“Won’t you, anyway?” she asked.
“Of course I’ll help you.” He got up and crossed the room and looked into her eyes. “I’ll do whatever I can, but it’s not the same. I won’t be in your bed at night to hold you when you cry.” He tipped his head to the side and gazed down at her. “Cathy, I love you. It’s hard to wait.”
“I know it is,” she whispered. “But I just need more time.”
“How much?” he asked.
She shrugged. “How long will you wait?”
He sat down on the couch and leaned his head back, thinking. She wondered what was going through his mind. Was he wondering if it was even worth hanging on?
“I guess I’ll wait as long as it takes,” he said.
“Well, if he’s going to be in there a year…”
He looked up at her with that look of dread again.
“I don’t want him coming home to a whole different family, to a household that’s not what he left. I don’t want to jolt him like that, make him feel like he lost a whole year out of his life. Or give him the feeling that he’s not a part of things here.”
“If he feels that way, Cathy, it has nothing to do with you. He’s losing a whole year out of his life no matter what you do. There’s no way around that.”
“But if we could just wait until he got out, set the date for some time after that. We could do it, Steve. I know it’ll be hard. It’s been a hard wait already, but we can wait. Can’t we?”
He looked like a child who had just been told Christmas wouldn’t come until July.
“Steve, look at it this way. If you marry me now, you marry all my problems. You marry my kids. You marry the smart-aleck remarks and the screaming fights. And you marry this prison sentence that I can’t even deal with yet. You and Tracy are so much better off without us right now. This is not what you bargained for when you gave me this ring.”
“I bargained for you, Cathy,” he said. “I wanted you, and I knew everything that came with it.”
“You didn’t know about jail.”
“No, but neither did you,” Steve said. He grabbed her hand and pulled her down next to him. Framing her face with both hands, he looked into her eyes. “We’re going to get through this together whether we’re married or not, Cathy. Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Will you count on me?” he asked. “Will you lean on me? Will you let me help and stop being such a tough guy?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
He held her with his eyes a moment longer. “I’m not promising to wait a whole year.” He smiled then, and she saw the mist swelling in his eyes again. “That doesn’t mean I’m walking out on you. What I mean is that I’m going to try my best to talk you out of waiting until Mark gets out. I don’t think waiting that long will do him or us any good. Maybe the time will come before then when you’ll feel more peace about it. Maybe when you see light at the end of this tunnel. Besides, if we break up, we have to return all those gifts.”
She smiled. “I can’t open them, you know. I don’t know whether I should return them now or not.”
“You don’t have time,” he said with a grin. “Just leave them right where the neighbors put them. They’re not in the way. And since the wedding was going to be so small, we don’t have a lot of planning to undo. My mother was going to make the cake, so that will be easy to cancel. I’ll call our guests and cancel the florist. Meanwhile, I’m going to go on acting like a man about to get married.”
He stayed a while longer. By the time he left, she felt a little better. But depression quickly fell back over her.
She walked aimlessly around the house, trying to straighten things up. Rick and Annie were out, and her every movement seemed loud and hollow. She avoided Mark’s room, knowing that there wasn’t comfort there—only more recriminations.
The blinking light on her answering machine told of stored messages. She dreaded hearing them. Most of them were probably shocked reactions from friends as they heard about Mark’s mess. But what if his lawyer had called with a new idea for getting him out?
She pushed the button and cringed at the first pity-filled platitude from the women’s minister at her church. She pressed fast-forward, and made her way through several more. When Sylvia’s voice came on, she sat back and listened.
“Honey, it’s me, Sylvia. I came by before going to the airport, but you weren’t home. I hope you’re all right.”
She could hear Sylvia pause to control her voice.
“Tory and Brenda are taking me. I have a 9:00 red-eye flight, so I can get there in the morning. I don’t know when I’ll see you again. But I love you, and I’ll be praying. Hang in there, honey.”
