by Connie Cook
They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then Ruth broke the silence by coming straight to the point.
"Bo, why are upset with me?" If they didn't get anything solved tonight, she was sure she wouldn't get any sleep other than the hour or so she'd had in the pickup.
"I wasn't upset with you exactly," he said.
"You were. It was obvious."
"I wasn't upset. At least, not angry. Disappointed maybe. It's hard to explain, but I'll try. Yesterday ... two days ago now, I mean ... Sunday, when I saw you at church, I just had the feeling that I didn't really know you. Or maybe that I never have. I thought I knew you because I've known you so long, since we were kids and all. But today, I realized that when you came back to Arrowhead when you were nineteen, I made the assumption that you were the same girl who'd left. But you'd had seven years of changing to do in that time."
"But I never changed. Not in essentials, I mean."
"Didn't you? The fact that you fell for a guy like Graham when you came back should've tipped me off that you weren't the same girl who left. I would've thought that was out of character for the old Ruth. You were always pretty good at seeing through people."
Ruth flared up. Criticism of Graham, however well-deserved, was never well-received by her. But she didn't bother to defend Graham. Or herself for falling for him.
"And you were engaged to Lily. I don't hold that against you," she said, keeping her voice level and staring straight ahead.
"But I didn't really know her. I never really knew her even when we were kids. She lived on an entirely different plane than I did. When I really got to know her, I knew I'd made a mistake."
Ruth set her mouth. She wasn't about to say that marrying Graham had been a mistake if that was what Bo was waiting to hear.
"I'm not criticizing your choice of husbands, Ruth. Well, maybe I was a little. I didn't set out to do that though. I was just using it as an example of how I realized on Sunday that maybe I only thought I knew you. Like I didn't really know Lily at all even though I thought I did, maybe I didn't really know you either. I've been going over and over things in my head since Sunday, and I've realized that I'd seen very little of you since you came back to Arrowhead since we were kids. Until you started working in the orchard. And maybe, like I'd done with Lily, I'd made you into the person in my mind that I wanted you to be without getting to know the reality."
Ruth digested this for a moment and found it bitter in her stomach and not at all like honey in her mouth, either.
"You think I'm like Lily?"
"No! No! That's not what I'm saying! I'm sorry, I'm saying everything all wrong. I don't think you're like Lily. I see how you've looked after your mother-in-law and then Lily and now Gabe, and I know there's a great deal of the old Ruth in that. The Ruth who never could turn away a stray. And I don't mean to call your mother-in-law a stray, either. Or Lily or Gabe. I'm saying everything all wrong. I just mean that maybe in certain ways you were the same old Ruth I knew when we were kids but in ways you'd changed. Or that you just weren't the person I'd thought you were. At least in ways. And maybe, like with Lily, by that time, by the time I was getting to know you again, it was too late for me to see you objectively. I was already in over my head."
They had pulled up outside the farm house, and Bo shut off the engine.
"It's late, Ruth. I'll see you tomorrow. I'll be by about quarter to eight to pick you up. Is that all right?"
"No! No, it's not all right! You can't leave me with something like that and expect me to go in and get a good night's sleep. We have to talk this out, Bo. Tonight. I have to know where you're coming from 'cause I have no idea what you're trying to say. I don't know how you think I've changed or how I'm not who you thought I was. I just don't know what I did to change your opinion of me. And I'm not getting out of this truck till I do understand." Ruth's voice had gone up several decibels.
Bo looked out his window rather than at her.
"It's late, Ruth. This could be a long discussion. It's after midnight. What will your mother-in-law think if she hears you come in at one or two o' clock in the morning? We'll talk tomorrow."
"You're worried about your good name, Bo?"
"I don't care what people think about me. I care what they think about you. It's sad but true; a girl always has more to lose when a reputation is at stake."
"Well, you can stop worrying about what Mom thinks. She's the one who sent me after you to get this thing talked out, and if she's waiting up and hears me come in late, I'll explain to her that it took longer to talk out than I'd expected. It was upsetting her to see me upset, and she wanted me to get it settled tonight. And now I do want to get this settled. Tonight. What do you mean that I'm not who you thought I was? At least in ways? What is that supposed to mean? What did I do to change your opinion of me, Bo?"
He looked at her very directly for a few seconds before answering.
"What's going on with you and that fellow you had at church – what was his name, James something?"
"Absolutely nothing."
"Then why did it look like there was something going on between the two of you?"
Long pause.
"Because I was a complete idiot and I listened to my mother-in-law instead of my conscience and gave in to playing the little games that, apparently, everyone plays which supposedly work for them. At least in the romance books. You have no idea how much I've regretted that foolishness since then."
Bo looked at her, astonished, and then burst out laughing.
"Let me get this straight. I don't want to jump to conclusions. When you say you were playing a little game, you mean ...?"
"That I was trying to make you jealous, yes." There. She'd done it. She'd blurted out the truth just like she was afraid of doing.
"Why?" he asked slowly.
