Chapter 7
Susan Bontrager had tracked Lloyd Kauffman from Houndsville, Pennsylvania, to Crystal Lake, Ohio, which represented, by any measure, an extraordinary dedication to a man who, so far as Jodie could tell, had not asked to be found.
She learned all this over supper.
The meal had been David’s idea. He had come into the kitchen an hour after Susan’s arrival, found Jodie standing at the stove with a blank expression, and, in his measured way, said they would have their guest at the table that evening for supper.
It was not a question. David Graber extended hospitality the way he always did—without flourish, without negotiation, and with the quiet expectation that his household would follow suit.
Jodie had simply nodded. She had set a fifth place at the table.
She had cooked a pot of chicken and dumplings large enough for six because she did not know how to cook for a crisis in small quantities.
She had changed into her good blue dress and pinned her hair neatly.
She told herself, firmly, that she was a grown woman and that she could sit across a supper table from a woman who had come to claim the man Jodie had been foolish enough to start loving, and she would do it with grace.
Susan came to the table scrubbed and composed, her dark hair pinned neatly beneath a fresh cap.
Her traveling dress had been replaced by a plain but pressed, well-fitted one.
She was not beautiful, Jodie thought, trying to be fair.
She was something more complicated than beautiful.
She was a woman whose face had been built for certainty—strong jaw, direct dark eyes, a mouth that looked as though it had opinions.
She carried herself the way a woman does when she has spent a long time being the most capable person in every room she enters and has grown accustomed to it.
Jodie could see it, and she understood it more than she wanted to.
Lloyd sat between them at the table. His face had the careful blankness he wore when he was uncertain, and Jodie noticed his hands were very still on either side of his plate.
He had not looked at her directly since the barn, nor had he looked at Susan directly.
He was, she thought, doing a remarkably thorough job of looking at nothing at all.
David said grace. It was a longer grace than usual. Jodie suspected her father was buying time for everyone at the table, and she loved him for it.
For the first few minutes, they ate in the silence of people who were all thinking a great deal and saying none of it.
The chicken was good. The dumplings were light and fluffy.
Jodie concentrated on these small mercies and tried not to notice the way Susan had positioned herself at Lloyd’s left elbow, establishing her claim.
It was Susan who broke the silence, first because, as Jodie was beginning to understand, Susan was a woman who preferred to control a conversation rather than wait.
“You have a lovely deheem, Mr. Graber,” she said to David. Her voice was pleasant and firm. “It is very gut of you to take in a stranger the way you have. Not every household would be so generous.”
“It was Jodie’s doing,” David said. “She found him.”
“So, I understand.” Susan’s eyes shifted to Jodie and lingered there for a moment. The look was not hostile. It was appraising. “That was very brave, Mrs. Schwartz, especially in your condition.”
“It did not feel brave at the time,” Jodie said. “It only felt as if it was the right thing to do.”
“Yah.” Susan smiled. It was a precise, calibrated smile. “Doing wat is right is a powerful thing. It has brought me a long way over the past few months.”
She turned to Lloyd and placed her hand on his forearm, lightly, in the way a woman touches a man she considers her own. It was a small gesture, almost casual. Lloyd did not pull his arm away. He did not lean into the touch either. He simply sat very still, a look of intense discomfort on his face.
“Lloyd and I have known each other since we were yung,” Susan announced, addressing the table but directing the words to Jodie.
“Our families have been neighbors in Houndsville for two generations. After his brother Aaron passed this summer, Lloyd was… not himself. I think grief does that to a person. It makes them run from the very things they ought to run toward.”
Jodie watched Lloyd’s jaw tighten at Aaron’s name, but still he said nothing.
“We had an understanding,” Susan continued.
Her voice was steady, but beneath it was something else—something that, if you listened carefully, sounded like a woman holding tightly to the edges of a story she needed to be true.
“Before he left, we had spoken about the future. About wat our life would look like. And then suddenly he left, and I…” She paused, and for a moment the composure cracked, just slightly. “I came to bring him deheem.”
The kitchen was quiet except for the ticking of the clock and the soft crackle of the fire settling in the stove. Jodie looked down at her plate. The dumplings had gone cold, and the gravy was beginning to set.
“Lloyd,” David said. His voice was even, unhurried. “Is this true?”
Lloyd looked up. His green eyes moved from David to Susan to Jodie, lingering on Jodie for one beat longer than on the others. In that beat, there was something raw, complicated, and entirely without words.
“Es dutt mer leed, I do not remember,” he said.
“I wish I could tell you plainly. I know Susan. I know her name, her face, and that she is telling the truth about Houndsville. Beyond that…” He spread his hands on the table, open and empty.
“I cannot tell you wat was promised because I do not know. I know that is not enough.”
Susan’s hand, still resting on his forearm, tightened slightly. It was a subtle motion, barely visible, but Jodie saw it and understood it perfectly—it was the grip of a woman who could feel something slipping and was determined to hold on to it.
Jodie set down her fork. She folded her hands in her lap beneath the table where no one could see whether they were steady or not.
“You have komme a very long way, Susan,” she said, and her voice was calm and kind, though it cost her a great deal. “You must be tired. We have a small but clean spare room. You are welcome to stay as long as you need to.”
