Love in Unlikely Places by Linda Byler

Author:Linda Byler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680996371
Publisher: Good Books
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

WHAT WAS THERE TO SAY? EMMA THOUGHT. WE CAN PLAN AND DREAM, but who is to know what God’s plans are? Dena was so young and so brilliant, the world at her fingertips. Why burst her self-imposed bubble of overconfidence?

Only once was a person fifteen, perched on the high diving board before springing off and plunging into the frigid water called “rumschpringa.” How to explain that word to Dena? Running around. It was, literally, that. You ran around in buggies to different homes, met single boys, you were introduced to dozens of girls you had never met before. Girls that were dressed in ways your mother would never allow, gorgeous girls who were so much prettier than yourself. You ran to the bathroom with a friend and tugged at your cape, replaced a few straight pins to make it all look a bit more like theirs. You turned your head this way and that, hating the way your hair was rolled all wrong, the way your covering looked limp and outdated. You longed for shoes with four-inch heels and a big white purse like that other girl’s, the small black purse you owned suddenly seeming hopelessly old-fashioned. The purse had been chosen under your mother’s conservative influence, and for the first time ever, you felt a sharp dislike of your mother. She was too bossy, too opinionated, and it was time she realized a few things about you.

You saw the ones who were popular, the ones who received the glances from the handsome boys. After that, you were crosshatched with discontent. It sprouted from your face in the form of red pustules that inflamed your low sense of worth, and you existed in this miserable bog until you chose to quit wallowing in the self-inflicted sorrow and get on with your life.

Rumschpringa wasn’t that way for everyone, of course, but it had been for Emma. After doing it for ten years, all that angst seemed laughable, really, but those early years had been achingly traumatic.

Here she was, long past the time when most young men would consider her as a wife. She had seen the fruits of comparing one love to another, had been duly chastened by God during her stay in North Carolina.

Things had simply not worked out, she told herself, half-listening to the ongoing chatter surrounding her as she gazed unseeingly out of the kitchen window.

The heat was becoming unbearable, the kitchen like a steam bath, the humidity thick and uncomfortable, waves of heat sucking the small valance against the screen and blowing it inward. She thought of the central air unit whirring against the side of the house in North Carolina, the cold air blown through vents along the wall, the epitome of comfort on a day such as this.

“So, what are you going to do this fall?” Esther was asking as she brought empty lemonade glasses to the sink.

“You know, I have no idea. I am . . . was sick of my teaching job, but now that I failed at being a nanny, I might reconsider.

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