Little Amish Matchmaker by Linda Byler Page B

Christmas Eve. It was a tradition, to open gifts the evening before Christmas, and then savor the rich stew Mam made with that expensive jar of oysters. They only had oysters at Christmas-time.
    The stale bread was brought from their freezer at the neighbor’s garage and cut into cubes with the best bread knife to make roasht , that delicious holiday dish of bread cubes, celery, egg, and great chunks of turkey or chicken. Isaac was put to work chopping celery, the old wooden cutting board a sure prevention from cutting into Mam’s countertop. He looked up when Sim came into the kitchen, sitting down to unlace his boots, humming softly under his breath.
    “What are you doing?” Isaac asked, scooping up a handful of chopped celery.
    “Oh, I might go watch the hockey players on Abner Speicher’s pond for awhile.”
    “Is the pond fit?” Mam asked quickly.
    “Should be.”
    “Not with 30 hockey players on it.”
    They went through this same conversation every year. Ice on the pond was a subject of great controversy, according to Mam. Six inches was sufficient, she’d say, until all those people started skating on top of it. Then what? She’d move around the kitchen wagging her head, finally giving in and saying if someone fell through the ice they would never forget it, and don’t come crying to her, she’d tried to warn them.
    “Wanna come along?” Sim asked Isaac.
    Isaac jumped off his chair, raced around the kitchen searching for gloves, boots, and his coat, shouting his elation. Of course, he wanted to go!
    He grabbed his hockey skates, clunked them into a corner of the kessle-haus (wash house) and raced back upstairs for an extra pair of socks.
    His room was pitch-black. He groped on his night stand for his lighter, found it and flicked it on above his sock drawer. It took only a second until he located a pair of heavy wool socks and ran headlong down the stairs.
    He didn’t even think of Teacher Catherine. He didn’t know girls came to these hockey games. He’d never been to one.
    So when he saw Teacher Catherine sitting beside another girl he didn’t know, warming her hands by the fire, he felt shy, unable to look at her.
    Teachers belonged in a classroom, not at a hockey game.
    “Hello, Isaac.”
    “Hello.”
    Quickly, he ducked his head as the other girl stared at him, smiling. He turned his back and prepared to pull on his skates. The schoolboys weren’t allowed to play hockey with the big boys, but they had a small section of the pond roped off, and this was where Isaac was going as soon as he got his feet into his skates.
    Sim’s voice made him very still.
    “Hello, Catherine. Kate.” Sim nodded in the other girl’s direction.
    Well, no use hanging around. Sim wasn’t going to do anything at all about having a date with Catherine anyway. So Isaac tiptoed on his skates through the snow, hit the ice and skated smoothly across the pond to Calvin and Michael.
    What Isaac completely missed was the “King’s Florist” truck that had crept slowly down Traverse Hill earlier that day, looking for Hickory Grove School.
    And the brown-clad driver who hopped out with a gigantic poinsettia in a lovely, woven basket trailing dark green ivy, with a Christmas card inserted on a plastic spike that said, “Merry Christmas, Catherine. A friend, Simon Stoltzfus.”
    He never knew his teacher pulled out the plastic spike, tore at the card with trembling fingers, her face tense with unanswered questions.
    He didn’t see her read the words for only a second, then fling the card to her desk, crumple into a second-grader’s desk and laugh and cry at the same time, then get up and whirl between the desks until her skirt billowed out, aflight with genuine happiness.
    Isaac had been at home chopping celery.

Chapter Eleven
    I SAAC WAS STIFF, SORE and extremely tired at 5:00 a.m. when his cheap, plastic alarm began its nerve-wracking little beeps. It was one of the dumbest alarm clocks anyone had ever invented for