Christmas at Rose Hill Farm Read online

  Jonah lifted his dark eyebrows, crossed his arms over his chest. “I only wanted to identify the rose so we could propagate it and add it to our inventory. That’s all.”

  When Billy saw the hesitation on Jonah’s face, he added, “A rose like this should be shared. You just need to do it the right way. Keep it quiet until I can identify it.”

  Jonah glanced at Bess. “Maybe I should run this by the bishop.”

  “Who’s the bishop now?”

  “Same one,” Bess said quietly. “Caleb Zook.”

  Billy winced. Same one as when he left, she meant. His last conversation with the bishop had been a painful one. He cast a glance at Bess. “How’s Maggie?”

  “She’s fine. Hasn’t changed a bit.”

  Jonah added, “I’m sure she’d like to see you.”

  Billy stiffened up. “I’ve got to get back to work.” He pulled his camera out of his backpack. He ripped open the foil wrapper of a new roll of film and inserted it into the camera, then rolled the film into place. He shot pictures from every angle, used up the entire roll of thirty-six pictures, took out another new roll, and took thirty-six more. As he photographed the rose, Jonah and Bess moved away to let him work uninterrupted. He set down the camera and picked up his sketch pad to scribble down some characteristics he’d noted, to study it further back at College Station. By this time Jonah had quietly excused himself and left the greenhouse. Bess remained, and he wished she would leave him alone.

  He wished everyone would just leave him alone.

  Bess studied Billy awhile as he stood in front of the rose. Clenched jaw, arms crossed over his chest, staring at the rose as if it were about to sprout wings and fly away. She wondered how many miles he’d drifted over the last few years, how many roses he’d rustled during his exile, how long it would take him to lose that distance he maintained so carefully. Once or twice, she saw a crack in it, but then he would roll up like a possum.

  She tried to think of something to say to Billy, but couldn’t. Being so close to him was making it hard to speak. She watched him photograph the rose, captivated by the sight he made as he leaned to the task. How wide his shoulders, how spare his movements, how capable his muscles. She watched him walk around the workbench to peer at the rose from different angles, noticing for the first time in her life how much narrower a man’s hips were than a woman’s, how powerful a man’s hands could be, how beguiling. Her eyes were drawn to those hands, wider than she remembered, and certainly far stronger.

  He put down his camera and took a sketch pad out of his backpack, paused to study the rose, then began to sketch it. As he concentrated, she was able to get a leisurely gander at his face. It was long and lean, like the rest of him. His mouth was straight and firm, unsmiling. With his chin tilted, his jaw had the crisp angle of a boomerang. His lips were slightly parted as he squinted skyward, his eyelashes seemed long as the corn stubble, sooty, throwing spiky shadows across his cheek.

  She used to love the crinkles at the sides of his eyes, as if he couldn’t help but smile, even if it were just in his eyes. So far, he kept his hat brim pulled low as if to protect any secret she might read in his eyes. He was working hard to keep expression out of those eyes. Same with his voice; it was respectful to her father and Lainey, but flat. And with her, slightly irritated.

  Bess realized she’d been holding her breath as he made his way around the rose, photographing it at different angles, and so she exhaled, clasping her hands together. “A customer asked me a question awhile ago and I wasn’t sure I gave her the correct answer.” Her voice shook, then steadied. “She wanted to know if a China rose was an heirloom or a modern rose.”

  He didn’t say anything, and Bess wondered if he’d heard. She sidled a little closer to him. “I told her that modern roses came from China roses,” she said, raising her voice. “I think that was the right answer.”

  Billy froze. He tilted his head at her like a barn owl, then shook it as if he were very sorry for her, and she had to bite her lip to keep from grinning. How many times had he given her that same look when she was just learning about roses? More times than she could count.

  “China roses were the first significant hybrids,” he proceeded to inform her in his best lecturing tone. “Europeans crossbred their roses with China roses and were able to get repeat bloomers. Before that, roses bloomed only once a year. But repeat blooming wasn’t the only reason they were hybridized. The Europeans hadn’t seen the bright crimson color before. In nature, true red is a rare color to find in flowering plants, even among roses.”

