Close to Home by Emma Miller

Chapter 1

Kent County, Delaware

Late September

Caleb Stutzman ignored the honking horn and kept the horse at a steady trot on the narrow blacktop road. It was a no-passing zone, but the driver of the black pickup truck with the oversized tires didn't seem to care. Still laying on the horn, he pulled into the left lane and zoomed around the Amish buggy. From the truck's passenger seat, a young man yelled out the window, "Get off the road, hayseed!" The pickup cut back into the right lane with a screech of its tires, barely missing a brown delivery van coming toward them.

The buggy's gelding shied to the right, toward a drainage ditch, but Caleb kept a tight hand on the leathers. The horse half-reared as the van rumbled past, but Caleb soon got the frightened animal under control.

Sitting beside him, Caleb's cousin Menno hadn't uttered a sound, but Caleb could tell by the way he gripped the buggy seat that he'd been scared.

"Those crazy Englishers," Menno muttered. "They're the ones that should stay off the roads. Not us."

"Ya," Caleb agreed. He'd seen a bad collision between a buggy and a car back in Virginia, where he'd lived with his uncle before coming to Delaware. An Amish family who lived next door to his grandfather had been coming home from Sunday services when they'd been hit and badly hurt. Only by God's grace had no one been killed. Sharing the road with motor vehicles was difficult. Horses only went so fast, and the English world wanted to move so much faster.

"The bishop says that we should pray for our English neighbors, but it's not easy," Menno said.

Caleb nodded in agreement as Menno continued his litany of complaints against the English with their worldly ways, but Caleb soon tuned him out. He had more pressing things on his mind. Early this morning, before joining Uncle Ebon and his cousins in the barn for chores, he'd reread the letter he'd just received from his grandfather to make sure he hadn't dreamed it.

Caleb had never been close to his mother's father. Moses Schwartz was a stern old man with a long, stringy beard and tufts of bushy gray eyebrows who had little patience for his grandchildren. Caleb's own mother, now in heaven, had been the oldest daughter in a family of seven children. Although she had always spoken with respect for her father, he had never approved of Caleb's father or their marriage and there had been none of the usual visiting back and forth.

So Caleb was surprised when he received a letter from his grandfather, and even more surprised when he'd read the contents. His grandfather's missive, written in a shaky hand, was as clearly stated as his opinions had always been. Moses Schwartz was making a take-it-or-leave-it offer to Caleb. He was offering Caleb his farm...a home, a livelihood. Exactly the life he wanted.

Caleb had tried wheelwrighting, the trade his father had chosen for him, but Caleb's heart just wasn't in it. The older he got, the more he realized that he was meant to be a farmer and to care for his family by living off the land. His grandfather's letter was an answer to his prayers.

There was just one problem. His grandfather had made the inheritance conditional on Caleb finding a wife, courting her and marrying her within the next thirty days.

Unfortunately for Caleb, the only woman he'd even considered marrying had left him to marry another man.