Willow was on vacation, after all.
After Vacation, a Break
When she returned from vacation, back to work and engrossed in her ministry at church, Willow felt like she had some unfinished business with Scott Yutzy. But she couldn’t be sure that he would have that same feeling. As far as she could tell, most of their relationship existed only in her mind. Perhaps this was inevitable, given her years of singleness, soloing through life and seeing all relationships with men as either business or ministry. Now she opened a door slightly and peeked through the crack to see what might be waiting out there for her. She hadn’t stepped through that door into real contact, even with the man who had appeared in at least one of her visions since meeting him.
During her trip, she had received two congenial text messages from Scott, who knew she would be disconnected from the cellular network during most of her vacation. In St. Thomas, a U.S. territory where her cell phone could send and receive, Willow read his simple message: “How is the cruise? Pray you are getting lots of rest.” As far as she could tell, he had sent it just that day, apparently paying close attention to their itinerary, which she had summarized in a text. That impression remained when his second message arrived soon after they returned to Miami. “Welcome back to the U.S. Snowy and ten degrees here. Sure you wanna come back?” he said.
Willow replied with cheery and brief appreciation for his attention and his humor, but was still opting for saying less until she knew for sure what was happening between them. Any progress in their relationship that happened over a text message felt much more out of her control than face-to-face interactions. Maybe if she had grown up with that technology she would have seen it differently. If she had ever explored a romantic interest during the age of cell phones and text messages before, it certainly would have helped.
The first Monday back offered Willow cringing cold and a penetrating wind as her welcome. Scott texted her while she was on her way to work. “Told ya so,” was all it said. As cryptically brief as that was, Willow knew just what he meant, referring back to that teasing second text while she was on her way home. The feeling that Scott was travelling with her, in his mind at least, prompted a more intimate reply this time.
“I’m beginning to think you know me better than our brief acquaintance would imply. Thanks for thinking of me,” she said, again hovering her frosty thumb over the send button for a reality check before committing.
“You’ve never been far from my thoughts since I met you,” Scott replied.
There it happened, and in a text message. Just as Willow feared. That slip into a deeper comfort with each other seemed illegitimate and strange without the look in his eyes to help her know that he meant what he was saying. Uncharacteristically, she dismissed the inner assurance that gave her permission to believe without seeing. She was still looking for guidance in how these relationships fit with the life she had crafted out of youthful ashes.
That night, Scott called, an old-fashioned phone call, of the cellular kind. Willow had just finished her quiet time in her recliner next to the fireplace. She left the gas fire running as she headed for the kitchen.
“What are you doing for supper?” Scott said, as soon as Willow’s hello reached his apartment in the hills.
Willow waited a beat. She hadn’t talked to Scott for two weeks either on the phone or in person. But she knew his voice. What she didn’t know is how he always seemed to know just what was next on her schedule.
“Are you watching me, like with spy cameras or something?”
Scott laughed. “Gettin’ ready to eat, are ya?”
“Umhmm,” Willow said, not ready to concede the harmlessness of this remote stalking, or whatever it was.
Still laughing, Scott said. “I have just the place for your decompression out of the glories of the Caribbean and into the deep freeze. Let’s go out.”
Willow considered the offer, curious what he meant by decompression, outside of the context of deep sea diving. Of course, she was more curious about what it meant to have this man she barely knew be so closely synchronized with her comings and goings. She wasn’t used to that. Having her mother live nearby had been a big adjustment, and Claudia didn’t have an extrasensory itinerary of her actions.
“Okay. You coming to pick me up?”
“On my way.”
When she heard his car pull up outside, Willow stopped trying to volumize her winter hair and looked out the window of the front door. His car still running, Scott skipped up the stairs, something held under his arm, something else in his free hand. Willow opened the door as soon as he started to knock.
“Oh,” he said, recoiling slightly in surprise. “You’re ready.”
Willow smiled.
“Here you go,” Scott said, handing her what looked about like a piña colada.
Willow looked at the drink, ice tinkling inside the frosted glass.
“Found a new way to frost a glass,” he said.
Willow just stared. She had her coat and scarf on, but no hat yet. She had worked so hard on her hair. But that had to be sacrificed anyway.
“Hold this over your head,” he handed her an emergency blanket, aluminum foil silver, but somewhat warm.
“Had it propped up by the heating vent. Car’s warm.”
Willow went through the motions like a sleepwalker as Scott draped the emergency blanket over her and helped her out the door. She had to focus on not spilling her drink. They made it down the stairs to the car without incident, and Willow was grateful that none of her neighbors witnessed the strange transition from house to car.
The car was indeed warm. Scott had the heat turned up all the way, and it was warmer in the car than in Willow’s townhouse. She let the emergency blanket slip off her head. She looked at the drink.
“I think this is illegal,” she said.
“What, you’re not twenty-one?” he said, almost looking serious enough to pull that off.
“Open container,” Willow said, recalling something she heard in a movie. It hadn’t been an issue in her adult life.
