Read Online The River by Beverly Lewis - Free Book Online

the familiar wagon. She wondered whose turn it was to host themeeting—not that she’d be going. Ruth, however, still seemed all right with the idea, despite Tilly’s refusal.
    “What do I care?” she murmured, recalling the last time she’d attended a Preaching service. So long ago.
    A quarter mile up the road, old Bishop Isaac’s place came into view. Tilly saw what looked like a carpentry shop built back behind the farmhouse. “When did this happen?” She found it interesting that the man of God had to supplement his farming income. Farming was certainly the preferred way to make a living, and anything else could be frowned on. Yet she surely wasn’t one to judge, sitting there driving her fancy car.
    Tilly pressed the accelerator and drove toward Josie’s parents’ sprawling acreage. She wished Josie hadn’t been so distant to her earlier, as though she were afraid to talk to Tilly. Or worse, harboring resentment.
    She has no idea what life was like for me when I left home, thought Tilly. None at all.
    She recalled that Ruth had written to tell her when Josie’s first child was born, six years ago. A son whom she and Sam had named Sammy. Then, two years later, a baby girl, Johanna.
    Yawning, Tilly glanced in her rearview mirror. She couldn’t let Josie’s reaction to her spoil her time exploring Eden Valley. No, she must choose to think back on their friendlier days and years, when they’d always shared their thoughts with each other . . . and their secrets, too. It would do her no good to ponder the loss of such a good friend. That was the last thing Tilly needed this weekend.
    Besides, a devout Amish girl like Josie might not have been too thrilled to receive my letters.
    Tilly refused to let her emotions take over. She was killing time, nothing more, while Ruthie and Mamm were gettingcaught up on the years they’d missed. Ruth sure doesn’t need me breathing down her neck .
    She slowed the car to a crawl when she recognized her Lantz grandparents’ homestead just ahead. She assumed that by now her widowed grandmother had moved into one of the Dawdi Haus additions at a son or daughter’s farmhouse. Hadn’t Ruth mentioned as much once? Tilly sighed. Her uncertainty about such things was the price she’d paid for not staying in touch.
    Nonetheless, there stood the splendid white house with its black front door and trim, a matching white two-story barn off to the left. Her father’s mother, Mammi Lantz, would sometimes have Tilly stay over, and she’d loved sleeping in the small spare bedroom, where an old feather mattress became her cozy nest for the night. Tilly’s father insisted that Mammi Lantz went out of her way to spoil her; however, his saying it didn’t faze her grandmother one iota. “I wish I’d had a little girl to love ,” Mammi Lantz would whisper to Tilly as she tucked her in beneath handmade quilts that sometimes smelled of mothballs.
    Her grandmother’s remark had lingered in Tilly’s mind all these years, though Tilly wondered now why Mammi Lantz, who was so well loved by her four sons, including Tilly’s own father, felt such a loss. Was Mammi disappointed—even pained—by the absence of a daughter?
    Back when she was a little girl, when Tilly was sad and feeling lonely and lying in her own bed at home, she sometimes soothed herself to sleep by imagining her grandmother’s cool hand lightly on hers, or the wonderful-good feather bed not so far away.
    But as Tilly grew older, times with Mammi Lantz grew less frequent—she had to be around “to help out at her own home,” Daed often said. And so it was with many of the joys of Tilly’s life as duty took precedence over all else . . . even people.
    Maybe Daed never realized how fond I was of Mammi, Tilly thought now, though she wouldn’t have believed it back then. With her return to her parents’ home imminent, she was doing her best to think well of Daed, hoping a change in perspective might ease the coming