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his forehead. She wanted to touch it, but she didn’t dare. She asked, “Areyou going to tell me about Martha Dewberry and your buggy ride together?”
    He regarded Leah seriously. “It is our custom that when a man is interested in a woman, he takes her home from church or community gatherings in a buggy. It is his way of telling others that he has special feelings for this person.”
    Despite herself, Leah felt a tiny flare of jealousy. “Where I come from, if a guy likes a girl, he asks her out on a date and he picks her up in his car. Or his parents’ car.”
    “We have no cars.”
    “That’s what your sister told me. But you don’t mind riding in them.”
    “Public transportation is fine for long trips, but for each one of us to own a car would be prideful. And it would break apart our community.”
    Every family Leah knew owned a car. Sometimes two or three cars. Neil had given her mother a car for a wedding gift, and Leah had used it to drive herself to the hospital. But she could see how vehicles separated people. She thought of people driving on the expressways, each locked alone inside a car, cut off fromfellow travelers. “So, are you a good buggy driver?”
    He grinned. “Passable.”
    “And do you like this Martha Dewberry? Is she your girlfriend?”
    His brow puckered while his gaze lingered over Leah’s face. “She is Amish.”
    And I’m not
. She heard the unspoken message in his comment. Suddenly she wanted to turn the talk away from their differences. She liked Ethan. But nothing could ever come of their friendship; they were from two very different worlds. She moved forward. “I’ll bet you’ve never played a video game, have you?”
    He shook his head. “I have not ever seen one.”
    She grabbed his hand. “Come on. Let me show you how.”
    She led him into the semidarkened video game room. Several kids clustered around machines, but she saw a vacant one back in a corner and took Ethan toward it. “Sit,” she directed. She positioned herself across the table from him. “I’ve played this one before back in Texas. It’s got levels of difficulty, so we can start slow, until you get the hang of it.” Shepaused, suddenly stricken by a thought. “It wouldn’t be against your religion, would it?”
    His features glowed by the pale purple light emanating from the game. “Play is not forbidden. We play many games. I can see no harm in trying this one.”
    It didn’t take him long to catch on. Ethan’s hand flew on the trackball, spinning and turning it. Leah threw up her hands in defeat as he soared over the million-point mark. “Are you sure you’ve never played a video game before? If I didn’t know better, I’d bet you’d suckered me.”
    His face was lit with a heart-stopping grin of genuine pleasure. “What do you mean—‘suckered’?”
    “You know,
pretended
not to know how to play.”
    “I told you, Leah, I do not lie.” His eyes twinkled. “It is an exciting game. I like it.”
    “You have to admit that modern conveniences aren’t all bad.”
    He leveled his incredibly blue eyes on her. “They have their pleasures.”
    A tingling sensation prickled up her arms. “Too bad you need electricity to play it.”
    He laughed. “Electricity is not the only need.Time is necessary too. With so much to do on the farm, who would have time for video games?”
    “It seems to me that work is all you have time for.”
    “Work is a good teacher. It gives us Amish a sense of meaning and purpose.”
    “Does it give
you
meaning?”
    He pondered her question, and she hoped he could tell that she was genuinely interested in his perspective.
    “Work helps me understand that my life is but one small part of God’s greater order,” he said. “The seasons come. They go. Harvest comes, and with it, God supplies our needs. But if we did nothing but
wish
for a good harvest, if we did no work to produce a good crop, then that would be foolish. And worse, it would presume on