Amish Christmas Memories Read online

  Lost donkey, gray-colored with one white ear and one black, northwest side of Shipshewana, last seen on County Road 265. Bruno was like a pet to our family. Please call the phone shack if you’ve seen him.

  The article ended with a phone number. He read it again, and suddenly it felt like a light bulb had gone off over his head. Of course Rachel’s family was looking for her. Only, they didn’t know where to look. How did you look for an Amish person that was lost? Caleb could think of only a few ways.

  You could drive around, which no doubt they had done.

  You could ask your neighbors, but news traveled fast in any Amish community, and if they’d known anything, her family would have been told about it within the first twenty-four hours.

  You could notify the police, but most Amish families—even the more liberal ones—were hesitant to involve local authorities unless they were sure something terrible had happened. Bishops usually coordinated any communication between families and local police, and Amos was already in contact with law enforcement, as well as area bishops.

  He glanced over at Rachel, who had her Bible open on her lap but was staring out the window. What if she’d been having problems at home? Maybe they didn’t think she was hurt or in danger. Maybe they were trying to give her time and space. If that was the case, then eventually, like the family who missed their donkey, they would put out an appeal for information.

  They might even put a notice in The Budget.

  Scribes submitted letters for each community, and the paper was published once a week. It contained national as well as local news. It contained letters from Mennonite and Amish communities. This was how he could help Rachel. He could pore over the letters every week, looking for any mention of a beautiful young woman with a slight smattering of freckles.

  He nearly slapped his forehead. He’d had this very conversation with Rachel once before. He’d promised her they’d scour the paper looking for anything that might reference a lost woman, but somehow in the business of the day-to-day workings of a farm, he’d forgotten about that promise.

  He stared down at the paper he was holding. It couldn’t possibly have news of Rachel’s disappearance. Scribes would have penned the letters two weeks ago and mailed them to the national office, then they would have been typeset and printed. The next edition was the earliest he could expect to find anything about a girl that had gone missing a week ago.

  He slapped the newspaper shut, causing his dat to glance up from the Farmers’ Almanac, and his mamm to look up from her crochet work. Some communities frowned upon needlework on Sundays, but his mamm long ago insisted that if it was enjoyable and relaxing, then it wasn’t work. If it wasn’t work, it was permitted.

  “It’s been a long time since I won a game of checkers.”

  “Because your mamm and I won’t play anymore. You always win.” John stretched and said, “I’m too tired to get throttled on a checkerboard.”

  His mamm shook her head. “You won’t talk me into it, either. I’m enjoying what I’m doing, danki very much.”

  Rachel must have been listening, because she finally turned to look at him when the room grew quiet.

  “Me? I don’t even know if I know how to play.”

  “One way to find out.” Caleb wiggled his eyebrows. “If you dare.”

  She started laughing then, which was something he hadn’t heard from her very often.

  Forty-five minutes later, she’d won her third game and Caleb’s mamm had decided they all needed coffee and dessert. Throughout the game he’d caught Rachel studying him, as if she was trying to figure something out. When he called her on it, she shrugged and turned her attention back to the checkerboard. It wasn’t until they were seated around the table, enjoying apple-crumb cake and sipping decaffeinated coffee, that she admitted what was on her mind.

  “I’d like to go into town tomorrow, to try working at the quilt shop. If that’s okay with everyone.”

  “Of course,” Caleb’s dat said.

  “I think you’ll love working for Katherine.” His mom stood to refill their coffee cups. “And maybe it will help you remember something.”

  “I wasn’t sure how I would get there, though. You only have the two buggies and—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Caleb’s dat said. “You can take the older mare and leave us with Stormy. I don’t have any reason to go to town tomorrow.”

  Which might have aggravated Caleb the day before—his dat just handing off the buggy and mare to Rachel—but not tonight. Tonight he was optimistic. He was still picturing Rachel as a wild horse that needed settling, a lost donkey that needed to be found. Look at her now. She was smiling and thanking his parents, and then looking at him questioningly.

  So he plopped a large forkful of apple-crumb cake into his mouth, sat back and smiled at her. She smiled back, though there was some hesitancy there.

  She would learn to trust him. He was certain of it.

  Then she’d begin to remember, and then she’d go home.

  Wild horse or not, she belonged back with her people. The least he could do would be to help make that happen.

  * * *

  Rachel’s morning wasn’t going so well. The owner of the quilt shop, Katherine, had been kind enough. Amos had spoken with her the Friday before, and she seemed pleased when Rachel showed up at her shop thirty minutes before opening on Monday morning. No, the problem wasn’t her new boss. The problem was that she couldn’t remember a thing about fabric, quilting or running a cash register.

  “Let me help you with that,” Katherine said. Her boss was older, gray-haired and plump. She was also Mennonite, which usually worked out well for Amish employees. She understood their ways and was patient when they needed a day off to help a family member.

