CHAPTER FOUR
Being in your own business is working eighty hours a week so that
you can avoid working forty hours a week for someone else.
—RAMONA E. F. ARNETT
I sat in one of the front pews in our old church, the same church I worried so much about returning to. A deep red carpet lined the floor, and the open ceiling peaked high over our heads.
A ten-foot dark wood cross hung solidly on the wall behind the pastor, witnessing his every move. On that particular day I can’t remember who gave the sermon. Absorbed by what he said, I leaned forward, all of my attention focused on the platform.
Suddenly, in the middle of the sermon, I felt a gentle tapping on my shoulder. I looked around and saw a stranger. The person didn’t say a word, only beckoned to me with her index finger to follow her out of the main auditorium, and even though I didn’t know who she was, for some reason I trusted her. I stood up, feeling slightly embarrassed about getting up in the middle of the service, but no one else in the congregation of more than three hundred even acted as though they saw me moving—it was as if I didn’t exist.
I followed out the back doors and into the foyer, then around a side hallway and down a long corridor with rooms on each side. I recognized the hallway—it led to all of the Sunday school classrooms in the church. The tile floor felt cool under my feet, and the walls were cement blocks painted white. One of the doors on the right led into the nursery, the same nursery where twelve years ago Angie played with her little friends and cousins. The person I followed turned into the nursery. As I followed her into the small room, I heard a child laughing.
Standing there in front of me, could it be?
“Oh, Angie,” I said, running over to her and getting down on my knees, looking into her deep blue eyes.
“Hi, Mommy,” she said as plain as day.
“Oh, Angie,” I said again, unable to say anything else.
“They are taking good care of me, Mommy,” she said in her pixie voice, and then I knew the others in the room, as well as the one I followed, were angels. I bent forward and felt Angie’s diaper, one of those “old-fashioned” cloth ones, nothing like the ones my daughters use on their children. On the day of the accident, I let Angie leave the house in a wet diaper, and it had always bothered me so much that she had died that way.
Angie laughed.
“Don’t worry, Mommy,” she said again, smiling, as I checked her diaper.
Her diaper felt soft and dry. What a relief!
“They are taking good care of me, Mommy. Don’t worry. When Aunt Fi drove over me, two big beautiful angels carried me into heaven. Now I’m picking flowers, playing with all the other children, and I even get to sit in Jesus’ lap.”
Then came that strange feeling of emerging into reality. The room and Angie and the angels all started to fade and swirl. I fought to stay there, to stay in that dream, but the reality of that cold autumn morning somehow gripped me and pulled me into real life. Through blurry eyes I looked at the clock: 4:30 a.m. Time to get up, time to get ready for market.
I took a quick shower, the water and the heat helping me wake up, before walking out into the kitchen and grabbing a mug of coffee. Our living quarters were small and cramped and left quite a bit to be desired, but I had purpose. I was a manager. The morning still slept in darkness, but I hummed while closing the heavy door behind me and walked out to the narrow sidewalk—I spotted my van and smiled. I was so proud of that van.
My boss had told me that part of my job as manager would be to pick up the Amish girls who worked for us, which is why I had to leave so early. He told me I should buy a new van to taxi everyone around in, so I went on down to the local Dodge dealer to look around. There was a particular kind of van popular back then, and I had always wanted one, but when I looked at the sticker price, my heart sank. I knew my and Jonas’s credit fell well short of the requirement. But I needed that van. I talked to my boss about it, and he said to go ahead and buy it—he would even co-sign on the loan for us! And the money he paid me for mileage covered the monthly van payment! Every morning I climbed into that van so thankful to God, and my boss, for the blessing.
By the time I picked up the last Amish girl and headed for the farmers’ market in Burtonsville, Maryland, light began creeping up over the eastern edge of the world. A feeling of warmth and happiness filled me, a satisfying feeling that only comes when you are making something of yourself, forging ahead in the world with hard work and willpower. On those early mornings, I felt that I could do anything.
