Free The Parting by Beverly Lewis

sober. “Will yours?”
    He grinned at her refreshing frankness. Here was a girl who spoke her mind, not caring to wait first to determine his opinion.
    “We Yoders are Old Order through and through,” he stated.
    She nodded and there was a hint of a smile. “Wonderful-good.”
    They stood there looking at each other. Has a girl ever intrigued me so? he wondered.
    When Nellie spoke again, he was suddenly aware of her lilac fragrance. “It was nice of you to drop by, Caleb, with your note.”
    He waited for her response, but she gave no hint of her reply. She merely smiled, turned, and walked away. He watched her head toward the front of the deacon’s house, to the seldom-used formal entrance.
    That’s all?
    Never before had a girl treated him so casually—not rudely, but keeping him at an almost measured distance.
    When Caleb had waited enough time to prevent people from suspecting he and Nellie Mae had been together, he looped back through the yard and onto the porch, aware only of his great curiosity about Nellie.
    Nellie feared her face might be suspiciously rosy as she walked nonchalantly into the house by way of the front door. She retraced her steps in her mind, wondering how she had bumped into Caleb. Was he already outside when she had headed through the porch and down the steps? For the life of her, she could not recall having seen him out there. Had it been an accident, or had he intentionally sought her out? She blushed once more at the thought.
    Warning herself to keep her emotions in check, Nellie looked for Nan and Rhoda and found them in the kitchen, still helping Susannah’s mother and others redd up.
    To think I almost didn’t offer to take out the trash today, she thought with a suppressed laugh.

C HAPTER 8
    The dawning of Monday’s washday was peaceful with Mamma and Rhoda already busying themselves with the laundry. Nellie slipped seven loaves into the belly of the woodstove, wondering why Nan remained in bed at this hour. While her sister slept, Nellie had put her morning to good use making eight pies and ten dozen cookies, mostly chocolate chip.
    For a moment, Nellie thought she felt the rumble of a distant train. Pausing from her work, she realized the rumble was instead the sound of the wringer washing machine in the cold cellar below where she stood. If she had a few minutes today sometime during the usual afternoon lull at the bakery shop, she might ask Mamma to tend the store a short time—not breathing a word to Dat, of course. She needed to slip away for some quietude out in the meadow, near the sugar maples, hoping for a glimpse of a deer, rarer these days than she remembered. No doubt the drought had affected them, too.
    Strange how wild things and humans can live side by side and yet keep such a distance . She contemplated the mystery of that, and as was often the case lately, her mind made the leap to her deceased sister, fond as she had been of God’s creation. Why hadn’t Suzy drawn a line . . . kept herself set apart from the modern world as she’d been taught?
    Nellie shook off the thought. Right or wrong, Suzy had always insisted her friends were wonderful-gut people.
    There are good people right here, sister . . . in the hollow . Nellie shrugged away her opinion and went to check on the cooling cookies. If they were ready to put into her large wicker carrier, she could begin her several trips up the lane to the shop, where she would arrange the day’s baked goods and hang the Open sign.
    “Another day, another dollar,” she muttered, using an expression her father sometimes said in jest. There was more than a grain of truth to the saying.
    When she arrived at her shop with the first basket of cookies, someone was already standing outside, waiting for her to open. The woman turned at her arrival—it was Uncle Joseph’s wife, Aunt Anna. Uncle Bishop, as she and her sisters sometimes referred to the man of God, certainly loved his sweets.
    Anna had come on foot across