  Katherine ran the customer’s credit card through, handed the woman a special ten-percent-off card that she kept on the shelf under the register and said, “Sorry for the trouble.”

  When the Englisch woman had walked out the door, Katherine turned to Rachel and said, “It’s okay. You can’t expect to remember everything right away. I shouldn’t have left you on the register.”

  She was kind enough not to point out that they’d already tried allowing Rachel to cut fabric and that hadn’t gone well at all. How hard could it be to measure and cut a yard of fabric? But it seemed the process was beyond her.

  “I don’t even remember if I used to work in a quilt shop.”

  “It’s a pretty standard register, so if you worked in any shop, you probably used something similar. There are a lot of different types of transactions, though, and it takes most employees a while to master all of them.”

  It didn’t seem to Rachel that there were so many things to master in checking out a customer—cash, credit or debit? But her mind went blank when she tried to remember which buttons to push on the cash register.

  She reached up and rubbed her right temple.

  “Headache?”

  “A little.”

  “Go to the break room and have a cup of tea. After that, you can work on putting together some of the quilting kits. We’re selling a lot of those to Englischers for Christmas gifts.”

  Rachel nodded, but the last thing she wanted to do was work on quilting kits. Katherine had shown her how to assemble them earlier in the morning, but she had trouble reading the pattern instructions and many of the pieces were quite small.

  She wanted this job to work, though, so instead of questioning her next assignment, she went to the break room, made herself a cup of herbal tea and was staring at the employee bulletin board when her co-worker, Melinda, walked up. She was thin and beautiful and impossibly young, probably under twenty.

  “Planning to go on a skiing trip?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re staring a hole in that poster.” Melinda tapped the Swiss Valley Ski poster.
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  “Something about it looks familiar, but I don’t know why.”

  “Want to go up there this weekend?”

  “All the way in Michigan?”

  “Six hours by bus. We leave early in the morning, get there by noon and ski all day. Sometimes we hire a driver and share the cost.”

  “I don’t think I know how to ski.”

  “You’d enjoy it,” Melinda assured her. “And when you get on the skis, it might all come back, just like riding a bicycle.”

  Which was a spectacularly bad example, as Rachel had no idea if she could even ride a bicycle.

  Why couldn’t she remember anything?

  Why did life have to be so hard at every turn?

  She blinked away tears and said, “I’ll think about it.”

  After she rinsed her mug out in the sink, she walked into the back workroom. It was a cheery area with windows along one wall and felt design boards on the other three.

  She walked to the quilt kit bin and picked up a Happy New Year pattern and large Ziploc bag. Then she walked over to the fabric stack, pulled out the bolts of fabric she’d need, carried them to the cutting center and began to measure and cut.

  Twenty minutes later, Katherine came in to check on her.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Gut. I’ve finished one and am starting another.”

  Katherine picked up the Ziploc full of fabric and frowned. “You’re working on the New Year kit?”

  “Ya.”

  “But you’ve used Christmas fabric.”

  “Oh.”

  Katherine sighed as she pulled out the fabric. “We’ll have to put this in our scraps bin now.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry.”

  Her boss looked at her with eyes filled with sympathy, which only made Rachel feel worse. “Maybe you’re pushing too hard. Maybe you need to give this some time.”

  “I like working, though.”

  “I know you do, and we like having you here, but, Rachel... I can’t afford to lose customers because you take ten minutes to check them out. And this fabric? It’s very expensive, and now it’s wasted.”

  “It’s only that I couldn’t remember what batik meant and—”

  Katherine smiled at her and patted her arm. “Why don’t you go on home today? Talk to Ida and John. I think it would be better if we wait, maybe another month or so, and then try again.”

  “You mean I’m fired?”

  “Not fired.” Katherine shook her head so that her gray bob of hair swung back and forth. “Let’s call it an extended leave of absence.”

  But Rachel didn’t want a leave of absence. She wanted things to be normal again. She retrieved her purse from her locker and walked toward the front of the shop. Katherine stopped her at the door and pushed an envelope into her hands. “Your payment for working this morning—and don’t even try to give it back to me.”

  Rachel nodded, muttered “danki” and stuck the envelope into her purse. This was bad. She wanted to be useful. She wanted to earn money to help Ida and John. She wanted to help pay for her food and any future medical bills. She couldn’t just mooch off their family forever.

  Caleb had been studying The Budget and then staring at her for over an hour the night before. She could see in his eyes that he was trying to think of how to return her to where she belonged. She was like a lost envelope with Return to Sender stamped across the front—only, no one knew who her sender was. Everyone was waiting for her to fully recover from the accident, but she wasn’t getting any better.

  Her mood plunged even lower as she climbed into the buggy and pulled out onto the road. At least she remembered how to drive a buggy. She stopped at the light and looked left and that was when she saw the sign for Dr. Jan Michie, Psychologist. Dr. Michie was the person Amos had recommended, the woman she’d spoken to briefly at the hospital. Even Beth had said the woman was a good doctor. Rachel had been clinging to the hope that she would improve on her own.

