Fall From Pride

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice shaky, “if those rural hills and farm scenes were Amish—ya, I could do that, only with my own touches, in my own way.” They leaned toward the screen together, so close her bonnet bumped his cheek. “Well, good for Grandma Moses,” Sarah said with a huge sigh, “and that nickname probably means she was elderly, too.”

“She took up painting very late, it says here, leaving the art of embroidery to follow her heart toward a new kind of art.”

To follow her heart… Sarah suddenly felt almost as close to the long-gone Grandma Moses as she did to her own grossmamm Miriam. The Amish didn’t embroider—too fancy—but she’d long ago given up stitching quilts unless she absolutely had to, and she’d suffered socially for that. Still, she did not want to be elderly when she got the gumption to try entire paintings, not with the latex paint she used on the barns but in oil paint on stretched canvas like she’d seen for sale in the back corner of the hardware store in town.

Nate left a big painting on the screen, one called The Old Oaken Bucket, with horses in the field, barns and hills, women in long skirts, even an Amish-looking man in the lower left corner of it. As much as Sarah was impressed with VERA’s insides, that picture perked things up, almost as if it were hung on the wall. It seemed like a gift Nate had given her.

She meant to move away, but they were suddenly wedged in close. Her breasts brushed his chest as she sidestepped.

“Okay,” Nate said, as if he needed to agree to something or was warning himself. “You know, I don’t mean to pry, but I smell lavender perfume or something really nice on you.”

“Not perfume,” she told him, blushing. “My friend Ella Lantz has a great lavender garden and makes soaps and sachets to sell. That’s just my—her soap. If you have a special someone, you might want to buy some of her Lavender Plain products, a gift from Amish country to take home.”

“Ah, no. I mean, there’s no special someone at home.”

She nodded. Their eyes locked again. She felt his intense stare clear down to the pit of her stomach.

Wiping his palms on his jeans, he moved away and peeked out through a small front window at Gabe as he had several times already, then back at her. “He’s still entranced,” he said, tilting his head a bit as if to peer inside her bonnet brim. She had the strongest urge to take it off, but she tried to concentrate on what Nate was saying now. He seemed as desperate to get back to business as she did, so he showed her his firefighting gear and explained how it went on, piece by piece.

“In those storage bins,” he said, pointing, “are PPEs—personal protective equipment—for a chemical or biological incident, coveralls, gloves, overshoes and a filter mask, some overlap from the fire gear I showed you. I’m a first responder in case there’s a terrorist attack. VERA’s equipped for Homeland Security, too.”

“Like 9/11 or a chemical attack, but I feel like there has been a terrorist attack on our Homestead area, too—only, thank the Lord, no one got seriously hurt.”

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