The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,2

isn’t easy. Losing a parent is hard enough, but your dad…” His voice faltered. “I mean, he’s just such a special…” Again, he stopped, cleared his throat, and then finally gave up.

“I know,” I whispered into the silence, aching for James as much as for myself. “I know.” Taking a deep breath, I blinked my tears away and forced my voice to sound more upbeat. “So the project’s going well?”

Clearing his throat again, James seemed glad for the change of subject. We chatted for a few minutes, and by the end of our conversation we both had our emotions back under control—until the moment we said goodbye and James added, “Give your dad my love, okay?”

“Will do,” I managed to squeak out before quickly pressing the “End” button. Just because I was feeling weepy myself was no reason to get James going again too.

Wiping my eyes, I sat back down on the needlepoint cushion my mother made when she and Dad first married. They waited twenty-five years for a baby, for me. That was part of the story too—part of the miracle, they said.

“James says hello.”

Dad nodded. He’d probably gathered that from my side of the conversation.

“He has projects and then midterms,” I added. “Otherwise he’d be here.”

Dad nodded again, his eyes still closed. I thought that maybe it was too difficult for him to speak, but then he said, “You look nice today. You’re so pretty with your hair pulled up like that.” His eyelids fluttered as he spoke.

I pursed my lips. All my life, my father had told me how pretty I was, even when I was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a simple ponytail. Even when I was thirteen and in braces, the tallest person in my class at five feet ten inches, including the boys and the teacher, and even when I was fourteen and couldn’t wash my hair for a week because I had broken my arm.

“I think I’ll rest a while,” he said.

“I’ll read to you later.”

“Thank you,” he whispered, his eyes still closed. “For everything.”

He’d done a round of chemo, for me, but then he refused any more, saying seventy-six was a good age to die.

His snow-white hair grew back curly after the treatment. He’d always been handsome, but now he looked like a geriatric angel. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and dabbed at my eyes. He was wrong. Seventy-six was far too young for him to die.

As he slept, a new rattle developed in his breathing.

I carried a wicker basket of wet towels out the back door into the shade of the overgrown yard. Dad bought an automatic washer when I was in high school, but he never felt a dryer was necessary. The sun was warm for a February afternoon, and the towels would dry by nightfall, even in the shadows of towering evergreen, maple, and walnut trees. To my right was the windmill, completely still now due to the breezeless afternoon, and beyond the yard were the hazelnut trees Dad had lovingly tended all of his adult life, although he always called them filberts, the more old-fashioned term.

Regardless of what the trees were called, I had always loved the order of the orchard: the perfect symmetry of the trees planted row by row, the cleared ground, and the comfort of the green canopies in the heat of summer. I sighed. I’d have to sell the orchard—and hire someone in the meantime to prune and mulch and then spray the trees in the spring and harvest the hazelnuts in the fall if it hadn’t sold by then. It was too much work for me to try to do on my own.

I reached into the cloth bag of pins at the end of the line and started hanging the towels.

Dad had stubbornly cared for himself as he battled cancer through the cold and dreary months of winter. I know there were days when he had still tried to care for the orchard too. When Sophie called me at the hospital a few weeks ago to say that Dad could no longer fix his own meals or keep up with the chores, I had taken an official family leave from the clinic where I worked and come right away, knowing I wouldn’t be going home until he passed.

I had a wooden pin in my mouth and a towel in my hands when Sophie’s Subaru turned into our driveway. I dropped both into the basket and started toward her. By the time