Sure enough, he had responded. His message was brief and to the point and exactly what I wanted to hear.
Great idea on the container garden! Put the supplies on the card. Don’t work too hard.
Smiling, I shut down the computer and then headed out to the backyard, Frisco yapping excitedly at my heels. I was happy to find work gloves, hedge trimmers, and a spade in the garden shed.
Then I got to work, thankful to have something constructive to do at last.
By the time the sun was setting, I had the remains of the hedge in neat piles on the patio. I had dug out two of the four stumps, which meant I could start on the containers the next afternoon. Brady came outside to see what I’d accomplished, and then I showed him the plans I had found on the Internet. I was relieved when he told me the boxes looked very much like what Liz had described to our dad when she first mentioned the idea.
While a frozen lasagna baked in the oven, Brady helped me put the pieces of the hedge into big yard waste bags. I liked working side by side with him, even for just a few minutes. When we were done, he said a yard waste truck followed the garbage truck on Friday mornings, which would be tomorrow. We pulled the eight bags out to the curb and then went inside to eat.
After dinner, Brady brought his laptop into the family room to work on his paper. I asked him if there was anything I could do to help.
“Not unless you know what MLA is.”
“Should I?”
He just laughed, but it was void of mirth.
I was beginning to see a pattern with him. Whenever a conversation veered toward me as a person or the life I had known as an Amish man, his tone took on a condescending edge. Brady had never been this way around me before. Prior to this, he had always seemed interested, maybe even intrigued, by the kind of life I lived as a Plain man. But not anymore.
“What is MLA?” I pressed.
“It’s the format I have to follow for writing this paper. They use it in college. Forget I asked.”
He flipped open his laptop, letting me know he expected no further help from me. Just as I had felt God’s prompting that morning at breakfast, I sensed I should not let this conversation drop.
I went into Dad’s study, searched for “MLA,” and within a few minutes found an easy-to-follow example of a research paper written in the Modern Language Association’s standards. I printed out the example to take back to the family room, and as I passed my father’s bookshelves, I grabbed the pictorial guide to Germany to look at while Brady worked.
Back in the family room, I placed the example on the couch next to him. He glanced down at it.
“Hey!” He picked up the pages. “Where did you get this?”
“Internet,” I said as nonchalantly as I could as I sat back down on the other couch.
He cracked a smile, the first genuine one I had seen in what seemed like hours on hours. “It’s a better example than what my teacher gave me. Way better.” He looked up at me. “Thanks.”
“Sure. Anything else I can do?”
“Maybe you could read it over when I’m done?”
“Be happy to.”
Brady slipped white ear buds into his ears and disappeared for all intents and purposes. I didn’t know how he could write a research paper while listening to music on his computer, but it seemed to work for him.
Settling into a wide leather easy chair, I opened the book on Germany. The first page nearly stole the breath right out of my lungs.
The inside cover had been signed to my dad by its giver.
To my dearest Duke,
So we will always remember the sweet years of our just-new marriage!
Love always,
Your Sadie
I turned the page, and the emotional tug I was feeling intensified. My mother had not only given the book to my dad, but she had written little notes on many of the photographs inside, in a curly, swirly script that begged to be touched.
On a full-page photo of a verdant green snapshot in the Black Forest, she’d written: “Remember the picnic we had at that park in Triberg? And how it rained? You carried me to the car so my new shoes wouldn’t get muddy.”
On a photo of a sparkling snow scene in Garmisch-Partenkirchen: “I told you I couldn’t ski! Ha!”
On a photo of a cobbled street in Berchtesgaden: “Do you remember eating ice cream on this street? And then I said I wanted to go into that little children’s clothing store so I could buy some lederhosen in case it was a boy. That’s how I told you we were going to have a baby. You nearly fainted in the street. And we did have a boy! We should have gone into the store and bought the lederhosen.”
Page after page, message after message.
When I felt tears pooling in my eyes, I rose from the couch to take the book upstairs to my bedroom.
I would read the rest of it when I was alone.
FIFTEEN