A Kingdom of Our Own

Chapter Twenty Five - Anxiety

On the last Friday of August, Skandar informed Dalton that they had been invited out for dinner in the evening. Their host was to be a woman named Monica who lived just across the field from Skandar, making them in relative terms, next door neighbours. He’d described her as a “kind, elderly woman who had lived in the community all her life” and added that she was one of the few Amish people he had grown close to. There was however a rather tragic side to the woman’s story. She had been widowed more than twenty years ago when her husband had died suddenly from Prostate Cancer and worst of all; she hadn’t had any children who could grieve alongside her. The doctors had said there was some problem with her eggs, making her infertile, and so ever since she had lived alone.

“As you can expect she can get quite lonely,” Skandar explained. “So I make sure I pay her a visit every now and then, as does Jacob and a fair few others.”

And so at half past five sharp, they found themselves being welcomed inside Monica’s small, but cosy two-bedroom cottage. Skandar and Monica kissed one and others cheeks like many old acquaintances do and then she turned to Dalton, beaming. She greeted him warmly and then gave him a light peck on his right cheek which made him feel a little uncomfortable, but he tried not to show it. He didn’t want to insult her hospitality. Then they followed her lead down a narrow hallway and through an arched doorway that led into the kitchen.

The kitchen was small and cluttered, with cabinets and shelves lining three walls. Steam rose from the stove as something bubbled away in a pan. Dalton didn’t have a clue what it was, but it sure smelt good. A small wooden table with four chairs around it sat in the centre of the room, with a variety of cookery equipment hanging from a beam above it. Just being in the general vicinity of food made a great sense of hunger instantly fall over him, reawakening the appetite he’d worked up after a day’s grafting on the fields.

Dalton took the nearest chair and watched as Monica started pouring three cups of tea from a china pot. Skandar helped her with the tea and carried the near-full cups to the table as they chatted back and forth, mainly casual talk about what they’d been up to over the past week. Dalton meanwhile sat back, rather disinterested in the conversation. He was dressed in his best dinner suit and had taken the time beforehand to comb back his hair. That was very much a rarity and he couldn’t help but feel a little bit uncomfortable. Smart just wasn’t his style.

“Are you hungry?” Monica asked, suddenly darting around the kitchen, opening the oven, stirring the pot, closing a drawer. She was certainly healthy for her age, Dalton thought. Skandar had told him she had turned sixty-six this summer, but she seemed far younger than that, in both appearance and spirit.

“Yes ma’am.”

“It’s so nice to hear a young man with manners,” she said as she stopped for a second and smiled at him. “Most kids in the outside world have no manners these days.”

“Does anybody?” Skandar chuckled in agreement.

Meanwhile Monica had put on a pair of oven gloves and had pulled a freshly baked loaf of bread out of the wood-burning oven. She sliced it into a dozen segments on a chopping board and then laid it in a basket on the centre of the table. Dalton grabbed the biggest slice he could find and instantly began to wolf it down. It was soft on the inside with a perfectly crisped crust on the outside and it tasted like no other bread he’d ever eaten. The Amish sure were good cooks.

“How’s Harry doing?” Monica asked, trying to generate some friendly conversation. Even though she’d never met the boy, she asked the question with deep concern as if he were someone she’d known for many years.

“He’s doing much better,” Dalton said, and suddenly he wondered exactly how much Skandar had told her about them. He’d told him that he trusted her with his life, so he presumed she knew a fair bit more than Jacob and the rest of the locals did. Dalton just hoped he hadn’t revealed too much.