Chapter 11
Usually on a Friday evening Joanna would be on a buggy ride with Jacob or the two of them would be sitting on Mammi Lu’s porch drinking lemonade. But tonight she skipped dinner with Mammi Lu and headed out to weed the flower garden instead, hoping to keep her mind off Jacob. And off herself.
Joanna thought of Mandy and wondered how she was doing. No doubt Caleb—or maybe Elaine—had told her friend Jacob had broken up with her. It would be best if she left a message for Mandy anyway.
She leaned her hoe against the fence by the sweet William and headed to the phone shanty at the end of the driveway.
After she dialed, she sat down on the bench.
When no one answered, she left a message, “Hi, Mandy. It’s me.
I just wanted to let you know that Jacob and I broke up—I mean he broke up with me.
In case you hadn’t heard.” She wanted to ask Mandy to pray for her, but they didn’t really ask for that sort of thing, even though she did pray for Mandy and hoped her friend prayed for her too.
“Also, I’ve been thinking about you and hope you’re doing well. ”
After she said goodbye and hung up the phone, Joanna slumped against the wall of the shanty. She wanted friendships with other women like Mammi Lu had with her friends, and Mandy was the closest she had to that. Her hope was, as they grew older, they’d grow closer.
She stood, squared her shoulders, and returned to the garden to tend the bachelor’s buttons and zinnias.
Two hours later Mammi Lu stood at the gate. “Joanna,” she called. “Come sit. I have a sandwich.” She held up a glass. “And lemonade.”
Joanna strode to the fence, leaned the hoe beside the gate, and took the glass from her grandmother. The sound of horses’ hooves caught her attention and Joanna’s head jerked toward the road.
Mammi Lu asked, “Are you expecting someone?”
Joanna tightened her grip on the cold glass. “Nee.”
The buggy grew closer. Joanna squinted through the poplar trees, trying to make out the driver in the dim light. Ike Slaybaugh waved and called out, “Hallo!”
Then Becky poked her head around Ike and waved too.
“Where do you think they’re coming from?” Mammi Lu asked.
“They’re probably just out for a ride.” Joanna and Jacob often saw Becky and Ike riding in their buggy on Friday nights.
It seemed they preferred that to sitting on their porch.
Joanna thought it odd an old couple would be acting like Youngie, but Becky and Ike often surprised her. They didn’t always act their age.
“God bless ’em.” Mammi’s voice was a whisper, but Joanna heard each word. She didn’t think her grandmother was jealous, not exactly.
The sun dipped lower in the sky. It would be dark soon.
Mammi led the way up the steps to the porch. As they settled into the two rocking chairs, Mammi picked up her knitting and asked, “Did you see Jacob today?”
“Jah.” Joanna didn’t want to talk about him.
“Was Adam working on the house too?”
“Jah, that was a surprise.” Joanna put the lemonade down on the table between the two chairs, beside the plate with the sandwich. “How did you know he’s back?”
“I saw him at Becky’s this morning.” Mammi put her knitting down. “Do you ever wish you’d given Adam a chance?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That night coming home from the wedding. When Adam said he wanted to court you.”
Joanna’s face flushed.
“I’ll admit I was eavesdropping. Not on purpose. But I couldn’t help but hear your conversation. Do you remember?”
“I do. But in my own defense I was only nineteen,” Joanna said.
“I’d never gone out with someone I did know—let alone someone I didn’t.
” She and Jacob went out for ice cream a couple of days after they met but didn’t start courting until months later.
“Besides, I thought Mandy might be interested in him.” She picked up the glass of lemonade and held it to her cheek.
“Do you think I should have been less cautious with Adam?”
“Nee,” Mammi said. “I just wondered if you regretted not courting him.”
Joanna shook her head. “I wanted to be his friend, but he wasn’t willing to be mine. Why would I court someone who didn’t want to be my friend? What kind of relationship would that be?”
“You have a point,” Mammi said.
After she washed the dishes, Joanna told her grandmother good night, put on her head lamp, and headed back out to the garden.
Once she latched the gate behind her, she stepped next to the rows of plate-sized dahlias. Her Dat wasn’t a fan of flower gardens, saying they were a waste of space and effort and too fanciful. He believed all labor should go toward producing food or earning money.