Cathy pulled her knees up on the couch and closed her eyes. Tears squeezed out. She felt lost, as if she’d let her life raft slip out of her reach.
Sylvia was leaving, and she didn’t know when she’d see her again. It could literally be years.
She looked at the clock, saw that it was only eight-thirty. If she hurried, she might make it to the airport before Sylvia left.
She grabbed her purse, stumbled into her shoes, and bolted out to her car.
It had begun to rain, and the scent of wet summer was heavy on the air. Darkness fell over Breezewood like a good-night blanket tucking them in.
Mark slept hard when rain pattered against his window. She wondered if he could hear it tonight.
She reached the airport and parked at baggage claim, then checked the monitor for Sylvia’s gate. Then dashing up the escalator without waiting for it to carry her to the top, she checked her watch.
Nine o’clock.
She ran down the wide hall, checking gates, until she came to one overflowing with people. Her eyes fell on Sylvia, Brenda, and Tory, huddled in the corner.
She was breathing hard when she got to them. “I thought I’d missed you!”
Sylvia sprang up. “Cathy! Oh, honey, you didn’t have to come!”
“Yes, I did. I couldn’t let you leave without saying goodbye.” She pulled Sylvia into a crushing embrace.
Brenda laughed. “Well, this just couldn’t be more perfect. Sylvia’s plane is late because of the weather.”
“Looks like a God-thing to me,” Tory said.
Sylvia pulled Cathy down into the chair next to her. “We can sit here and visit and pretend it’s one of our porches. Did you see Mark?”
Cathy sank into the seat and leaned her head back against the wall. “I saw him. He’s angry. Blaming me. I don’t know what to do.”
“It could be a long year,” Sylvia said. She looked down at her knees. She was wearing a pair of shorts, and Cathy noticed that her legs were thinner than they’d ever been. Sylvia was working too hard in Nicaragua, she thought. She wasn’t getting enough to eat.
“I was thinking about how awful this was today,” Sylvia said, “and then I started thinking back on Joseph’s illness, and Tory’s pregnancy. We thought both of those were horrible crises, too.”
“They were crises,” Cathy said. “No way around it. Don’t try to sugar-coat it. They were awful.”
“Yeah, they were,” Tory said.
“But remember when they were all over?” Brenda cut in. “That night in the hospital, when we all sat around and talked about the best moment of the crisis, the pivotal ones where we learned something and grew?”
“I’m tired of learning things and growing,” Cathy said.
“Well, aren’t we all?” Sylvia agreed with a smile. “I was tired of learning and growing in the fourth grade when we started doing multiplication tables, but I still had to learn them.” She gave Cathy a thoughtful look. “We did it again with Tory, you know. After Hannah was born and all was well, we were able to look back and think of the best moments. There were lots of them.”
Cathy knew what she was getting at, but she rejected it. “Sylvia, there aren’t going to be any best moments when my son is in jail. I’m not going to grow from this. I’m not going to
learn from it. I’m just going to grieve for a very long time.”
“That’s what I thought,” Tory said, “but Barry came back…and we have Hannah. As hard as things have been with her, I wouldn’t undo any of it.”
“If we learned anything from those days,” Brenda said, “it’s that sometimes God uses crises to bless us.”
“Thanks, guys, but this isn’t just your run-of-the-mill crisis.”
“No crisis is run-of-the-mill,” Sylvia said. “And we know you’re in pain. I’m not trying to make it sound easy. I’m just saying that I think some day, maybe not so far away, we’ll all be able to sit around and think back on this year and what happened with Mark, and we’ll see some things that we can’t see now. Who knows, Cathy? Maybe this will be a wake-up call for Mark.”
“I wish I’d taught him better,” Cathy said. “I should have taught him responsibility. I should have taught him consequences. I shouldn’t have waited for the state to do it.”
“You tried,” Sylvia said. “Don’t kid yourself. You haven’t been sitting around letting him off the hook.”