We arrived at market, and everyone piled out, yawning and waking up but usually laughing too—we were a fun group, we worked hard together, and we knew that smiling and laughing made the long days go faster. We walked down the aisles crowded by produce and baskets and barrels overflowing with things for sale. The stands were brand new but simple, nothing fancy. Some of the food stands looked more permanent, with walls and high ceilings. The main hall was large; in the mornings you could hear it start to wake up as people called out to one another. The market’s grand opening lay only a few months behind us, and an air of fresh excitement radiated throughout the building.
In our stand we cleaned and prepared for the day, turning on ovens and stocking up inventory. We sold soft pretzels, homemade potato chips, and mountain pies, pastries filled with beef and vegetables, while also selling candy in an adjoining stand. Usually we got ready with time to spare, and I headed down to where one of the tenants served an inexpensive but hearty breakfast over a tall counter. We sat on the round stools and chatted about the goings-on in the market—who was getting married, who was having children, who was selling their stand or hiring more help. In some ways that market group seemed extremely diverse, but there were more similarities than differences: most of us who worked there grew up in Lancaster County, most of us were Amish or grew up in the Amish-Mennonite community, none of us was scared of hard work, and we were all trying to get ahead. I felt responsible for my family, trying to bring in some extra money so that Jonas could push ahead with his dream of providing free counseling to those who needed it. Already he counseled two days a week and studied two more days, and I felt proud that by working I could allow him to continue. Yet that feeling of responsibility brought back a lot of memories from my childhood.
A Thursday afternoon in 1961. I was twelve years old at the time and had only recently heard the whispers, the crying, the hushed discussions about how relatives would help us in our time of financial difficulty. I entered the house that afternoon, like every Thursday afternoon in those days, knowing Mom would be at market with Dad. We had suffered some serious financial setbacks in the previous years, so Mom would go along to market to try to save on labor costs while the eight of us kids stayed home and looked after things. My allergies forced me inside while the rest of my brothers and sisters worked in the garden or the barn, and I looked around for the note I knew waited for me, a note from Mom addressed to “Annabetz” listing the number of pies and cakes needed for that weekend’s trip to market.
“10 cherry pies, 10 apple pies, 10 shoefly pies . . .” The list went on. Occasionally the heaviness, the responsibility, the wish to run outside on such a beautiful summer day, the sadness that Mom wasn’t home—all of these things would combine and bring tears to my eyes. Yet arriving in the basement meant a time for action, and action has always formed a welcome distraction. Soon I was making pie crusts, pie filling, and icing for the cakes, all the while humming to myself, wishing my sisters could be there singing with me. In what seemed the blink of an eye, the work vanished, fifty or sixty pies and cakes baked slowly in the huge stone oven, and I thought to myself with a smile how Daddy would yell out to the customers in the market that they had the best cakes and pies around.
“Get your fresh, hot, soft pretzels here!” I would yell out to the morning, thinking about Daddy and how he would bring in the customers with his loud voice booming through the market. But this was Burtonsville in the fall of 1987, and I was managing another stand, not working at Daddy’s. I often thought of Daddy, how proud he would be to see me in there managing and working hard. I find that a lot of times I’m still working hard for him, even though he’s not around anymore.
Just before 9:00 a.m. we started work in earnest, filling up the pretzel display and waiting on the first customers to arrive. From that point on the day blurred in one long hustle and bustle and whirlwind of work: roll pretzels, help customers, clean, roll more pretzels, help more customers, make sure all the employees get their breaks, prepare for the lunch and dinner rush. Finally the day eased off to a slow finish as the market emptied. Clean the equipment. Wash the dishes. Pile into the van. Drive home.
I got home late Friday night dog tired but happy. Sales were good, not as good as we needed them to be, but every week showed steady improvement. I stayed up for a little while talking with Jonas about the day but went to bed at a decent hour—the next morning it all started again.
Saturdays were even better than Fridays because my daughters went to market with me. Both of them worked hard, and LaVale, even though she had only just turned eleven, pretty much ran the candy side of the stand by herself. I found myself completely surprised at how well she dealt with customers and handled the money. At the end of the day, she even gave me a complete inventory with a list of her recommendations as to how much I should buy for the following week. She always knew exactly what I wanted her to do just before I told her—I often called her my little soul mate. I felt so close to her in those days.