  Lecture over, he turned his attention back to his work and she searched her mind for something else. Anything to keep him talking.

  “So the Chinese loved roses before the Europeans did?”

  “Before?” He hesitated. “Not sure about that. The world’s oldest roses go back thousands and thousands of years. And loved is the wrong word. The Romans used the petals as confetti. The Chinese used the roses for cures and remedies. Rosehips are a source of Vitamin C.”

  Bess didn’t mind hearing him tell her facts she already knew—she was that eager to hear his voice.

  “The Chinese fed their children rosehip tea long before anyone else did. But they didn’t have the same admiration for rose flowers as the Europeans did. European royalty used roses as legal tender.”

  She nearly sighed in admiration. She wondered how a man could know so much.

  Then, suddenly, as if Billy realized he was slipping back into an old, comfortable role with Bess, a coldness came over him. “Look, I’m not here to give you a lesson in basic rose tending,” he said brusquely. “Unless you know something about this rose, I need to concentrate.”

  Bess blinked and took a step back as if she’d been slapped. Her cheeks burned and she tried to will them to cool. She busied herself with deadheading some of the flowering roses. Billy had certainly changed in more ways than the obvious physical ones. He had hardened into manhood. Yet he was stunted somehow, Bess thought. Like a crop that had suffered an unexpected frost.

  She watched his head, hat firmly in place, bent over the potted rose and its deep green leaves, its one lone rosebud. Unless you know something about this rose, he’d said . . . and she was suddenly transported to another time.

  ———

  Mid-November 1969, a crisp autumn afternoon. Billy was peering at a leafless rosebush sitting on newspaper on the kitchen table at Rose Hill Farm. “What’s so special about this rose?”

  Mammi clapped her big hands together. “Now, there’s a question that’s finally got some sense to it.” She pointed to a large book of botanical prints, resting wide open at the end of the table. “I want you to figure it out.”

  Billy examined the picture, then studied the rose. “How do I do that when it has no leaves and no blooms? Not to mention that I know this much—” he pinched his thumb and index finger together—“about roses.”

  “Study its traits.”

  “It’s got big thorns,” Bess said, trying to be helpful.

  Billy gave her a look of sheer disgust. “Roses produce prickles, not thorns.”

  “Same thing,” Bess said. Billy looked serious as a sermon.

  Billy set his lips and shook his head slightly as if she were speaking gibberish. “Not hardly.”

  Mammi’s attention was on the rosebush. “Better not be a hybrid. Dadgum hybrids have no fragrance at all. They’ve ruined them.”

  “Then why do they make them?” Bess asked in her bravest voice. They didn’t hear her, so she asked again. “Why do they make hybrids?”

  Billy kept his eyes on the book. “Because they’re disease resistant and more cold hardy.”

  “Bah!” Mammi said. “The old-fashioneds are the strong ones. They’ve endured.”

  “Hybrids have a broader range of color and form,” Billy said, turning pages in the book.

  “Pish.” Mammi dismissed that with a wave of her hand. She didn’t think much of how hybrids had tinkered with M
other Nature.

  Billy let out a breath and looked at Mammi. He still had barely noticed Bess existed. “Where’d you find that pathetic excuse for a rose?”

  Mammi suddenly grabbed a broom and busied herself. “Here or there,” she said, looking aside. She always looked aside when she wasn’t telling the exact truth.

  “Bertha . . . did you hear me?”

  “Roses belong to everybody,” Mammi said. Again she looked aside. Bess knew enough to keep her mouth closed tight.

  “You could call Penn State and see what they have to say about it.”

  “And let them chop it apart and bisect it?”

  “Dissect it,” Billy corrected.

  “Never!” Mammi didn’t trust the government, and that included universities.

  “They’ll make sure it stays safe.”

