Their Small-Town Love

by Arlene James

  Straightening, he looked out over the crowded pews and let that sink in. “Those last two seem pretty tame compared to the rest of that laundry list, don’t they?” he asked, then he braced his elbow on the pulpit and literally shook his finger at them. “But every time you repeat slander you murder someone’s reputation. Every time you gossip, you gouge holes in your own soul and that of the person you’re repeating those rumors to, not to mention those of the people you’re gossiping about.

  “Lately,” he went on, “this town has been eaten up with gossip. Someone says this and someone else that, until no one really knows the truth anymore, if they ever did. I’ve heard it myself from some of you sitting out there right now. It’s gotten entirely out of hand, this talk, and some of you need to apologize because of it. Christ did not take Himself to the cross so you could malign others and whisper about ugly deeds. Instead, He went to the cross so you, we, can find forgiveness, no matter what we’ve done. It’s God’s gift to us, bought and paid for with the death of His Son, ours just for the asking. Sometimes, once we have it, we forget that it belongs to everyone, don’t we? Even those we’re so keen to gossip about.”

  People shifted in their seats, and one or two flashed guilty glances at Ivy. Her face burned, but she kept her expression impassive, her hand gripping Rose’s. After a few more words of exhortation, Grover invited those who wished to receive counseling or prayer to come forward during the invitation time, then he left the pulpit and stepped down in front of the altar. He did not ask the congregation to rise or to sing. Instead, he asked them to bow their heads, while the pianist played softly.

  “Some of you need to get yourselves up here,” he said bluntly. “Let’s get it right with God, people. It’s time to stop this nonsense and get it right with God again.”

  Ivy bowed her head together with Rose’s, aware of Daniel leaning forward to cover his face with his hands. After a few seconds, she heard movement as folks started down that aisle with sniffs and shuffling of feet. A sense of peace infused her, as if the Holy Spirit settled over that place and wrapped it in a cocoon of forgiveness.

  Thank You, Father. Thank You, she prayed. Thank you for forgiving me, and thank You for bringing me here today. Forgive me for not expecting You to protect me, for not expecting You to take care of me and those I love. I won’t run again. Instead, I’ll let you lead, and I will follow. Wherever You take me, that’s where I want to be.

  She kept her head down, not wanting to discomfit anyone, until finally, after several long minutes, Grover spoke again.

  “Thank you, brothers and sisters. We’ve done some good here today, healed some wounds, I hope. All of you who came forward, I commend you. Now, if there’s no one else…” He paused a moment, looking out over the gathering. “Let us pray together and dismiss.”

  Grover bowed his head and lifted his hands, but before he could speak, a figure shot up.

  “Daniel?” Rose said.

  Ivy looked up to find her brother-in-law on his feet. His hands grasping the back of the pew in front of him, he trembled all over, like a man with the flu. He bowed his head, gasping for breath, then he stepped out into the aisle, but instead of going forward, he turned uncertainly to face his wife.

  “I did it,” he said in a ragged voice. “I spread those lies about Ivy.”

  Rose squeaked in dismay, her hands cutting the sound off as she clapped them over her mouth. Mentally reeling, Ivy saw her father rise and turn to stare at Daniel. Her first thought was to spare him, them, everyone. She could see the shock on her father’s face and felt the same emanating from her sister. Sitting forward slightly, she prepared to rise and say—she honestly had no idea what she would say—something to stop this, to deflect it, but then a pair of warm, heavy hands fell upon her shoulders.

  She knew those hands, loved those hands.

  Biting her lip, she covered one of those hands with her own.

  “Why, Danny?” she heard her sister ask.

  “It was all so perfect before she came,” he said plaintively, his face contorted and wet with tears. “We were happy, and we were going to have another baby. Then she came back, and it all went wrong.”

  Rose sprang up. “It wasn’t perfect, Danny. The pregnancy was problematic from the beginning. You know that.”

