Mennonites Don't Dance Read Online Free Page B

window in his parents’ house. On top of a low hill, the structure sat higher than theirs, and Jonah had often imagined how he’d grow up to raise a different sort of family there. A family that laughed together often. There would be pictures of grandparents — his wife’s parents — on the mantel above the fireplace. They’d empty loose change from their pockets into a dish by the front door to spend on ice cream, instead of locked away in a metal box kept under the wood stove, with a mouse trap set on top. In the house on the hill, the pantry would always be lined with glass jars full of plums.
    When Jonah and Hazel first arrived, Jonah stood on his porch and looked down their hill, wild with grasses, towards his parents’ house that was surrounded by a yard of compact dirt and strewn with orderly accumulations of broken down machinery.
    Jonah’s father looked over Hazel for the first time as she stood next to Jonah in their front door, twisting the thin gold ring on her finger. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and, because she hadn’t been expecting company and it was a hot day in July, a blouse that was unbuttoned halfway from the bottom and tied into a knot. Her dark hair swung freely across her face.
    â€œDoesn’t seem to me she’s likely to last long out here,” he said to Jonah. The same way he might have talked about a cow that wasn’t fat enough to produce milk.
    Jonah’s father had taken off his hat when he knocked on the couple’s door, even though Jonah knew he had no mind to come inside. Now he hit the hat against his hand to indicate he’d said what he came to say, and a puff of dust was expelled into the air. He waved it away before he set the grubby old fedora back on his head. “Just see that she isn’t a burden to me and your mother. We’re too old to put up with trouble on account of someone who can’t pull her own weight.” At barely fifty, Jonah’s father wasn’t old enough to have been busy dying for so many years.
    Hazel stood at the door for a moment longer before gently pushing it closed.
    â€œWe should have gone over to see them as soon as we got here,” Hazel said when she turned around and faced her husband. She was anxiously unknotting her blouse and tucking it into her waistband. Jonah watched for a sign that she was hurt, or disgusted, by his father’s behaviour. That she was angry at Jonah for not telling her before what kind of a miserable old bugger the man was.
    â€œFirst they couldn’t make it out for our wedding and now this. Your parents must feel so left out. We should go over right away and apologize.” Hazel looked around her and picked up a basket of jams and crackers — a wedding gift from a favourite teacher — from the kitchen table and stepped towards the door.
    â€œApologize?” Jonah said. “He just insulted you. He should be the one to apologize.”
    â€œYes. But he won’t, will he?” Hazel said, surprising Jonah.
    â€œThere’s no point.”
    â€œThere is. Even if not for them.” It didn’t matter that Jonah didn’t understand, because in that moment he believed her. He would have believed her if she said pigs laid eggs. And two years later, he still believed her when they had Katie. Even after his father bent over her crib and shook his head. Nobody had asked him, he said, whether he wanted to be a grandfather.
    â€œHe’s sick in his heart. He can’t help himself,” Hazel said after Jonah’s father had left.
    â€œI suppose.” Jonah lifted Katie from Hazel’s arms and looked into her sleepy face. “It doesn’t matter, though.”
    When Katie was old enough, Jonah taught her how to take fresh eggs from under their hens, the way his Aunt Ardelle had taught him. He knew, and it pleased him, that sometimes his father would be out in his own yard and see