Free The Calling by Suzanne Woods Fisher

grewused to it, though now and then a whiff of someone sorely in need of a bath and a bar of soap hit her hard, and she turned away by faking a cough. It shamed her, but it was the truth. She wished for hot showers and soft beds for them.
    After everyone found a seat, Sylvia insisted on a word from the Lord. “Jesus gave you this day,” she said. “He didn’t have to do that, but he did. So now we are going to hear his words.” Everyone bowed their heads as she read a few verses from the Sermon on the Mount.
    “Amen!” an older black man shouted out, after she read that the poor would be blessed. “Amen for that blessing, Sister Sylvia! Praise the Lord!”
    Accustomed to the man’s enthusiasm, Sylvia gave a nod to Bethany to start serving the paper plates. She liked to control the portions, so each plate received the same amount of food: two slices of pork, mashed potatoes, green beans, a slice of watermelon. People could have seconds, she said, if they asked.
    Bethany took plates to the table of girls from the Group Home. They looked at her with blank stares and took the plates without even a thank-you. Do you realize how hard these old sisters are working? she wanted to ask them. Do you even care?
    Bethany felt the eyes of someone on her. She turned and was startled by one girl at the end of a table, staring at her. Her fiery red hair was long and tangled, as if she had not combed it at all, and she eyed Bethany with a hard-edged hostility. Angry eyes. Bethany looked back, and even from this distance she could feel the radiating resentment, so fierce and terrible.
    By three o’clock, Bethany was exhausted. The five sisterskept at it, making sure everything was spick-and-span in their careful, deliberate way. Each pot had been scrubbed, rinsed, and returned to the shelf. The kitchen was spotless, just the way it had looked when they arrived. And nothing at all like the kitchen in their own home.

    It was Sunday morning. The summer heat lay heavy over the barn, blending the air with barn smells of horse and cow and hay, along with Sunday smells of soap and starch and brewing coffee. Seated on hard backless benches on one side of the large barn were the men and boys, across from them sat the women and girls.
    As much as Jimmy Fisher tried to keep his mind on the sermon, his gaze swept across the room to a checkerboard of pleated white and black prayer caps. Seated along a row of young women, white shawls and white aprons and crisp black prayer caps to mark their maiden status, with them, and yet somehow apart from them, was Bethany Schrock.
    She sat with her shoulders pulled back, and a look on her face as if she was supremely interested in the minister’s lengthy description of the plagues of Exodus. She appeared utterly pious but Jimmy knew better. His gaze fell to her lap, where she was gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing, small handfuls of apron.
    Bethany Schrock didn’t have the hands of a typical Amish girl, Jimmy noticed, not big, blunt-fingered hands. They were slender, delicate hands. He tried to push those thoughts away, to keep his mind on the suffering of the Israelites, but one thought kept intruding—what was Bethany thinking about that made her hands so tense? What was running through her mind?
    It was unfortunate that Katie Zook happened to be seated next to Bethany. Each time Jimmy chanced a look at Bethany, whose eyes stayed straight ahead, Katie assumed he was making eyes at her and she would start to brazenly blink her eyes rapidly and her lips curled into a pleased smile. His interest in Katie Zook had come and gone like a summer rain burst, but her interest in him was more like a coal miner staking a claim. He would have to give some thought as to how to go about dropping her kindly. Katie was the persistent type, cute but clueless.
    He listened to the chickens cluck and scratch outside the open barn door, to the horses moving around in the straw in their stalls, to the bleats of