  “But we were okay. Then she came back and upset everything. You had the baby too early, and your father kept saying…” He brought his hands to his head. “Olie kept saying how she was like your mother, how she ruined everything.” He started to sob. “I—I think I needed to punish someone because we lost the baby. I told myself that I was d-doing it for you, that if she went away and stayed away we could be happy again.”

  “Oh, Daniel,” Rose said, stepping out to take her wounded husband in her arms. She turned a look of sorrow and apology on Ivy as he wept as he must have needed to do since the death of his child.

  Some people near the back of the church rose and slipped out at that point. Others murmured softly. Some wept themselves. After a moment, Daniel lifted his head and stepped free of his wife to look at Ivy.

  “Can you ever forgive me?” he asked.

  The hands fell away from her shoulders, but she felt the man behind her rise as she did. As she moved forward into the aisle, he did also, and when she reached out for her ravaged brother-in-law, Ryan’s arms were there to enfold them both.

  “How can I stand here,” she managed to say to Daniel, “forgiven and free of all my past mistakes, and not forgive you? Of course, I forgive you.”

  “I took my pain out on you!” he exclaimed. “I’m so sorry.”

  “No one has to tell me what stupid things we can do in pain and guilt, Daniel.”

  Smiling through her tears, Rose grasped Ivy’s hand and squeezed it while still holding onto her husband. Ivy sensed movement, someone coming up the aisle, and assumed it was Grover, until she heard the sound of her father’s voice.

  “This is my fault,” he rasped.

  Whirling within the safe confines of Ryan’s arms, Ivy stared at Olie and saw a softness that she had not seen in many, many years. Chin quivering, shoulders slumped, he shook his head.

  “Dan hasn’t done anything I haven’t been doing,” he admitted. “I took out my pain and anger at your mama on you.”

  “Daddy.”

  “She was sick, you know, Ivy. She couldn’t help herself, and the whole town knew. They knew every time I took her back. They knew I loved her too much to stand my ground and say no more. And once she was gone for good, I made up my mind I’d never be that weak, pathetic man who loved too much again. Instead I became a weak, pathetic man who loved too little.”

  “Daddy!”

  “When my own daughter came to me, I turned her away,” he said in a small voice. “Because she’d disappointed me, because she’d hurt me, I turned her away.” He squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head. “God forgive me,” he said. “It’s eaten at my soul like cancer, and I’m so sorry, Ivy.”

  “Oh, Daddy, it’s okay,” she said, slipping free of Ryan to go to him.

  Olie shook his head. “Dan blamed you for the loss of their baby, and that was none of your fault.” He lifted an agonized gaze, whispering, “But you lost yours, Ivy, on account of me.”

  “No. No! That was my choice, my decision. I might not have been brave enough to give her up under other circumstances, but it was the right thing, the best thing, for her.”

  “What about what’s best for you, Ivy?” Olie asked softly, lifting his hand to her arm. “What about what’s best for you?”

  “You know, Dad,” Ivy said, with a tearful glance over her shoulder at Ryan’s beloved face, “I think I’ve finally figured that out.”

  Olie, too, glanced at Ryan before pulling her roughly into his arms. “I’m so glad. Because I love you, Ivy. I always have.”

  She wept then from sheer joy, and when she felt Ryan’s strong, comforting hands again, she turned once more into his embrace, laughing now. The building was al
l but empty, she realized, most folks having quietly slipped out.

  The Jeffords remained, of course, and Grover and his wife, Rose and Daniel, a few others. A little old woman with stark white hair and tearstained cheeks stood openly staring, her hands clasped to her chest. Mrs. Roberts, perhaps? Clara Roberts, Ivy seemed to recall. She supposed they had made quite a spectacle of themselves, but she didn’t care. How could she care about something so silly as that?

  “He loves me,” she whispered against Ryan’s chest, and then he made the joy complete.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “in case you haven’t figured it out, Olie’s not the only one. I love you, too.”

  And she kissed him with all her heart, right there before God and her family.

