“No, he needs to come.” Arden gazed over at her soberly. “Look, he’s not okay on his own. Can you keep this private?”
She nodded, and he pulled out the bills, passing them over. It was a strange relief to be able to share this emotional burden with her, at least. She flicked through the bills, her eyes widening.
“Oh, Arden... I didn’t know!” she said.
“Yah.”
“What will you do?” she asked.
“I’ll pay it.”
“Can you...?” She swallowed, and her cheeks reddened. “I don’t mean to offend, but can you afford that? This is a lot of money owed...”
“I can just afford it,” he said.
This kept happening. Whenever he got close to getting his savings built up enough to make things right with Job, he hit another obstacle. They turned onto the road, and he flicked the reins, speeding the horse up to a trot. It was nice to be driving in an area that was used to buggy traffic. It was less stressful here in Pennsylvania than in Ohio—at least in that respect.
“It doesn’t seem fair that you have to pay it, though,” she said.
“I’m the one here,” Arden said. “I’m the one who has to do it. But you can see that my grandfather needs to come home with me, right?”
“I can see that he can’t do this alone...” Her tone was quiet and even agreeable, but he noticed her wording. She wasn’t accepting that Moe would have to leave, was she? Sarai would always be a force to be reckoned with.
“Moe loves Ellen, you know,” Sarai said after a moment of listening to the horse’s hooves.
“Love is a strong word,” he said.
“And I don’t use it lightly,” she replied. “He loves her. I daresay that, at his age, if he’s forced to part from her, he’ll decline.”
And that would be on his shoulders, too, would it?
“Sarai, what am I supposed to do?” he demanded. “I’m one man! And not a rich one.”
“I know,” she said.
“What solution is there?” he asked. “Your daet is a good man, but it isn’t fair that he be supporting everyone else around him, either. I won’t be a burden on your father. Maybe we can help our grandparents write letters back and forth and help them visit each other. I don’t know. But this is all I can do.”
“We can pray,” Sarai said. He looked over at her, and she gave him a small smile back. “It’s really quite a powerful option.”
“Yah,” he agreed. “Then we’ll pray for something to come along.”
But for all his praying in the past, all he’d ever gotten was that daily bread. Gott’s ways were not his ways, and Gott seemed to be intent on teaching him a lesson about getting just what he needed and not a scrap more. What made him think that He would answer with more now?
Sarai waited in the buggy as Arden went into the bank. When he came out and got back into the driver’s seat, he looked sober. They set off for their first stop, the dry-goods store. Arden went in alone, the bill in his hand, and a few minutes later he came back out, silent. They did that for every single bill in the pile, Arden going into the store with money and the bill, then returning looking graver and graver.
By the last stop, the creamery, they went inside together.
“Good afternoon,” Haddie Ebersole said with a smile. Her fourteen-year-old son, Timothy, poked his head out of the back of the shop.
“Mamm, the Troyer order is done,” he said.
“Thanks, son.” She cast him a smile, then turned her attention back to Sarai and Arden. “Sarai, I have your grandmother’s order here.”
“Danke,” Sarai said. “That’s why I came.”
Haddie turned her attention to Arden. “Arden Stoltzfus? Are you back in town? My goodness, the last time I saw you, you were thirty pounds lighter. You’ve grown up.”
“Yah. Hi, Haddie,” Arden said with a bashful smile. “I’m here to pay off my dawdie’s bill.”
Sarai stepped away to give him privacy. But she did notice that the thick wad of bills had dwindled down to just a few left, and when he counted out the last of them onto the counter, his hands were empty.
She’d never experienced that before—having no money at her disposal. Cash was never even necessary for her, and she realized in a rush that she was just a little bit spoiled that way. She’d never experienced the lack of anything, and here Arden was, giving his last dollars to pay bills that weren’t even his.
When they left the shop and got back up into the buggy, she looked over at him.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“That’s life,” he said, and he picked up the reins.
“It’s not fair, though,” she said.
Arden just held the reins but didn’t flick them. The horse shuffled his hooves, waiting.
“If a man doesn’t have ready money, he can still have two things,” he said. “A job to support himself, no matter how humbly, and his self-respect. I’ve got both.”
He flicked the reins then, and the horse started forward with a jingle of tack.
And not for the first time, Sarai wished that Arden would let her father help his grandfather instead of taking the burden on himself like this. But she understood. Arden was a man now, no longer a boy in the community. It was time for him to take care of his own family.
