Running from Monday

by Lea Sims

  Claire thought for a moment. “She’s got two full sets of some pretty expensive china packed away in the spare bedroom. And I’m pretty sure that C. Ford Riley painting in the dining room is worth some money. There may be some other stuff, but those are the two that come to mind.”

  “The painting with the two turkeys sitting under the tree?” Delaney said. Her uncle loved that painting. She hated it just on principle.

  “Yep, that’s the one. That’s a Riley. Elizabeth said Jimmy bought it from a doctor who was retiring and selling all the art work he had up in his practice.”

  Delaney snorted. “My uncle was a walking bag of contradictions.”

  “Speaking of which,” Claire suddenly remembered, “I seem to recall that Jimmy had a coin collection. That might be worth some money.”

  “It probably would be if he hadn’t pawned it to pay our bills at the beginning of my senior year.” Delaney cast a sideways eye roll at Claire, who was sitting next to her in the passenger seat. “That’s when he got fired from Crawley’s.”

  “Oh, didn’t know he did that. But Elizabeth was pretty mum about all that back then. Are you still pretty set against going to the house and sorting through any of this stuff?” Claire asked.

  Delaney chewed her lower lip and tilted her head to the side, weighing the question. “I would obviously prefer not to be there. There isn’t anything I want or need from the house. But I realize it’s probably unrealistic to think I can pull all this off without having to go in there.” She grimaced and blew out a long “pfffffft” with her lips, shoulders sagging in resignation.

  “Why don’t you cross that bridge when you come to it, hon,” Claire suggested. “I can work with the liquidator and go through Elizabeth’s things. We can set aside anything valuable for a tag sale, and I’ll see what might be suitable for donation.”

  “I can’t dump all of that on you. Not gonna happen.”

  “I need you to listen to me, Delaney,” Claire said suddenly serious, her voice more stern than Delaney had heard it at any point in the last week. It prompted Delaney to take her eyes off the road and glance at her passenger. Claire’s lips were pursed and one slightly gray and grizzled eyebrow was raised.

  “I’m listening, Ms. Claire.”

  “I want to do this…not only for you but for Elizabeth. There’s a million reasons why this makes perfect sense. I don’t want you having to rifle through those old memories if you don’t need to. And I probably should be the one to go through all that stuff. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve been gone a long time. I know that house well—not the house it was ten or fifteen years ago, but the house it is right now. Elizabeth had been living alone there for quite some time. She changed a lot of stuff. I know where everything is. It will be better and quicker for me to work with the liquidator.”

  Delaney turned into the Refresh Station parking lot and slid into a parking space. Putting the car in park, she clicked off the ignition and turned to Claire. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Tears welled up in Delaney’s eyes, and the knot of anxiety that had been camped out in her chest all week suddenly loosened. She’d been dreading these decisions. Claire had just handed her a get-out-of-jail-free card, and even though she couldn’t shake the feeling that she should be declining the offer, she had every intention of taking that free pass. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your help. Obviously, Claire, if there is anything in that house that you want or need, it’s yours.”

  “Good. That’s settled.” Claire’s tone brooked no argument. “And there are actually some things of Elizabeth’s that would be a blessing to have because they are sentimental to me, so I appreciate you saying that. When will you go home, you think?”

  Delaney looked lost for an answer. “Um…wow, I don’t know. I guess if you’re going to help with the liquidator, I think I can handle coordinating things with Hugh from New York, which means I can head back home now.” The realization that there was no longer anything keeping her in Savannah hit her oddly. She should be relieved to learn she could go home, but she found herself disappointed that there was no longer a reason to delay going back. She found herself longing for more conversations like the ones she’d had this week. She knew these moments had been significant, and while she had no idea what it all meant, she wasn’t anxious for it to end. And then there was Drew. An image of his beautiful eyes and gentle smile flashed through her mind, and her pulse quickened.

