Katie's Choice by Amy Lillard

fire had taken his parents, his uncle came to get him. From that point on, he’d lived in Chicago, a world away from their small cooperative. Tim Carson had been Zane’s only living relative, and fate had cruelly taken him too.
    That tiny part of Zane that needed a family had long since been destroyed. No use wishing for something he couldn’t have. Not that he even thought he wanted one. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about the possibility of a family. Ever. He wouldn’t know what to do with one.
    Now he was practically engaged. Marriage usually meant family, but he and Monica had never talked about it. He made a mental note to bring it up the next time he called her. Or better yet, face-to-face when he was back in Chicago.
    The thought of starting a family, then shipping out on assignment didn’t seem fair. Her family had enough money to support them, but . . . well, that was out of the question. She said she understood his need to work. Would she understand this? She wasn’t exactly the maternal type.
    Katie Rose drifted into his thoughts. Pretty as you please, the striking image of Monica was replaced by the honey-haired vision who lived next door. Now she was maternal. One look at how she cared for Samuel and any fool could see that. Katie Rose cared for her brother’s children as she would care her own, but according to her assessment, she would never have any. That’s not what she believed God had planned for her.
    He tried not to laugh at the idea as he reached for the next shirt, another blue one, almost the same shade as the first.
    Katie Rose would make a wonderful mother. He knew the school would be sad to lose her as the instructor, but she was destined to be a mom. He saw it in the gentle brush of her fingers across Samuel’s brow, the silence in her eyes as she mentally accounted for them at the school, her watchful gaze as she trailed them home. Still, she said she was too old for marriage.
    “Tell me,” he said, reaching for the next article of clothing and stretching for a clothespin. “Do women get married young around here?”
    “ Jah ,” Ruth said, nearly shouting over the roar of the machine engine. “Most girls join up when they’re about twenty. It is nothin’ unusual to have a marriage one year and a baby the next.”
    A baby at twenty-one. That seemed on the young side, but then so did motherhood at twenty-five. He knew women in their forties who were just getting around to starting their families. So what made Katie Rose so certain that a family wasn’t part of God’s plan for her?
    He looked down the row of clothes he had just hung. Either Ruth and Annie liked to wash in color sequence or blue was a prominent color in the Amish world. He dragged the basket around the end of the pole and started down the other side. Amazing what he remembered from his childhood days. Using a common clothespin for two items came back as naturally as walking. He smiled, pleased with himself.
    Next shirt up was green, then blue, followed by dark blue. “Tell me, Ruth. Do the Amish have something against red?”
    “It’s too flashy to practice humility.”
    He gave that some thought. He supposed red could be considered showy. And just in his short time with the Amish he understood their need to blend, to be as one. “And yellow?”
    Ruth gave him a quiet smile. “We reserve the showy colors to decorate our flower beds. We wear the colors of serenity.”
    “So purple’s okay?” he asked, holding up an eggplant-colored dress.
    “Only certain shades,” Ruth explained. “If the bishop finds it too bright or boastful, he’ll send one of the ministers to have a talk with the person in question.”
    He blinked, trying to take that all in. It seemed controlling, almost cultish, but he hadn’t really seen anything to make him believe the Amish were more bent toward a cult than a normal run-of-the-mill religion.
    Annie must have heard something in his tone, as she approached and said,