“No alcohol, actually,” Scott said, pulling away from the curb and giving an apologetic laugh. “I didn’t get around to buying the rum.”
“Too bad,” Willow said, not too disappointed for an appreciative grin.
In ten minutes, Scott pulled the car into the parking lot of the big indoor water park, built on the contours of a mountain’s base. Willow looked at him out of the corner of her eyes, her little grin returning for an encore. She tried to look skeptical. She wanted to burst out laughing.
“I don’t have a swim suit,” she said.
“Oh. Well, I think that would be illegal,” he said, trying his seriously kidding face.
Willow raised her eyebrows.
“Just dinner, no swimming,” he explained.
“Oh. I guess that is like the cruise. Mother and I contented ourselves beside the pool, not in it.”
“Of course,” Scott said. He shut off the car and scrambled out, scampering around the front in time to meet Willow and arrange that emergency blanket again.
She looked more seriously skeptical this time and he laughed, pulling the silver shelter off and stuffing it back in the passenger seat. He hooked an arm through hers and hastily escorted her to the door of the water park. Her hair flew in the wind and her ears froze, in spite of the scarf. She couldn’t retract her neck enough to shelter them completely.
As soon as they entered the building, Willow could feel the rocking motion of the ship again, conjured by the smell of chlorine in warm, humid air. She laughed aloud at the discovery.
“How did you know?” she said, her eyes sharp and flashing at Scott’s bright and playful smile.
“Oh, I have my ways,” he said, a hint of shyness keeping his eyes from meeting Willow’s directly. He let go of her arm and she immediately hooked her arm around his. He laughed, leading her toward the snack bar. They had to pay the entrance fee to actually reach the snack bar, but Scott seemed prepared
for that. The clerk who sold them the tickets followed them through her bifocals as they merrily headed for the snack counter, inside an area marked off by a pressboard entry meant to look like the masts and sails of a ship. On board the snack bar, red square tables stood in a grid across a space no bigger than a decent-sized laundromat. The only patrons eating there wore towels, wrapped around various parts of damp pale bodies, none of them over the age of twenty-five.
The couple paused by the order counter and Scott said, “I insist that you order the most expensive thing on the menu.”
Willow laughed as she located the double cheeseburger with fries and a drink as the premium food item on offer.
“Can I have the chicken sandwich, instead?”
“With fries and a drink,” he said, still using that insistent tone.
Willow nodded.
“Okay, you go find a seat and I’ll be with you shortly.” He swept one hand toward the choice of seating and tilted his head to one side in gracious invitation.
It was even warmer in the snack bar, the fryers and grill enhancing the heat from the pool. Now she knew what he meant by “decompression” from her Caribbean cruise. She could hardly stop laughing all the way to the cleanest table she could find. But, as she sat at the little red table on the picnic-style bench, looking around like a new kid at school, she started to second-guess herself. She reviewed the way that she had simply allowed herself to be led along that evening, Scott taking the initiative and Willow complying without question. She had just kept laughingly allowing him to do what he wanted. For about ten seconds this realization rattled around a little box inside her, and it felt dangerous, like a mistake, like surrendering control.
Then she hopped out of that box and scampered away, shaking its dust off her feet. Surrendering control was the first step to the most amazing experiences in her life as an adult. It was the way her heavenly father blessed her most, the way she saw Jesus every day in some significant way. Why should a relationship with a man, a significant relationship, be different? Well, she knew why. But she believed that, if she searched the pockets of this particular moment, she would find in them familiar scraps of reassurance and bits of valuable change, which had been accumulating even during the years when she avoided romance.
Scott arrived at the table with two blue plastic trays filled with paper containers of dubiously healthy food and a champion’s grin. He was pretty proud of himself, Willow decided. She allowed her soul to share in that pride. She laughed yet again.
“Is this working?” he said, as he arranged his double burger and fries and glanced at Willow under his dark brown eyebrows.
Bypassing the momentary urge to pretend that she didn’t know exactly to what he was referring, Willow stopped laughing. She nodded, unwrapped her chicken sandwich, and said. “So far, so good.”
That canned response spoke more to Scott than anyone could rationally expect. He didn’t know details of Willow’s life, but he knew enough to assume that she had stayed single on purpose, and guessed that the purpose was not just her calling to ministry. He assumed she carried some scars that would spell out some dark secret, if he ever got close enough to trace them with a careful finger. He could tell that she was consciously allowing him a step closer.
“So, do you come her often?” he said.
Willow held her sandwich in both hands. One eyebrow arched high, she looked around. “Was just waiting for the right occasion.”
“A certain class of company, perhaps?”
“Exactly.” She grinned with a dollop of mayonnaise in the corner of her mouth.
Scott tried not to react to a deep dive by his hungry soul, flowing with a rush of hope inspired by that smile. “Slow down, buddy,” he told himself, in an internal voice much the same as the audible voice he used when advising his college-age son, Daniel. Scott had also been intentionally avoiding romantic entanglements during the years of recovery from his wife’s death—recovery for himself as well as for Daniel.
