Free Fearless Hope: A Novel by Serena B. Miller Page B

code. In fact, he was beginning to regret ever having looked up from his typewriter. This could be a mistake. The woman was a little too attractive for comfort. Having her working around his house could be distracting.
    “My . . . wife is presently living in Manhattan,” he explained. It was close enough.
    “She does not live with you?” There was suspicion in the woman’s voice.
    “She has a job there,” he answered.
    “He is writing a book.” Violet beamed like a proud mother. “It is very good.”
    The woman was uninterested in his writing. She had gotten stuck on the fact that his “wife” was living in another state.
    “Why does she not live here with you?”
    “I enjoy living here, and she does not.” Slightly annoyed that he was expected to explain anything about his living arrangements at all, he was brief. “We’ve worked out a temporary compromise.”
    He had not expected to get the third degree. That was one of the disadvantages he was discovering about living in a small community. People actually seemed to think that they had a right to information about one another’s lives.
    “My name is Hope Schrock. I will clean the house for you.”Hope sounded as though she were bestowing a favor upon him. “You will be pleased.”
    Her confidence was amusing. This was a woman who seemed to know her own worth.
    “Let’s start out with a couple hours a day,” he said. “We could try it for a week or two and see how things work out.”
    “I can bring my children?”
    “If you can wash the dishes and do a little laundry and sweeping with your kids around, it doesn’t matter to me. How much do you charge?”
    She named an hourly wage that he thought ridiculously low, to which he readily agreed. The relief he saw on her face transformed her. She smiled and her smile lit up the room. The woman even had a dimple in her right cheek. “You will not be sorry,” she said. “I am a gut worker.”
    “I’m sure you are.” He wanted to get back to the scene he had been writing before it grew stale. He rolled a new piece of paper into the typewriter.
    “I can start tomorrow?” She sounded hopeful.
    “Sure. That’s fine, whatever you want to do.” He wrote out the address on a piece of paper. “Here’s where I live.”
    She glanced at it and turned pale. “Are you sure this is where you live?”
    “Of course I’m sure.” He frowned, wondering what the problem was. “Why do you ask?”
    “Because that was my parents’ home for many years. I grew up there. I did not know it had been sold.”
    “I’ve not lived there long,” he said. “The back door is unlocked whenever you want to go over.”
    “ Ja ,” she said. “The lock never worked too gut on that door anyway.”
    He did not hear her. He had already gone back in time to 1942 and didn’t notice when she left the store. He barely registeredthe fact that Violet had brought a fresh pot of Earl Grey to the table.
    “I didn’t realize you’d bought Henry and Rose’s place,” she said. “You might want to know how they lost it, if Hope is going to be working there—it was a terrible thing in this community.”
    He looked up from the typewriter. “I’m listening.”
    “Henry was one of the finest farmers around, and that’s saying something. Then an Englisch friend took him to a horse race over near Columbus. Henry always loved horses. The track also had a casino attached. Henry started disappearing for days at a time. Rose didn’t know what to do. She thought he was having an affair, and was so ashamed, she didn’t tell anyone for a long time. She didn’t know he’d gotten addicted to gambling. No one figured it out until he was in such deep debt he lost everything—including the farm. It caused quite a stir around here.”
    “It’s hard to imagine an Amish man getting addicted to something like that.”
    “An Amish man can get into the same trouble anyone else can.” She walked back to her stool at the cash register.