An Amish Christmas

187 Pages·2009·0.83 MB·English

by  Keller Cynthia

An Amish Christmas is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Cynthia Steckel
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Frontispiece art: © 2010 iStockphoto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keller, Cynthia.
An Amish Christmas : a novel / Cynthia Keller.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-34552380-8
1. Amish—Fiction. 2. Christmas stories. I. Title.
PS3572.I263A83 2010
813′.54—dc22 2010015471
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.1
To Mark, Jenna,
and Carly
for whom I am grateful each and every day
And
for Jean Katz
we battle the darkness of sorrow
with the brilliant light of loving memory
Acknowledgments
It is a lucky writer who has the good fortune to have colleagues who are
also friends. I have known and collaborated on many projects with my
agent, Victoria Skurnick, for over two decades. She is supremely
generous in deed and spirit, fantastically smart, and the most
kindhearted person I know. She can also make me laugh until I cry, one
of my favorite qualities in a person. In good times, she is the first to
applaud me, and in bad, the first to extend a helping hand. It is a true
privilege to call her my friend.
A special thank-you goes to Sharon Fantera, who is the godmother of
this book and without whom it would not exist.
My editor, Linda Marrow, has been fantastic in every way, from her
early support to her encouragement and wise suggestions. She is all you
could want in an editor—plus, we had fun. I am thrilled and grateful
that I had this opportunity to work with her.
I hope my husband and children know how touched I have been by
their tireless cheerleading and their desire to help in whatever way I
asked. Sharing this experience with you three has made it that much
more meaningful. I love you with all my heart.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
About the Author
Chapter 1
“You’re looking a little pathetic there, Mom.”
As her daughter, Lizzie, entered the kitchen, the words startled Meg
from her reverie. Leaning on both elbows at the kitchen’s butcher-block
island, she’d been staring, unseeing, at the large tray of untouched
cookies before her. She reached up to remove the tall witch’s hat she’d
been wearing for the past two hours, and set it down beside the tray.
“They’re such cute cookies, aren’t they?” Meg asked her daughter in a
wistful voice. “Not one trick-or-treater this year. I can’t believe it.”
Lizzie, her laptop computer tucked under one arm, paused to stare at
her mother’s handiwork. “Dude, how long did it take you to make all
these? They’re insane.”
“Don’t call me ‘dude,’ ” Meg responded automatically. “I thought it
would be fun to try something different. It wasn’t a big deal.”
She had no intention of confessing to her fifteen-year-old how long the
process had taken. After finally locating the correct chocolate cookies—
the ones with the hollow centers—she had used icing to “glue” chocolate
Kisses, points up, into the middles, then she’d painstakingly drawn
hatbands and bows with a tiny tube of red icing. The result was rows
and rows of miniature witch hats. Adorable. They would end up being
tossed into the bottomless pits that were the stomachs of her thirteen-
year-old son, Will, and his friends.
“Honestly, why do you bother?” Lizzie’s muffled voice came from
inside their walk-in pantry closet. Meg knew her daughter was grabbing
her favorite evening snack, two Pop-Tarts that she would eat right out of
the foil package. “No one cares. It’s stupid.”
Meg quietly sighed. Maybe it was stupid to hang the tissue ghosts from
the trees in their front yard. To carve the jack-o’-lantern that was the
centerpiece of the arrangement on the front steps, with hay, gourds,
stuffed scarecrow, and all. Okay, so Lizzie and Will were too old for the
giant figures of witches and goblins that she’d taped on the windows.
Lizzie was at some in-between stage, too cool to trick-or-treat but
probably looking forward to next year, when some of the kids would
have driver’s licenses. Meg anticipated there would be parties at
different houses, no doubt with alcohol involved; she wasn’t looking
forward to that phase. Will had also declined going from house to house
this year, preferring to goof around with his buddies on someone’s
driveway basketball court. But she’d thought Sam, her nine-year-old,
might still have gotten a kick out of her decorations. Wrong. He never
appeared to notice them, and he’d barely made it through a half hour of
ringing doorbells before declaring he’d had enough of this holiday. What
on earth had happened to Halloween being so much crazy fun, the way
it was when she was a child? Didn’t kids know how to enjoy a holiday
anymore? Besides, she was cutting back on the fuss; in the past, she
would have spent hours baking cookies for trick-or-treaters. This year
she had simply combined premade ingredients.
Lizzie, armed with her snack, left the room as the jarring noise of the
garage door opening announced that Meg’s husband was home. She
watched James enter and set down his briefcase in the mudroom before
coming toward her. He looked exhausted. As the top in-house legal
counsel to a large software corporation, he more than earned his salary.
Somehow he managed to withstand endless pressure, maintain constant
accessibility, and coolly handle one crisis after another. And those were
only a few of his job requirements, it seemed to her.
Pulling off his suit jacket, he gave Meg a perfunctory kiss on the
cheek.
“Happy Halloween,” Meg said brightly.
“Ummm.” His attention was already on the day’s mail, which he
retrieved from its customary spot on one of the counters. He was
frowning as he flipped through the envelopes.
“Something wrong?”
“Too many bills, Meg.” He sounded angry. “Too many bills. It’s got to
stop.”
She didn’t reply. In eighteen years of marriage, James had rarely
complained about their bills. Sure, he wasn’t thrilled with paying private
school tuition for three children, but it was something he and Meg both
wanted to do. Beyond that, it was understood between them and even
among their friends that his wife was the saver and he was the spender.
Meg had always understood that things were important to her
husband. It was he who purchased the designer suits, their fancy
watches, her expensive jewelry. It was he who booked the first-class
vacations. He was the one, in fact, who chose this enormous house. Even
with three children, Meg had no idea why they needed five thousand
square feet in one of the most expensive sections of Charlotte.
It was clear that growing up with very little had left a psychological
scar on James that he tried to cover up with material trappings. She
didn’t like it, but she understood. That was what he needed to feel
comfortable. He didn’t brag or rub his success in anyone’s face. Still, it
was as if he had to have more of everything just to feel he was level with
everyone else.
Recently, though, he seemed to have undergone a change in thinking.
He had started complaining regularly about everything she and the
children spent.
“Are you hungry?” Meg moved to open the refrigerator door.
He slapped the mail back down on the counter. “I mean it! The
spending has to stop. We need to batten down the hatches.”
She turned back to him. “You’re right,” she said soothingly. “We will
—the hatches, I mean, and the battening. Now, can I get you something
to eat?”
“I don’t want anything,” he snapped. “I’ll be in my study.”
Meg stared after him. Aside from his sudden financial prudence, he
had been uncharacteristically irritable for a while now. And it had been
getting worse, she realized, not better. She heard the door to his study
slam shut. James was typically calm, even in a crisis. Especially in a
crisis, she amended. That was one of the things she loved about him.
They met as sophomores at the University of Illinois in a nineteenth-
century American history class. Meg happened to sit next to him one day
early in the semester. When he began to juggle a pen, an assignment
pad, and an empty soda can, it made her laugh. She grew more