  Claire took in the perplexed and pensive look on Delaney’s face. “You don’t have to rush back just because things are settled, you know. I would hate to see you zip back to New York without giving yourself some time to process all that’s happened here. I’d also love for you to come with me to our family weekend.”

  “What’s family weekend?”

  “Refresh Station has an annual weekend to celebrate our life together as a church family. We pretty much spend the whole weekend doing fun stuff together. We have a worship service tonight followed by dinner in the lunch bay. Tomorrow we have a full day of games, scavenger hunts, relay races, and our annual ministry teams kickball game. Then we’ll have an outdoor movie and picnic in the park tomorrow night. I think they’re even going to have a firefly roundup if there are any out tomorrow night. It will be a ton of fun. Will you stay?”

  Delaney experienced an oddball clash of pictures in her head. Claire couldn’t have invited her to anything that sounded less like her normal life if she’d tried. Church services were already a colossal detour from her routine, but scavenger hunts? Relay races? And who still played kickball? Those things were so…Americana. They were such a departure from the fast-paced, sophisticated activities of her New York lifestyle, she grinned and shook her head at the irony.

  But the picture Claire painted with those words tugged on her soul unexpectedly. What she was describing, Delaney had to admit, sounded like a whole lot of good old-fashioned fun. It could be a great way to unwind from the week, and Rogue would love a day outdoors romping around a picnic and game play.

  “I won’t have to hop up and down the field in a potato sack, will I?” she exclaimed with sham alarm. “I can’t see me doing that in high heels, Ms. Claire.”

  Claire barked out a laugh, her ample bosom bouncing in amusement. “I’d sure like to see you try, honey! And I’m not sure what kind of relay races they’ll have going on, but I’d leave those heels at the hotel.”

  They parted with a hug. Delaney drove back to the hotel to get some work done and Claire headed into the church to help prepare the dinner they would be having after services that night. Delaney had secretly hoped she’d run into Drew while she was at the church, but she didn’t see his car in the lot and resisted the urge to ask where he was. When he dropped her off at the hotel after their trip to the sanctuary yesterday, he’d asked if they’d see each other again before she left. She’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I hope so.” They hadn’t exchanged phone numbers or made plans to reconnect, and she wasn’t quite sure how to interpret his intentions.

  She was very attracted to him, more so than she cared to admit. She’d already run through a long list of reasons why she needed to nip those feelings in the bud, but she couldn’t quite control the little zing of electricity she’d get in the center of her chest when she heard his name or when she had a sudden image of him trip unexpectedly across her mind. This was rather new territory for her. She hadn’t had these fluttery feelings for a man in a very long time, possibly ever, and wasn’t prone to romantic notions. She’d never put much stock in the idea of “love at first sight.”

  She’d only had a couple of boyfriends before Danny, all rather short-lived and uneventful, each lasting six months or less. In those relationships, she’d experienced attraction, companionship, mutual interests, and physical connection, but nothing that came close to butterflies and skipped heartbeats. Even with Danny, there ha
d been very few, if any, of those feelings. He had been as disinclined toward them as she had been. She was emotionally guarded and he wouldn’t even hold hands. They’d been quite the perfunctory pair, to be sure.

  This wasn’t a crush or flirtation, not a sexual attraction or romantic impulse. What had been hovering between her and Drew this week was tender and powerful. The air around them was sweet and full of peace. Delaney found herself holding her breath even as she savored the recollection of it. She’d never experienced anything like it. What was it about Drew that had triggered this response in her? He was inarguably good-looking. In fact, he was downright dreamy. But she never had a hard time attracting handsome men. The clubs she and Lexie frequented were loaded with them. Good looks alone would never account for this effect on her. No, with Drew it was the heady mix of masculine good looks, tenderhearted sincerity, quiet intellect, and superhero integrity. It was a killer combination, and in her current emotionally vulnerable state, his appeal was penetrating places in her heart that had previously been impregnable.

