The Best Christian Short Stories

by Brett Lott

  He shook his head.

  "'You just gotta love him. I love your father'—that's what she told me." She looked him straight in the eye. "I don't love Craig," she said. "Not anymore anyway."

  He couldn't get the garage door open because for a minute he couldn't figure out the lock. Dang shame anyway, he thought, people having to lock up garages. What kind of life you got when you can't trust the neighbors?

  Once he got it open, he backed the truck up the driveway like a moving van, and inside a couple of minutes he had the kids' seats strapped in and everything loaded—whatever Janna had packed and plenty of room to spare.

  "How come you took the bikes, Grandpa?" Kurtis said, flicking his glasses up on his nose.

  "Your Grandma and I gonna want to try these things out," he told him. "These are beauties—"

  "They're not for big people," the boy said, scolding him. "They're for kids."

  He stopped dead in his tracks. "You aren't kidding?" he said. "Maybe we ought to leave 'em here then."

  Kurtis pursed his lips. "Can I ride at your house?" he asked.

  "All day long if you like—all over town too," he said. "Tell you what—why don't we keep 'em in the truck in case you want to tool around?"

  "Okay with me," the boy said.

  He picked up Kurtis and hiked him up on his arm. "Grandma says she's got blueberry muffins just growing in the kitchen. She says you shouldn't be eating anything all the way back to Iowa, just saving up room for those muffins."

  "I love muffins," Kurtis said.

  "Grandmas know that. They got lists of what kids like," he told him.

  The boy pointed over his shoulder. "It's Daddy," he said, and he scrambled to get down.

  The tall blond guy getting out of the squad car didn't look like the Craig he wanted to see. He remembered what Eleanor had said the first time she saw him after he got the job: "There's something about a uniform." And what was worse was the way Kurtis ran down the driveway just to get to his father, so much like he loved him.

  Right then he'd have given anything for a trowel and a pail of mush. Rather than face the talking he was going to have to do, he'd have traded places with any mason in the whole valley, even though it was hot as Hades. Like Jonah, or Moses, he thought. He got those two stuck in his craw because the both of them complained to the Lord they couldn't get the words out.

  Craig was down at the end of the driveway, sort of nuzzling his son's hair and looking for all the world like the father Wilf figured he wasn't. "So much like you," Eleanor had told him—and not just that first night either, but later, at the wedding, at the reception, when Craig and Janna walked from table to table, greeting the families and well-wishers, Craig standing there straight as a beam, looking like for a dime he'd rather be out somewhere filling silo, while Janna—who really wasn't all that much better at being sweetheartish—led him around like a mule. "You were the same way," Eleanor told him that night at the head table. "I was so mad at you."

  He'd pointed at Craig. "It's all he cares about is the honeymoon," he said. "I can't blame him."

  It was blue, the uniform, full of badges and whatnot, his waist thick as a roofer's with tools of the trade, the gun leaning away from his hip on the right side, things hanging all over. But neat. His hair was cut shorter than Wilf remembered, even styled, and he didn't look at all like a drunk.

  "Kurtis, you run inside now," Craig told his son. "Go see what Mom's up to."

  Wilf wiped his hands on his pants and walked out the open garage to meet him. Scared?—sure, he thought. Give me the words, Lord.

  "I been thinking," Craig said when he came up. "You're my father too, you know? Not just hers anymore."

  Wilf lifted his cap and wiped back the sweat. "That's true in the books," he said.

  Craig raised his eyebrows enough to let him know he didn't like it. "You don't know the half of it," he said. "You don't know anything but what your daughter tells you."

  Down there around his belt there was belly hanging already, and he wasn't even thirty-five, Wilf thought. Without the uniform, he wouldn't have been such a big shot, doughy in the face, red in the cheeks like an alcoholic, a man who looked like he could have had a heart attack long before his time.

  "You don't want to hear the other side?" Craig said.

  "I'll listen," Wilf said, "but right now I'm bringing my daughter home."

  Something came up in Craig's throat. "We can lick this," he said, choking something back, "but I can't do it without her."

