The Christmas Courtship. Emma Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ back. But she hadn’t expected this here. Or at least she had hoped it wouldn’t happen. And at once she wondered how much Eunice knew about her and her circumstances, as her mother liked to put it.

      “Chasing after two toddlers at her age.” Eunice made a clicking sound of disapproval between her teeth. “How old will she be come next year?”

      Joshua smiled sweetly at Eunice. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Rosemary.” He leaned around Eunice. “Good to see you, Martha. Visiting your aunt again, are you?”

      Martha giggled and pushed her glasses up farther on her nose. “Ya.”

      “What are you doing here at Byler’s?” Eunice asked. “None of your stepsisters could make it today?”

      “They could.” Joshua added a huge bag of chocolate chips to the cart.

      Also not on the list, Phoebe noted.

      “But I like grocery shopping,” Joshua said.

      Eunice drew back with a harrumph.

      Joshua leaned around Eunice again to speak to Martha. “Rosemary’s cousin is visiting, too,” he told the younger woman. “This is Phoebe.”

      Martha gave a quick nod, giggled and gave her glasses another push at the bridge of her nose.

      Phoebe glanced behind Martha. There was a long line of customers behind her in the aisle now, waiting to get by or move forward.

      “Visiting, are you?” Eunice said to Phoebe, her face lighting up with interest. “From where? Rosemary didn’t say she had a cousin visiting. I was just there two days ago at her sickbed. She never mentioned a word.”

      “We need to go, Eunice,” Joshua said, intervening in the conversation. “Have to get these things home and we’re holding other folks up.” He nodded in the direction of the customers lined up behind Eunice and Martha and their grocery carts. Then, for good measure, he reached out and gave Eunice’s cart a little push.

      Phoebe didn’t know why, but that struck her as funny, and she had to look away so Eunice wouldn’t catch her smiling.

      “I suppose you’re right,” Eunice huffed with obvious disappointment. She grabbed the handle of the cart with both hands and gave it a shove. “Tell Rosemary I said hello and for her to stay off that foot. Tell her I’ll be by at the end of the week.”

      “Will do,” Joshua said as Eunice passed them, discernibly reluctant to move on. When Martha passed, he nodded to her.

      The minute they were gone, Joshua leaned on the end of his cart, drawing closer to Phoebe. “Sorry about that,” he murmured, meeting her gaze.

      She placed her hands on the handle and leaned forward, her words meant only for him. “Town gossip?”

      “Editor of the Amish telegraph.” Joshua’s eyes twinkled.

      He had nice eyes, brown with thick lashes. Expressive eyes.

      “No news she doesn’t know and readily share,” he told her. “True or otherwise.”

      Phoebe couldn’t help herself. She laughed and then felt self-conscious. People were pushing past them with their shopping carts, some looking with interest at her and Joshua leaning across the cart whispering to each other.

      “How’d you know?” he asked.

      “Ours is Lettice Litwiller. I think they look alike,” she teased. “She and Eunice.”

      He laughed and slapped his hand on the edge of the cart. Then he grabbed a bag of flour from the cart and lifted it out with ease.

      “What are you doing?” Phoebe asked, watching him return the bag to the shelf.

      “Putting it back. We don’t need flour.” He reached for another bag.

      Phoebe picked up the third and pushed it onto the shelf. “Why did you put it in the cart, then?”

      He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He returned the bag of chocolate chips, too. “Just because I know it annoys Eunice to no end that Rosemary has no problem getting us boys to sweep a porch or pick up some milk on the way home from town and she can’t get her own sons to pick up their dirty clothes from the floor.” He grabbed the cart and started forward, then halted again. He curled his finger to draw her closer again.

      Phoebe knew their behavior bordered on inappropriate. Amish men and women were not generally so friendly with each other and certainly not in public. They didn’t laugh and whisper to each other. And a woman like her, a woman who’d nearly been shunned, definitely had no business carrying on with a man this way.

      “That,” Joshua said, his tone conspiratorial, “and I want to see how long it takes to get around the neighborhood that Rosemary had one of her stepsons buy thirty pounds of whole wheat flour and a huge bag of chocolate chips.” He laughed. “Bet she’ll have Rosemary baking cookies for the whole county.” He raised his eyebrows. “Something new for the Amish telegraph.”

      Phoebe met Joshua’s gaze over the grocery cart and smiled, not just because she liked his silliness, but because she was pretty certain she’d made her first friend in a very long time.

       Chapter Two

      Her cousin Rosemary’s home looked just like Phoebe thought it would. It was a rambling white clapboard farmhouse, two stories with multiple additions, rooflines running in several directions and two red chimneys to anchor the proportions. The land was flat, no hills and valleys like home, but beautiful in its own way even in the dry bareness of autumn. There were barns, sheds and small outbuildings galore, painted red, all dwarfed by the enormous old dairy barn that Joshua explained housed Benjamin’s harness shop. There, the family not only made and repaired leather goods like bridles and harnesses, but also sold items like axle grease, horse liniments and other items Amish and English customers were in need of.

      “We sell eggs, too,” Joshua said as they drove up the crushed oyster shell driveway, past the parking lot, where there were two black buggies tied to a hitching post, an old pickup and a little blue sedan parked. “My sister Bay—” He glanced at Phoebe, the reins in his gloved hands. “I’m just going to tell you now, we dropped the step part ages ago. So, when you hear one of us say brother or sister or daughter or son, we might mean that we’re not actually related by blood, but we’re all family now.”

      “Got it.” She nodded and smiled to herself, happy for them, a little sad for herself. In the home where she’d grown up, her stepfather had never let her forget that she was a stepchild, which had somehow translated to mean she was something less than his own children. Phoebe’s father had taken ill when she was just a baby and died. Her mother had remarried a year later and Phoebe had become the stepdaughter of Edom Wickey, an authoritarian, dogmatic man who easily saw all of the ills of the world but never the good.

      “So, anyway,” Joshua went on, pulling Phoebe back into the conversation. “My sister Bay Laurel, we call her Bay, sells eggs and sometimes frying chickens out of the shop. I think they’re adding jams and such. Oh, and she sells our sister Nettie’s quilts, СКАЧАТЬ