Davey's Daughter Read Free Page B

she had all the charms of one of the apple trees behind them as he asked Priscilla questions and listened closely to her replies.
    Just when she was ready to walk away, Lee turned to Sarah and asked how she was. His eyes met hers with so much blue it was like a streak of lightning blinding her for a second before she could see clearly.
    “I’m fine,” she said curtly.
    “You get home okay Saturday night?”
    “Yeah.”
    Defiantly, she met his blue eyes, eyes that seemed to mock her now. She felt as if he knew everything that happened that night between her and Matthew Stoltzfus.
    She felt the warmth rising uncomfortably in her face, and she lowered her eyes and kicked at the loose snow, her composure sliding away in a free fall along with the whirling snow.
    Dat stood comfortably, his hands in his wide trouser pockets, his black coat bunched up above them, his wide black hat protecting his face and shading his eyes as he observed this exchange with seasoned perspective.
    It wasn’t Dat’s way to say anything serious about matters of the heart. That was Mam’s domain, but a small smile played around his lips as he noticed Sarah struggling to regain her air of aloofness.
    So that was how it was with Sarah. Well.
    The remainder of the day she thought of Matthew, his warm brown eyes, the way he had asked if she’d consider being his girl. She thought how it would feel to have finally attained the long awaited goal of being exactly that — Matthew’s girl. Oh, the thought of buying and wrapping a gift for him! She’d dreamt about it for years but knew couldn’t happen this year, but the next one, likely.
    As she mixed the butter and sugar for a batch of peanut butter cookies, she planned what she would buy. When she burned the first sheet of cookies, Mam was not happy, her cheeks a brilliant shade of red, her hair almost crackling with frustration, clucking and fussing, saying she’d never been so on behind with her Christmas baking, and goodness knows she still had nothing for Anna Mae’s baby.
    “Sarah, stop being so dreamy. It upsets me.”
    Sarah watched her mother running around, accomplishing nothing. She told her to calm down — she was acting worse than Mommy Beiler ever had.
    “Humpf.”
    It was a huge insult. Mam esteemed her work ethic far above that of her late mother-in-law’s, but she was used to navigating the surprising waters of mother-daughter relationships, and so she drew her lips to an uncompromising line and remained silent.
    After about a hundred Hershey’s kisses had been pressed into as many peanut butter cookies, Sarah felt uncomfortably warm and nauseous, not to mention completely irritated by Mam’s silence, so she said loudly, “I don’t know what you’re so mad about.”
    Mam burst out laughing, sat down, and slid low in her chair, her feet wearily stretched in front of her. She pushed up her white covering, extracted a steel hairpin from her bun, and scratched her head before replacing it.
    “Huh,” she sighed. “One of these years, believe me, I’m going to skip Christmas altogether. I’ll just sit in a corner somewhere and read a Bible story about the Baby Jesus and let it go at that.”
    She stretched her arms over her head.
    “Levi, get away from there!”
    Mam sat up and leaned over, her eyebrows lowering as Levi tried to make off with yet another cookie.
    This was when Sarah loved Mam best. When she was completely herself — just Malinda, humorous and comfortable and not taking things quite as seriously as usual.
    “These peanut butter cookies make me sick after the chocolate on top gets cold,” Levi said, as wily and slick as any thief trying to convince a judge of his innocence.
    “They do not!” Priscilla retorted.
    The door burst open, and Suzie exploded into the house with her bonnet tied haphazardly over her head scarf, her boots covered with snow, and her coat buttoned crookedly.
    “Hey! The English people’s school bus is stuck on the hill past