  Wilf shook his head. "Well, you're going to have to, because I didn't drive all this way for nothing."

  "I won't let you," he said, his eyes jumping from the brickwork to the garage and the bushes, the landscaping. "I'm not letting you take my family."

  "You aren't the law this time," he said, "even if you're wearing a uniform."

  "Then who is?" he snarled.

  Wilf looked at the truck. "I guess it's me."

  "On whose authority?"

  "My own." He thumbed at his chest.

  The kid was ripped up. You could see it. "I'm in counseling now, all right?" he said. "Dang it, Wilf, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing."

  "Aren't you on duty?"

  "Yes."

  "Then clean up these streets, all right? Get out of the way," Wilf told him. "I'll be glad to talk about this once we get back home. I'll talk forever. But right now I'm getting her out of here, and there ain't nothing more to say."

  "Don't do this, Dad, all right? Stay over tonight. Stay in our house here and we can talk. We can start over. We can sit down over coffee, and you can hear me out for once. You must be tired—"

  "I got a full tank of what I been running on."

  "Don't do this to me, Wilf," he said. "Don't do this."

  "It's nothing I'm doing to you, Craig," he said. "What I'm doing, I'm doing for her. What comes after this is what the two of you got to do together." He rubbed the sweat from the corner of his lips with the back of his wrist. "Don't fight it now, because it's a done thing."

  That whole time Janna was loading the kids behind them, strapping them in the backseat, checking through the stuff Wilf had loaded in the back of the truck. She threw in her purse and whatever other goodies she'd tucked along. Craig stood there in his uniform, his hands in his back pockets, looking almost like a baby, Wilf thought, sadder than anything. Maybe there was hope.

  "Where's Daddy going to sit, Mom?" Kurtis said, once she had him in good.

  That question hung in the silence like the sound of a siren.

  "Mommy's got plenty of books," she said, showing the kids the big shopping bag up in the front seat. She climbed in the front seat.

  "Daddy?" Kurtis said.

  "You got a map?" Janna asked.

  "I know the way," Wilf told her.

  "You got gas? I got money," she said.

  "It's already filled," he said.

  "C'mon, Daddy," Gracie said.

  Somebody had to say something, he thought. "Your daddy's coming later," Wilf said. "He's got to work, and then he's coming by himself."

  Janna pulled the shoulder harness around her and locked it in place. Kurtis reached out with both hands for a kiss from his father, and Craig obliged, crawling into the backseat to give both a hug. Wilf stood outside the driver's side, Janna acting like her husband was some kind of desert snake. Then he went back to the garage and pulled down the door.

  Through the back of the van, through the handlebars of the bikes, he saw Craig hold on to every last minute, and he was struck with the sense that the kids, both of them, looked more like their father than they did like Janna. Craig pulled himself back a bit from Gracie, touched his lip with his pointer and tapped the tip of her nose.

  Janna turned and ripped out the seat belt, then stepped back out of the truck. "Get him out of here, Dad," she said. "Let's go. Get him out of here."

  He stood at the back of the truck as both of the kids wouldn't let their father go. "Good Lord," he said to himself, "gi
ve me a map out of this." Maybe I ought to stay, he thought. Maybe he ought to just sit here with the two of them until things settled down or something. Maybe hauling them off wasn't the right thing to do. Twenty minutes ago he'd been sure that the only question was going to be how long all of this was going to take, how much time to pack the car and have them aimed back toward the Midwest.

  Craig slowly untangled himself from his kids and backed out of the seat, stood there with the door open, looking at him. "Look at what you're doing to them," he said, just like that, talking way too loud. "Look once what you're doing to my kids," and then he pointed at them, as if they weren't kids at all, nothing with blood and a heart.

  He shouldn't have said something like that in front of the kids, Wilf thought. He walked around the passenger's side, stepped between his son-in-law and the door, and shut it softly. "Now, get back in that car or go in the house or do whatever you're supposed to do," he told Craig, "or else I'm going to call a real cop."

