The Christmas Courtship. Emma Miller

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      Phoebe stood behind the grocery cart watching Joshua place multiple boxes of cereal in the basket.

      “I know this looks like a lot, but my brothers and I, we can eat.” He flashed her a grin as he put two more boxes into the cart. He was up to eight: three boxes of bran flakes with raisins, three boxes of wheat biscuits and two boxes of something with marshmallows. He’d said that his little stepbrother, Jesse, loved marshmallows. “My dat has five boys and one daughter. My sister’s married. She and her husband decided to stay in New York when we moved here two years ago. My twin, Jacob, and I are the youngest. All five of us boys live at home. Then there’s Rosemary’s children. Even with my stepsister Lovey married and living down the road, there are the four girls, then Jesse and the babies.” He tugged at the cart and she gave a push. “That means twelve of us at every meal, plus the two littles, and that’s if Lovey and her husband, Marshall, don’t come by, which they do all the time.” He chuckled. “We had to build a second kitchen table so we could all sit down to eat at the same time.”

      Phoebe smiled to herself as he went on. Even though she knew she’d done the right thing in leaving Pennsylvania, she’d still been nervous about coming to Rosemary’s and meeting her extended family. She hadn’t seen her cousin in years, and then to come under these circumstances, it was more than a little overwhelming. And then when it wasn’t Rosemary who came to pick her up, but her son. Her stepson. That had really set Phoebe off-kilter. At the bus stop, Joshua had seemed annoyed with her, at least at first, because he couldn’t find her. But it had been the right thing to do, to hold Amir for Daneen while she used the ladies’ room. Phoebe knew what it was like to try to do day-to-day tasks with a baby in your arms all the time and no one to help you. And she’d only been in the ladies’ room for a few minutes.

      Phoebe glanced at Joshua again. She had liked him at once. Despite his irritation with her back at the bus stop, he seemed to be good-natured.

      He pulled the grocery cart forward and began to put bags of rolled oats into it. She’d never seen an Amish man grocery shop by himself before. Her stepfather had never stepped foot in a grocery store, let alone shopped on his own.

      “...a lot of confusion the first few weeks after we arrived from New York, the twelve of us,” Joshua was saying. “Lovage didn’t come with us, straight off. She stayed to see her mother’s farm sold.” He’d been talking since they left the bus station. Which was fine with Phoebe because then she didn’t have to talk. Not talking meant not having to answer questions.

      “But then we found our footing.” Joshua added some granola bars to the cart. “Hickory Grove is a nice place. I think you’ll like it. We do.”

      She smiled at him as he went on. He was nice-looking, Rosemary’s stepson. Joshua was around Phoebe’s own age, maybe a little younger. He had reddish-brown hair that curled at the back of his neck beneath his black knit hat and a handsome face, with dark eyes and a strong brow. His face was clean-shaven, which meant he was unmarried. Which of course made sense since he still lived at home. She had known the man Rosemary had wed had children from his previous marriage, but she hadn’t known he had adult sons.

      “Ne? Never been?” Joshua asked.

      Phoebe looked up, realizing he had asked her a question. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

      He gripped the end of the cart so they were looking at each other, her on one side, him on the other. He had nice hands: strong, with squared-off nails that were clean. “It’s all right,” he told her. “I talk too much.”

      “It’s not that at all,” she said.

      “Ne, I talk too much. Everyone in my family says so. I talk when I’m nervous and when I’m not. I talk when I’m happy and when I’m sad. When I was little my mother used to say that she put me to bed talking and I picked right up on the sentence come dawn the next day.”

      Phoebe struggled to hide a smile. His cheerfulness lightened her heart. He made her hopeful that this move had been the right thing for her to do. “I’m enjoying hearing about your family,” she said. “It sounds like you all get along so well. Your father’s children and Rosemary’s. It can’t be easy making two families into one. It’s not as if you’re little ones.”

      “It’s not always easy. Mornings when we have to get out of the house for church can be tense.” He shrugged. “But we’re working on it. Once a week we sit down together and eat a bunch of desserts and talk about whatever’s bugging us.” He shrugged. “Whether it’s my brother Jacob not taking his turn cleaning horse stalls or our stepsister Ginger hogging the upstairs bathroom.”

      He turned down the baking aisle, still pulling the cart along. Phoebe followed.

      “But my father and Rosemary are so happy together,” he told her over his broad shoulder. “They love each other. So we’re all determined to make it work. All of us,” he said with conviction.

      Phoebe smiled at him again, this time making no attempt to hide it.

      He knitted his brows. “What?”

      She felt her cheeks grow warm. She was tempted not to tell him why she was smiling, but it wasn’t really in her nature not to answer an honest question with an honest answer. “You said your father and Rosemary love each other. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man say such a thing.”

      “Say what thing?”

      “Speak of love,” she responded quietly. “It’s not very Amish, is it?”

      He thought for a moment. “My father’s a man who doesn’t hide how he feels and he doesn’t mind telling you, good or bad. I guess I take after him.”

      Phoebe looked up to see an Amish girl of about twenty with a woman who was likely her mother approaching them. They were each pushing a grocery cart overflowing with boxes of cereal, flour and sugar, and bags and bags of cookies, snack cakes and potato chips.

      The younger of the two women caught sight of Joshua, giggled and looked away.

      “Joshua?” The older woman acknowledged him and stopped her cart, blocking other customers, Amish, English and Mennonite, from continuing down the aisle. She СКАЧАТЬ