  Mammi sat back in her chair and patted the topknot tucked under her prayer cap in a satisfied way. “It’ll be safer with me. I’ll make sure it has southern explosion.”

  “Exposure,” Billy corrected. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Grow it.”

  Billy snorted. “First you gotta bring it back from the brink. That thing is about dead.”

  Mammi wasn’t paying him any mind. Maggie Zook had gone unnoticed in the kitchen until she started poking at the pathetic-looking rose. “Don’t touch it, Maggie Zook, or I’ll have your father get after you.”

  Billy rolled his eyes. “As if Caleb Zook would ever scold Maggie. He’s way too soft on her.”

  Maggie slipped across the room to whisper to Bess. “He’s only saying that because his own father is a bear. Wallops him for the slightest thing.”

  Shocked, Bess shuddered. Her own father had never even raised his voice to her, not once.

  “Billy’s brothers are just like his father—big unfeeling louts—and I’m related to them so I can say so. But Billy, he’s more like his mom. That’s why your grandmother took Billy under her wing.” Maggie patted Bess on the arm. “Your grandmother—she’s one of a kind. My dad says she likes people to think she’s a grizzly bear, but she’s a teddy bear at heart.”

  Bess glanced over at Billy and Mammi, heads bent together, one brown, one salt-and-pepper, poring over the book of botanical rose prints.

  ———

  With a bang, Billy closed up his books and turned to Bess, vaulting her back to the present. Should she tell him what she knew about this rose? But what did she know? Not much. She couldn’t even remember what Mammi called it, or if it had a name at all; her grandmother had so many special roses. She felt the gossamer-thin memory shimmer and glint in the back of her mind, just out of reach. Something vague about a Most Special Rose. But it was there, waiting for her to bring it sharply into focus. She tried to reset her face. Tell him. Don’t tell him.

  “I’m ready to go. If you’re too busy to drop me at the bus stop, I can walk. It’s not far.”

  “You’re not staying for supper?” The chickens had gone to roost, and the chill of afternoon had begun settling in. Stay, Billy Lapp. Please stay.

  “No,” he said firmly, bending over to stuff his camera into his backpack. “Dark sets in earlier these days. I want to get back.”

  “I’ll let Dad and Lainey know that you’re leaving.” Tell him? Don’t tell him. Tell him?

  “No need. You can tell them goodbye for me after you get back from dropping me off.” His face set stubbornly as he rose, tugged his hat brim down low, and lunged down the brick path of the greenhouse, pride stiffening his posture and adding force to his shoulders.

  Definitely do not tell him. Bess closed her eyes, then opened them, as if to rewind the events of the day. But of course that was impossible. Time moved in only one direction.

  The buggy ride to the bus stop was a repeat of the morning’s trip. He had told her quite a bit. And he had told her nothing.

  4

  As Billy rode the bus back to College Station, he tried to focus on the characteristics he had gleaned about the Rose Hill Farm mystery rose, but his mind kept flicking back to the events of the day. And he couldn’t dispel the image of a pink-clad girl who filled his mind.

  Finally, he closed his note pad, stuffed it in his backpack, and stared out the window. Over the years the vista hadn’t changed at all: horses, harvest, horizon. Beyond the window the sky at twilight was awash with pink, red, and orange, but it couldn’t lighten the tumble of uncertainty that rolled around inside him today: he had gone home.

  Home. He thought of what he had left behind, years ago. A father, three brothers, the farm where he’d been born and raised. The town. All the familiar places and people he’d known his whole life . . . yet it wasn’t home anymore. He was prepared to feel detached, cut loose, to be reminded of a vague sense of deprivation. But he had been completely unprepared for his reaction at seeing Bess again.

  He felt . . . stunned, stricken. Bess, with her woman’s body, hair swept and fastened in a knot, and . . . that face. That breathtaking face, filled with an expression of openness glowing at him, schoolgirl’s cheeks flushed pink, lips shining, azure eyes that seemed to send all the blood in his head right to his heart, causing it to pound like a jackhammer.

