The Christmas Quilt: Quilts of Love Series by Vannetta Chapman Read Free Book Online Page B

made the pudding after we got home from town yesterday.”
    “You should have rested. I know everyone will love it though.” Annie scooted around her, placing her hands on her shoulders as the door opened again and her parents walked inside.
    Jacob Weaver’s face lit up when he saw her. Leah knew that her father-in-law loved her. There was no faking some things, and the grin on his face was genuine.
    “It smells wunderbaar in here,” he declared as he set his cane by the door and made his way across the room. He still walked with a slight limp from the buggy accident that had happened three years earlier, the disaster that had brought Annie home—and brought Annie and Samuel together. Leah supposed it was a case of what had been meant for evil, God had used for good.
    Thinking back to that time caused her heart to ache.
    She glanced up and across the room, saw Adam talking to Samuel and laughing at something he said. Things had been so natural between her and him then—before they wed, before the babies. She’d spent months looking forward to being a wife and a mother. Now she was learning that sometimes life was nothing like what you expected.
    “You’re looking very gut . Both of you are.” Jacob hugged first Leah and then Annie. “How are my favorite girls?”
    “ Dat. I thought you said I was your favorite girl.” Reba stuck her bottom lip out in a pout as she set a plate of cold chicken on the counter.
    She was still tall and awfully thin for a seventeen-year-old girl, but any outside markings of a tomboy were gone. Now the quietness and beauty about her was hard to ignore. Leah had noticed how she’d changed at church meeting last week. When Reba walked by a group of older boys, they had stopped talking and stared after her, as if she were new to their community. One had shaken his head and blushed all the way to the rim of his hat.
    Reba, in keeping with her natural inclination to be clueless around two-footed beasts, had seemed oblivious.
    “Didn’t you?” Reba teased, sneaking a piece of cheese from one of the plates. “Tell Annie you did call me your favorite last night.”
    “ Ya. I suppose I did,” Jacob admitted. “Just now I meant she and Leah are my favorite older girls.”
    Reba laughed and moved to the living room, where she proceeded to corner Samuel. Leah heard the words poultice and herbs then mare . Samuel walked over to a shelf of books, selected one, and handed it to her.
    The room filled with conversation as Charity described her latest buggy ride with David Hostetler and Rebekah remarked on the pudding Leah had brought.
    The back door opened again and the gusting winter wind nearly tugged it out of Onkel Eli’s hand. Onkel Eli, Jacob’s brother, stepped inside with Rachel. She had apparently accepted a ride with Eli, though Annie confessed she had feared Rachel would change her mind and not come. After having been married to Adam over two years, Leah felt as if she knew Eli well, but she couldn’t have told anyone a lot of details about him. He was one of those people you seemed to have known all your life, and she probably had. He’d lived in their district for as long as she could remember, but she’d been a child and he’d been an adult.
    After she’d joined the Weaver family, he’d become her onkel —plain and simple. He’d accepted her as if she’d always been part of the family. She still didn’t actually know anything about him though. He was merely Onkel Eli—a sweet old guy who loved to make toys, nearly always had a twinkle in his eyes, and didn’t seem to have a harsh bone in his body. She wondered for a moment if he could fix the problems in a marriage, if maybe she should go and talk to him next week.
    That was ridiculous though. He’d never been in a relationship as far as she knew! She pushed the thought away.
    Eli wasn’t as old as she had at first thought—maybe in his early forties. When she’d once asked Adam why he’d never married, Adam had