A Mother's Gift Read online

  “You can’t touch our stuff!”

  “If you sneak into our room, so help me—”

  When both girls rose indignantly from the table, Jude grasped their shoulders. “I’m serious. You can run off to your room, but not before you hand over your phone,” he insisted. “I suspect it’s in one of your apron pockets.”

  Glaring in disbelief, Adeline and Alice appeared ready to bolt from Jude even as he held their gazes and their shoulders. Finally, Adeline reached into her apron pocket and hastily tapped on the screen of the cell phone before pressing hard on a button on top of it. She tossed the phone onto the table.

  With red faces and muttered curse words, the girls rushed from the kitchen. Moments later the angry thunder of their sneakers on the wooden steps and along the upstairs hallway filled the house with their resentment. Their voices were muffled, but after their bedroom door slammed, the strident tone of their conversation filtered into the kitchen.

  Jude raked his hand through his dark hair. “That didn’t go well,” he muttered in frustration. “I suspect the only way I’ll keep them home is to take the wheels off their buggy—or stable their mare over at Jeremiah’s.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leah murmured. “The moment we walked in, they were set on confrontation. No matter what you’d said, you weren’t going to win them to your way of thinking.”

  “When did they get so cynical? And so rude?” Jude gazed into Leah’s eyes, appearing totally baffled. “While Mamm was here, I saw nothing but compliant, well-behaved girls, but my mother was obviously as clueless as I’ve been. I can’t believe all this foul talk and indecent clothing—and tattoos!—have come about in the three months we’ve been married.”

  Leah shrugged helplessly. “They were gone some, jah, but they were here most of the time—or so I thought. Maybe they’ve had us all fooled.”

  “They’re thinkin’ to hitch up with those English guys real soon. They don’t wanna be Amish no more.”

  Leah’s heart sank as she turned to see Stevie’s shadowy form in the doorway of the front room. Jude groaned and pulled out a chair so he could sit down and lean his elbows on the table. “What else have they told you, son?” he asked gently. “Do you know these boys’ names?”

  Stevie entered the kitchen to take his usual seat beside his dat, so Leah sat down, too, at Jude’s left. “Nope, they don’t tell me nothin’. Sometimes I hear ’em talkin’ in their room, when they’re gettin’ ready to leave and they’re excited. They don’t know I can hear ’em.”

  Leah pressed her lips together grimly. She couldn’t imagine being anything but Plain, and she’d never entertained thoughts of leaving the Old Order. Even when she’d been a teenager and some of her friends had whispered about the exotic lives they might live if they found English husbands, she’d never believed those girls would really leave the Amish church. Indeed, those friends had been married to Amish men for years now and had large families....

  But this situation with Alice and Adeline sounded a lot more serious. “Do they want to leave because of me, Stevie?” Leah asked cautiously.

  The boy shrugged, shaking his head. “I dunno, but I don’t think so,” he replied after he’d thought about it. “They’re girls, and they get wild-hare ideas sometimes, like maybe once they get married their lives’ll be perfect and they won’t have no more problems.”

  Leah’s eyebrows rose. Such an observation seemed beyond a five-year-old boy’s comprehension, yet Stevie had obviously thought at length about his sisters’ situation.

  “What problems?” Jude asked, exasperated. “They have a comfortable home and—even if they don’t like knowing that I might not be their birth father, they surely can’t hate living here badly enough to go English. They have no idea—”

  “Jah, they have no idea what they’d be getting themselves into,” Leah echoed, grasping Jude’s forearm in sympathy. “What they’ve seen of English life in the pool hall—or riding around with boys—is not reality.”

  “Thank God,” Jude put in quickly. “It’s one thing for teenage girls to keep secrets from their parents, but it’s another thing altogether when they believe that getting away from home will guarantee them the happily-ever-after they apparently envision. You’d think they’d know that, after witnessing the stress and strain of some of the marriages they’ve been around all their lives.”

  Leah wondered if Jude was referring in part to the years he’d spent with Frieda, but it wasn’t her place to ask. Her heart went out to Jude, who stared glumly at the table, scraping a little spot of food with his fingernail.