It had been Daniel who finally broke Scott out of the social inertia of his singleness. Old enough to be sure of himself, Daniel reminded Scott of what he already knew, that he was not cut out to be alone. The son felt responsible for saying what had to be said, given his plans to attend school in Oregon.
“Dad, you gotta find a new wife. Mom would be saying the same thing. You know she would,” the wise young man said, that last weekend before freshman year.
Scott didn’t sign up on dating websites, but internalized the permission to open his eyes to the options—permission not just from his eighteen-year-old, and not even from his deceased wife. He had only recently begun recovery from being his own harshest critic and mental cop. He knew it was time to let himself off the hook, as if he no longer owed it to his wife to stay single because he had lived and she had died. Add to that his vows to love and cherish and all that, and the need for permission made some sense. She had died on his watch. He owed it to her to stay loyal even in death. But that was the old Scott. He had finally accepted that the kingdom of grace, to which he held allegiance, permeated everything in his life, to the point that he even had to apply it to himself. His survivor’s guilt evaporated in the months that followed.
Then he had to decide to settle down somewhere in the U.S. after his stint in Thailand. Where to live, as a single man, free to look for someone with whom to share his life? That brought him to the Oak Tree Church, made famous mostly by the reputation of Willow Pierce.
Even during his most honest self-reflection, Scott believed that he didn’t move to Palos Heights just to be near the woman that he admired from afar. Jamie had persuaded him to try Colorado, hearing Scott’s Thailand longings for a year with four seasons, and knowing Scott would be an asset to one of his favorite churches. Jamie would never admit to anyone that he had introduced Scott to Willow with a long-term merger in mind. But many had their suspicions.
Willow and Scott talked away the rest of that evening until closing time at the water park over empty, grease-spotted, paper containers and tall plastic glasses of melting ice. Willow was practicing relaxing in Scott’s presence, exterminating the feeling that he was a threat. He was, of course, a threat to end her life as she knew it, if she were to allow him to keep drawing closer. But her encounters with her heavenly father recently had discounted the value of that old way of life, at least as a sacred institution to which she owed loyalty.
Back in the car, which Scott had insisted on warming up before Willow came out to join him, they rode in silence that tipped along the fine edge of peaceful comfort and painful awkwardness. Had they said all they could say to each other? Had either of them said anything that they should prepare to retract or that would eventually demand an apology?
Willow leaned her head back on the brittle headrest, still frozen even in the warming car. She rolled her head slightly to her left and caught Scott nearly mirroring her maneuver. She laughed aloud, forcing a small cloud of her breath to hover over the dashboard before settling on it like a miniature snow squall.
“Thanks for the decompression time. I didn’t even realize how much I needed it.”
Scott adjusted his knit hat up off his eyebrows with one gloved hand. “You are quite welcome. It was fun.” He started to say something about how long it had been... But that seemed a dangerous path to explore, so he stopped himself.
Willow understood. She looked out her side window, glimpsing what lights and sights peaked around the frosty coating on the glass. “We both have to get used to it, don’t we?”
Laughing quietly through his nose, a double barreled swirl of steam surging toward the windshield, Scott responded to the multilevel conversation with one true and certain word.
“Definitely.”
Too Close to Those Pearly Gates
Friday of that week, instead of the Friday night worship service, Willow and Claudia accepted an invitation to a little party at Annetta’s house. Willow’s former boss was trying out her new role as a retiree, partying a
nd living a life of leisure. Not really. She was getting bored already and wanted to stir up things by mixing together some people she knew from different segments of life. Willow had declined to bring Scott, opting for an opportunity for Claudia to get out and meet people. That Claudia and Annetta were close in age did not imply, for Willow, that they would particularly connect with each other, but the hope did cross her mind. Stranger things had happened.
As a woman raised in small-town Kansas, where the African-American population hovered below one percent, Claudia had some moving to do, a spot in the twenty-first century standing open for her, as long as Willow had any influence.
Arriving at Annetta’s house toward the end of January, greeted in warm light against the cold, early evening darkness, the fragrances of sweet potato pie, roast beef, and coffee stirred Willow’s hope that celebrations had not ended at the New Year. Annetta stood in the door with a brown apron over her orange and purple traditional West African dress. Willow detected a well of relaxation surrounded by a little wall of anxiety in her old friend. She took note for later conversation.
“Oh, there they are. Right on time and the first ones here,” Annetta said. Claudia had to adjust some habits when she came to live in Colorado; one was making the effort of punctuality. Willow held it as a high value, a sign of respect for the people with whom she was meeting or visiting.
Cold cheeks nestling into warm ones, hugs without the hands of the hostess—who held a spoon in one hand and a dish towel in the other—and merry greetings filled the porch for a few seconds, until the door was finally closed against the bitter winter air. Claudia looked like someone had just pinched her backside in a crowded room, as she recovered from all the hugging and kissing. Annetta didn’t discriminate between old friends and dubious acquaintances when it came to the warmth of her greetings.
“Come, come,” she said. “Come on in. You two can help me set some things out. I expect five more people and any time now.”
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 21