He tipped his head. “It could be. I don’t really know. I mean, I’ve just worked with Greg some on Attabury, and that was a side thing for him. I’m not even sure what kind of projects they do or the pay or the benefits or anything like that.”
“But you would think about it?” she asked, and after a second, he shrugged.
“Yeah. I’m thinking about it.”
“Okay, don’t freak out,” Dani said when she got Rachel on the line the next morning. She had somehow managed to wait to make the call until Jaden was on the bus and Eric was out of the garage though it had taken giant vats of superhuman willpower to make that happen.
“O…kay?”
“And you can’t tell anybody. Not even Caleb.”
“Not even…?”
“I’m serious, Rach. Not even Caleb. I shouldn’t even be telling you, but I’ve got to talk to somebody to make sure I’m not just thinking this could work when it really can’t.”
“Gee, girl, this sounds serious. What’s going on?”
Dani put her hand on the top of her head and exhaled. “What would you say if I told you Eric is thinking about taking a job with Greg?”
“With Greg? Greg Lawrence?”
“Yep.”
“Well, first of all, I’d say that’s going to be an awfully long commute.”
Rather than offer a retort, Dani simply nodded as if her friend could see her, egging her on to figuring out what she wasn’t saying. If she didn’t say it, that couldn’t be called telling somebody, could it?
“Wait,” Rachel said after several seconds. “Hold on. Are you saying…? You’re not thinking about… moving here, are you?”
Dani scrunched her face so hard, it almost brought tears to her eyes. “Is that completely crazy or what?”
“Crazy? No, it’s not crazy! That’s awesome!” Rachel’s voice ratcheted up with excitement. “But wait. Why can’t I tell Caleb? He’ll be thrilled.”
“Because,” Dani said, latching seriousness down over the excitement, “we don’t even know if it will work yet. I mean, they’re just talking about it. Ooooh.” She half-growled, half-yelped. “This is killing me.”
“Well, do you want to move?”
That was the part she still couldn’t quite believe. “I want to move so bad, I’d be packed in ten minutes if I knew we could make things work down there. But then part of me says we have to be practical about this. I mean, what if I can’t find a job? What if this thing with Greg’s company doesn’t work out?”
“What if it does?”
Dani let out another yelp. “I just… I don’t want to get my hopes up and then it doesn’t work, you know? And I don’t want to think that is going to fix everything, and we get there, and it all falls apart.”
“Well, no place is going to fix everything. Tough things happen here too.”
“I know. I know. That’s why I’m trying to stay practical here and not just jump in without looking.”
“At the same time,” Rachel said, “we would love to have all of you here. Rhett asks me practically every day when Jaden is coming to play with him again.”
“Jaden loves them too.”
“Well, then it sounds like something we need to start praying about, that the right thing for everyone will happen.”
Most days since she’d been at home, Dani spent her time grocery shopping, doing laundry, cleaning, and looking up possible jobs in the area. She would check the job site she’d put her résumé on periodically, but mostly she got spam about work from home offers where “you can make $5,000 a month in less than 15 minutes a day!!!!!” She scrolled through the “offers” until she couldn’t take it anymore.
Clicking off the site, she considered her options and decided Rachel was right. Praying for the right thing to happen had never been on her go-to list of prayers. Most of them were target-specific focused on what she knew she wanted and how she wanted it to come. This felt like trying to nail Jell-o to the side of a moving freight train.
“God,” she said, still shaky in her dealings with Him as she sat down in Eric’s chair in the living room, “I know what I want here, but…” She let out a breath. “What I really want is what You want. Please show us what that is or help us to know what that is or however this works. I want to do something, but everything I try seems like it runs me into a brick wall, so if there’s something I’m supposed to do, show me what that is. If there’s not, please show me how to let this go and not overthink it into the ground.”
She opened her eyes and glanced at the end table. Softly she smiled. Eric’s Bible.
With another breath she reached for it and opened it, not looking for anything in particular, just planning to let it give her some company for a few minutes.
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Thinking into that, Dani thought about Pastor Steve’s sermon. That Nehemiah guy certainly didn’t have a spirit of fear. He made a request of the king, got permission, warded off the enemies, gathered the resources and the labor, made a plan, and got it done. She liked that. How he hadn’t been timid in his actions. Actions to her had always been the natural outgrowth of intelligence. She was good at coming up with a plan, putting it into action, and seeing it through. That was why this whole new way of existence was such a challenge. Independence she understood. Dependence was a lot harder.
She flipped to another page.
I will lift up my eyes to the hills—
From whence comes my help?
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
Help. She’d never been very good at using that word. Maybe because from the time she was very young, her mother had insisted only the weak asked for help. Dani took a breath at that thought. She let her mind go to Ridgemount and how they all helped each other. No one was above or below their need for help or their willingness to help or to ask for it. Even she had come to learn that it was no crime nor embarrassment to need help. “God,” she whispered, “I need Your help, Lord. I do. I need Your help to learn to do this and to do it right.”