  By the time the bus arrived in College Station, he was in a state of agitation. He forced himself to a semblance of calm before he reached the camera shop, arriving just after the manager had closed up for the night. It took cajoling, but he talked him into letting him drop off the film cartridges for development. Next stop was the Extension office at the university, where he could find resource books on lost roses. Jill had given him a key so that he could use the small library when he worked weekends. There was a rack of bookshelves and a small table under the window where he had spent many quiet Sunday afternoons, poring over dusty magazines and old books about extinct roses. He grabbed a few books and tucked them under his arm, then hurried to the place he loved best. His greenhouse. Penn State had a number of greenhouses, but one in particular felt like home to him. Even if it was a cheap hoop house, it was his.

  He moved through the greenhouse to reach the shelf that doubled as his desk, breathing in the warm, moist, musty air. Here was his domain. Here he had total control. Here nobody laughed at him, like his brothers did, or found him lacking, like his father did. The greenhouse was more than a workplace to him, it was a sanctuary. During his darkest hours, when faith deserted him, his love of plants had sustained him.

  This time of day, the greenhouse was clean and quiet, no work to be done. And nobody to listen to his ranting frustrations over the day’s turn of events.

  He went straight to his shelf, turned on the desk lamp, and leafed through the books, trying to narrow down the parentage of the mystery rose. If only he had a better idea of what characteristics the bloom would reveal, identifying it would be much easier.

  He suddenly felt a gust of warm air, looked behind him, and there was the hobo from Friday, smiling broadly as if he’d just been waiting for Billy to return so he could come in for a visit. He looked at Billy as if he was something special.

  “Hello there, Billy Lapp.”

  Oh no. He hoped this guy wasn’t going to come around to bother him every day. “George, isn’t it?”

  George nodded. “You’re working late.”

  “I got something important on my mind.” The hobo didn’t catch his hint, so Billy added, “I’ll give you a cup of coffee, but then I gotta get back to work. Not even sure the coffee’s still hot, but you’re welcome to it.”

  “What are you working on?” George glanced at Billy’s sketches and the open books on the shelf.

  “I’m trying to identify a rose discovered at an Amish farm.” Billy had bent over to unzip his backpack and get his thermos. He opened it and sniffed. Not hot, but not cold.

  “Weren’t you raised Amish?”

  He snapped his head up to look at George. “How do you know that?”

  “Your accent, for one. I can tell English is your second language. And then there
’s that.” He pointed to Billy’s hat on the metal stool.

  His old felt hat, distinctly Amish. Billy loved that hat. It had been his grandfather Zook’s hat, the one thing from his old life that he couldn’t get rid of. “Yeah, well, that was a lifetime ago.”

  George had an odd look on his face: surprised, amused, he couldn’t tell. “Interesting choice of words.”

  Suddenly, Billy felt stupid. Here was a man who had once lived another life, was clearly well educated, and was currently just down on his luck. He could practically read the hobo’s thoughts: What would Billy Lapp, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, know about other lifetimes? He probably thought Billy was a fool. Perhaps he was.

  In the quiet of the evening, Billy found two fairly clean mugs and wiped their insides with a paper towel. It surprised him to discover he didn’t mind the hobo’s company so much; it eased the burden of his loneliness.

  George walked halfway down the length of the greenhouse and stopped to sniff the orange blossoms on a potted tree. “Did you know that oranges were only eaten, not made into juice, until Albert Lasker sold packaged orange juice?” He grinned, revealing a row of bright, white teeth set against his dark face, and clasped his hands as if he held something secret in them. “I marvel at all there is to discover on earth. Just a hint of what’s to come. An eternity of discoveries.”

  Billy gave a nod, but he had trouble parsing meaning from the hobo’s curious sentences. He poured lukewarm coffee into the mugs and handed one to George. “Do you take anything in your coffee?” He looked around the shelf where he kept supplies. “Not that I have anything to offer. Maybe I could find some sugar someplace.”