“You haven’t, Cathy,” Tory said. “Every time I’m at your house, Mark’s been grounded for something. And for the last couple of years he’s been home-schooling with Brenda because of what he did in the public school. You did the best you could to keep him away from the friends who were a bad influence.”
Brenda nodded. “He’s building a testimony, Cathy, and you have to let God finish the work that he started on him.”
Cathy wanted to believe that God had a plan in all of this, that things were going to turn out well, but she knew Mark’s heart was not where it needed to be. She wasn’t sure he was going to allow God to work in him.
The ground clerk’s rapid-fire voice amplified across the terminal. “Ladies and gentlemen, Flight 531 from Memphis has arrived at Gate 15. We will begin boarding momentarily.”
The reality of Sylvia’s departure hit Cathy in the heart, and she grabbed Sylvia’s hand. “Don’t go,” she whispered.
Sylvia smiled. “I have to. I have work to do.”
Tory pulled a tissue from her purse and dabbed her eyes, and Brenda struggled valiantly to hold back the tears welling in her own eyes.
“But there’s a mission field right here in your own neighborhood,” Cathy said. “You don’t have to go to Nicaragua to find people who need help. All this time you had a criminal living right next door and you didn’t even know it.”
“Don’t say that,” Sylvia scolded. “Honey, don’t ever say that about your son again. You need to learn to bless Mark, not curse him. The words that come out of your mouth, even if he doesn’t hear them, are more powerful than you think.”
Cathy wondered if there was a cave nearby she could crawl into for the next year. “Maybe my words are exactly what got him to this point,” she said. “Maybe without even knowing it, I’ve cursed his entire life.”
“There you go again,” Sylvia said, “blaming yourself. You’ve got to stop that. All you can do is say that from this moment on things will be different.”
“But how?” Cathy asked. “How do I make them different? Sylvia, you don’t know how many times I’ve gotten on my knees and prayed and asked God to make me a better mother, to make me stop finding reasons not to teach them the Bible, to stop letting the television dictate our evenings. I’ve prayed that God will empower me to do that and make me want to when I’m lazy. But I’m still me. I still say things I wish I hadn’t said. And I still do things wrong. How do I change? How do I make myself the kind of parent that would raise godly children? None of this is working for me.”
“Do you remember the story Jesus told about the vine and the branches?”
Cathy was thankful that was one part of the Bible she was familiar with.
“Jesus said that we should abide in him and that through him we could bear fruit. Do you understand what that means, Cathy?”
“I think I do,” she said. “It means that we get our power from God.”
“Don’t you know that a branch that’s not attached to the vine is going to die? The leaves wither, and it doesn’t bear anything. There’s no fruit.”
“So you think I’ve fallen off the vine?” Cathy asked.
“No,” Sylvia said, patting her knee. “I think you’re still on the vine. I just don’t think you’re using the vine for your power. You see, in a vine all the branches get all their energy and all their life from that vine. Every piece of fruit, every leaf on the branch, comes from that vine. The branch can’t do it alone. There’s no way. If it falls on the ground it just withers up and dies. That’s what Jesus was trying to tell us. All you have to do is abide in him. You have to soak up the life that he gives you. You have to soak up the power. You have to use it.”
“And how do you do that?” Cathy asked. “By reading your Bible every day?”
“Not just reading it,” Brenda said. “By soaking it up. Studying it. Meditating on it, thinking about it, turning it over in your mind, living with it, breathing it.”
“That takes a lot of effort and a lot of time,” Tory said. “It’s not so easy when there are kids running through the house demanding your time and attention.”
Cathy allied herself with Tory. “Or when you’ve got a clinic to run and people who need things done, when you’re trying to keep a fiancé happy. Life just wears me out. I’d love to spend all day every day reading the Bible, but that’s just not realistic. I really do want to feel that power and authority that comes from Jesus. But I’m new at this, and I’m slow growing. I guess I should be a lot further along by now, but I’m not.” She shoved her hand through her hair. “I guess God’s pretty disgusted with me.”
