One
Miriam Brennemann stood at her kitchen window, gazing out toward the green fields beyond. It was a still summer morning in early July, the color just beginning to creep along the edges of the sky. The air carried a chill, and the floor of the big farmhouse kitchen was cool beneath Miriam's bare feet, but she had been up at this hour often enough to recognize the promise of the day: It would warm up soon enough, turning hot and fine.
Oh, Daed, she thought. This is just the kind of day you always loved.
On an ordinary day, Miriam would be bustling about the kitchen, preparing the breakfast that she and her husband, Daniel, would share when he came in from feeding the livestock in the barn. Miriam's father, Jacob Lapp, would come from his section of the house, the dawdi-haus, to join them. The three would talk over the work for that day, drinking the kaffi Miriam always made strong and dark, eating the hearty breakfast all would need for the long hours of work ahead.
Then Daniel would head to the fields while Miriam and Jacob walked to the end of the long, straight drive that led from the farmhouse to the main road. There, they worked together to ready the family farm stand for that day's business.
But everything was different now. Jacob Lapp had died three days earlier, passing quietly in his sleep, a simple and straightforward relinquishing of earthly life and a moving on to his new life, with God. Today he would be laid to rest beside Miriam's mother, Edna, the wife who died of a fever so long ago. There were many who would come to honor her father, Miriam knew, for Jacob had been both well respected and well loved among his Plain and Englisch neighbors alike. But the one who would come the farthest was Miriam's younger sister, Sarah.
Sarah. Sarah is coming home!
Miriam tried to picture the sister she hadn't seen in four and a half years. The image was faint but the emotions were vivid.
It was ridiculous to feel so unsettled, Miriam told herself. Sarah was her sister, after all. Unlike others Miriam knew who had made the decision to leave the Plain life, Sarah had not stayed close by. Instead, she had made a home for herself in faraway San Francisco, first at the university, where she had gotten her degree, and now in her first job.
She'd sent a letter every week of the six years she had been gone. Collections of her thoughts and impressions, glimpses of what happened during the day, jotted down before she went to bed each night. It had always seemed to Miriam that reading one of Sarah's letters was just the same as listening to her sister talk. Miriam had discovered them, stacked by year and tied with pieces of household twine, in the bottom drawer of her father's chest of drawers. She knew her father treasured the letters. He had saved every single one. Clearly they were precious to him.
All of a sudden, Miriam spun away from the sink, marching with determination to the kitchen door. She thrust her bare feet into the plastic clogs waiting there and took down a key that hung on a hook by the door. She opened the door, stepped outside, and shut it behind her with a quick snap, as if she feared that she might yet change her mind. And then she was moving, her quick strides eating up the yard. Not until she heard the crunch of the gravel driveway beneath her feet did Miriam slow her pace.
Sarah. Sarah is coming home today for our father's funeral.
She had come back to Lancaster just twice, both visits early in her time away.
It was easier for me that way, Miriam admitted to herself as she topped the rise of the small hill that lay between the farmhouse and the main road. Was that a bad thing? It was not that she had ever wished for Sarah to leave-or stay away. Only that once she had gone, things seemed simpler. Simpler with Daniel, Miriam thought. The hard knot of doubt that she had held in her chest for years seemed to loosen a little when Sarah was gone.
Miriam paused for a moment, gazing down. She could see her destination now: the Stony Field Farm Stand. Just seeing the stand comforted Miriam. It was her daed's place and hers as well. Even more than the house where she'd been raised, the farm stand brought her father back to her.
Miriam started down the hill, picking up her pace until she was almost running. Ach, but it felt so good to move! To be doing something, even if all that "something" involved was a walk. As was the Plain way, since her father's death, neither Miriam nor her husband had been responsible for any of their usual chores. Instead, friends and neighbors had come to help get ready for the funeral. They had taken over all the daily tasks that went into keeping a farm going so that Miriam and Daniel had time to mourn together. But in truth, when Jacob's body had been prepared for burial by the Englisch funeral home in town and then returned to the farmhouse, Miriam had spent many hours sitting beside her father alone. She prayed silently, giving thanks for Jacob's life. On the outside, she appeared calm. But on the inside, her thoughts scurried back and forth, no matter how hard she tried to capture them and make them move in their usual orderly lines.
Daed was dead, and everything had changed. But there would be even more changes to come. Sarah was coming home. Not just for a few weeks, but for the rest of the summer, her longest stay since leaving six years before. Just thinking about it made Miriam's stomach hurt, and the fact that she felt badly about this made it hurt even more. She loved Sarah, and worrying about what might happen as a result of her visit did no good. It did no good at all. What would happen did not rest in Miriam's hands. It was in the hands of God.
Miriam reached the farm stand, using the key she'd brought with her to open the padlock on the back door. She opened the door and took a step into the building. Her fingers moved toward the light switch, then paused. I didn't come to see, she thought. I came to feel. Certain of her footing, for she knew every inch of this place by heart, Miriam took several more steps forward. Though Miriam was far from fanciful, it seemed to her that she could almost feel the farm stand reach out to envelop her.
It smelled so good! But the way the farm stand smelled was never the same twice, Miriam thought. It changed with the seasons, just like the goods her father sold. Could this be why it reminded her so much of him? she wondered. Her father was like this place that he had created, solid and sturdy on the outside. But inside, he still had the ability to surprise. He had certainly surprised everyone by giving Sarah his blessing to go off to college.
Help me, Daed, Miriam thought. Help me to be like you, to accept with grace what I cannot change.
