Checkers on the Hill by Doris Wilbur

Author:Doris Wilbur
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 979-8-88819-034-0
Publisher: Sunbury Press, Inc.
Published: 2023-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Eli and Hope were becoming good friends. Hope was a gentle, respectful woman who stayed home to care for her two daughters because her husband worked long hours. She was a good homemaker and enjoyed her job caring for their girls, keeping house, and cooking delicious meals for them. Eli made a decent salary, so Hope did not need or want to work.

Although she wasn’t Amish, she often shared yummy Amish food with us. We would hear a knock at the door, and one of her daughters would deliver a jar of chow-chow or a pan of Amish breakfast casserole to us. Another time, we got some Shoofly pie, a delicious molasses dessert. I was washing a jar that had held some of her chicken corn soup. I dried it off and asked my son, Lucas, to take the jar across the hall to her.

“Now, be sure and hand it right back to Hope, then say, ‘thank you very much. We really liked it,’” I instructed him. Lucas was younger than our daughter, but I thought it was an easy task for him to do. The kids went back and forth between our apartments to play all the time. He went out the door to deliver it, and I watched through the peephole to make sure he was at their door before I went to finish up the dishes. He returned a few minutes later, and I asked him if he had handed her the jar and remembered to say, “thank you very much. We loved the soup.”

He said, “Yes, Mommy, I did,” and went back to his room. About ten minutes later, there was a knock on my door. I opened it to see Hope standing there in her bathrobe. She had a towel wrapped around her hair and a serious look on her face.

“Did Lucas say anything to you when he came back?” she asked.

“No. Why? Is something wrong?”

Then she started laughing as she told me what had happened. She said Lucas knocked on the apartment door, and she had called back, “I’m busy right now.” She had left the bathroom door ajar slightly to listen for her daughters, and before she knew what was happening, Lucas was beside her in the bathroom, where she was stark naked, taking a bath. She quickly tried to hide under the bubbles while Lucas handed her the jar and said, “Mommy told me to say thank you.”

“Oh my God, Hope, I didn’t know he would do something like that. I’m so sorry. I’ve never let him see me naked like that or come into the bathroom when I’m using it,” I said, covering my mouth and grimacing.

Hope patted my arm. “It’s all right, Josey. My girls let him in, and it was a perfectly innocent mistake. I thought you would like to know, just in case he told you I was running around naked in my apartment.” She was laughing loudly now, and I started laughing right along with her.

“It must have been comical to see me scrambling to cover up with those bubbles.

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