  But there was something else, something she hadn’t been able to put into words for several days. Drew walked with God. It wasn’t just that he was a Christian or a man of faith. The presence of the divine was evident on his life in ways even Delaney could not deny. An anti-faith person might minimize it by suggesting that Drew was simply a sensitive soul. But she would be hard pressed to agree with them. One of the primary reasons she found herself now questioning her own assumptions about God was because the evidence of him was staring her in the face. God was undeniably revealing himself in the person of Drew Hemming. As drawn as she was to his golden eyes and his beautiful heart, it was the sacred in Drew that attracted her most. It drew her inexplicably, beckoning to deep places within her she had not realized were still full of girlish hope.

  In truth, she was yearning for love—real, deep and abiding love. And as wonderful as it would be to have that love from a man like Drew, right now she needed it most from the one person she had abandoned all hope of receiving it from…God. Her throat constricted tightly as this realization swept through her. She longed for the faith of her childhood. She craved once again the assurance that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

  Could she put her hope in that again…in him again? She wasn’t sure, but this week coming home to Savannah had made her consider for the first time that perhaps she’d slammed the door on faith too soon and that, just possibly, her life had been the emptier for it.

  She pondered this all the way back to the hotel and continued to mull it over while she showered and got ready. By the time she pulled back into the parking lot of Refresh Station Church, she still hadn’t settled the question, but she was more open to God answering it than she had been since that dark day in high school when she’d decided that life was best survived on her own.

  As she made her way into the church and down the hall, she stopped short at the stairwell, her eyes pausing at the wall above the doorway. The word Sanctuary was hand-painted in beautiful curling script and underneath in small square block letters, was a reference to Exodus 25:8— “Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.” She’d heard the word “sanctuary” her entire childhood, never really contemplating its use or meaning in a church setting. It was simply a word to describe the room they held services in. But as she looked at it, her visit to Timber Ridge fresh in her mind, she recalled Emma’s words to John.

  “This place is called a sanctuary for a reason. By definition, a sanctuary is a safe haven—somewhere you know you’re safe, cared for, and able to heal.”

  The wounded and angry girl on the inside of her rebelled at the suggestion that this definition of the word had anything to do with what went on behind the closed doors of a church. But had she allowed her uncle’s deception and hypocrisy to cloud her view of other believers? Was it possible that she had painted them all with the same scarlet brush? To be certain, Shady Oaks Community Church had never been a source of healing or rescue for her. Looking back, she could see that her resentment toward the church had deepened every time she saw people socializing with, serving alongside, or extolling the leadership virtues of her uncle—people who either knowingly turned a blind eye or were seemingly oblivious to the man he really was. Either truth made them hypocrites and fools in Delaney’s eyes. She had always believed the church was aptly named. She thought most of the people were as “shady” as her uncle was.

  But the reality was, they didn’t know. Her uncle had fooled them all, and it wasn’t really fair to blame them. They could be a rather gossipy group, and she still couldn’t abide their rather Deep South brand of fundamentalism, but they hadn’t been terrible people. It was hard to cop to the unreasonable grudge she’d been carrying for so long, but if she was in for a penny, she was in for a pound. If she needed to heal, then she was in the right place, and it was probably time to get on with it.

  “Well,” she exhaled a shaky break, both resigned and expectant, “if you’ve got something to say to me, God, I’m all ears.”

  “The higher you build walls around your heart, the harder you fall when someone tears them down.”

  —Unknown

  “Thatta way, Delaney!! Turn right, lassie…I mean, turn left!!” Bryan Green shouted directions to Delaney, who was completely blindfolded and navigating her way through an obstacle course that involved crawling through makeshift tunnels, weaving around traffic cones, and stepping in and out of old truck tires, all while holding an egg on the end of a spoon which, if dropped, would eliminate her team from the relay. “That’s it! Okay now stop…STOP!! There’s another tunnel in front of ye! Ye’ll have ta crawl throo!”