  Just like that he was all words. Craig blew out a whole lot of things in a tone of voice he shouldn't have used, words that could have been forgiven, Wilf thought, if it hadn't have been for the kids right there beside him, their doors and windows closed, but his own door still open like a gash. It wasn't the words so much as the pitch of his voice that the kids wouldn't forget, the sound of an animal wounded, their father.

  Big as owls' their eyes were when he got into the truck. He started the engine as quickly as he could and pulled it into gear, but Craig ran out front and stood directly in the way, the look on his face rock-solid. Janna said, "That son of a bitch," and Wilf reached across the seat and grabbed her wrist. "Don't let me ever hear you say that about their father again," he said.

  "Well, look at him," she said, eyes like notched spears.

  He wanted to cry, not for himself but for all of them and the darkness all around that, try as you might, you never could quite turn your back on—hate, pure and simple evil he could feel even in the way he was, right then, pinching his daughter's arm.

  "You're not going," Craig screamed, and he put both hands up against the hood as if by force of will he could stop them.

  The kids don't have to hear another word, he thought as he got out of the truck again and shut his door behind him, keeping hold of the handle. "I'll run you down, Craig, I swear it," he said as quietly as he could. "You better believe me when I say I'm right now bringing Janna home."

  "You'll kill me for what she says?" He pointed at the front seat. At least he didn't scream. "You don't even know the whole story, and you'll run me down?"

  "I ain't going to hurt nobody here if you get out of the way," Wilf told him, slowly, quietly. "What I'm saying is, soon as I get back to Iowa I'll call you and we can talk forever. But right now, I got to leave—we got to leave."

  "Then leave my kids behind," he said.

  "Who's going to care for them, Craig?" he said. "Who's got the time with you off to work? Don't be stupid." He pointed at the squad car. "Get back to work. Once things cool off here—tell you what, I'll pay for a ticket. You fly home."

  Craig took his hands off the hood but stayed in front of the truck, backed off just enough for Wilf to think it was his turn to act, so he threw open the door and jumped in without looking at his son-in-law, as if trusting him to give it up. But when he got back behind the wheel, Craig still held his ground.

  Janna should never have done it, but she did. She rolled down her window and screamed at him. She said, "Get out of the way." That's all, nothing else at first, but it wasn't so much what she said either as the way she laced those words with hate. "You son-of-a-bitch," she screamed at him, "get out of the way." Right in front of the kids.

  Whatever it was that set him off so fast he didn't even change clothes back in Neukirk, whatever force pushed him to drive down here as if going to Arizona was a trip to Sioux Falls, whatever fire was in his belly all the way down went out maybe because Janna didn't seem so much his daughter, someone who needed him, as someone who needed something a whole lot more than anything a father could ever begin to think about providing.

  He reached over, but at that moment, she yelled, "Go ahead," and he looked back up at Craig, who had that service revolver out and pointed right at Janna, his elbows down on the hood, the gun in both hands like you see on TV. "Go ahead," she yelled again. "You don't have the guts," she said.

  And just like that, Craig stood up from the aim he'd taken, stood straight and tall, and turned that gun on himself, swung it up toward his mouth, and in that flash, that half-second, Wilf finally did exactly what he'd threatened, without even thinking. Even before Craig got that barrel in his mouth, Wilf hit the gas and the truck lunged forward like some tethered beast and knocked him down. There was no sudden clunk because Craig wasn't so much smacked by the force as he was shoved hard to the cement.

  "You stay in the truck," he yelled at his daughter, and in those few seconds—three maybe—that it took for him to get around the hood to the front, he thought of so many possibilities that it seemed almost as if he might be the one about to die. Concussion—and he saw Craig in a hospital bed like some swami, head in bandages. Pinned beneath the truck—he'd have to call on the Lord for the great strength, like farm women lifting tractors miraculously off their husbands. And even as his mind was riffling through scenes, he waited for a shot from that pistol that would have ended it in the way Craig had threatened.