  Epilogue

  Ryan shielded his eyes against the October sun setting over the bleachers and blew the whistle clamped between his teeth to call a halt to practice.

  “Hit the showers!”

  Helmets and shoulder pads clacking, the football team turned as one and jogged toward the field house. Ryan trotted in the opposite direction. On the three days a week when she did her show, The Voice of Experience, Ivy always stopped by the practice field on her way in from Wichita Falls to drag him home a little early. “Someone,” she would say, “has to do it.” Ryan couldn’t have been happier to let her.

  Reaching the sideline, he swept her into his arms and kissed her soundly. Behind her from the bleachers came laughter. Pulling back slightly, she glanced in that direction.

  “Always have to give them something to talk about, don’t we?”

  “It’s all good, Mrs. Jefford,” he told her. “I can hear it now.” Leaning close, he whispered in her ear, “Mr. Jefford loves his wife.”

  Giggling, she shoved at him. She had been a June bride in perhaps the biggest wedding Eden had ever seen, so big they’d had to hold the reception in the high school cafeteria. Olie had insisted that they “do it up in style,” and because he was paying, “as a father should,” they hadn’t argued.

  They had married at First Church, where the Jefford family had attended almost forty years, according to Hap. Ivy and Ryan, however, had decided to make their church home at Magnolia Christian, with Olie and Rose and Daniel. It was time, Olie said, that the Villards established themselves as pillars of the church. Ryan was only too happy to aid that cause. Besides, he liked the young pastor, Davis Latimer, and his wife, Becca, Justus Inman’s granddaughter with the beautiful voice. Ryan had known her all his life. She taught choral music at the high school, and the two couples were becoming fast friends.

  Since the wedding, Ivy had turned that wonderful old house of his into a real home, right down to the nursery. When it came to the next generation of Jeffords, the coach and his wife had somehow made it to the finish line ahead of the others, or would come May, just in time for Mother’s Day.

  Charlotte and Ty, meanwhile, had finally moved into that monster of a house they’d built not far from here. Hap had moved in with them, and the Esquivels had taken over the motel, where their eight-year-old daughter Olivia liked to sit cross-legged in front of the potbellied stove and watch Hap and his cronies play dominoes on the game table in the lobby, when she wasn’t chasing after Ace, that was, and trying to teach him Spanish.

  Holt and Cara, too, were expecting a happy event sometime around the end of June, and Holt was racing against the weather, trying to get a third bedroom built onto his ranch house before winter set in. With his drilling business booming, it didn’t seem likely, so Ty had sent for a construction team all the way from Dallas, the very ones who had built his and Charlotte’s house. Holt complained that he didn’t want the Taj Mahal, just a nursery, but when the crew arrived, Holt would no doubt put them to work.

  Rose and Dan were hoping to try for another child again, too, before long. The doctors said the chances were excellent that Hunter and Scott would soon have that baby sister, after all.

  “Or at least,” Hunter said, “a stinky baby brother.”

  Their courage amazed Ryan, and he and Ivy and all the rest of the family, both families, wished them well.

  If the past year had been one of weddings, the next year promised to be one of babies, which was just as it should be. Much was just as it should be.

  On that steamy August day when Ivy had confirmed her pregnancy, she had finally read the card that she’d received from Chelsea’s adopted parents for last Mother’s Day. Chelsea was well and happy, it said, a joy and gift for which they would forever be grateful, but she had begun to ask about the mommy who had carried her in her belly. She was still too young, they had written, but one day she would want to meet Ivy. They had wanted to know how Ivy felt about that.

  Ivy felt grateful and anxious and right about that, and so, on the bedside table, the Jeffords now had a framed photo of a lovely little girl with dark hair and big brown eyes. Ivy no longer wept over it, but she did hold it against her heart every night before she slipped into bed. Ryan expected that she always would, but she would have their child to hold close to her heart, too, and hopefully several more. He thanked God for that.

  “I had an unexpected caller today,” Ivy said as they walked arm in arm toward her hybrid.

