“So what are you threatening this time?” Perhaps I was egging him on just a wee bit, but there is a lot more babe (as in baby) in the Babester than I had ever imagined back in the days when my reproductive clock was ticking louder than Freni’s windup oven timer.

Gabe ran perfectly manicured fingers through a head of still dark, thick hair. “No threats, just facts. I’m moving back across the road to my own farm.”

“Your own farm? Don’t we own everything together?”

“Apparently not. You seem to think our son is exclusively yours.”

“He’s not a possession, for goodness’ sake. All I was saying is that I think it’s harmful-”

“Tell that to my back,” Gabe said, and stalked off.

“Well that’s really mature,” I shouted after him.

24

“Ach!” Freni said, her dark eyes widening behind her bottle-thick lenses. “So now the divorce, yah?”

“Divorce?”

“For the English the rate is fifty percent, I think.”

“But I’m not just any old English,” I protested. “I’m a Mennonite whose ancestors were Amish for hundreds of years.”

“Yah, but Gabe is English, and he is fifty percent of your marriage.” She paused in her dough kneading and inched closer so that her flour-speckled bosoms were uncomfortably close to mine. Then she twisted what little neck she had upward and trained those beady eyes on mine. “But I think maybe your husband was already married-metamorphically speaking.”

“Uh-I’m not quite sure what you mean, dear.”

“I mean that he is married to his mama, of course. Just not in the physical way.”

“Oh! You meant metaphorically!”

“Yah, that is what I said. Magdalena, the Bible says that no man can serve two masters. This is the same for families; a man must choose to put his wife before his mother. That is what God wants.”

“Does this apply to your Jonathan and his wife, Barbara?”

Despite her stubby legs, Freni managed to leap back about a yard. “But that woman is from Iowa! And so tall!”

“Who happens to be a doting wife and a wonderful mother to your three grandchildren. Freni, you might wish that Barbara would go back to her family’s farm, like Gabe did to his farm, but in that case she’d take the triplets with her.”

“Ach! So now I say no more,” Freni said, and went back to punching dough.

If I didn’t believe that the Babester would calm down and see the error of his ways by suppertime, I would have followed him across the road to the other farm, the one he calls his, and-well, I would have come up with something. But I didn’t need to go that far with my thinking, because a doctor wouldn’t cut off his nose to spite his face. Okay, so maybe a plastic surgeon at a narcissists’ convention might do that so he could reattach it and garner some business, but then his motive wouldn’t be to spite his face. At any rate, you get my point.

Confident that my marriage would be mended by din-din, I buckled Little Jacob into his car seat, and off we headed to the Sausage Barn for my business lunch. I had yet to hear back from the Zug women, but I took them both to be the type to just show up, rather than respond courteously to my invitation. A free lunch is a free lunch, but good manners are a thing of the past.

Certainly the owner and hostess of the Sausage Barn, Wanda Hemphopple, seemed to be expecting me.

“In the future, Magdalena, kindly make reservations for a party of this size.”

“At the moment, it’s me and the baby, or did a Zug woman or two show up?”

“Harrumph. And just when I thought we were getting to be friends.”

“I thought so too. Tell me, Wanda, what have I done to offend you now? And just so you know, I fully intended to retrieve that sausage link that I dropped down your beehive at the pancake breakfast, but then Minerva keeled over dead and-”

“You what?” Wanda doubled over at the waist and shook her head vigorously. Out of the volcanic cone of a hairdo fell a fork, a book of matches, three toothpicks, and a button, but no sausage link.

“I was just kidding, dear. Really, Wanda, you might want to shampoo that thing occasionally. Aren’t you afraid of rats?”

“ Magdalena, how could you? And after what you did to me in high school.” Then I really did drop a wiener down her do, and it stayed there until it got ripe enough to draw attention to itself.

“I was mere kid then, a child of seventeen. Besides, I’ve apologized a million times. Now, may we skip to the part where you effusively admire my baby, whom you haven’t seen since his little-um-thing was ritually made even smaller.”

Wanda flipped the perilous pile of filthy hair back into a skyward position and glanced at the cutest baby ever to render a human body practically in twain. Little Jacob was wide awake and even smiled at the restaurateur-then again, he may have been merely passing gas beneath the privacy of his blanket. Either way, the effect was the same.

“As I live and breathe, Magdalena, this is the cutest baby I have ever seen! He looks exactly like his father.”

“Thanks.”

“I was being sincere, by the way-on both counts. Say, what’s the deal with the Sisters of Appetite?”

“You mean Sisters of Apathy,” I said.

“I meant what I said. If you think Minerva ate a lot, these ladies would have given her a run for her money-except that would be your money, given that Susannah said lunch was on you.”

“They were here?”

Wanda is a keen practitioner of schadenfreude. She nodded happily, causing the tower of vermin atop her head to teeter perilously.

“You bet your bippy,” she said.

“When?”

“They left not more then five minutes ago. What a strange bunch. One of them sounded just like your mother-in-law.”

“It was; Ida Rosen is now Sister Disaster.”

“Wow. But hey, wouldn’t that make her your sister-in-law as well?”

“Probably. Now, if you’ll excuse me, dear, my dogs are barking, so I’d like to sit down.”

“Dogs? I don’t allow animals in here, Magdalena! Not even that rat of Susannah’s-or Mother Disturbed, or whatever it is she calls herself.”

“It’s just an expression; it means my feet hurt.”

“Okay, okay, you don’t need to be so grouchy.”

“I’m not being grouchy,” I may have snapped. Honestly, nothing makes me crabbier than being accused of being irritable in the first place. It’s unfair, and I hate injustice, plain and simple. It’s not a character fault and I don’t need to apologize for the fact that I sometimes have the right to be annoyed.

“I put youse in the Oak Dining Room on account of there’s so many of youse,” Wanda said, and without a trace of sarcasm.

With Little Jacob’s carrier slung over one arm I trotted along behind the hostess with the mostest-hairdo, that is. The Sausage Barn has two special meeting rooms, the Oak and the Sycamore, and I’ve eaten in both plenty of times, but never by myself. Oh well, as long as I got fed, who cared.

I have been blessed with healthy gums and strong enamel. Were that not the case, my dentures would surely have cracked when my jawbone hit the floor. As it was, my chin took quite a beating and I had to set Little Jacob on the nearest table while I stooped to pick up that errant part of my anatomy.

“Well I’ll be dippety-doodled and hornswaggled,” I eventually gasped.

“What did she say?” the Zug wife demanded. “Is that American?”

“It’s Magdalena trying to speak southern,” Frankie snarled. “We don’t all speak that way, including the southerners.”

I stared at my entire list of suspects. Even the smug mug of Alison’s math teacher, Merle Waggler, was represented. What had he done, called in sick? And at the taxpayer ’s expense! Perhaps it really was time to look for his replacement.

But if one cannot help being taken by surprise now and then, it is best to keep an arsenal of snappy rejoinders ever at one’s disposal. I pulled just such a zinger from my verbal quiver and took aim at the handsome Elias Whitmore.