  What he saw before anything else was the pistol, maybe three feet from Craig's right hand, and the first thing he did was stick it in his pants. Craig was up on one elbow. His face seemed turned at an angle, like a dog who hears something strange in the wind, woozy as if he'd hit his head. "You're my son, all right," he told him, "and I'm not going to forget it." He picked him up by the shoulders and dragged him across the driveway and laid him in the grass. Then he got back in the truck, slammed the door, and the Travelall bumped softly down the end of the driveway as he turned it right, toward 35th Avenue.

  "He okay?" Janna said.

  He didn't dare look back at the kids, but he knew he couldn't let Craig lie there in the grass, helpless. He reached for the sweatshirt he kept beneath the seat, stopped the truck when he was alongside the police car, jumped out once more. "I'll call you, I swear," he said as he lay the sweatshirt over his son-in-law's shoulders. "We got to make something out of this," he said. "It can't end this way."

  Craig pulled himself up and held his head with both hands. Wilf got to his feet and went to the car. If he could operate the radio, he'd call something in, he thought, so he opened the door and picked up the handset, tried clicking it, making it squawk, but there was nothing. He looked up and down the dash for some kind of switch for the lights, and when he found it, he snapped it on so red and orange flashes danced across the panel on top, sending colored lights banging off the front of the houses up and down the street.

  He wasn't thinking so much about the kids when he got back inside because Janna was crying now, and for that he was thankful. He came up to the traffic on 35th and pulled into the right lane, going south toward Thunderbird. If he'd taken his work truck, he could have used the CB, but he figured the lights would pull in a crowd and somebody would see Craig there on the street, somebody would help him. Hadn't Janna said that his cop buddies were always looking out for him? It was all he could do now to get some distance on the whole mess, separate them for a while, cool the whole business down, bring some silence.

  He saw Janna sneak a peek at her kids as they came to the freeway entrance, and he turned right into the cloverleaf and took that long curve so slow it seemed they weren't leaving all that trouble behind in the dust and the darkness of the desert. A pair of courteous eighteen-wheelers swept into the left lane to give him room, and he was on his way home.

  The lights of the north suburbs gradually tailed off with each mile they passed in the silence outside the big city. He didn't have a thing to say to her. If there were some way he could draw a partition up between them
, like a taxi, he'd have done it, because he didn't have a good thing to say to his daughter right then, nothing sweet. It wasn't at all like he imagined it, he thought, wasn't at all like Moses taking people out of trouble, wasn't that way at all, he thought, not the kind of joy he thought he'd feel doing the right thing.

  Ten miles north of 35th and Thunderbird, the lights from the city finally stayed behind them, the tail-end of a long clear desert day still glowing over the ridge of mountains west, a ridge cut jagged by the purple dusk. The only thing lit in front of them now were green Interstate signs and here and there a billboard. He looked over the gauges in front of him. Tank was full. The truck rolled heavily, the engine pulling a bit, the gas pedal low to the floor beneath his boot, even though they weren't speeding and not about to, not with Craig's friends in uniform. They were going uphill, he remembered. All the way to Flagstaff it was a climb.

  Perfect silence in the truck. Just so there'd be something, he turned on the radio and something country and western came up with so much volume he turned it down so there wasn't much more than a beat and faintest hint of melody. The faint reach of the interior lights wasn't enough for him to see anything of the kids in the rearview mirror, little more than a shine off Kurtis's glasses.

  So he tried to run away for just a minute. He looked out to what was left of a sunny day. Somewhere out there west, he thought, if you go far enough into that ridge of mountains that wouldn't disappear, if you climbed high enough to get out of the desert cactus and those thick bushes that crawled all over the hills, up high enough somewhere, you'd find pines probably, and somewhere a lake, perfectly blue, like the sky above it, and about a thousand trout or walleye or pike or whatever, a little lake so still it'd be a shame to start a motor. You could take a canoe out there, pack some bait in, and a couple of rods, and spend a day talking to nobody whatsoever, nobody but worms and some fish and the Good Lord of peace in the wind and the stillness.

  "Grandpa," Kurtis said.