Nodding, Mamma seemed unsurprised. “Ella Mae and I have both noticed it over the years, too.”

Susie wondered why Britta brought this up to Mamma when Britta had already discussed it with Susie. Was she trying to get Mamma to talk about the accident?

“From what I’ve heard, there used to be lots of flowers and cards or notes . . . even a little white cross,” Britta said. She paused, and Susie wondered what Mamma was thinking about all this. “But now it’s just this one bouquet,” Britta continued. “It’s sweet, isn’t it, that someone besides us still remembers what happened there?”

“Truly it is,” Mamma said softly.

“But who?” Britta asked.

Susie shrugged. “S’pose it could be any number of folk.” She wondered who Britta had been talking to, to know that there had been other flowers and notes and cards and such years ago.

At that moment, Mamma waved at the van coming down the road. “Lookee there, our driver’s right on time,” she said quickly.

Mamma seems uncomfortable with this talk, Susie thought, wishing Britta hadn’t mentioned the bundle of flowers.

Susie stood outside with Britta after the mid-May Preaching service, waiting for the youth to be called indoors for the fellowship meal. She couldn’t help noticing Mamma over talking with Ella Mae near a terraced bed of pink, white, and rose-hued peonies, both of them looking quite solemn. Ella Mae was nodding her head thoughtfully, and Mamma leaned closer, as if to whisper. The scene reminded Susie again of that peculiar time at market when she’d clearly interrupted a private exchange between the women. Seeing them like that now, she sometimes wished she was privy to their shared secrets.

Susie sat on the back porch that afternoon, waiting for Britta to finish the late-afternoon goat milking. Over yonder, she could see the Ebersols’ road horses standing head to tail in the southwest corner of the meadow. Rarely one to just sit and twiddle her thumbs, even on the Lord’s Day, Susie enjoyed the cool breeze, knowing summer weather was just around the corner.

To the west, the neighbors’ dairy cows were drifting into the deep pasture, where they would likely spend the night under the stars and waxing crescent moon. Susie recalled the warm summer night, five years ago, when Mamma had let her pitch a tent in the backyard. Susie and Britta and two of her cats had slept happily beneath a full moon.