  “Oh? Someone interesting.”

  “You could say that. It was Brand.”

  Ryan stopped dead in his tracks and swung her around to face him, anger setting his face like stone. “What did he want?”

  Brand Phillips had moved to the West Coast and taken up where he and Ivy had left off with their show. Sadly, it was raunchier and more popular than ever. Even the nightly television news programs had taken to mentioning the latest scandalous topic under discussion. Currently, it had to do with Brand’s divorce and all the women he’d managed to cheat on his wife with in the short year of their marriage.

  “Mostly, I think he wanted to embarrass me,” Ivy said, tilting her head to one side.

  Ryan felt his temper spike. “And did he?”

  “No. I think it rattled him because he couldn’t rattle me. Kay says we sounded like any two old business partners who had gone their separate ways, only one seemed quite content with her lot, and the other did not.”

  “Hmm.”

  “He offered me my old job back.”

  Ryan lifted an eyebrow. “And what did you say to that? Something appropriate to Christian radio, I assume.”

  “Very appropriate.” Taking his hand, she smiled and started for the car once more. “I told him I wouldn’t trade my life in Eden, Oklahoma, for anything short of Heaven.”

  Ryan smiled and pulled her close once more. He meant to keep her there for the rest of his life. They would grow old together, right there in Eden, with their children and grandchildren and, God willing, great-grandchildren around them, and it would be the next best thing to Heaven.

  Oh, Eden was no better or worse than any other small town, he knew, but it was home, his own personal paradise, fashioned like the Eden of old by the hand of a loving God for His children. They even had a new cell tower out east of town now. Who could ask for anything more?

  Certainly not Ryan, for God had gifted him with far more than he’d ever dreamed possible. Not any of the Jeffords, when it came to that, and, no, nor any of the Villards, either. Not anyone whom God has so blessed.

  For true Eden is anywhere that faith and love grow.

  Dear Reader,

  Whole industries have been built around gossip. We gobble up everything that promises fresh scuttlebutt. Many celebrities actually court gossip in order to stay in the public eye, knowing how prone we are to stop, listen and, worse, pass it on.

  Yet gossip is one of the most destructive forces in the human arsenal. Gossip and slander destroy not only reputations and opportunities but, more importantly, relationships. It must seem, when compared to some tragedies, that gossip is relatively harmless, but anyone who has ever been subject to character assassination knows the harm that it can do and how many it can affect.

  What
is the opposite of gossip? Truth, of course.

  May you always love in truth.

  God bless,

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  Ivy is worried about returning home to attend her high school reunion. Have you ever attended a reunion? Were you happy you went? Why or why not? Describe what your experience was like.

  Ryan has close relationships with his brother, sister and grandfather. How important is family to him? To you? Discuss.

  Devony told Ivy that even forgiven sin, though the eternal ramifications are removed, still bears consequences in the here and now. Is this correct? Why or why not?

  Ivy felt guilt over past choices. Is it possible to let guilt distort our understanding of God’s will? How?

  Ryan felt great reluctance to directly address Matt about the gossip concerning his wife. Is this understandable? What would you have done in his place?

  Olie was hurt and disappointed by the choices made by his wife and daughter. He had a difficult time finding a balance between tolerance/permissiveness and intolerance/harshness. How can Christians find the appropriate balance between tolerance and intolerance?

  The Internet has taken media and communication into new realms, allowing ideas to be disseminated around the world with the click of a button. Considering Devony’s situation, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

  As a Christian educator, Ryan occupies a highly visible position within the community. Was he right to be concerned for his own reputation? How could he protect his own reputation and stand up for those who may have made mistakes? Should he have done so?

  Olie worried about distancing himself from those who seem to flaunt God’s standards. What do we as Christians do when those among us seem to be behaving in ways counter to God’s law?

  Ivy stated that joining the church seemed to deepen her father’s resentment and condemnation of her mother and that this turned her off religion. Has this ever happened to you? How and why?