  “I need to talk to them before they really go off the deep end,” he said in a tight voice. He picked up the cell phone, shaking his head. “I should go upstairs right now and—”

  Leah sensed Alice and Adeline were in no mood to listen to reason, and that Jude would only be deepening the chasm that seemed to loom between them and their dat. “Maybe in the morning, when we’re all calmer, we’ll have a better idea about what to say to them so they’ll actually listen,” she suggested, tightening her grip on Jude’s arm. “You don’t have a sale tomorrow, so we’ll all be home together and we can hash this out.”

  * * *

  Come very early in the morning, however, Leah was awakened by loud voices in the kitchen—and she realized that Jude’s side of the bed was cold, as though he hadn’t been beside her for quite some time.

  “You don’t own me!” one of the twins yelled.

  “You’re not even our dat, so butt out of our lives!” her sister lashed out vehemently.

  Fumbling for her robe, Leah hurried from the bedroom.

  * * *

  Jude had prepared himself for the worst, but he still couldn’t believe his eyes. Around ten-thirty the previous evening, a rumbling truck had wakened him from a fitful sleep and on impulse he’d checked the twins’ room. He’d known as soon as the door didn’t budge that the girls had sneaked out despite his insistence that they stay home. When he’d pushed aside the dresser blocking the door, the open window told him all he needed to know—and the clothing strewn around the room and on the undisturbed beds scared him into remaining awake the rest of the night.

  He’d been on the verge of going to fetch Jeremiah—but he’d reasoned that the girls wouldn’t be at the pool hall this time. And when he’d gone to saddle Rusty, and he’d seen that the girls’ rig and their mare were still in the stable, he’d thought better of rousing his brother for a wild-goose chase. If the girls had left with their English boyfriends in that backfiring truck, they had all the advantages on their side.

  So he’d wrapped himself in a blanket and waited in the girls’ room, watching for them in the moonlit night. He spent a lot of the time pushing and prodding on the cell phone he’d confiscated, but the screen remained blank—he had no idea how to turn it on. Around four in the morning the girls had dashed in from the road, clambering up the tree like lithe monkeys. He’d stepped into the corner of the room until they were safely inside, slipping the phone into his pocket.

  “We’re going downstairs to talk about this right now,” he’d said, hoping not to waken Stevie and Leah.

  Alice and Adeline’s shrieks could’ve roused the dead, but somehow he herded them downstairs and into the kitchen. Waves of resentment rolled off them as he lit the lamps—and even in the low glow of the lantern he set on the table, he saw the irrefutable evidence of the trouble they were in. The makeup they were wearing was smudged and their long hair hung rumpled around their shoulders—and when they removed English-style jackets he’d not seen before, telltale bruises on their necks completed a picture he didn’t want to witness.

  Despite the fear that curdled Jude’s stomach, his anger got the best of him. “Care to tell me why you defied me by sneaking out in the night?” he demanded.

  “You don’t own me!” Adeline blurted out.

  “You’re not even our dat, so butt out of our lives!” Alice cried out defiantly.

  Memories of the night
these girls had been born flashed through Jude’s mind. How could he make them believe that despite their mother’s duplicity, he had loved them—had considered them blameless and innocent and utterly wonderful since the moment he’d first laid eyes on them?

  “I’m sorry you see it that way,” Jude whispered. He prayed for a calmer mind-set in which the right words would bring the three of them to resolution—or at least help them speak in more civil tones. “If we can stop placing blame for a moment—if we can acknowledge that no one in this room was responsible for the fact that I’m not your birth father—maybe we can talk about the more serious situation we’re in right now.”

  “And if you think you’re old enough to run off with English boys—to marry them and escape your Amish life,” Leah asserted from the doorway, “then you’re old enough to answer our questions truthfully.”

  Jude sighed, regretting that the girls’ clamor had awakened Leah—yet he was relieved to see her tying the belt of her robe and approaching her seat at the table with a resolve that bolstered his courage. Even with her pale, tired eyes and her long, loose hair pulled hastily back in a kerchief, she’d never looked stronger or more beautiful to him.

