“I can’t reveal her identity. She’s a minor, so a meeting between you will be up to her and her father. But I’ll let them know.”
She nods, but I see her mind working through all the possibilities. “There is a chance Willis and I could adopt and raise Noah’s daughter? Is that what you’re telling me, Kate Burkholder?”
I nod. “It’ll probably have to go through the court system,” I tell her. “But I thought you’d want to know it’s an option.”
She glances past me; her eyes widen slightly. I glance over my shoulder to see Willis standing in the kitchen doorway a few feet away. Neither of us heard him approach. But I can tell by the look in his eyes he heard every word.
Without speaking, without making eye contact with me or his wife, he brushes past us and walks into the kitchen. For an instant, I think he’s going to keep going and walk right past us, through the mudroom and back outside. Instead, he stops at the table, sets his palms against it, leans heavily, and lowers his head.
Miriam’s eyes flick nervously to me, then to her husband. Grabbing the kitchen towel, she uses it to dry hands that are already perfectly dry. “Sitz dich anne un bleib e weil,” she says to her husband. Sit yourself down and stay a while.
Staring straight ahead, Willis pulls out a chair and sinks into it. “En kins-kind,” he whispers. A grandchild.
“You heard?” Miriam asks him.
“My hearing is just fine.” When he raises his head and looks at his wife, I see tears in his eyes. “It’s been a long time since we had a little one in this house. Not since Noah.”
“Well, I’m not so old that I can’t manage a baby,” Miriam huffs, but she’s crying, too. “A mother never forgets.”
“A father, too,” he whispers.
Realizing this is a private moment that I’m no longer a part of, I pull the social worker’s card from my pocket and place it on the table in front of Willis.
*
Back in the Explorer, I take a moment to calm my own emotions, trying in vain not to examine them too closely. In that instant, I’m keenly aware of my age. The passage of time. How easily the things we cherish can slip away. No matter how unflagging my denial of its existence, I know there is a silent clock ticking inside me. A clock that sets its own pace, one that cannot be sped up or slowed down or stopped.
Another deep breath and I’m steady enough to call Tomasetti.
“I hope you’re not too far away,” he says without preamble.
“You miss me that desperately, huh?”
“That, and I just broke the seal on that Cabernet you’ve been saving.”
I laugh, but my voice is thick with emotion. I don’t want him to know that I’m a little too caught up in this Baby Doe case. That I’m probably thinking a little too hard about my own life.
“Kate?”
Feeling like an idiot, I choke out a sound that betrays the tears waiting at the gate. “I’m leaving the Fisher place now.”
“Everything okay?”
“I think the grandparents are going to adopt Baby Doe,” I tell him.
“Good for them.” His voice is warm. “Good for everyone involved.” He falls silent and then asks, “So, are you coming home?”
Home.
I like the way the word rolls off his tongue. The warm impression it leaves in my chest. “John Tomasetti,” I whisper, “You can count on it.”
Read on for an excerpt from
Linda Castillo’s new novel,
After the Storm,
available July 2015
CHAPTER 1
Present day
I was eight years old when I learned there were consequences for associating with the English. Consequences that were invariably negative and imposed by well-meaning Amish parents bent on upholding the rules set forth by our Anabaptist forefathers nearly three hundred years ago. In my case, this particular life lesson transpired at the horse auction near Millersburg and involved a twelve-year-old English boy and the Appaloosa gelding he was trying to sell. Add me to the mix, and it was a dangerous concoction that ended with me taking a fall and my father’s realization that I saw the concept of rules in a completely different light—and I possessed an inherent inability to follow them.
I never forgot the lesson I learned that day or how much it hurt my eight-year-old heart, which, even at that tender age, was already raging against the unfairness of the Ordnung and all of those who would judge me for my transgressions. But the lessons of my formative years didn’t keep me from breaking the same rules time and time again, defying even the most fundamental of Amish tenets. By the time I entered my teens, just about everyone had realized I couldn’t conform and, worse, that I didn’t fit in, both of which are required of a member of the Amish community.
Now, at the age of thirty-three, I can’t quite reconcile myself to the fact that I’m still trying to please those who will never approve and failing as miserably as I did when I was an inept and insecure fifteen-year-old girl.