by Meg Moseley
No doubt about it. She should have disobeyed Carl more often.
As Jack sat on a log a few feet from his latest fire, a sense of foreboding hung over him. Over the next few weeks, he had to make a gradual return to his normal life, and that meant leaving Miranda and the kids to their own devices, for the most part. He couldn’t be in both places at once.
Besides, it was a Friday. The night that meant loss and grief and regrets.
Ava left him on a Friday. He’d found his mom on a Friday. His dad died on a rainy Friday afternoon. Even Jesus died on a Friday. Sometimes, it took until Sunday to remember that Sunday always came.
Jack checked his phone for the time, the silvery light nearly blinding in the darkness. He and the boys had come back from the pizza place an hour before, but they were still banned from the house. He didn’t mind; it forced Timothy to participate in the outdoor festivities. The girls had joined them too. Everyone but Miranda and Yvonne had gathered around the fire.
Once in a while, Martha and Rebekah shared mysterious smiles with each other, then giggled and clammed up. They thought their secret was safe.
As if Jack hadn’t noticed they wore jeans.
A great encouragement, those jeans. Now that Miranda’s posse knew what freedom tasted like, they would wage war if she ever tried to drag them back to Mason’s legalism.
As the fire’s orange tongues licked the night sky, Jack entertained the bitter notion of burning Mason in effigy. Not a Christian thought, but it would have been a satisfying way to celebrate. Lord willing, the man’s tyranny over Miranda and her family was over.
Jack had grand plans. He would come back on weekends. He’d take them to church—a mainstream church. He’d take them to Chattanooga sometime, to the aquarium. To the school, where Martha’s eyes would light up at the sight of all those books in the library. There was the zoo. The Cooledge Park carousel. The river, the caverns, Lookout Mountain. They could spend the night at his house. His bachelor digs would come alive with noise and laughter.
He closed his eyes, imagining Miranda in his bed.
He pictured himself sleeping on the couch. The perfect gentleman. That couldn’t last forever.
A minor commotion startled his eyes open. Over Jonah’s grumpy protests, Timothy hauled him away from the fire.
“Not so close.” Timothy situated his baby brother on one of the logs and returned to the outskirts of the circle to stand guard.
Jack tried to relax and absorb the peace of the mountains. Crickets chirped, the wind rustled the pines, and the children chattered around the fire.
Back at the house, an engine turned over. Headlights and red taillights wavered against tree trunks and vanished into the darkness. Yvonne had left.
Jack waited, not knowing if Miranda would stay inside or join them.
Time crawled. He couldn’t stand it.
“Timothy, would you mind being in charge for a few minutes?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Thanks.” Jack started toward the house. Nearly there, he looked behind him. Timothy, silhouetted against the fire, hadn’t budged from his post.
Then Jack turned the corner, going around the house, shutting out the dim orange glow. Alone in the soft darkness, he found his way to the front. The porch light was off.
Then it was blazing in his eyes and he was blinking at a gorgeous blonde in jeans and a pale green sweater. Her hair swung freely, falling just to her shoulders in a sassy cut that simply couldn’t have sprung from the scissors of a great-grandma.
Miranda shut the door behind her and stopped there, exactly where they’d first met. He’d been coming up the steps to knock when she’d ventured onto the porch. Upbeat, excited about meeting his brother, he’d talked about wanting family connections. Miranda had smiled, served lemonade, juggled two toddlers, and said how nice it was to meet a surprise brother-in-law. She hadn’t said a word about having just lost her son.
Now her eyes asked … something. Jack stood motionless, trying to hear her unspoken question. What did she want from him? Or what did she want to give?
An invitation into the invisible box she’d built around herself. That was it. His doubts gathered wings and darted away like bats, back to the darkness where they belonged.
“Wow,” he heard himself say from an echoing distance. “Jeans.”
“I had to try on half a dozen to find some that fit.”