Susan looked at her. Something shifted behind her dark eyes—surprise, perhaps, or the discomfort of a woman who had prepared herself for a fight and was offered a chair instead. “That is… very generous,” she said, and for the first time, her voice was not entirely composed.
“It is wat my mudder would have done,” Jodie replied simply.
David caught her eye across the table. In his steady gaze, she saw something she had not expected to find there—not pity, not worry, but a quiet, fierce pride that made her chest ache. She looked away before it could undo her.
The meal continued. Susan, sensing an opening, began to talk about Houndsville—the farms, the community, the autumn harvest, and the life she had built and was offering to share.
She spoke with conviction, painting a picture of a settled future with the fluency of a woman who had rehearsed it many times.
Lloyd listened. He nodded where it seemed appropriate, but he ate very little.
Jodie ate nothing at all after the first few bites. The baby, who had been restless all day, had settled heavily against her ribs and was making her feel both full and hollow at the same time, which, she reflected, was a fair description of her general situation.
She prayed, silently, for equanimity. She received heartburn.
It was halfway through the apple cake—Ruth’s apple cake, still fresh enough to serve, which felt like a small betrayal of an ally—when the kitchen door opened without a knock and Ruth Yoder herself stepped in, slightly breathless, a shawl around her shoulders and her face arranged in an expression of cheerful innocence that would not have fooled a child of six.
“Jodie, leibling, I am so sorry to interrupt your supper. I believe I left my good shawl here the other day, and I have only just remembered it. The blue one with the fringe. Have you seen it?”
Jodie had not seen it because Ruth had not left it, and Ruth Yoder had never, in sixty years, forgotten where she put a shawl.
Jodie understood at once that she had come because the grapevine had carried the news of Susan’s arrival in Crystal Lake with the speed it carried all news, and Ruth had decided this was a situation requiring observation.
“Ruth, pliese sit down,” Jodie said. “Have some cake. This is Susan Bontrager, from Houndsville. She is visiting.”
“How lovely.” Ruth settled into the chair by the window—her chair, the observation post from which she had monitored the Graber household’s affairs for a quarter of a century.
She accepted a slice of her own apple cake without comment.
Her eyes swept once around the table, taking in Susan’s hand on Lloyd’s arm, Lloyd’s careful stillness, David’s watchful silence, and Jodie’s composure, which was holding but, Ruth, who had known her since birth, could see was costing her considerable emotional effort.
Ruth caught Jodie’s eye across the table. The look lasted perhaps two seconds. In those two seconds, Ruth said, without words and with absolute clarity: patience, my girl. Be patient. This is not finished yet.
Jodie looked down at her plate and breathed.
After supper, Susan offered to help with the washing up.
Jodie politely declined because she needed the washing up.
She needed the hot water, the familiar weight of the dishes in her hands, and the small, rhythmic work of cloth on crockery.
She needed to stand at the kitchen sink with her back to the room and her face to the dark window, where she could see her own reflection looking back at her, pale, steady, and holding.
Through the window, she could see, faintly, the yard, the barn, the fence line standing to attention, and the dark shapes of the rolling hills against the sky.
Lloyd was outside. He had excused himself after supper with a quietness that was neither retreat nor escape.
He was standing by the woodpile with his hands in his pockets, looking at the hills the way he always looked at them—with a calm sereneness as though they were feeding him vital energy.
Susan was in the spare room, unpacking. David sat in his chair by the fire, reading his Bible, saying nothing, which was David’s way of saying everything.
Ruth had left, with promises to return and the missing shawl still missing, which meant she would be back within forty-eight hours at the outside.
Jodie washed the last plate, dried her hands, and stood for a moment at the window, both palms flat against the edge of the sink.
She did not feel anger toward Susan. That surprised her a little, because she had expected annoyance.
But what she felt instead was something quieter and more complicated.
She felt recognition. She looked at Susan Bontrager and saw a woman who had fixed her heart on a plan and found it missing, someone frightened beneath all that composure, and who had come some distance not out of stubbornness alone but out of the desperate courage of a person who cannot bear to lose the one thing they had counted on.
Jodie understood that. She had married Isaac Schwartz for something not so very different—not love, exactly, but the plan for love, the shape of what she had hoped love would become if she only held on long enough.
She understood Susan, which made the whole thing worse, because it would have been much easier to hate her.
Outside, in the dark yard, Lloyd turned from looking at the hills and looked toward the kitchen window.
He could not have seen her there, not with the lamp behind her and the glass between them.
But he looked, and after a moment he turned away and walked slowly toward the barn.
Jodie watched him go and felt the distance between them settle.
Patience, Ruth had inferred. Be patient.
Jodie dried her hands on the clean towel. She hung it on the hook by the stove, then banked the fire for the night and checked the latch on the kitchen door. She blew out the lamp and began climbing the stairs to her room.
In the dark, with one hand resting on the curve of her belly, where her daughter turned and turned in the small warm world, she was not yet ready to leave, Jodie Schwartz did what she had been doing all autumn.
She waited. Not because she was patient by nature, but because she had learned, the hard way, that the things worth having could not be hurried, and the things that could be hurried were almost never worth the having.
She went to bed, but she could not sleep for a long time.