Chapter 3
“I just have this feeling I can’t shake that something’s going to happen.” Ada finished paring the potato and rinsed it underneath the water in the sink before cutting it up into little pieces and putting them in the pot that was heating on the stove in the bunkhouse. The Clybourn family usually had Sunday dinner together, but sometimes by the time they’d done all the chores, gone to church, got home, and finished up anything that they hadn’t gotten done before they went to church and got the food cooked, it was the middle of the afternoon before they finally ate.
“You mean you don’t feel like that all the time?” Lois asked.
Lois was Ada’s youngest sister, and she just recently graduated from college. Ada should have known better than to try to talk to her about it. She was too young, too new to this whole adult thing, to understand that the feeling Ada had was different than anything she felt before.
“I understand what you’re saying,” Priscilla said as she opened up a package of ground beef and dumped it into the skillet that had been heating on the stove. “It’s just that feeling that you need to be ready, because something unexpected, something you couldn’t even imagine could possibly happen, is going to happen.”
Lois just looked confused, but Ada nodded. That was exactly right. Priscilla ought to know. She’d had plenty of those kinds of things happen to her in her life.
Ada’s life had been much different. Boring. All she’d ever done was live at home and work with her family. Most of the time, she knew that was exactly where God wanted her, and she didn’t regret never branching out to do anything else. She knew everyone said that she should travel while she was young before she got married and she should have all these experiences and all that, and she’d just never bought into it.
If God wanted her to have those experiences, she’d have them. But she wasn’t going to live her young adult life for herself, because what was going to happen? All of a sudden one day she was going to wake up and decide that she should use the rest of her life to serve the Lord? And then all of a sudden she was going to be a good servant?
That wasn’t how that happened. It happened one day at a time as she built a life of service and love for God. She couldn’t spend ten years living for herself and then think that she was all of a sudden going to become a great Christian at some random point.
Even Christians she knew had fallen into the trap of the world telling them that they needed to live for themselves and travel and experience things while they were young and put off marriage.
Of course, Ada had put off marriage. But it was because she just hadn’t felt like any of the guys who had been interested in her were what God wanted for her. She’d never had a sense of rightness about them. And she never had liberty when she prayed and asked the Lord if she should say yes to their proposals.
There had been three that she had turned down.
“If you’re feeling that, I would say you’d better hold on,” Priscilla said, laughing a little. She just recently got married to a country music superstar. The biggest entertainer in the world, which was hard for Ada to wrap her head around. Priscilla was so grounded, so humble, so unpretentious and wise. The idea that she was married to a man who could command tens of thousands, or even a hundred thousand people, by his very presence on stage was almost more than Ada could conceive of.
But Cooper and Priscilla were exceedingly happy together, and Ada could see that despite the fact that it didn’t seem like they were meant to be, they were definitely meant to be.
“That’s exactly how I feel. Like I need to hold on, because life is about to change.” Just stating the words out loud gave her a shiver of fear. Was that why she had turned down other men’s marriage proposals? Because she didn’t want or like to change?
“I hate change,” Claudia said as she sliced up tomatoes for the salad.
“I do too,” Ryland said, and Ada nodded at her. Ryland was quiet, she didn’t talk a lot, but she was one of the nicest people that Ada knew. She’d married their brother Lucas, who was the exact opposite in many ways—outgoing and funny and never met a stranger. The two of them got along perfectly.
“Same. Even saying that out loud made a shiver of fear go through me. I love our life here. I love our family, and I love being able to work together. Even though sometimes we get on each other’s nerves, it’s the way I think family should be.” She believed that with all her heart. Families weren’t meant to break up and go live on different ends of the earth. Families were meant to be a support system, people who encouraged and helped each other. People who were there for each other. But the modern way of life didn’t encourage that at all. In fact, if a kid was over eighteen and still lived with their parents, it was frowned upon, unless they were going to school, and even then they were expected to treat their parents like they were old and outdated.
Was that really the way God wanted them to be?
Ada didn’t think so. But their society had kind of hijacked that attitude. Ada had fought that trend, but she ended up not getting married at all. Which hadn’t been her plan, either.
“Maybe God is going to bring you a husband,” Alaska said, mixing the crackers with the butter and almonds to make the topping for Granny Brewster’s Vegetable Casserole, a Clybourn family recipe that had been handed down through generations. No Sunday dinner was complete without it. It was probably the first recipe Ezra had asked her to make after they got married.
“Or maybe he’s going to bring a preacher to the family. Maybe it’s not about you at all, but it’s about Him looking down and seeing that Sundays are really hard for us, and it would be a lot nicer to have church here on the ranch. Then we’d have the dude ranch people coming as well. And maybe even our short-term rental people.” Sondra, who was in charge of all the ranch’s social media, spoke up from where she was filming everything that was happening in the kitchen. She often put music with the video if they were having a personal conversation, so none of them were worried that anything was going to get out. And by now, they were used to Sondra’s constant pictures and videos, knowing that it advertised not just the dude ranch and their short-term rentals, but also their grass-fed beef and other agricultural items that they had for sale. Because of the success of what Sondra did, the ranch had become solvent.
“I would miss going to church every Sunday. I’d miss seeing the people of the town. Sometimes that’s the only day I get out,” Ada said, knowing it was true. She didn’t want to have a church on the ranch, even though it would make Sundays a lot easier. Here it was two o’clock in the afternoon and they were just now cooking the potatoes. It would be three o’clock before they could eat. And she was starving. She couldn’t imagine how hard it was for Alaska with the small children to feed. Their schedule definitely made it harder for the parents, since they probably had to have a small meal for the kids and then help to make a bigger meal for the adults. It was just...difficult to deal with that many people, along with the ranch.
“There’s always something that delays things. That wouldn’t change even if we had a preacher and a church here,” Phoebe said, and everyone knew she was absolutely right.
“Still, we would save the drive into town and back. And we can control how much time we spend. Not that I want to shortchange the Lord, but we could even have preaching while we ate on days where we’re super busy.” It seemed like Priscilla had thought about it, because her ideas made sense.
“We couldn’t have the dude ranch people or the short-term rental people coming if we didn’t have a specific time and program.” Ada stated that, even though she agreed with Priscilla on most of her points.
“Then maybe we couldn’t do that. It could just be us. There certainly are enough of us, and it seems like we’re growing every day.”
She smiled, and her cheeks grew rosy, which of course made Ada wonder if Priscilla perhaps had something to tell them. But Priscilla didn’t say anything more, and Ada didn’t ask. If she wanted to wait until she was further along, or if she wanted to wait until she knew for sure, or perhaps she hadn’t even told her husband, Cooper, yet.
Or maybe Ada was just imagining things.
Lord, will I ever get to have children?
She was almost at the age she’d given up the idea. Not that being in her mid-thirties was too old to have children, but she didn’t have a prospective husband in sight. It would take at least a year, wouldn’t it?
Even as she thought that, she knew it was wrong. Some of her siblings had met their spouses and married in a matter of weeks or months. It could happen to her too. But so far, in more than three decades, it hadn’t. She didn’t hold out a whole lot of hope that it was going to happen with enough time for her to have a family as well. And she’d always wanted a big one, just like the one she grew up in. She wouldn’t trade her big family and tons of siblings for anything, even though she knew it was a lot of work.
That feeling, the feeling that something was going to happen, a feeling of anticipation mingled with fear, rippled through her again.
Something, something was going to happen. She was sure of it.