And that was it, Miriam thought. The true reason that her stomach hurt at the thought of Sarah coming home and staying for so long. Miriam would have no choice now. She would have to face the fear that had been her constant companion for six long years, the question that Sarah's absence had allowed her to push to the back of her mind:
If Sarah had not chosen an Englisch life, would Daniel have asked Sarah to marry him?
And the even more painful question that inevitably followed:
Have I always been Daniel's second choice?
Miriam swayed, reaching out for one of the farm stand display tables for support. Stop this! she told herself fiercely. Stop this train of thought right now. No good will come of it.
But Miriam could not stop. She never had been able to stop. That was just the trouble.
In the dark, Miriam began to move around the farm stand, finding her way by touch. She made one circuit of the space, and then another, while her thoughts circled inside her mind.
There were days when it seemed to Miriam that she had lived with the fear of being second best forever, that it went hand in hand and step-by-step with her love for Daniel, getting up with her each morning, going to bed with her each night, until the love and fear were so entwined that they, too, were married and could never be pulled apart. Days when it seemed to her that the greatest task that God had ever charged her with was finding the way to understand, to be at peace with, the confused workings of her own heart.
Miriam stopped walking and then reversed direction. Once again as if following her body's lead, a series of images began to unfurl inside her mind. Daniel, not as the strapping man he now was, but as he had been the day Miriam first saw him, a wobbly but energetic not-quite-two-year-old. Miriam herself had been all of three at the time. The pair had been in the front yard of Daniel's adoptive parents, the Brennemanns.
Daniel had taken his first steps straight toward Miriam, ending his sudden burst of locomotion with a grab to hold on to her and keep himself upright. The tactic backfired, and they had both tumbled to the ground. But rather than crying, Daniel had simply gazed into Miriam's face with wide, astonished eyes. Miriam gazed right back. For several seconds, neither made a sound. Then Daniel began to laugh, and Miriam had heard her own laughter ring out even as she felt a fierce and sudden love blossom inside her young heart.
Her facility for spontaneous laughter had faded as she had grown, but her love for Daniel had not. Through all the years that followed, she had never lost it. It had remained inside her heart. Years that had seen Miriam grow into a young woman, slim yet strong, and Daniel into a determined, hardworking farmer, reserved and spare in his habits, but who had never quite lost that twinkle, dancing at the very back of his eyes. He was more sure-footed now. The years had certainly changed that. And they had changed something else. They'd changed the direction of Daniel's footsteps, or so it had always seemed to Miriam, so that they no longer led straight to her, but to her younger sister, Sarah.
Sarah, Miriam thought. Everything always came back to Sarah. She stopped walking.
Sarah, who was almost exactly Daniel's age, rather than slightly older, as Miriam was. Sarah, whose quick laughter seemed to be the perfect match for the twinkle that never quite left Daniel's eyes. Miriam had seen these things, even as her heart bled a little at the sight. And she was not so blind that she could not see that pretty much everyone in the district expected that Daniel and Sarah would one day make a match of it. They seemed so well suited, so comfortable when they were together.
And Miriam couldn't help but think that maybe if Daniel had married Sarah, she would have given Daniel children.
Children, Miriam thought. She pressed a hand against her mouth, suppressing a cry, thinking of the months and years that she had been childless. And wondering, as she did every day, if God meant her to be barren. If that were truly His will, then Daniel had chosen the wrong sister.
But Daniel had not married Sarah. That was not the way things had worked out.
Daniel had been baptized almost immediately after his rumspringa, just like Miriam. Like her, Daniel had chosen the Plain life. But the months went by and still Sarah made no move to come forward and be baptized. Until finally the day came when she asked to speak to her father and sister together and told them the truth: She was choosing an Englisch life. Much as she loved her family, and cherished the way she had been brought up, Sarah believed that the world outside was where her steps were being guided. That was where she truly belonged.
And there was more. Unbeknownst to either Miriam or Jacob, Sarah had continued her education, studying in secret, and had applied and been accepted at a college in faraway San Francisco. She would not simply be leaving the community where she'd grown up, she would be moving three thousand miles away, all the way across the country. There, she would study to become a social worker. It was to this work, she told her father and sister, that she believed she was being called.
"You are sure?" Jacob had asked, after a moment's stunned silence.
By way of answer, Sarah had knelt at her father's feet, placed her hands on his knees, and gazed directly into his eyes.
"As sure as I have been of anything in my life, Daed," she replied.
Miriam's daed expelled a great breath, so great a breath that Miriam had been certain there was not an ounce of breath left in her father's body. And then he spoke once more.
"I will miss you, my daughter, but I will also wish you well. For I think you could not make a choice such as this if your heart and feet were not being guided by God. May He give you wings to fly."
Sarah had put her head on her father's knee and wept. Miriam had left the two of them alone. She was stunned that Sarah could make such a request. And she was surprised that Daed had accepted Sarah's choice so easily. Miriam knew that others in the district would judge Daed harshly for giving Sarah his blessing to leave, for raising a daughter who did not join the church. But mostly, she was shocked and hurt that her sister had not confided in her. How could Sarah keep such a secret from her own sister? Did Sarah mistrust Miriam that much? What other secrets had Sarah kept from her?
That day, like today, Miriam had gone outdoors. She'd wandered aimlessly through the fields for what had felt like hours, trying to sort out her own tumultuous emotions. Only when the sun began to set did she turn her feet toward home.
And it was on the journey back that she had seen Sarah and Daniel together. Sarah speaking earnestly, her face upturned toward Daniel's bent head. With one hand, she gripped Daniel by the arm. Even from far away, Miriam had felt like a spy, an intruder. But she could not seem to turn away or avert her eyes.
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