  She wasn’t improving, though.

  So she tugged on the mare’s reins and pulled into the doctor’s parking lot, set the brake on the buggy and picked up her purse.

  She wasn’t helpless. There were things she could do to hurry her recovery along, and seeing a doctor was one of them. She’d do whatever Dr. Michie suggested, because she would find her lost memories. Then she’d be whole again, she would find her family and life would be exactly as it had been before.

  * * *

  Caleb saw Rachel turn into the doctor’s parking lot. He pulled up beside her as she was getting out of her buggy. Reaching over and opening the passenger door of his buggy, he called out, “Going to the doctor?”

  “Maybe. I mean, ya. I am.”

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then come in out of the cold. Tell me about your morning.”

  Rachel glanced toward the front door of the doctor’s office, turned back to Caleb and finally smiled. “All right. It’s not like I have an appointment.”

  She stepped up into the buggy and shut the door.

  He only had a small heater in the front of the buggy, but it had been running full blast and the interior was reasonably warm.

  “So why are you going to the doctor...if you don’t have an appointment?”

  Rachel cornered herself in the buggy and looked directly at him. Caleb suddenly realized that she was quite different from the two women he had stepped out with. They’d been young girls, unsure of their heart or mind. It had hurt his pride when they’d dropped him for someone else. In truth, it had devastated him and sent his self-confidence into a tailspin, but he could see now that those relationships weren’t meant to be. When he was ready to step out again, and he wasn’t interested at all at the moment, but when he was, it would be with someone like Rachel. Someone more mature, more serious, but still able to laugh at the ups and downs of life.

  She took her time, weighed her words and listened. Had she been this way before her accident, or was it because she was out of her environment?

  Finally, she sighed and glanced back toward the quilt shop. “You know I worked at Katherine’s this morning.”

  “And it made you ill?”

  “Nein.” She smiled at his joke. “It didn’t go very well. I couldn’t quite catch on...”

  “Catch on?”

  “Remember how to do things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Run the register, cut fabric, sew.”

  “You’ve forgotten all of those things?”

  “Apparently.”

  “I’m sorry, Rachel. This must be very hard for you.”

  “It is.” She squeezed her eyes shut and pulled in a deep breath. When she looked at him again, she seemed to have found some inner calm. “I don’t mind not remembering how to sew. I don’t even mind being a terrible employee at the quilting shop. It’s only frustrating to know that I must have been good at something before, but I have no idea what that thing was.”

  He nodded, remembering the time he’d tried working in a nearby furniture factory. They’d been in the middle of a long drought, and his parents had needed the money. It was a terrible idea, and he hadn’t been good at it at all. That—not being good at something—had taught him to appreciate the work that he was able to do well.

  “You’ll find what you’re good at. The quilt shop wasn’t the only place on Bishop Amos’s list.”

  “I would like to find a job that would help me to pay my way.” She scrubbed a hand over her face. “Whatever happened to me—whether it was an accident or something else—has made me realize some things.”

  “Such as?”

  “It’s important to be useful each day, to be able to contribute in some way. I have a feeling that before...that maybe I was dissatisfied a lot, that I wanted more out
of life.” She shook her head, allowing her gaze to slide back toward him. “I guess that might be hard for you to understand. You seem very satisfied living with your parents and working on the farm.”

  “Oh, ya. I am now, but I wasn’t always.” Instead of explaining, he added, “And there are times when I’m restless to try something new. Remember how much I wanted the alpacas?”

  “Seems like you’ve had them longer than a week.”

  “Seems like you’ve been here longer than a week.” In fact, he’d found her in the snow exactly seven days ago. Looking back, that seemed like a different season in his life completely.

  Rachel nodded, her eyes scanning the scene outside the buggy window, across the parking lot to the fields beyond, and then going back to him. “Those first few days, I had the feeling that you wanted to be rid of me.”

  Caleb pulled off his hat and stared at it. Finally, he replaced it on his head and said, “Could be I saw you as an outsider, an intruder of sorts.”

  “Intruder, huh?” She smiled at the thought. “Sounds like a burglar or something.”

  “But I see now how much my mamm and dat like having you around.”

  “And what of you?” She pressed her fingers to her lips, as if she could snatch back the question. “That was inappropriate. I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t, not really. I’m glad you’re here, Rachel. I’ve never had a schweschder—obviously...”

  “Is that how you think of me? As a schweschder?”

  “Not exactly.” He frowned and tapped his thumb against the buggy seat. “Maybe we could try being friends.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “And when I’m being bullheaded or nosing into your business, you could just tell me.”

  “And when I’m being lazy, you could tell me.”

  “Sounds like a plan, as long as you don’t storm off mad, and I don’t grow moody.”