headed across the park to where he was helping the other men rearrange heavy wooden picnic tables.

“Geoff’s busy,” Emma said as Jeannie came closer.

“Em, it will be hours before we serve the pies, so stop being such a worrywart and let me handle this, okay?”

“Okay.” It was true. Emma was given to worrying. Once when she had been especially concerned about Sadie’s admiration for a group of teens that she had met at a non-Mennonite gathering, she had turned to Jeannie in frustration. “Don’t you ever worry about Tessa? I mean, right now she’s okay, but as she gets older and has more contact with outsiders…?” she’d asked.

“You worry enough for both of us,” Jeannie had assured her, and then she had tweaked Emma’s cheek. “Thanks for that,” she’d added with a grin.

But Emma was all too aware that life could be hard, especially for children growing up in a society that was estranged from the outside world. And especially when they lived in a community on the very outskirts of that world, crossing its boundaries many times a day as they went about their business. She and Lars had decided to allow both Sadie and her fourteen-year-old brother, Matt, to attend the nearby Christian Academy for their high school years as a way of exposing them to the ways of others without losing the focus on their faith in the process. But she still worried. How would her children fare as adults? Would they be content to follow the stricter faith that she and Lars had raised them in, or would they—like Jeannie—want more freedom, more assimilation with the outside world?

“Hi, Mama,” Sadie said, giving Emma a sidelong glance meant to gauge just how much trouble she might be in for being so late.

Where were you?
were the words that sprang to Emma’s lips, but she swallowed them, heeding her husband’s advice to temper her first impulse in favor of a more diplomatic approach. “Oh Sadie, there you are. I was looking for you,” she said as if she’d hardly noticed her daughter’s tardiness. “Could you please slice those loaves of bread and set them in baskets—one on each table?”

Sadie blew out a soft sigh of relief and sat down on one of the benches to slice the bread. “Sorry I was late,” she murmured.

Emma understood that Sadie wanted her to ask what had kept her—clearly her daughter was anxious to tell her something. She was fairly glowing with the excitement of whatever adventure she had shared with her aunt. But then Sadie could just as easily take affront to Emma’s inquiry and refuse to tell her what was going on. Patience was the answer, as it so often was when raising teenagers, or so Emma had discovered. “You’re here now,” she said and tucked a wisp of Sadie’s long hair back into place. “When you’ve finished slicing the bread, go find your brother and make sure he’s set up the play area for the little ones; then you can take charge of watching them.”

There was no doubt in Emma’s mind that her son, Matthew, had already completed the list of tasks she’d given him. He—like his cousin Tessa—was very dependable when it came to such things. In some ways, Matt at fourteen was the more mature of her two children. It was Sadie she worried about despite Lars’s assurances that both their children would turn out just fine.

“Can’t Tessa do that?” Sadie begged. “She’s so much better with the kiddies than I am.”

“The children love you and you know it. You’ll make a wonderful teacher one day, Sadie.”

Sadie’s face twisted into an expression of pain. “What if I don’t want to be a teacher, Mama?”

“I thought—”

“What if I want to do something else—something more… exciting.”

“Such as?” This sudden change in her daughter’s outlook for the future gave Emma pause. From the time she was four, Sadie had talked of nothing else but someday being a teacher. “A nurse?”

Sadie’s frown tightened. “There’s more to life than teaching school or being a nurse or housewife,” she protested.

“All noble callings,” Emma reminded her.

“Sure, and for some people—like Tessa, for example—probably the very best thing. But for somebody like me…”

“You’re sixteen, Sadie. You’ve got time.”

“I want to go places, Mama,” she replied as she filled baskets with bread and covered them with dish towels. “There’s so much beyond Pinecraft.”

Emma looked at her daughter. To Sadie the world outside the boundaries of their lifestyle was exciting and mysterious. To Emma it was frightening, a place where innocence could be crushed in a heartbeat. And yet she understood that to try to dissuade Sadie from her dreams would only make her cling to them more vehemently. “You’ve got time,” she repeated. “Now please go check on your brother.” Clearly weighing the pros and cons of the mundane task of slicing bread in favor of something that at least gave her the freedom to move around the park, Sadie took off at a run. As Emma watched her go, she couldn’t help thinking that Sadie would make a wonderful teacher—and someday a wonderful mother, for she had inherited the best traits of Emma and her sister along with her father’s wry sense of humor and easygoing manner. Lars was right. She was young. In a couple of years, she would sort everything out.