Of course there were trying times even then, like the time I found LaVale and her cousin smoking a cigarette behind my brother’s house. Or the time LaVale and that same cousin took her older sister’s car for a joyride. But even those things seemed rather innocent at the time—sure, they gave me some stress and worry, but worse things could happen, right? LaVale and I still remained close, even through those relatively small conflicts. Unfortunately, things would get much worse in our relationship over the coming years.
My relationship with LaWonna was another story. Things changed when we first arrived in Pennsylvania, and I worried about her constantly. One of the major changes was her getting a driver’s license. I could feel her pulling away from me and felt disappointed at the choices she made. I also thought she was getting into trouble, but little did I know just how serious her trouble was becoming, or how much her past haunted her. Anyway, some of that frustration, on both of our sides, spilled over into our time working together at the market stand, until one day she approached me.
“I just can’t work for you anymore, Mom. I like you as a mom, but I just can’t work for you!”
I felt devastated. The fact that LaWonna didn’t want to work with me hurt me deeply. We found her another job at a local pharmacy, but despite eliminating the stress that came from working together, our relationship continued to deteriorate. I took her decision not to work with me as a very personal rejection, something that made me feel inadequate as a mother and also as the friend I thought I should be to her. Couple my crumbling relationship with LaWonna with lingering guilt regarding my past, and depression began creeping in.
As always, I hid my feelings well by staying busy and rushing about from here to there, an easy thing to do since being the manager of a small business required it: market on Friday and Saturday, church on Sunday, banking on Monday, running errands on Tuesday and Wednesday, looking over the inventory and picking up ingredients on Thursday, and then back to market again on Friday. And I loved every minute of it. I made $200 per week plus mileage. That meant I was making $800 to $1000 a month plus the use of the van basically for free, and Jonas was able to counsel more people, spend more time studying. We were really doing it, we were living out our dream, and apart from my low self-esteem, I enjoyed life and work and never considered doing anything else.
We could both feel the momentum gaining: week after week more people came to him about their troubles, their broken marriages, their difficult children, their past abuse or current addictions. Soon he met with eight to ten people each week, and I joined him in the sessions if I could. But running the market stand began taking over my life.
I completely immersed myself in the business, adjusting the menu and eventually emphasizing the soft pretzels as much as possible because of their low cost and increasing popularity. I eventually persuaded my boss to go to just soft pretzels on the one side of the stand, while still selling candy on the other side. I also took care of the books, tracking payments and sales and deposits. When Christmas came around, there was a Christmas party to attend, something I never even thought about, and I received a generous Christmas bonus! Financially we still lived month to month, but things felt secure.
Then another turning point: early in the new year a friend of mine told me there was a market stand for sale at the Downingtown Farmers’ Market. They sold pizza, stromboli, and (the reason she called me) soft pretzels. I never planned on buying my own business—far from it—and felt fortunate just to be managing the stand I already worked at, but Downingtown was only a thirty-minute drive from our house, and the long journeys to Burtonsville every week were starting to wear on me. My friend gave me the details of the people who owned the store and even found out by asking around that they had been trying to sell for quite some time. My initial thought was that they would want way too much money, yet they seemed to want out, and I began to wonder if I should look into it.
But I also felt very committed to my boss. I couldn’t leave him without a manager. The whole idea of abandoning him and his business nearly kept me from even calling the stand owners, but in the end I thought, It can’t hurt to just call, and besides, a lot of market stands sell for $100,000 or even more—most likely it will probably be well out of our price range. I wrote their names down and decided to give them a call when I had a chance.
“Hi, my name is Anne Beiler. Are you the ones selling the stand in the Downingtown Farmers’ Market?”
“Yes, we are.”
“I’m interested in buying your stand. How much are you asking for it?”
A moment of quiet deliberation on the other end of the line. I nearly said, “Okay, thank you,” before they even spoke, so sure was I that the price would be unthinkable for Jonas and me.
“$6,000,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
After asking a few more questions, I hung up the phone and just stared into space for a few moments. $6,000. That was hardly anything at all compared to what I expected the price to be. The sum just kept running through my mind. $6,000 . . . $6,000 . . . $6,000 . . . Jonas stood there with me in the kitchen and I turned toward him.