As he urged his clumsy feet up the steps, he inhaled a light, flowery scent that challenged the smell of smoke on his clothes. Placing his hands on her shoulders, he thought he could feel the merging of their invisible boxes into a heady little universe of their own.
He leaned toward her but hesitated, giving her a chance to escape. Instead, she stretched up for a quick, awkward kiss that was all the sweeter because she’d initiated it.
“I’m out of practice.” She let out a low, breathy laugh. “But practice makes perfect.” Her hand found his shoulder and slid up toward his neck, and she tugged him into their second kiss.
It was much better than the first. Solidly on target. Warm and willing, on both sides.
He pulled away to study her. To savor her. Her face framed with a wild abundance of silky hair. Her lashes longer than ever, her big eyes shimmering with tears.
“A buckwheat cake was in her mouth,” Jack sang, so softly that his voice cracked and wavered. “A tear was in her eye. Says I, I’m comin’ from the south. Miranda, don’t you cry.”
“You didn’t come from the south. You came from the north. But you came. You came when I needed you.” She clamped her lips together, parted them long enough to say, “Thank you, Jack,” and clamped them shut again like a dam against a flood.
He couldn’t answer. He wanted to give back everything that had been stolen from her. But that wasn’t something a man could say out loud. It was just something he would try to do.
For now, there was nothing to do but tease those pretty lips into a smile and kiss them again.
And again. And again. Forever and ever, amen.
twenty-seven
Saturday sped by, a blur of long conversations and stolen kisses. Miranda and Jack sat up late, talking, and when she’d finally gone to bed, she hadn’t slept well. Plagued by nightmares of being trapped in a closet under a pile of stolen sweaters, she woke on Sunday with a stabbing headache.
Two reddish brown ibuprofen tablets lay on her palm. Jack had fished them out of his shaving kit for her. If she took them, they would be the first bit of pharmakeia she’d taken voluntarily since she was eighteen.
Of course she would take them. They might help her survive the Sunday service at a mainstream church Jack had picked from the phone book. He kept using that word, “mainstream,” as if it were a guarantee against heresy.
He stood before the hall mirror, fussing with the tie he’d borrowed from Timothy. They were funny, those two. They were learning to get along, almost as if they’d always wanted to like each other and had now decided they could, except Timothy still retreated into sullen moods sometimes.
Miranda popped the tablets into her mouth with a swallow of water, then looked down at her dress of periwinkle blue. A matronly style from the hand-me-down bags, it was years out of date but better than the sacks she’d thrown out.
“I love, I love my twirly dress,” Martha sang. Spinning in circles, preening and pirouetting like a little pink bird, she was oblivious to the fashion faux pas of wearing clunky brown shoes with a lacy dress.
Rebekah wore a simple jacket and skirt in a soft blue. Her shoes were wrong for her new outfit, and it was even worse in her case. Partly because she had big feet, partly because most girls her age would have known the shoes were wrong, but she didn’t have a clue.
Miranda was afraid she’d ruined her children. They would be misfits forever. Other children would laugh at them.
She turned quickly to hide her tears from the girls and nearly crashed into Jack. She spun away before he could inspect her, but paid for it
with a flash of vertigo.
“Lookin’ good, y’all,” he said. “Except for some cat hair here and there, everybody looks reasonably respectable.”
She looked down at her own frumpy shoes, evidence she was living half in her new world, half in her old world. Her heart and her head were still making the transition into unknown and terrifying territory.
Jack picked a cat hair from her shoulder. “It’s chilly out. Do you and the girls have coats?”
“Just capes. The girls would rather go without. They don’t want to hide their pretty new clothes.”
“And what about you, Mrs. H.?”
She made a face. “I guess I’ll wear my cape. One last time.”
He lifted the cape off its peg and draped it over her shoulders. Its weight was familiar. Comforting.
Stifling.
About to fasten it at her throat, she balked. “I’d rather freeze.”
