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can answer them, I will. And if not, I’ll find out the answer for you.” Grace made change and counted it into the woman’s hand. “Now that you know where we are, you’ll have to come again.”
    The woman smiled. “You’re very kind.” She looked at Grace, her gaze drifting up to the head covering of white netting she wore from morning to night. “I’ve often wondered what it would be like to live as you do,” she whispered.
    Grace laughed softly. “Well, we’re not as strange as you may think.”
    “But you don’t drive cars or have electricity, do you?”
    “Neither one, no.”
    “No phones or radios, either?” Looking chagrined, the woman said, “I don’t mean to pry. Your ways are fascinating, though. You see”—and here she stepped closer—“I’ve always felt drawn to a simple life.”
    Grace rarely encountered this sort of open admiration among the English customers here or while tending the roadside vegetable stand in front of her family’s house. Most Englischers were proud of their complicated lives with televisions, computers, cars, electricity, and whatnot. Uncertain how to reply, she only nodded in agreement.
    “Oh goodness, I hope I didn’t offend you, miss. I would just love to know more about Amish folk.”
    Grace thought of suggesting a book, but she certainly wasn’t ready to offer the woman a tour of her father’s house. “We live as our Anabaptist ancestors did.” She suddenly remembered the cell phone one of her aunts was permitted to use for her quilting shop over in Honey Brook. “With some slight modifications.”
    “Oh really? Like what?”
    The woman’s fascination struck Grace as comical. She wondered, for a fleeting moment, if this customer with all her questions was somehow related to nosy Priscilla Stahl. “There are plenty of differences ’tween churches amongst the People. What’s allowed from district to district is entirely up to the voting membership.”
    “Members are permitted to give their input?”
    “Jah, we vote twice a year on our Ordnung. ”
    The woman’s bewilderment registered in her big brown eyes.
    “The church ordinance,” Grace added. “Our rules.”
    Another clerk came over to ask Grace something, and she was secretly relieved. “You’ll have to excuse me.” She smiled and scurried off to the other side of the store.
    Such a curious soul!
    She’d heard plenty of stories about pushy Englischers. But this woman had been the first Grace had ever met who’d seemed genuinely interested in their way of life. Of course, that didn’t mean she was ready to join their ranks. All it took to discourage some outsiders was the thought of rising at four o’clock to milk a herd of dairy cows . . . before a hearty breakfast. That and having to learn the language of their forefathers, Pennsylvania Dutch.
    Grace located the item the other clerk had wanted and wondered what might have prompted the customer’s preference for all things simple. She recalled something Mammi Adah often said with a knowing smile on her wrinkled face: “When you get what you want . . . do you want what you get?” Grace assumed it was merely human to crave a different situation in life and not something unique to fancy folk.

    Adah stood out in the middle hallway and knocked and yoo-hooed to Lettie, the newly baked bread warm in her hand. She’d tried to make a point of respecting Judah and Lettie’s privacy but knew she hadn’t always succeeded since she and Jakob had moved into their side of the roomy house.
    Lettie called back for her to let herself in. “You can just come over without askin’, Mamm, you know that.” Lettie had her hands in a wash pail and was down on the floor on all fours, looking up at her.
    “I baked you some bread.” Adah placed it on the table and sat down with a grunt as she observed Lettie wash the floor by hand. “Your Mandy ought to be helpin’ with that.”
    Lettie kept on, her head down. “Sometimes doin’ the work