“They want $6,000. That’s all they want for the stand.”
Jonas waited there beside me while I thought some more. Even though the price came in much lower than I expected, $6,000 was still $6,000. It might as well have been $100,000, since we didn’t have either amount saved up. Still, an incredibly strong feeling began welling up inside of me, the feeling that I should buy the stand, and I blurted out my feelings to Jonas.
“I just think I need to call them back and tell them I want it. I mean, $6,000. I thought it would be at least $100,000.”
Jonas didn’t even hesitate.
“Well, honey, if you feel like you should do it, just do it. Pop will give you the money.” By Pop he meant his dad.
“Do you think he would?”
“Well, you know he’s been telling us if we want to buy a house he would loan us the money. If he has the money to do that, why wouldn’t he loan you just $6,000?”
I turned back to the phone, almost shaking. I called the stand owners back, only a few minutes after we first spoke.
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is Anne Beiler calling back. I would like to buy your market stand for $6,000.” Even then I thought perhaps I heard the price wrong during the first call, or maybe they sold the stand in those precious few minutes while Jonas and I spoke.
We agreed on the price, and I told her I would drop a check off at her house the following week. I still hadn’t seen the market stand or even secured the money to buy it! But I felt as though I was doing the right thing. Immediately after the phone call, Jonas and I hopped in our car and drove over to Jonas’s parents’ house.
We told Pop the story, and then Jonas asked him for the money.
“Well, sure I’ll give you the money,” he said without even a moment’s hesitation.
He wrote out the check at the kitchen table and handed it to me. It felt heavy in my hands, simply because of the amount. No one had ever handed money to me like that. The feeling of physically taking that check from him laid such a feeling of gratefulness and responsibility over me that I hardly knew what to say.
“Pop,” I said, my voice shaking. “I don’t know when I’ll ever be able to pay this back, but I promise you, I will.”
He just looked at me with a loving, steady gaze and said three words.
“I trust you.”
Jonas and I walked back to the car. I was stunned, could feel the check bulging in my pocket like a heavy rock. By the way I acted, you might have thought I had just been given $1 million. The following week I dropped the check off while Jonas traveled to Downingtown to check out the market stand we’d bought. In only a few short days I went from managing someone else’s stand to purchasing my own. The only thing left to do was tell my boss about my plans.
My heart raced. It was a Monday, and I sat across the table from him at a local restaurant and ordered my breakfast. He probably thought we were having one of our usual meetings to discuss the business, the staff, and how things were going at the market stand in Burtonsville. He had no idea I was about to give him my resignation. He also had no idea I couldn’t even work for him that very weekend, only five days away.
But I planned everything to the tee. My sister Becky would take over as manager until he could find someone, and I even hired a few extra workers just to make sure he wouldn’t be short of help. I would give the van to Becky for her to use, and she would provide transport for the Amish girls who needed rides. Finally I blurted it out, told him I bought a market stand and needed to be there that weekend. I told him all the plans I’d put in place to ease the transition and apologized again and again for the short notice.
Once again, he proved to be a man full of understanding. He appreciated that I arranged for everything, even though I had to leave on such short notice. I couldn’t be more thankful to him for the opportunity he gave me at Burtonsville, and I still feel so thankful to him for believing in me—his confidence that I could make his little market stand work instilled in me such drive and self-belief that I can’t picture my life today without his positive influence. But he still had an important role to play over the coming months as I transitioned into my new store.
I sat quietly at the kitchen table. The cold winter air tried to push its way in through the door or the cracks around the window, but we sat snug in our little burrow. A small light-bulb lit up the room; behind me stood two closed doors, one led to my and Jonas’s bedroom, where Jonas slept quietly, and the other to LaWonna and LaVale’s bedroom. LaVale lay quietly in her bed, but I could tell by the creaking that she was still awake. The early hours of the morning came, and still LaWonna didn’t return.