“I won’t let you freeze.” Jack whipped the cape off of her and dropped it on the floor. He took his rumpled raincoat off its peg and held it up by the shoulders. “May I interest you in the latest style? The menswear look.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Capes are so last year, dahling.”
She smiled and let him help her into the coat. He cuffed up the sleeves, fastened a few of the buttons, and motioned with one finger for her to spin around. She complied, laughing. Feeling like a little girl in a spinny dress.
Jack kissed her forehead and nudged her toward the door. “Let’s go, troops,” he called.
As Jack pulled the van onto the road, Miranda looked both ways for familiar vehicles. She let out a sigh of relief when the road was empty.
“Afraid someone’s going to see you sneaking off to a different church?”
“Sometimes you’re a little too perceptive, Jack.”
“Trying a new church doesn’t make you a rebel or a backslider or a traitor.” He looked in the rearview mirror. “You need a little more of the rug rats’ perspective. They’re as excited as if we were headed for a carnival.”
“I know, but it feels wrong. Like I’m abandoning my friends on a sinking ship.”
“So? They can jump ship too.”
Miranda lowered her voice. “What if this church’s pastor is no better than Mason?”
“I’d guess that nine out of ten pastors are better than Mason. Most clergymen aren’t in it for money or power. They’re in it because they love God and people.”
“I wish I could believe you.”
“And I wish I could drag you up to ’Nooga this morning to meet my pastor. He’s one of the good ones. I’d trust him with my life.”
She stared ahead at the winding road, remembering the day she’d met Mason. She’d thought she could trust him. “How did you decide on the church we’re trying this morning?”
Jack coughed. “I, uh, opened the phone book to the church listings and took a stab.”
“You what?”
He ran a finger under his collar as if it had grown too tight. “You heard me.”
“You steered me away from Yvonne’s church because they believe in prophecies but you’ll trust your fingers to pick the right church?”
“Yes ma’am. I’ll let you have your hang-ups if you’ll let me have mine. Deal?”
Miranda smiled and offered her hand. “Deal.” They shook on it.
Neither of them spoke again until he pulled off the county road to a side road, and from there to the parking lot of a small, brick church surrounded by shade trees. At the front entrance, a man and a woman handed palm fronds to adults and children alike as they arrived.
“It’s Palm Sunday,” Jack said, swinging the van into a parking space. “I’d almost forgotten.”
While he explained the tradition of palm fronds to the children, Miranda watched a middle-aged man help an elderly woman exit the passenger seat of a beat-up car in a handicapped spot. He maneuvered her walker so she could lean on it. Once she’d started moving, he pulled a black Bible and a large, pink purse from the front seat.
Then Miranda noticed his clerical collar. Matching the woman’s slow shuffle, the pastor escorted her toward the building. He let her take her time, as if ministering to a frail and needy lamb took precedence over everything else.
In nine years of knowing Mason Chandler, Miranda had never seen him perform such a simple, humble task. Carrying a woman’s purse was beneath Mason’s dignity, even if that purse wasn’t large and pink.
A purse-toting pastor certainly wasn’t looking after his own interests.
A smile started deep within Miranda and made its way to her lips. Jack’s fingers might have picked just the right church after all.
Jack knew he was leaving something undone. He just couldn’t think what.
It wasn’t as if he’d be gone for weeks and weeks, but an unfortunate confluence of deadlines and committee meetings required his presence in ’Nooga for at least four days. Maybe five.
He walked into the kitchen and cleared paper hearts from the refrigerator door so he had room to affix his phone number at a four-year-old’s eye level. “Martha asked me to teach her how to leave a message,” he told Miranda. “So I did. I’ll leave my number here, just in case.”
“Okay.” Miranda paused in tidying the counter. “I hope she won’t abuse the privilege.”
“I don’t think she will.” He smuggled the hearts into the trash. Martha would never notice.