“He’s not disgusted,” Sylvia said. “He’ll feed you milk as long as you need it. But eventually you’ve got to take solid food.”
“If I’d taken it sooner,” Cathy said, “then maybe Mark wouldn’t be in this position.”
“And maybe he would,” Brenda said. “Do you believe that God is a good and loving parent?”
“Yeah,” Cathy said. “And a wise one, too. He always knows what’s best. When I just parent in fits and starts, trying and failing and trying again, God gets it right.”
“You have to trust him with Mark,” Sylvia said. “He’s coming of age, Cathy. He’s at the point where there’s very little that his mother can tell him. God’s got to get his attention. And he’s in a place right now where he can.”
“How can you say that?” Cathy asked. “He’s in there with criminals and thieves and drug addicts!”
“Maybe he needs to look around and see what he could turn out to be. Or maybe God has just strategically positioned him there for a very important reason. Maybe he’s going to use him.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Just wait,” Sylvia said. “Just wait and see what God can do. I can’t promise that everything will turn out exactly the way you want, but I can promise that you’ll be amazed at the way God works through this.”
Cathy stared off into space for a moment, trying to picture it, but she failed. Finally, she reached out to hug her friend. “I’m going to miss you,” Cathy whispered.
“And I miss you already,” Sylvia said. She turned back to Brenda and Tory, and they all got up and hugged.
When they separated, Sylvia smeared her tears across her face. “I wish I could come back for the wedding.”
“Well, maybe you can,” Cathy said. “We postponed it again. Indefinitely.”
“No!” Tory cried. “Cathy, you can’t.”
“It’s just not a good time,” Cathy said. “But it’s okay. We’re still in love. I’m still wearing the ring. And according to him, he’s still going to act like a man about to get married.”
The boarding call piped across the terminal, and Sylvia framed Cathy’s face. “Don’t you throw everything away because one bad thing happened,” she said. “Steve’s a good man. An answer to prayer.”
“I know,” she said.
“I won’t forget that.”
Sylvia picked up her bag. “And if you need me…any of you…I’m just down the continent.”
They laughed through their tears and hugged again, none of them in a hurry to let go.
That night, unable to sleep, Cathy got out of her bed and knelt down beside it. She put her elbows on the mattress and folded her hands in front of her face.
“Lord,” she whispered, “I know I don’t even have a clue what it means to abide in you. I can say I’m doing it—but when I try to read the Bible…the words just rattle around in my brain, and ten minutes later I forget what I read.” She hated admitting that. “Change me, Lord. I’m talking a major makeover. I want to be able to pray for Mark the right way, in a way where you can hear me and honor the prayers and answer them. I don’t think I’ve been taking prayer seriously enough, especially not the prayers about my children.” Her voice wobbled.
“I need you to put me back on the vine, Lord, and give me that life that I know you have. Pump it through me and help me.” She wiped her tears. “And, Father, be a parent to Mark, so he has at least one good parent who knows what he needs. Because I sure don’t.”
The words tightened her throat, and she sat back on her heels and leaned her face into the mattress.
There were no more words, no more petitions. She had nothing left to say, but she hadn’t finished praying. She felt as if God’s hand touched the back of her head, stroked her hair, like a daddy comforting a hurting child. He was here with her, her father and her husband. He was her provider and her sustainer, her teacher and her comforter. He had revived her branch on the vine.
Neither her church nor Steve, nor Sylvia, nor any of her godly friends could do that for her. Only Christ could. And he could do it for Mark as well.
Time passed without any marking. She never looked at the clock nor yearned to get back in bed. She was still praying, even if the words weren’t coming. This time, she was listening, receiving. And God was not locked away somewhere in some inaccessible throne room, silently registering her prayers. Instead, he was sitting here with her, holding her in his lap, loving her like the child who had finally come home.
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