I wanted to go look for her but, without the first idea of where to begin searching, decided to just wait. A few weeks earlier LaWonna had stayed out late, and Jonas went looking, driving the endless back roads and scouting a few of her friends’ houses, to no avail. While he drove those country lanes, he experienced a revelation—he would never find her driving around like that, and by chasing her into the wee hours of the morning, he allowed her decisions to shape his life, deprive him of sleep, and cause him to worry. No more, he thought to himself as he turned the car toward home. No more. And somehow he wiped his hands clean of the situation, still confronting her when necessary, still helping me raise the girls, but managing to separate himself from the things over which he had no control. I, on the other hand, was not nearly that strong.
I wept. I prayed. I read my Bible. Still she didn’t come back. These nights happened time and time again, and still I would wait up for her. At first when she came back, she would completely ignore me, and I would give her the silent treatment in return as she went into her room and slammed the door behind her. At other times we would have discussions that left both of us feeling angry and wronged.
One night I followed her into her room.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” I asked.
Her eyes looked very sad.
“I don’t know what’s wrong, Mom. I just don’t think I can live here anymore.”
Should you decide to look for the first Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzel stand, you would need to go down Route 30 in eastern Pennsylvania just west of Philadelphia and take the Downingtown exit. After driving through a small town that reminds you of just about every other small town in America, you would need to go through a few intersections. Then you would need to go back in time to the late 1990s, to the years before they bulldozed the market and turned it into one of these large box-store strip malls.
Don’t get me wrong: When we first visited our new stand, the one we’d just bought for $6,000, the last words to spring to mind would have been “life” or “energy.” The market was old and tired, the tenants dissatisfied, and the customers disenchanted. My previous market stand had always felt alive and exciting. The first day I worked there had been the market’s first day of business, and everyone could feel the energy. Customers loved what we offered, stand owners were motivated by the potential to turn the market into something successful, and all of this transferred to more lively employees. Downingtown, on the other hand, was old and in decline.
Jonas and I still felt optimistic about our stand, but the atmosphere of the place dampened our enthusiasm. All of the stand owners seemed to have so much to complain about: there weren’t enough customers, the rent was too high, the parking lot was too dirty. The employees just kind of sat there and stared at you. As we walked down to our end of the market, things seemed a bit more lively. It was a newer section with mostly Amish stand holders. But I must admit worry began creeping into my mind when I compared the chemistry of that market with the one I’d worked at just the weekend before.
During the first weekend, the previous owners of our stand helped us learn the operational ropes, taught us how they did things, and gave us their recipes—all of the normal handover stuff. They were eager to leave, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
The first thing we did that week was clean and renovate the store to make it more functional. The stand was one of the larger locations in the market—we had seating and sold pizza, strombolis, soft pretzels, and ice cream. We cleaned the equipment, and Jonas added some touches of his own to make the operations flow more smoothly. My youngest brother, Carl, even showed up one day to help us with the changes. When I tried to pay him for his work, he just shrugged it off.
“We’re just glad you guys are back,” he said. “This is what family is for.” He couldn’t possibly have known how touched I was—after all we went through during our years in Texas, after feeling so nervous that my own family wouldn’t accept me because of all the mistakes I’d made, here they were helping me out so much. With their help we finally got the store just right: everything was sparkling clean, the equipment was ready to go, and we were fully stocked for our first week of sales. I could hardly sleep at night.
When I did sleep, my nights filled up with strange dreams and premonitions. Whether stressed about making the business work or lying in bed waiting for LaWonna to come home, I found my nights becoming more and more restless. I remember one dream in particular.
Cruising down the road in our old ’73 Cadillac, the blue one we moved to Texas in, suddenly I saw Angie in the car with me. I couldn’t believe it, and I remember feeling very excited to see her. She looked just like LaWonna, only taller and with long dark hair, and she was probably around fourteen years old. Absolutely beautiful. I don’t remember how she got there in the car with me, but immediately I said, “Oh, Angie, let’s go see Aunt Vern!” Vern is my brother Merrill’s wife, and she became a close friend to me during those first years back from Texas.
I went in the front door of Vern’s house and walked up the steps. I stood at the top and yelled down the hallway, “Vern, someone is here to see you.”