Sunday had slipped through his fingers in a hurry, half of it taken up with going to church. It had gone well, for the most part. Miranda liked the pastor, Jack’s built-in heresy detector hadn’t gone off, and they’d caught Jonah just before he pilfered a twenty from the offering basket.
Jack had spent the afternoon collecting his belongings, rounding up every last paper and sock and book that had migrated there with him. Now his bags were packed and loaded into the car. Only minutes remained before he had to leave. Only minutes to nail down whatever it was that he’d forgotten.
Circling the kitchen, mindlessly counting rafts of paper hearts, he remembered. “Microwave. That’s it. I was going to run to Clayton and buy you a microwave.”
“I haven’t had one since college. I’ll get along fine without it.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. You need to get over your fear of—”
“Fear? Jack, I’ve never been afraid of microwaves. That was Carl’s notion. I just never got around to shopping for one.”
“Sorry. I’ll—I’ll bring you one.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“But I want to. Will you remember to lock up at night?”
She gave him a wan smile. “We’ll be fine. And don’t start lecturing me again, professor.”
“No, I won’t. I’ve been thinking though. I’m glad you like this new church, but maybe you should ask Yvonne to put you in touch with some good, sane homeschoolers. They’re everywhere. Big families, little families. Conservative and not so conservative. Most of ’em are some variety of nonconformist. You’ll find some new friends.”
“I’d say that nearly qualifies as a lecture.”
“I’m sorry. Old habits die hard. Miranda, if you can only—”
“No wonder I have a hard time hearing God speak.” Her voice rose. “There’s always some man telling me what to do, and I can’t hear God for all the noise!” She seized the broom that stood in the corner and started sweeping the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “Here, let me sweep.”
“No.”
“Please. It can’t be good for your shoulder.”
He moved behind her, encircling her with his arms and taking charge of the broom, his hands over hers. Bits of construction paper, crumbs of dried Play-Doh, even stray grains of rice from Martha’s bridal spree several days ago. The floor was a mess, and he was inordinately grateful because it gave him more time to waltz across it in a broom dance with Miranda.
“Waltzing Miranda, waltzing Miranda,” he sang softly. At the last moment, he reme
mbered to turn the line into a question: “Will you come a-waltzing, Miranda, with me?”
Her shoulders shook in a tiny, carefully controlled sob.
He stopped moving and leaned his head against hers. “Everything’s going to be all right, darlin’.” He brushed his lips against the nape of her neck and felt her shiver. Encouraged, he nuzzled her again. “You smell delicious.”
Timothy walked in, quiet as a cat. Something flickered in his eyes. Surprise or anger or something worse.
Miranda froze. Jack held her more tightly, his lips poised to nibble her ear.
Jack took a breath. “Timothy, you can be loyal to your father but still let your mother move on with her life.”
“Oh, yeah. You two are a great combination.” Timothy curled his lip. “The guy who harps about digging for the truth, and my mother, who lied to me for years about Jeremiah.”
“Show your mother some respect, young man, or you’ll answer to me.”
Miranda twisted out of his arms, and the broom clattered to the floor. “You’re not in charge of disciplining my children.”
Jack raised his hands. “Sorry. I was treating him the way I’d treat him if he were my own son.”
“He’s not your son, Jack.”
“Yeah, Jack, I’m not your son.” Timothy swaggered out of the kitchen.
Miranda’s face was white. “I can’t believe he said that.”
“It’s true. He’s not my son.”
“Not that. He called me a liar.”
Jack rubbed his face with his hands, trying to squelch the doubts that kept plaguing him. Maybe it was better to be blunt.
“That’s true too,” he said. “You lied for years by keeping quiet. You deceived Timothy. You made him think he was going insane. He has every right to feel betrayed.”
A small sound behind Jack proved to be Timothy at the table, his hands white-knuckling the back of one of the chairs and his eyes pleading. He wasn’t a guard dog or the alpha male. He was a gangly, half-grown puppy.