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school in a few days. And maybe enough to splurge on an ice cream cone afterward.
    When he told Jenny that they were heading into town tonight to go school shopping, she balked. “We should go back to Ohio, so Mom knows where we are.”
    “We’ve been over this, Jenny. If we stayed in Ohio, Child Protective Services would step in and put you in a foster home. And Mom doesn’t need to know where we are. All that matters is we know where she is.”
    Jenny scowled. But then, she was always scowling. Her face was going to be set in a permanent scowl. “She’s going to get out soon. Then things will go back to normal.”
    Normal? What was normal? Their mother was a part-time house cleaner and a full-time drug addict. Old Deborah had been a godsend to them. She was an older Amish woman who became connected to the Ohio Reformatory for Women by fostering prisoners’ children—an informal arrangement, outside of Child Protective Services but blessed by them, that suited everyone. Chris and Jenny had been living with Old Deborah, off and on, since Chris was eight and Jenny was one.
    Once a month, year in and year out, Old Deborah took them by bus to Marysville to visit their mother. The program Old Deborah participated in wasn’t trying to convert children to become Amish. Its goal was to keep incarcerated mothers involved in the lives of their children. Studies showed that there was less recidivism if mothers felt like they were continuing to parent their children. The Marysville warden had created all kinds of programs to enhance the bond with mothers and children. But Chris and Jenny had stayed with Old Deborah longer than they had lived with their mother. They couldn’t help but look Amish, act Amish, talk Amish, and mostly, think Amish. For Chris, for the first time, the whole of his life really began to be transformed into something other than what it had ever been, something leaning toward normal.
    It rankled their mother. She made sharply pointed comments about the Amish, but what could she really do aboutit? Old Deborah was raising her children for her. And doing a wonderful job with it too. She was grandmother, counselor, mentor . . . all wrapped into one warm, loving package. She fed them, washed their clothes, combed out Jenny’s tangled hair, took them to the dentist or doctor if they needed medical attention. Old Deborah and her church family were loving toward them. Chris had no doubt they wanted them there. Life was stable at Old Deborah’s. No one was on edge—waiting for his mother’s dip into addiction. Chris knew what to expect each day at Old Deborah’s. It was peaceful and safe and good.
    On some level, Chris’s mother must have known that her children were better off with Old Deborah than with CPS. Or maybe she just liked having the visits. She never registered any formal complaints about the Amish school or Amish church Chris and Jenny attended, though she gave Old Deborah plenty of informal complaints. But when Chris became baptized in the church last fall, she blew her top. It still chilled Chris to think of his mother’s outburst, filled with horrible accusations. He just stood there, taking it, not answering back, just like he always had, but he hadn’t been back to see her since.
    Jenny didn’t remember what it was like before Old Deborah’s, but Chris did. And he would do everything in his power to make sure he and Jenny never went back to that. After that scene his mother had made about his baptism, Old Deborah quietly took him aside. She told Chris that his grandfather had sent her some legal papers, right before he died. He was leaving a house in trust for Chris and Jenny, and property taxes were paid out of the trust each year. When Chris turned twenty-one, he would inherit the house and land. When Jenny turned twenty-one, half of the house would belong to her.Old Deborah gave Chris a package with all of the legal paperwork, including a key to the house. “There’s just one