"Why do you think? Don't be purposely dense. I'm not going to be the one to say it first."
His laughter started slowly and built. Soon they were both laughing till neither one could breathe.
"I can't believe it. I just can't believe it," Bo said when he had regained control. There was a great deal of delight mingled with the disbelief in his voice, however.
"Well, Mom told me we had to do something drastic because you were a man of your word and you'd promised me you'd never 'bother' me on the subject again."
"And you, you little idiot," he said fondly, "it never occurred to you that you could just come to me and tell me you'd changed your mind?"
"How unfeminine!"
"To change your mind?"
"No, that's too feminine. A woman's prerogative and all that. I fought against admitting I was so completely feminine for a long time."
Bo roared again.
"I mean, it's unfeminine to ... to do the chasing," Ruth explained lamely.
"You little idiot," was all Bo said again. His arms went toward her but stopped short. A chuckle exploded from deep in the back of his throat.
"Waiting in my truck till midnight. I'm sorry I made you wait so long. Course, you could've always just knocked on the office door, couldn't you? You have no idea how terrifying – and wonderful – it was to see you suddenly materializing in my front seat when I'd just spent the past four hours doing nothing but thinking about you. You'll have to thank your mother-in-law for me. I surely owe her for that one. I don't know how I'll repay her." His words were light, but there was sincerity in them.
"But now that I've done all the explaining I need to do," Ruth said, "you still have some to do. Why do you say that I wasn't who you thought I was? Just because you thought I'd fallen for James and you were disappointed in me for it? You thought he wasn't a man of character?"
"No, that wasn't it. To be honest, it was when you ran after me at church that day. Now, of course, I'm glad you did. Otherwise, I probably would've crawled away to hide and lick my wounds, trying to convince myself I was happy that you'd found someone who made you happy. So it was a very good thing you came after me, or we might never
have gotten to the bottom of all this. But at the time, it made me think you were playing a different kind of game with me."
"You see, I told you a woman shouldn't run after a man. But wha'd'you mean? What game did you think I was playing? I don't understand."
"Well, it certainly hadn't occurred to me that what I'd witnessed between you and James was all about ... trying to make me jealous. That's the last thing I would've thought of. You'd made your feelings toward me so clear when we discussed it all those months ago."
"Yes, well, a woman's prerogative, remember."
"Fair enough. And believe me, I'm not scolding you for changing your mind. At least not in this instance. If you change it back now, I will be unhappy about it. At this moment, I couldn't be more thankful for that woman's prerogative."
"But tell me, what did you think I was playing at then?"
"Remember that I'd had a little experience of ... of a particular type of woman. The kind of woman who's maybe not completely above-board all the time. I mean, after getting to know Lily well enough to know what she was really like ... well, once bitten, twice shy."
"Point taken. You thought you may have been mistaken in the kind of woman I was. Go on."
"Well, to see you with James and then to have you run after me, apparently very concerned that I should think there was nothing between the two of you – as though you were trying to string me along, too – I thought ... well, it seemed to me like maybe you were the kind of woman who ... like maybe you ... there's a type of woman, and of a man, too, of course, who thinks more of the power they can exercise over the opposite sex than ... I mean, with Lily, for instance, I soon learned that her feelings for me, maybe for anyone, didn't run very deep. Maybe they couldn't. But what went deep with her was to have a man running after her. That meant more to her than what she felt for him. It's the love of power rather than the power to love, I suppose, and women can exercise a great deal of power over a man if they choose. I'm sorry to say that, for a whole day and a half, I've been trying to convince myself that you were that kind of a woman. That you were the type of woman who would turn a man down one day and then run after him the next, just to hang on to him. That, of course, you had many excellent qualities but that there was your failing. And that I'd just have to get over my illusions about you and see past your shortcomings and go on being your friend as I'd promised. In fact, in my bitterness, I turned so irrational as to start to think that maybe all women were like Lily in that area, and I shouldn't hold it against you for being like all other women, etc. etc. But the alternative – that you were concerned I should know that there was nothing between you and James because you actually did care something for me – well, that seemed unbelievable. Especially after I'd seen you with James. It seemed to me that you were using either one or the both of us to play us off the other. And it was quite shattering to think that."
"Guilty," Ruth said. "Except that I was using James. Not you. I wasn't using you. I was only trying to deceive you. And I have repented bitterly since then for both those sins."
Bo laughed. "For some reason, I find those failings extremely easy to forgive all of a sudden. Not like when I thought I was the one being used. Poor James."
"Don't you waste a thought on him. I'm not worried about James."
"Well, then, I won't worry about him either though you may have done more damage to his heart than you seem to think."
"Unlikely, but if I have, he'll soon recover."
"Heartless woman!"
"Not quite."
The two had been imperceptibly drawing closer and closer together, as though by an invisible magnetic force, throughout this exchange. They looked each other straight in the face for a moment. It was Bo who drew back.
"If you feel like we've got it all sorted out and you'll be able to sleep now, maybe you'd better get inside so your mother-in-law can get some rest, too."