She flipped through the pages.
In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.
Acknowledge Him. She nodded slowly. “Acknowledge Him,” she said aloud. “How do you do that?” Sitting back, she closed her eyes to think about the question. “How do I acknowledge someone? Well, for one thing I don’t ignore them.” A sharp stab hit her heart. “Yeah. I’ve done that a lot, haven’t I, God? I’ve ignored You, pushed You in the corner, gone on with my day and my life as if You didn’t even exist.” She let out a breath. “You make time for them,” she said. “You invite them in. You talk to them, get to know them. Make time to be with them.”
She remembered her early non-encounters with her grandmother at church, how she had turned away and hoped her grandmother didn’t see her. Of course she saw her! Of course she did. But it was Dani’s choice not to acknowledge her, and what had she lost by doing that? The cost was immeasurable.
Thinking it probably wiser than not to put the book down, instead, she flipped to another page.
The wise woman builds her house, But the foolish pulls it down with her hands.
A pang of deep regret jerked through her heart. “A wise woman builds her house,” she said slowly, “but a foolish one pulls it down with her hands.” Dani leaned back in the chair, her eyes pooling with tears. “God, forgive me for every way I’ve tried to pull my house down. I truly did not know what I was doing. Please forgive me and help me to build, never to tear down.”
Build, her spirit said. Build. What are you building, and who are you building it for?
The hold she’d had on herself slipped so that it was no longer she who was controlling her thoughts, rather they skipped over each other like rocks across the glass face of a still pond, causing ripples as they went. She looked around her house, the house she had so thought would solve everything when they boug
ht it. But it hadn’t solved anything. Who are you building for?
Her mind went to Caleb and then to Derek. They built things for people. Eric and Greg too. Even Rachel, Jaycee and Sage. They all built things, not for themselves but for others. Then her mind skipped over to Pastor Steve and Jane. She squinted, seeing for the first time what she never had perceived before. They were builders, too, helping others to construct a life, a life of hope and joy and love. A life not wasted away in the confines of the empty pursuit of more, more, more.
“God,” she whispered, “I want to help build. I don’t know what that means, but I want to help them all build. I want to make a difference in this world, God, not just for myself and my family, but for as many others as You have in mind.”
A flash of a thought sparked through her, and not really understanding it, she sat forward and laid the Bible back on the table. Sitting forward, she opened her laptop and pulled up the email Eric had sent her with the details of the cash they had gone through. Not having a clue where to even start, she clicked on the first one, did a quick search for a place to call, and started calling.
Because she didn’t have all of the information like serial numbers and some identifying factors Eric and Greg had not included in the data, she wasn’t able to pin down a lot of the answers, but she was beginning to see that their find had the potential of being huge. When she was sitting in the line to get Jaden after school, she texted Eric. I’m probably going to Ridgemount tomorrow. Can you ask Greg for the key to the sdpb?
She knew he would wonder what she was up to.
No problem, the answer came back in more than a few minutes. You tracking down the money?
I’m on it.
“So what’d you find out?” Eric asked when Jaden had gone into the living room to work on homework after supper.
“Some. Not much. I really need to do an inventory so they can help me out a little better. I’m probably going to take the scanner if that’s okay.”
Eric knew his wife well enough to know not to argue. “Sounds good to me.”
The next day Dani was in Ridgemount by 10:30. Greg was going to meet her at the bank. She would have to be back on the road by 1, so that didn’t give her much time.
“You came prepared,” Greg said with a nod at the equipment she held under her arm.
“Always.”
After explaining the situation to the bank manager, Greg helped her get the box open, and he showed her how they had cataloged it so she wouldn’t have to spend valuable time reinventing the wheel.
“Okay. I think I can take it from here,” she said.
“Just hang on to the key,” Greg said. “I can get it from you this weekend. We’re looking forward to seeing what you’ve done with the place.”
Dani laughed. “So am I.”
Once he left, she got to work, thankful for her hours pouring over tediousness in law school. It was going to come in handy now.
Eric resisted the temptation to call or text her. She was busy, and he needed to let her work. But between that and wondering how Attabury was shaping up, not to mention questions about the job and the possible move, he was getting very little of his immediate work done.
All the way home, Dani’s mind ran over and through the numbers. The people at the website had been most helpful, probably owing to the dead-sure-bet that they wanted her business more than the next breath. She thought about the mortgages, knowing them both almost by heart she’d studied them so long. If her conversations during the day panned out, there would be more than enough to pay off both of them and have money left over.
So why did she feel so unsettled about it all? Excited. She should feel excited, she told herself as North Carolina flashed by outside her window. She needed to talk to Eric about it. That was probably why her spirit felt all jangly instead of at peace. Yes. That had to be it.
“How’d it go today?” Eric asked, laying his jacket over the kitchen chair and his laptop case in it. He still couldn’t believe she hadn’t sent anything, and honestly he was worried about why she hadn’t.
