Free The Tempted Soul by Adina Senft Page A

going straight to the second. “I’ll talk to a counselor at the correspondence school. They’ll know.”
    “And what about Sarah Grohl?” Carrie persisted. “Does she know about your plans?”
    “No.” The word sounded as though it had been dragged out of him against his will.
    “Then you have her to think of as well,” Emma said. “Do you really want to deceive an innocent girl like that? Because you will have to give her up if you go ahead with this.”
    “Maybe she’ll come with me.”
    “And maybe it isn’t fair to ask that of her. While you’re going to college and working your way through, what is she going to do with her eighth-grade education? Stay alone in your one-room apartment and mend your socks?”
    Silence hung in the shadows of the back of the buggy, which rocked as Carrie turned into the lane of the Stolzfus farm. She drew Jimsy to a halt in front of the path under the trees that led to the Daadi Haus.
    Emma climbed down. “ Gut Nacht , Alvin. I pray God will help you with your choice. Denki , Carrie. Tell Melvin we’re all anxious to hear about his trip to Philadelphia.”
    Carrie waited until the lamp in the sitting-room window dimmed and brightened to signify that Emma was safely inside, and then she turned the buggy. Alvin climbed into the front as she headed for the road.
    “I’m not a fool,” he muttered. “I’m just not cut out to be Amish.”
    “We all have to make our own decisions,” Carrie said. “But it’s when we involve other people in the actions we take that it gets dangerous.”
    “Correspondence courses never hurt anybody.”
    “No, probably not. But the attitude behind them, the deception, can hurt any number of people. Emma, your parents, Sarah. Think of them and how your unwillingness and disobedience can hurt them.”
    He propped his elbows on his knees and let his hands dangle between them, head down. Carrie knew when to plant a word in season, and when to let it rest in the soil. She made up her mind to enjoy the silence of the evening for the rest of the ride.
    Alvin didn’t speak again until she drew level with the lane to the Esch place. “Just drop me here,” he said. “If they hear a buggy, everyone will come out to see who it is, and Mamm will have a hundred questions.”
    Giving a brother a ride didn’t seem to Carrie worthy of a hundred questions, but she brought Jimsy to a halt anyway. “ Gut Nacht , Alvin.”
    He mumbled something and jogged up the lane, keeping to the grass on the wayside so his boots didn’t crunch in the gravel. Carrie shook her head and started Jimsy for home.
    Choices.
    In the end, weren’t they what created a happy life or a miserable one? And the problem with being sixteen was that sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference.

Chapter 7
    T he next day, Joshua arrived after lunch, put away his horse, and got to work painting the equipment shed like the very model of a hired man. It was as though last night’s brush-off of poor Emma had never happened…or since it had, he wasn’t allowing it to bother him.
    Carrie had often thought how lucky she was to be Melvin’s wife. A man like Joshua just proved how right she was to feel that way. And now with Melvin coming home tonight, she wanted everything in the house to be perfect. She’d been up cleaning since six a.m. The house’s inside sparkled, at least. There wasn’t much she could do about its shabby exterior, but if Joshua pitched in to help them, maybe they’d get it painted before the rain started.
    At five, she put a casserole in the oven, closed the chickens into their coop for the night, and hitched up Jimsy. She was leading him out of the barn door when Joshua came around the corner with a bucket of scraping tools and brushes.
    “Where are you off to? I was hoping we could pick some apples.”
    “Melvin and your cousins will be getting into the bus station at quarter to six. I’m going to meet them.”
    “That’s right. I forgot they were coming