“What’s up?” her husband asked, coming alongside her and nodding toward Sadie. “Why were she and Jeannie late?” His tone held no censure, just simple curiosity.

“Not sure yet, but the two of them have been up to something.”

Lars shook his head and chuckled. “I assume we’ll be the last to know.”

“As usual,” Emma said. She smiled up at the man she had known since she was a young girl. The tall, thin boy who had lived across the road from her parents—an Amish boy then. His grandparents on his mother’s side had been Swedish, and he had inherited the white-blond hair of that side of the family. But his eyes were the deep blue of the sea. Emma had fallen for him the minute she saw him.

He was the eldest of eight brothers and sisters, all of them gathering now in the park, surrounded by spouses and children of their own. When she and Lars were teenagers themselves, she had assumed that he would be drawn to the livelier—and prettier—Jeannie, but it was Emma whom he had courted, announcing to her his intention to marry her as soon as they were of age.

And in spite of her delight that he had chosen her over her sister, she had fired back that she would never marry an Amish man—especially one of Swedish heritage. She had told him that such a combination did not bode well for his ability to be flexible and open-minded like her father and brothers were. The very next Sunday he had started attending services at the conservative Mennonite church her family attended, and he converted just before their wedding.

“Our girl is coming into her
Rumspringa,”
he said now of Sadie.

“That business of running-around time is from your ways,” Emma reminded him. The Amish tradition was to permit children in their teens to have a time when it was considered all right to explore the more liberal ways of the outside world. The idea was that this would help them understand the serious commitment they were making when they decided to be baptized and become full members of the faith.

Lars shrugged. “Still, whether you believe in Rumspringa or not, she’s got all the signs—restless, curious about the outside ways. It won’t do to try to stop her exploring, Emmie.”

“Ja
. I know. It’s just…”

“The kids will be fine,” he assured her, smoothing the lines of her forehead with his thumb. “Both of them—look who they got for a mother.” He waved to someone across the park. “Your folks are here—looks like your mama brought enough food to feed the whole group single-handedly.”

“She always worries there won’t be enough,” Emma said, shaking her head as the two of them headed for the parking lot to help her parents unload the car.

“Die Mutter und die Tochtor,”
Lars said with a chuckle.

Like mother, like daughter. Emma only wished that the same could be said of Sadie and her.

Chapter 2

Jeannie

T
he sun was setting by the time most of the extended family and their guests headed back to their homes scattered across the area. Some went by bicycle—the elders and single cousins—while those with children crowded into older model cars and drove away, leaving a trail of fine sandy dust in their wake.

Jeannie watched as her husband, Geoff, helped Lars and Matt reposition the picnic tables and fold the cloths covering them for Emma to wash. Tessa and Sadie were given the job of policing the area for any trash that might have been left, while Emma and Jeannie packed up the last of the food.

“All right,” Emma said, drawing Jeannie’s attention away from Geoff, “where did you and Sadie go this morning?”

Jeannie had been having second thoughts about her impulsive act all day. What had she been thinking to go behind her sister’s back that way?

“Sadie didn’t tell you?” she hedged.

“Don’t dodge the question. You know she didn’t, or I would have said something and she wouldn’t be finding ways to avoid her father and me. So just tell me.” Emma’s eyes widened. “Did you buy her that skirt she’s been admiring in that shop on Main Street?”

“It’s her news. Just keep an open mind, okay?” Jeannie turned away without waiting for Emma to agree. She called out to the others, “Hey, everybody, sun’s setting.”

It was a tradition the two young families had adopted years earlier when they had become the unofficial organizers of the annual picnic. They were always the last to leave, staying to watch the sun slip beyond the horizon, marking the end of summer and the beginning of the school year for the children and in many ways a change of seasons for the adults as well.