  “What do you want to know?” Adeline challenged.

  “You won’t like the answers,” Alice warned them archly. “You probably won’t even understand the answers, seeing’s how you know a lot more about ducks and goats than you do about being a wife or a—a mother.”

  Leah blanched and Jude grasped her hand. “Let’s also remember that Leah wasn’t around when you were conceived, so you don’t need to include her in your resentful accusations,” Jude insisted. “For starters, why’d you get those tattoos? And why Tinker Bell?”

  The twins exchanged secretive glances. “Our English guys think tatts are sexy,” Alice purred. “So they took us to the tattoo parlor and paid for them.”

  Jude swallowed hard, reminding himself that he was bound to see and hear more than he’d ever wanted to know during this conversation.

  “Tinker Bell’s our mascot—our role model,” Adeline continued with a furtive chuckle. “She can fly—so she can leave whenever she wants to.”

  “With just a wave of her wand, her pixie dust makes everything right again,” Alice added breezily. “Tink loves to have fun—and so do we. And to our way of thinking, you can call them frolics, but a bunch of women getting together to clean house or cook for hundreds of people coming to a wedding—”

  “Or canning vegetables in a hot kitchen, or even spending a day hunched over a blasted quilt, gossiping,” Adeline interjected with a sneer.

  “—is not our idea of fun or frolic,” Alice finished quickly. “There’s more to life than working all the time! All Amish women ever do is work.”

  Leah sighed. She was no stranger to such observations, because she’d escaped what she’d perceived as women’s work by spending her time with Dat and the animals. True enough, raising livestock had been her livelihood, but even on cold, snowy days she’d considered barn chores a lot more fun than the canning, cleaning, and quilting the twins had just mentioned in such disgusted tones.

  “When I was your age,” Leah began carefully, “I thought marriage would be the perfect answer to the problems I perceived in my life—”

  “Hah! Who did you think would marry you?” Alice sassed.

  “Jah,” Adeline put in with a laugh, “most guys probably thought of you as being one of them! More a man than a—”

  “That’s enough of such talk!” Jude blurted out. “When did you become so crass? So insensitive to everyone else’s—” He sighed loudly when Leah rose from the table wearing a perplexed expression. How he wished he’d been able to quash the twins’ talk before they’d hurt her feelings again. “Honey, please sit down,” he pleaded. “I thank God every day that I recognized you for the fine woman you—”

  “Don’t you hear it?” Leah demanded as she hurried toward the front room. “I think there’s a baby crying outside.”

  Chapter 10

  As Leah stepped outside, the backfiring of a car made her look down the lane in time to see a pair of red taillights turning onto the road. In the darkness, she saw a container near the edge of the porch, from which came the frantic wail of a baby—a sound that had always made her feel helpless and utterly inadequate. Other women had known since they were girls exactly what to do when a wee one cried, but Leah had grown up as a tomboy, without siblings. She was so unfamiliar with babies that she’d joked with her dat, saying she’d probably put the diaper on the wrong end—and then stab the poor thing with the safety pins as well.

  Shivering in the predawn chill, Leah quickly grabbed the container—a big basket, it was—and carried the crying child inside. She hurried through the dark front room to set the basket on the kitchen table, where the lamps lit the twins’ amazed faces. Jude rose to shift the lanterns out of the way as the baby’s ear-splitting cries filled the room.

  Leah could only stare at the poor little wiggling figure, wrapped in a worn blanket and wearing a tiny white cap. Jude must’ve read the barely disguised terror in her eyes, because he immediately scooped the infant from the basket and held it against his shoulder.

  Adeline watched as he began to walk around the room and murmur comforting words, while Alice snatched a piece of paper from the laundry basket. “ ‘My name is Betsy and my mamm can’t keep me,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Will you please give me a loving home?’ ”

  Leah’s heart lurched. “Who would abandon a poor, helpless baby on somebody’s porch—and then sneak away like a thief in the night?”

  “A hungry baby, I suspect,” Jude put in as he swayed with the wee child. “What else is in the basket? Any bottles or formula?”

