A Match For Addy (The Amish Matchmaker Book 1) by Emma Miller Page A

then with their actions?” She chuckled again as she dropped to her knees beside a row of curled green shoots pushing up from the rich earth. “Start there and work toward me so that we can talk.” Sara waved to a spot about ten feet down the row of green beans. “Leave about so much space—” she used her thumb and forefinger to show about four inches “—between the beans. Otherwise, the plants will be too close together and choke each other.”
    Addy nodded. She’d been working in her mother’s garden and thinning vegetables since she was four or five years old. She knew how far apart green beans should be, but again, she’d show proper respect for Sara, who was her elder and her employer.
    “I’m not one who believes that a man is always right,” Sara continued. “Not even a husband or, in your father’s case, a preacher. But there are ways to speak to people. And the same rule holds for women and children. If you speak too sharply, like as not, the other person is offended and either snaps back or says nothing and goes away thinking the worst of you.”
    “So I should have just let Gideon muddy the floor?”
    Sara plucked a plant and dropped it into a pile. “Some toss these seedlings aside, but I’ll sort through them and replant them at the end of the row. A few will wither, but most will slowly recover, sink deeper roots, and make a fine crop of late beans for my table.”
    Addy waited for Sara to answer her question, but she went on talking about green beans, about different kinds of beans, how long they took to mature and what kinds could continue to produce when the summer heat grew more intense.
    “Plants are a lot like children, I’ve always thought,” Sara mused.
    “Do you have children?” Addy asked, thinking that was a safe subject and might get her past the notion of her own inadequacies.
    “Dozens.”
    “Dozens?” Addy looked at her in surprise. Her mother hadn’t been certain. She’d thought Sara had mentioned several daughters. But dozens? How old could she have been when she married the first time?
    “It has never been the Lord’s will that I give birth to a child,” Sara said softly, “although I spent many an hour on my knees praying for one. Yet two of my husbands brought children to our marriage, all good girls and boys. And, in my years as a matchmaker, I have been blessed with helping many young men and women. In a way, all of them have become my children.”
    Addy nodded, sorry to know that Sara was barren and that she had thoughtlessly asked another question that might bring regret.
    “I think it was part of His plan for me,” Sara explained. They were only two arms’ lengths from each other now. “Now we move farther down the row,” she said. “You here, and I’ll start there.”
    Addy dropped the bean plants into Sara’s hand and continued down the row.
    “I was fortunate in my husbands and in my marriages,” Sara went on. “Some more than others, but that’s the nature of things. Maybe I could have been wiser the first time around. As I said, I was born with the same fault as you. A quick temper and a prickly disposition.”
    “Do you think I have a prickly disposition?” Addy’s face warmed as she stopped thinning the beans and glanced at Sara. Why did Sara want her working for her if she found so many faults in her?
    She bent over the beans, the color of her dark skin blending with the rich garden soil. “You’re intelligent, strong, not lazy, and devout, so far as I can see. Yet you are bearing down on thirty and yet unmarried.” She shrugged. “Either the young bachelors in Delaware are sadly deficient, or there is something you have yet to learn in finding the right husband.”
    “Maybe I’m just picky,” Addy said, and then admitted what she truly feared. “Or maybe it’s because I’m too tall, too plain and as skinny as a beanpole.”
    Sara scoffed. “Nonsense. Look at me. Short, brown as a wren and round as a barrel. And I’ve