  The hardest part about the challenge was that Delaney was laughing so hard, she could barely breathe. People were screaming at their teammates all around her and it was total chaos. When she started out, she could barely discern Bryan’s instructions from those around her, so he’d taken to issuing his directions in a bellowing Scottish brogue, and she had almost dropped her egg in shocked laughter. He was really throwing himself into the part, rolling his r’s enthusiastically, calling her “lassie,” and at one point threatening to “farce-feed” her haggis if she dropped her egg.

  They were gathered in Forsyth Park, about a hundred and fifty adults and children in all, working their way by teams through a series of relays and contests for which there were supposedly “big prizes” at stake at the end of the day. After spending the previous evening soaking in the wisdom and comfort of a beautiful worship service, in which Pastor Jason had spoken on the subject of belonging in God’s family, Delaney had found herself adopted by the worship team, who whisked her away with them downstairs and settled her in at their table for dinner. This was due in large part to Drew and Abby, who introduced her to the group at the end of the service. During dinner, they had regaled her with stories about the church, including some hilarious tales about Elizabeth and Claire. Bryan was their worship director, and he had insisted that Delaney be on their team the next day for the relays. As a result, she was now sporting a gray “I’m with the band” T-shirt and carefully stepping through a hula hoop that was hanging between two tent poles.

  And she was having the time of her life.

  What she couldn’t see in her blindfolded state was that she was currently in the lead. Despite her side-splitting laughter, she had managed to interpret Bryan’s brogue-laden guidance correctly and was deftly maneuvering her way through the obstacles with impressive speed. Drew was positioned at a cone halfway down the field at the end of her leg of the obstacle course, where he was waiting for Delaney to work her way toward him and pass off the spoon and egg to him. He would then take it on the next leg of the challenge.

  As Delaney made her way through the course, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was wearing Adidas running shorts and tennis shoes, and her long shapely legs made her look like a gazelle, albeit a gazell
e wearing a blindfold. He’d been a little surprised when she’d agreed to participate in the relay. She could be polished, sophisticated, and inarguably professional. But she also didn’t balk at being blindfolded and making a fool of herself. She was challenging all of his assumptions and constantly surprising him. And the way she was giggling nonstop at Bryan while diving through pop-up-tent tubes was, he had to admit, downright adorable.

  “If you’re not careful,” Pastor Jason said from the cone to his right, “She’s going to catch you gaping at her like an idiot. Have some pride, man. Geesh.” Jason grinned unrepentantly at Drew, who had jerked his head toward him in surprise. Jason was waiting for one of his relay team members to reach him, and he didn’t mind distracting Drew a bit while he did so. The pastoral care team had beaten the worship team two years in a row at these games, and Jason wanted to keep it that way.

  “You’re hilarious,” Drew said drolly, shrugging off the insinuation that he was infatuated with the beautiful blonde who was rapidly making her way toward him, even though it was probably more true than he was ready to admit to anyone, even to his pastor and best friend. “And if you’re not careful, she’s going to rob you of your annual relay team bragging rights.”

  Jason’s expression sobered at that possibility and he turned to watch the progress Delaney was making. She came crawling out of the last tunnel and stood up waiting for Bryan to tell her where to go. “Gooo, Gooo!!” Bryan screamed, jumping up and down like a maniac. “YER AT THE END!!! JEST RUN STRAIGHT!” Delaney didn’t wait for clarification. Holding her spoon solidly out in front of her, she took off running. Bryan had failed to tell her how far she needed to go or at what speed, so when she finally realized that Drew was yelling at her to slow down, it was too late.

  She barreled right into him, hitting him square in the chest. He barely had enough time to reach out, wrap his hand around the spoon, and pull it out of her hand before they toppled to the ground. He hoisted it high above their heads, trying to keep the egg on the spoon. He wrapped his other arm tightly around her, holding her close as they fell over. She immediately ripped off her blindfold and found herself staring down at his wide smile and laughing eyes. His gaze dropped to her lips, and for a fraction of a second, she thought he was going to kiss her. But he quirked an eyebrow at her and said, “Get off me, gorgeous. We’re losing our lead.”