  “Nope, just a few folded clothes,” Adeline replied as she lifted the items from the basket and placed them on the table. “We gave all the bottles and diapers and other baby stuff to mamm’s youngest sister a couple years ago, remember? Mamm said she was finished having babies.”

  When a pained expression flickered over Jude’s face, Leah had a feeling Frieda had made her announcement—unusual for a Plain woman, unless she was ill—without giving Jude any say in the matter, or maybe without telling him beforehand. Her head was beginning to throb with the noise of the baby’s cries, so she went to the mudroom to put on a barn coat over her nightclothes. “I’ll get some fresh goat’s milk,” she said as she tied on her black bonnet. “It’s the best we can do until we figure out what else to feed her.”

  The silence of the chilly night relieved Leah’s headache as she hurried out the back door toward the stable. If the girls and Jude think I’m running from that crying baby, well, so be it, she thought with an embarrassed grimace. The mother who abandoned Betsy must’ve been terribly desperate—and obviously had no idea how unprepared I am to deal with a wee one—when she dumped her off in a laundry basket and drove away. Her use of the word mamm seems Amish, yet I can’t think a Plain family wouldn’t care for such a sweet, wee baby. . . .

  Once inside the stable door, Leah lit the lantern hanging on the wall. As she walked past dozing horses toward the pens of goats in the back, her thoughts cleared. Gertie and her new twins were settled in their straw, appearing peaceful and content, their eyes reflecting the lamplight as they glanced up at her. In the adjoining pen, the goats Leah raised for their meat roused from their sleep, watching her continue to the pen where she kept the three milk goats.

  Daisy, Tulip, and Buttercup rose slowly to their feet, assuming it was time for their morning milking. Leah quickly fastened Tulip into the milking stand, poured some feed into the attached trough, and grabbed a bucket. As the milk hit the metal in rhythmic spurts, she was keenly aware of how she could tend her animals without even thinking about it, yet she had no idea how to proceed with little Betsy—except that the poor abandoned baby needed food, diapers, and other supplies as soon as they could gather them. She felt confident about feeding Betsy goat’s milk diluted with some water, be
cause she’d supplied milk for a couple of neighbor ladies who’d been unable to nurse their wee ones, but beyond that . . .

  Why on earth did that woman leave Betsy here? She could’ve chosen any number of other homes in Morning Star where folks already had young kids and babies.

  When she’d milked the three goats, Leah took a big plastic bottle and its nippled lid from the cabinet. She sighed, replacing it. Even though the bottle and lid had been sterilized between uses with orphaned lambs, she didn’t dare risk infecting Betsy by using her livestock equipment.

  Lord, I hope You’re giving Jude and the twins some ideas about how to proceed from here, she prayed as she strode toward the house with her covered bucket of goat’s milk. When she stepped into the mudroom, Betsy’s cries sounded quieter. She saw the twins at the stove with a pan of boiling water.

  “We found an eye dropper, and the girls are sterilizing it,” Jude explained. He was rubbing Betsy’s back as she rested against his shoulder. “After we’ve had breakfast and tended the animals, we’ll visit some neighbors to borrow diapers and such—and we’ll let Jeremiah know we have an abandoned baby.”

  They make it sound so simple, Leah mused as she took off her barn coat and bonnet. “I have to pasteurize this milk—boil it and then cool it quickly with an ice bath,” she remarked. “Meanwhile, would some water make Betsy feel better?”

  Jude smiled gently. He looked completely at ease handling the tiny baby, even as he picked up on Leah’s nervousness. “The girls have changed her diaper, so as soon as that eye dropper is cool enough, I’ll give Betsy some water, jah,” he said softly. “I can’t imagine why her mother would’ve dropped her off—let alone left her without even the basic necessities. She’s a sweet little thing. Probably no more than three months old, best I can tell.”

  Leah swallowed hard. The tension that had hardened Jude’s face while he was squabbling with his daughters had disappeared, and he now appeared totally smitten by the tiny girl he was rocking from side to side. As his gaze met hers, Leah saw desire in his dark eyes—not sexual desire so much as the yearning to hold his own baby . . . a baby he’d fathered with her.