She came out of her bedroom, and Angie was standing beside me.
“And who is this?” Vern asked, smiling.
I said, “Vern, you don’t know who this is?” I couldn’t believe she didn’t recognize her immediately.
Suddenly Vern’s face nearly exploded with excitement and joy. “Oh my, this is Angie! You look just like LaWonna! Anne, you must be so happy!”
They hugged and cried and laughed, and I remember feeling so grateful that Vern could see her too.
The three of us left the house and got in the car.
Vern sat in the front seat with me and said, “Let’s go see Aunt Beck. She would love to see Angie.” So we headed off down those wonderful country lanes, driving between fields of high corn, a blue sky above us. With Angie and Vern with me in the car, the three of us off to show Angie to my sister Becky, I couldn’t have felt happier or more carefree.
Vern and I sat in the front seat talking, and when I looked in the rearview mirror, Angie had turned into a little three-year-old girl. I kept looking back then quickly talking to Vern, trying to distract her so she wouldn’t see what was happening—for some reason I was embarrassed by Angie, afraid Vern would see her acting like a baby and slobbering all over everything.
Finally we arrived at my sister Becky’s house and we went up to the kitchen. When we walked in, she looked over at us and said hello.
Excitement choked my voice as I said, “Becky, I brought someone to see you.”
“Should I know who this is?” she asked.
What was wrong with everyone? Why didn’t they see what was going on? Why didn’t they recognize Angie?
“Don’t you know who this is?” I asked Becky, my voice changing to a whine. By now Angie had returned to her fourteen-year-old body.
“You are Angie!” Becky exclaimed, her eyes glowing. “You look just like LaWonna!”
Suddenly I woke up.
Immediately upon waking, I felt a realization stir up from deep inside of me. Perhaps it was a mother’s intuition, or perhaps God told me. Whatever the case, the strangest feeling overwhelmed me, a feeling that something had happened to LaWonna when she was only three or four years old. I knew that LaWonna was that little girl in my dream whom I felt embarrassed about. But what could have happened to her? From that point on I never stopped wondering, but nothing I imagined came close to the reality of the past she was hiding.
A few weeks or months later, my fears were confirmed when I went to pray with a friend of mine. LaWonna dated her son, and we would meet from time to time to pray for our children, asking God to keep them safe.
During this particular prayer time, my friend and I talked for a while before I left. I could tell something bothered her, so I asked her about it. She said that during the week she came home earlier than expected and heard her son and LaWonna upstairs—LaWonna sounded very upset.
My friend didn’t know what to do. Should she go upstairs? Were they fighting? She waited until LaWonna left, then asked her son what all the noise had been about. He told her that LaWonna had told him a terrible secret, something he couldn’t tell anyone else.
“Something horrible happened to her when she was a little girl, Mom,” he said. “But we can’t tell anyone about it.”
I remember that first day in my market stand, the relief that only comes with the serving of a first customer, the elation you feel when the register begins filling with money and you know you can at least pay the rent, pay the employees, and have enough left over to buy the ingredients for next week. We flew around that stand like greased lightning, yelling playfully back and forth to each other, making customers smile, serving only the best. But what I’ll remember most is how nervous I felt, how happy to be doing something on my own, and how love overwhelmed me when a deliveryman walked up the aisle, stopped in front of my stand, and dropped off a bouquet of flowers with a note:
You can do this, honey.
Love, Jonas
At the end of those first few weeks, I felt two things very strongly, the first being that we could definitely make this thing work. Sales went up each week, customers seemed happier than ever, and people loved the life and energy my family and I brought to the stand. By now both of my sisters, my daughters, a few in-laws, and even nieces and nephews worked for me at the stand, and we had tremendous fun working together. The market was only a thirty-minute drive from my house, so even though I was busier with work, I wasn’t away from home any more than when I ran Burtonsville. I felt positive about the new venture and knew we would make a success of it.
The second main thought in my mind at the end of those first few weeks almost makes me laugh when I think about it, considering the fact that I ended up building the largest soft pretzel chain in the United States: the pretzels we made during those first few weeks tasted horrible, and I couldn’t wait to stop selling them.