“You do?” I whispered.
“Ya. I do.”
We settled into the call and soon were chatting easily, this time with the focus on her end. Rachel caught me up on life in Lancaster County, and with every word, I found myself longing to be home more and more. Best of all, she and I were laughing and talking and getting along as if our last nightmarish phone call had never happened.
“I’ve been to two weddings this week. And both times I had to sit with the poor girls who weren’t chosen by anyone.”
I sat back in the deck chair, grinning like a fool.
“Gut. I’m happy to hear it. Though I’m surprised Wally Yoder didn’t ask you to go to the table with him.” Wally was a good friend of mine, but I knew he’d had his eye on the beautiful—and taken—Rachel Hoeck for years.
She was quiet for a moment. “Actually, Tyler, he did. So did Angus Fisher. But I told them no, that just because you were away didn’t mean I was available for courting.”
I swallowed hard, surprised at the impact her words had on me. I had never been the jealous type, but something about the thought of those two guys putting the moves on my girl the moment my back was turned made me a little crazy.
“So am I?” she asked, snapping my mind into focus.
“Are you what?”
“Available for courting?”
I took in a deep breath, wishing I could just will her to understand every single step of this complicated and confusing path I had been on.
“The answer to that is no. Definitely, positively no, you are not available for courting.” After a beat, I added, “Unless, of course, you want to be.”
I heard a soft intake of air on the other end of the line—I had caught her by surprise—and then she replied, “No, Tyler. I definitely, positively do not.”
In that moment I wished I could simply fly through the phone, all the way to Pennsylvania, just so I could look into her sparkling blue eyes.
“So what’s going on out there?” she asked. “You sound different. Has something happened?”
I wondered where to start. The last time we talked, I’d told her about the various elements of my quest—the mysterious conflict with Brady, the photography lessons, the word from God that I was to honor others before myself. So I started from there, summarizing all I had seen and done since and explaining how God had been moving in so many ways throughout every circumstance and conversation. I told her what Liz had shared with me the other day, how my mother had spent her years as an Englischer longing to return to the Amish world she’d left behind.
At that Rachel sighed. “Oh, Tyler, I’m so sorry for your mamm—but so glad you found that out. Don’t you see? It would be the same for you too. I just know it would. If you left for good, you would spend the rest of your life regretting it.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t then. It took even more than that to finally open my eyes.” With mounting excitement, I told her about my experiences yesterday, starting with my lesson being postponed and how I’d wanted to use the time to break into my father’s storage unit and find my mother’s photographs. I told her about the busyness of life out here and my search for a quiet place to pray and my time at the coffee shop. I told her about the puppies and that feeling of always being a visitor.
“Then I went for my final photography lesson, and it all just kind of came together for me there.”
“Oh?”
“Ya. First, I realized I was never going to figure out the appeal that picture-taking had for my mother. It’s just not that kind of a process.”
“I could have told you that, even though I’ve never used a camera in my life.”
“I know, I know. But I had to try.”
“I understand.”
“Next, Lark helped me see something important, that every person belongs where they love and are loved.”
“You are loved here, Tyler.”
“I know. But that’s the beauty of it. Because I have love in both places, I can’t lose by living in either one.”
“Oh.” Her tone was hesitant.
I continued quickly, “Not to worry, though, because what I finally came to understand is that the person I most am on the inside—the person God intends me to be—is the Amish Tyler, not the Englisch one. Something happened that gave me a real glimpse of myself in the outside world, of me being the man I would have become had my mother not died. And I realized that I didn’t want to be that person. I want to be me. The Amish me. The me I really am.”
Rachel was quiet for a long moment. “I’m so glad to hear that,” she said finally. “You can’t imagine how glad.”
In her voice, I could hear the weeks of uncertainty begin to melt away. “So what happened to make you realize this at last?”