The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,102

got tested, I could find out for sure.

Ada took a step backward. “Why?”

“To see exactly how we’re related. It’s no big deal, just a swab of the inside of your cheek.” I was pretty sure I could find someone at the hospital to do it, or if not I could buy a test.

“DNA is the genetic code, right?”

I nodded.

“What do you think we would find out?”

I shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Or maybe we’ll learn exactly how we connect, why we look so much alike. Whatever it would or wouldn’t tell us, it would mean a lot to me.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I will think about it.” Glancing toward her sleeping grandmother, Ada motioned for me to step outside. Together, we moved onto the porch, and after pulling the door shut behind her, Ada produced a cell phone from her pocket, flashing me a sheepish grin. “I can text you later, once I decide. What is your number?”

I rattled it off and then smiled, surprised but not shocked that Ada had a cell phone. After all, she hadn’t joined the church yet. Though I didn’t totally understand the rules regarding Amish cell phone usage, it seemed to me that they had a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” cell policy, at least with their as-yet-unbaptized youth.

She gave me her number as well, and I quickly entered it in my contacts, thrilled to be able to communicate with her without having to come out to the house to do so.

“It might take me a while, though,” she said, “to make my decision.”

“How long?” I couldn’t contain my frustration.

She shrugged and a pixielike smile crossed her face. “I need to think on it.”

My prenatal appointments ended at the same time Zed and Ella trudged up the drive, coming from the bus stop a quarter mile up the road. Ella was texting away as she walked through the door, and she kept on going straight up to her room. In a few minutes, when I stood halfway up the stairs, I could hear her talking on the phone.

Marta had left a note on the table saying that she’d gone into town. I assumed to talk to her lawyer.

I could take my laptop into town or recruit Zed into helping me again. He seemed to have better luck with online searches than I did and wasn’t likely to share those searches with anyone else, one of the perks of recruiting an adolescent boy who hardly spoke.

I gave him the name Burke Bauer and said that the man probably lived in Lancaster County during the 1980s, maybe near where his Aunt Klara lived now. I was pretty sure there could be a slew of men with the same name and knew the chances of finding the right Burke Bauer were pretty low. And Mammi hadn’t said that he was my father, but I didn’t know why else she would have told me his name. Maybe, just maybe, it was true that my grandmother loved me. I clasped my right hand with my left, remembering her tender touch, and ducked out of the dining room, fighting back tears. Yes, I thought she loved me. Even still.

I collapsed onto the sofa in the living room and closed my eyes, blinking tears away. Ella’s door opened and closed. She started down the stairs, but her cell rang again and she turned around. A moment later her door opened and closed again.

Zed spoke from his perch at the computer across the room. “Lexie, I have something.”

I jumped to my feet. The kid was amazing.

“How about this?”

I looked over his shoulder. It was an obituary for a Burke F. Bauer II, who died at age forty-eight more than ten years ago. A prominent businessman in Lancaster County, he had run his family’s nursery stock business for many years. Bauer was survived by his wife Lavonne and one son, B.F Bauer III.

I did the math. If the guy in the obituary was my father, he would have been more than thirty when I was born, which was too old to have been fooling around with a nineteen-year-old girl. The more likely culprit was his son, apparently also named Burke Bauer. I told Zed to see what he could come up with for that one, but after a good ten minutes of clicking around, Zed had managed to find only one thing, a brief newspaper article in a local paper about him winning the science fair in the spring of his senior year in