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

asked my mother if she thought I’d be interested. He’s a nice fellow, so I hear, a hard worker, but...” She grimaced. “Too much of him for me, my
mam
and
dat
said. Too much Abram altogether.”
    “He’s a large man?”
    “About the size of one of my father’s Percheron draft horses.” She giggled. “Or maybe the whole team.”
    “Ellie,” Addy scolded, a little titillated by her new friend’s daring. “That isn’t kind. My
dat
says that a person is the way God made them, and we should accept them as they are.”
    “Ya,”
Ellie agreed. “But think about it. How foolish would we look together? Me little, Abram...well...Abram. If we sat on the porch swing and it didn’t break, it would be like a schoolyard seesaw. He’d sit down, and my end of the swing would fly up.” She chuckled and shook her head. “
Ne
, Addy. Better I be an old maid knitting baby bonnets for my sisters and mufflers for my brothers than be married to such as Abram.”
    “I suppose.” No fat boy had ever asked to walk out with her. No boy, fat, skinny or in between, had even driven her home from a singing or a work frolic. The truth was that she’d passed her dating years watching other girls ride out with boys in their buggies, and play badminton with them on their front lawns.
    Her one venture into the marriage market had been a near miss with the then-new preacher in Seven Poplars, Caleb Wittner. Her
dat
and
mam
had wanted her to marry him, and for a while, Caleb had come to several family dinners. But they’d never gotten past the considering-each-other part of dating. Caleb was a respectable enough man, but she hadn’t felt as if he were someone with whom she could spend the rest of her life. He seemed a little boring to her, with nothing to talk about but his woodworking. To her parents’ regret, she’d put an end to that courtship before it had even started. Which turned out to be just as well because he soon married her cousin Rebecca, and they were a perfect match.
    Addy sighed. It would be nice to have someone she liked pursue her, even if she did later turn him down. But there always seemed to be more eligible young Amish women than suitors, which was why Sara’s matchmaking services were in such high demand.
    She climbed down the ladder, moved it over a foot and climbed up it again. The smell of baking bread wafted in from the kitchen. Sara was a fantastic baker, and she preferred to make rye or whole-wheat loaves with yeast instead of the baking powder biscuits that Addy had grown up eating. Sara liked to get her baking out of the way early in the day, and Addy’s mouth watered at the thought of the midday meal they would be sitting down to in a few hours. Between the apple tarts, the
lebkuchen
, the
fastnachts
, the streusels and the shoofly pies that Sara whipped up in her kitchen, it was a wonder that she wasn’t as plump as Addy’s cousin Anna.
    Thinking of Sara’s round face brought a question to mind. Addy glanced around to see that they were alone and lowered her voice. “Why is Sara’s skin darker than ours?” she asked Ellie.
    Ellie shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t you have anyone with dark skin in your community?”
    “Ne.”
Addy felt her face grow warm, and she was sorry she’d asked. Most Amish she knew were fair-skinned, with rosy cheeks and German features. Sara had curly, almost blue-black hair, but she didn’t look African-American. What was her family background?
Mam
had asked her this morning if she knew.
    Ellie bent over and measured out another length of tape for the windowsill. “Not so unusual to have members with darker skin in other Amish settlements. I went to school with a girl who was very brown, but she was a foster child that a family in our church adopted. Louise, her name was. Very good at arithmetic. She won the prize every year at the end-of-school picnic.”
    “I just wondered.” Addy turned back to her task. “It’s not important.”
    “Not all people are