The Beekeeper's Son (The Amish of Bee County Book 1) by Kelly Irvin Page B

stumbling about on two left feet. This wasn’t her first singing, so why did her heart pound and her palms sweat?
    She took a deep breath and let it out. Frannie giggled for no apparent reason. Deborah exchanged glances with Leila and Rebekah. Her sisters rolled their eyes and shrugged. Their cousin had been giggling as they walked along the sagging fence that divided a field of cornstalks, only knee-high, from a field of milo just beginning to get heads and up the dirt road that led to Leroy’s house. Deborah hoped her cousin would stifle those giggles during the singing. It would get embarrassing to be with her otherwise, on this, their first time to a singing in Bee County.
    She smoothed the clean apron she donned over her nicest blue dress. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was the least faded. Mudder had insisted Deborah come. Said it was part of joining the community. In an odd little fit of closeness, she had straightened Deborah’s kapp and smoothed her fingers across her cheek before murmuring that the dress brought out the blue of her eyes.
    Her mother always said Deborah looked the most like Daed.The blue eyes were his, but Mudder’s were blue too, so Deborah could only imagine that Mudder wanted to see what she wanted to see. To her, Caleb was a little miniature of Daed. Even without a single photograph, she would never forget what her father looked like. She thanked God for that blessing, at least.
    “What are you looking all moony-eyed over?” Frannie did a hop-skip that made her seem more like three-year-old Hazel than a seventeen-year-old who’d been going to singings for over a year now. “This is supposed to be fun.”
    It would be more fun if Josie and Aaron and her other friends would be there. Stop it. Aaron was in Ohio by now. Farther away than ever. “I’m not moony. I’m just . . . a little nervous, this being at Leroy’s house and all.”
    Having the singing in the bishop’s house made it seem more like another prayer service than a time to get to know the other young folks in this tiny district.
    “Will there be a lot of people?” Leila looked festive in her lilac dress and freshly ironed kapp. “Will Leroy and his fraa stay around the whole time? Back home we have the singings in the barn and the older folks stay up at the house. Just come down to check on us once in a while.”
    “Our barns are old and messy and dirty and hot.” Frannie waved a hand, her expression airy as if this explanation made perfect sense. The idea of cleaning the barns didn’t seem to have crossed her mind. “Besides, Leroy says adult supervision will make sure we stay on a righteous path. There’re usually a couple dozen of us, depending on who can make it. Leroy and Naomi most likely will sit out in the backyard and visit with Andrew and Sadie.”
    Two dozen. Back home there’d sometimes been fifty or seventy-five on a good night.
    “How do you . . . I mean . . . doesn’t that make it hard . . . to . . . you know . . .?” Deborah floundered for words. Courting was private, and holding the singings right under the bishop’s nose with a handful of young people defeated the purpose. Most all of them would be in their rumspringas. “Do the boys and girls pair up? Do you play games?”
    “We play volleyball usually.”
    Those weren’t the games Deborah meant, but she didn’t want to tell her cousin if Frannie didn’t already know of such things. Every district was different, every Ordnung different—one of the things she found most confusing. If a way of doing things was true and proper in God’s eyes, wouldn’t it be the same for all Plain folks? Another question she never expected to have answered.
    She and Aaron had spent some time in the shed out in back of Josie’s barn at a singing not long after her seventeenth birthday. It had been hot and sweaty, but Aaron had grinned the whole time and he’d held her hand without trying anything else until the boys outside yelled their five minutes