Dat moved through life like a rambunctious bear, driven this way and that by his latest whim.
On the other hand, Joanna’s mother barely moved at all.
Looking back, Joanna guessed her mother had been depressed, besides being overwhelmed with seven children in eleven years, including two sets of twins.
The farm Joanna had grown up on had been in her father’s family for nearly two hundred years, and Mammi Rhoda and Dawdi Hiram lived across the road that dissected the farm in two. But Joanna had always been a little afraid of her father’s parents, especially her grandmother.
They lived in the bigger house, just the two of them, while Joanna and her family crowded into the smaller one.
As her brothers grew into men who were over six feet tall like their father, the house became more and more crowded.
The fact the land couldn’t support more than two families was the reason Joanna’s Dat had decided to visit Maine and look for land to buy.
He hoped to farm with as many of his sons as possible.
It was from the porch across the road that Dawdi Hiram first saw the smoke on the frosty February morning they planned to travel to Maine.
Joanna, the only girl in the family, was cooking breakfast while her Dat and her brothers did the chores.
Dawdi began ringing the fire bell on his porch and at first her brothers ran across the road thinking the big house was on fire, but Dawdi redirected them.
The roof of the smaller house—their house—was on fire.
Joanna’s littlest brothers, the young twins, were still asleep and their mother ran to wake them and shoo them out the front door.
Then Mamm ran to the phone shed to call 9-1-1 while Dat and Joanna’s oldest brothers grabbed ladders and the garden hose and started up on the roof.
Another brother began to toss the luggage and hampers stacked by the front door onto the porch, directing the little boys to haul them on down the stairs and out into the yard.
As sparks began to fall, they dragged the suitcases and hampers of food to the driveway.
Mamm came back from the phone shanty and told Joanna to go back in the house with her. “We still need to eat.”
There were no flames in the house, but smoke hung along the ceiling and in the stairwell.
Joanna grabbed a potholder and the frying pan filled with scrambled eggs and Mamm grabbed the pan of sausage.
As they walked out of the house, Mamm called for the younger boys, who were wearing pajamas, winter coats, and boots, to follow her across the road to her in-laws’ house.
As they climbed the porch steps, Mammi Rhoda called out from the door. “Joanna, did your cooking set the house on fire?”
Mortified, Joanna turned around. Her father and three of her brothers were on the roof now. Dawdi Hiram shouted directions from the ground. She hadn’t done anything different two hours earlier when she stoked the fire than she had any other morning.
Mammi Rhoda laughed at her own joke, but Joanna didn’t think it was funny. She knew she hadn’t started the fire—most likely Dat hadn’t cleaned the chimney when Mamm reminded him it needed to be done.
Five minutes later Dawdi commanded Dat and the boys off the roof and to come eat their breakfast. Twenty minutes after that the fire trucks finally arrived to find the roof engulfed in flames.
The vans arrived to take them to Maine and the drivers grew impatient. Dat asked them several times to wait. “I’ll pay you just the same,” he said.
Finally Dat, Dawdi, and the fire chief conferred. Then Dat and the boys cleaned up and changed their clothes at Mammi and Dawdi’s house, and the boys loaded the luggage into the vans. “All the more reason for us to find a new place,” Dat said.
“I don’t want to go,” Joanna said. “Can you drop me off at Mammi Lu’s?” She made the mistake of asking in front of Mammi Rhoda.
Her grandmother’s lips tightened. Then she said, “You can stay here. I’m going to get a head start on my spring cleaning—you can help.”
Joanna turned toward her mother, hoping she’d say Joanna could go to Mammi Lu’s.
“You need to come with us,” Mamm said. Joanna followed her to the van.
Joanna thought of how cold it had been that day, compared with the heat in the garden now.
She swiped her hand across her forehead.
Then she gathered up the weeds she’d pulled, stepped through the gate, and dumped them in the waiting wheelbarrow.
She pushed it to the compost pile. Another buggy was on the road, a lantern hanging from a pole by the driver’s side.
On any other Friday night, she would have expected it to be Jacob.
Could it be him? The buggy kept going. Joanna returned to her weeding and to her memories of the day her childhood home burned.
Life hadn’t been the same since. But it wouldn’t have even if the house hadn’t burned.