Ruth laughed and jumped out of the pickup without another word. Sleep was a forlorn hope, she was sure, but it didn't matter now.
"Ruth," he stopped her as she was almost at the front door, "We can still talk this out tomorrow, too. Let's say after work? For dinner? Tell your mother-in-law you won't be home for dinner."
"Okay," she said shyly, waved, and went inside.
* * *
As she had thought, the only sleep she got that night was her nap in Bo's pickup. But lying awake with happy thoughts is much different than lying awake with unhappy ones. Sleep was not regretted.
She replayed different scenes from the night over and over.
How silly the incident with James had been, and yet, now she wasn't sorry it had happened. It was a roundabout way of getting to a point of understanding between her and Bo, but they'd arrived there in the end. Probably better to have gone straight to that point in the first place, but ... ah, well. She'd have to thank Mom in the morning when she told her the outcome.
What a man he was above all the other men she'd ever known!
She dwelt tirelessly on the look she'd seen in his eyes as they'd met hers on Sunday when she finished her solo.
All the painful yearning of months, even years, had been poured into his look in that one, unguarded moment when he hadn't known she was going to see it.
And yet, in spite of the pain, he'd determined to go on being her friend, enduring the discomfort of being near her and believing she didn't care for him.
When he saw her, as he believed, happy with someone else, he'd determined to be glad for her in spite of what her happiness did to him.
Even when he'd believed her to be less than he'd believed her to be, he'd wrestled with himself until he'd determined to overlook her faults and go on thinking the best of her that he could.
Was there anything he wouldn't do for her? She believed he'd die for her if it came to that.
The words of a passage in the Bible from Ephesians 5 that she treasured came back to her.
Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it ... For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.
It seemed that everywhere she turned these days, she saw pictures that all pointed in one direction. And that direction was death. But, oh, what a beautiful picture this was! And what a beauty in this death!
She'd been married once. She understood the little, daily, hourly, minutely doses of death that were required to make a marriage work. She understood that if her relationship with Bo took them toward marriage (and honesty caused her to acknowledge, in spite of the boldness of the thought, that the relationship was certainly taking them toward marriage), then there would be death required of her. There would be death required of Bo.
It was a little death to put aside her own wishes, her own rights, her own ideas, her own feelings in order to make room for someone else and his wishes and rights and ideas and feelings. She was no more naturally unselfish than any other human. And death was never easy.
But through that death, what a glorious resurrection! The death of the two, separate, self-willed, self-serving entities. The raising to life of the one flesh.
Life through death. There was no other way to real life. Its path lay through death.
And there was no more heart-stoppingly romantic figure than the one willing to give himself for the one he loved. Willing to lay down his own wishes and rights and ideas and feelings. Willing to lay down his own life.
How could she help loving Bo when he reminded her so strongly of another One who had been willing to lay down His life for her?
Bo's only a man, she reminded herself. I mustn't put him on a pedestal, or he'll be sure to fall off it. There's only One who won't fall off any pedestal I put Him on.
But how true it was! The glorious resurrection of the one flesh in marriage was in
deed an awesome picture.
Her eyes filled, and she sang the beautiful, old words in a whisper, "Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly ..."
* * *
Exhausted as she was from her sleepless night, nothing could have kept her away from her date with Bo. Even if she slept through it, she was going.
They left immediately from work. When he'd picked her up in the morning, Bo had advised taking a change of clothes, and Ruth had run back inside for a pair of blue jeans and an old sweater that she'd thrown on after work was finished.
She wasn't surprised to find that Bo's pickup turned in the direction of the road to the lake. No crowded, noisy restaurant for their first date. Only the open air and the still and the calm and the blue, blue water and sky of God's creation (and the baloney sandwiches she'd spotted in a decrepit picnic basket in the pickup). Baloney wasn't her favourite, but bless his heart! He'd wanted to make their picnic with his own, two hands and probably couldn't fix anything else. She was oddly touched by the baloney sandwiches.
She hadn't been to the lake since a time when she'd been there last with Graham. She fought with old memories. But it would be a good place for a new start with Bo. It was good to face old memories. It was time to start making new ones.
Chapter 30
There had never been such a spring in recent memory. Or in any memory of Ruth's possession.
It was the end of April, and all the apple trees were in full bloom.
Ruth strolled through the orchard where Bo was checking irrigation lines and where she'd agreed to meet him at the end of her working day. He had something he wanted to show her, he'd said.
She let out an ear-splitting whistle, a talent she'd learned in childhood, and followed the sound of the replying whistle.
Bo's smile of welcome lit the orchard.
"I have three more rows to finish checking. Wanna come along?" he asked.
They strolled beneath the canopy of trees – in their spring finery resembling downy, earth-bound clouds on gnarled trunks – down the aisles of long grass littered with white petals. There was no need for speech nor touch. They were perfectly content just to be near each other, experiencing a shared experience of spring in the orchard and the silent presence of the other.