“We need to eat first,” she said, setting the casserole on the table, “then we can talk.”
“Is this a good talk or a bad talk?” he asked because he was having a hard time telling from her cryptic tone.
“Jaden! It’s time for supper,” Dani called into the other room. When she turned, she caught him in her gaze and held it on him. “Sorry I didn’t call. I probably should have. It’s just I really think we need to discuss this when we’ve got some time, not over texts or in the five minutes between meetings.”
“Okay.” Eric nodded and took a breath that helped to calm his irrational fears about why she hadn’t called. She was right. Decisions like this didn’t need to be hashed out in a chain of text messages. He sat down. “This looks great.”
“Thanks,” Dani said, coming to the table. “I got a little late getting Ja, but I didn’t want to get pizza. You know how expensive that is.”
Work. He knew she was worried about it.
When Jaden came in and took her seat, Eric put his hand out to both of them and bowed his head in prayer. They were a family now. Everything else was down the list of important.
“So what do we got?” Eric asked, shadowing her at the table when she pulled up her work from the afternoon.
“Well, you were right.” She angled the laptop so he could see it as he sat down once again. “It’s a lot. A whole lot.”
His nod was serious. “Okay.” He looked over the information and jerked in a breath at the number following the word Total at the bottom. “Is that…?”
“It’s a rough estimate. I didn’t get a chance to get all of the bills registered in it though. It takes forever to go through them even with people who know what to look for.”
“That’s good because I was feeling like an incompetent idiot trying to decipher all of it on Saturday.”
“No,” she said, “it really is a lot. Like this one.” She pointed to one line. “It could be worth as much as $2,000 on its own if it has this serial number, but with this one, it’s only worth $50 in good condition.”
“That’s what we were running into. Plus, I don’t have a clue what’s considered good or pristine or bad condition on any of them.”
“Right. So I think our next step after this weekend is to actually take it to an appraiser, somebody who does this stuff all the time. I don’t want to chance it with anyone else.” She spun the computer and typed something in. “I came up with two places I think could give us estimates. That way we’ll have a comparison. And I want them to appraise each bill separately or at least in batches because if we could get a lot more at one place for one batch and more at a different place for another batch, I think we’d be ahead to pursue it like that.”
He nodded, thinking it all through. “Well, that answers what to do for the next steps. What’re you thinking after that?”
Dani’s small amount of busyness slowed all the way down to a stop. “Well, I looked up some laws, just to make sure, but I think it’s ours to do with what we want. There is no living heir, no one else who would have a claim on it.”
His gaze bored down into her. “So why do I get the feeling none of this is good news?”
She had asked herself that very question the entire day. Now, having to answer it out loud, she sat back and let her thoughts trace over every one she’d had. “I just can’t help but feel like… it’s not for us, like God isn’t saying for us to use it—even for the mortgages. I know, that makes zero sense, but…”
“Well, I’m learning that God’s ways don’t always make much sense at the time He’s asking us to trust Him and do them anyway,” Eric said, “and a lot of times we’ve got to learn to walk on faith not on sight. So if you don’t think we’re supposed to use it for the mortgages, then what? What’s it for? What’re we supposed to do with it? Give it away? Okay. I’m not gonna lie, that’s a lot of money to be giving away, but if you think that’s what we ought to
do with it…”
With a very slow shake of her head, she closed her eyes, hearing the craziness of the idea bounce through her head. “I know this is going to sound pretty much insane, but hear me out.”
He nodded as his hand came across the table near hers but not on it. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about Hazel and about the life she lived, or didn’t live really. She spent her whole life in that house with my great grandmother coming and going. From what I can gather in the diary, she and my great grandmother were as close as people in two different walks of life could be back then. I know my great grandmother loved her, I mean, really loved her. She could have left, maybe even should have left, but she didn’t. Mrs. Attabury, Hazel, in turn sold practically every swatch of land she owned to try to pay her. She didn’t have a job, no other way to get an income. She couldn’t even drive. She lived 51 years after her husband died with nobody to take care of her or love her other than my grandmother. And she worried about what would happen when she couldn’t pay my grandmother anymore although looking at things from this perspective, she probably didn’t realize how little she was paying her in the first place.”
“Okay,” he said. “I get all of that, but where does that leave us?”
Dani’s gaze came up to his, soft, pleading, remorseful. She hated to suggest this because she knew it would mean the money couldn’t be used to make his life easier. “Remember the other day when we were visiting Grandma, you said it was like God’s grace had forgotten about that place?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it’s just been waiting for the right time to show up.”
Eric puzzled over the words. “I don’t think I’m following you.”
She turned to him then, all the way, so that her hands came under his and his over hers. Tightening her grip on him, she held on, praying he still had no intentions of letting go. “I want to help them, Eric. All of them. Or at least as many of them as we can.”
Raising Attabury: A Contemporary Christian Epic-Novel (The Grace Series Book 5) Page 50