After a year of trying to forge relationships at the apartment with neighbors who did not want to socialize, John was in heaven. When he finished recounting everything he had learned about Chuck, the neighbor, Charissa asked if he could call Jeremy and check in. “Mara’s worried about him.”
“What should I say to him?”
“That we missed them at church, that we’re wondering how they are. I don’t know—use the excuse of finding out when he wants to start work on the bathroom.”
While John dialed Jeremy’s number, Charissa skimmed the lecture notes that had been provided for her about research strategies and citation styles. Maybe they were adequate. She had begun the semester thinking she would revise and improve everything that had been given to her, but when she agreed to take over the writing section at the last minute, she hadn’t factored in the time it would take to read and grade papers or to meet with students who needed input on assignments—or more rarely, to encourage students who had life issues they were struggling with. Those were the conversations that had most surprised her, that a student would seek her wisdom not about writing technique but about life.
The memento mori exercise she had adapted and assigned them in February had prompted a few of them to ponder the trajectory of their lives, to consider what they were devoting their energy to and why. Prayerfully engaging the exercise herself had stirred up her own questions about why she was pursuing a PhD and why she wanted to teach, questions she had avoided giving serious time to contemplate because she wasn’t sure she was ready to listen for her soul’s deepest answers.
“Hey, Jeremy,” John said. “Missed you guys this morning . . . Yeah, yeah . . . No, I get it. Totally. You need your rest.”
She shifted position on the couch as Bethany punted.
“No, I know,” he said. “Glad you guys are okay. And whenever you’re ready to start on the bathroom, let us know.”
Much as Charissa wanted the tile and fixtures revamped as quickly as possible, she wasn’t looking forward to sharing the space. Maybe Jeremy could work during the day, and she’d plan to stay on campus, with close proximity to restrooms.
“Yeah, I’ll check. Riss?”
She looked up from her notes.
“Okay if he starts tomorrow?”
Tomorrow? She mentally scanned her schedule. Yes, she could spend the day on campus. “Sure.” Maybe he would be done by the end of the week. She was amazed by how efficiently Jeremy worked. But since he charged by the project, not by the hour, he probably was eager to move on to other jobs. She hoped he had some scheduled.
“Did he say if he has some other projects?” Charissa asked when John hung up the phone a few minutes later.
“Nope. Didn’t mention anything.”
“Did he mention Mara offering to convert her basement into an apartment?”
“An apartment? No. Like, for them to live in?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what every husband and father aspires to,” he scoffed, “living in his mother’s basement with his family.”
“It was a kind offer from her, John. She’s worried.”
“And they’ll find their way. Economy’s bound to pick up soon, right?”
Charissa closed her lecture notes and opened her journal. Maybe it would be easier to intercede if she wrote out her prayers. For Becca. For Mara. And for Jeremy and his family.
Hannah
Hannah rolled over on her side of the bed, where she had spent the past hour trying in vain to nap while Nathan and Jake watched an Indiana Jones movie downstairs. Whatever it was that had required an hour of Nathan’s time yesterday, he wasn’t sharing details. “Just some teenage boy stuff,” he’d said when he arrived home. “Nothing to worry about.”
With fifteen years of pastoral experience behind her, Hannah understood the complicated dynamics of confidentiality. Boundaries, however, had been far more well-defined when she was single and working out of a church office or when she was ministering in a hospital room or restaurant booth or nursing home. As for developing intimacy as a married couple while honoring the intimacy of a father-son relationship, she was at a loss. If some issue had arisen with Jake that needed resolving, what role did she play? She was “Hannah” to Jake, not “Mom.” If Jake were “their son,” then she and Nate would work together to help him. But so far, Jake wasn’t asking for her help with anything. She would be a test subject for his science project. That was all. Jake cleaned his own room, made his own lunch, asked Nathan for help with homework, and politely welcomed her into their space, like a long-term houseguest.
“It’s still early days,” her mother had said on the phone when Hannah casually mentioned she wasn’t sure how to function as a stepmother. “You’ll find your way. Tell me about your honeymoon. How was Ludington?”
The details she felt comfortable sharing with her mother were ones about the bed and breakfast, a Victorian house with four-poster canopy beds, a fireplace and Jacuzzi in their room, a cozy nook for reading, and delicious food elegantly served. She spoke about their proximity to the lakeshore, where they had enjoyed leisurely walks along the beach and savored sunrises and sunsets. She also described their outings into the Manistee National Forest, where Nathan had taught her how to cross-country ski and persuaded her to join him on a two-person snowmobile for an exhilarating ride she would never forget and hoped someday to duplicate. With her helmet pressed against Nathan’s back and her arms wrapped around his waist, she began the ride with eyes closed. But eventually she lifted her head, loosened her grip, and cried with the sheer beauty of it, shouting her enthusiasm as he increased velocity to soar through the deep snow-covered woods. A speed addict, Nate reported to Jake after he returned from his spring break trip with friends. You should have heard her. Jake had smiled his shy smile. He was the one who had first suggested snowmobiling as a way for Hannah to learn how to play.
What she didn’t tell her mother (did any new brides confide such details to their mothers?) was that she had also cried, not with wonder, joy, and pleasure, but with shame as she struggled to offer her body to her husband. She had been ill-prepared—emotionally, mentally, and spiritually—for the uneasiness she would feel in those early days of exploring oneness. Nathan was tender and patient, gently reassuring and demanding nothing more than she was prepared to offer. For this she was grateful. But even so, she couldn’t shake a gnawing sense of inadequacy. And to whom could she confide? For years she had offered pastoral counseling to married couples struggling with everything from financial stress to parental challenges to sexual difficulties and dysfunctions, couples who forgot—or didn’t mind—that the pastor they consulted offered remedies derived from theological and therapeutic wisdom rather than from personal experience.
She could have told Meg, and Meg would have understood. Meg might even have commiserated with her, offering wisdom from her own experience as a newlywed.
Hannah reached for a photo she had removed from Becca’s memorial collage to scan and keep for herself: a picture of Meg at the Kingsbury Gardens with an impossibly blue butterfly poised on her shoulder, her face lit with the same light that had radiated from her when she knelt to wash Hannah’s feet. Luminous. That was the word. Even with her protruding collarbone and weary eyes, Meg’s unveiled face reflected God’s glory and revealed his image.
Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. That was Meg’s testimony. She had crossed the finish line with radiance, with love. Like the butterfly at rest on her shoulder, she had endured the rigors of transformation to discover wings.
Hannah kissed the photo and fell asleep clutching the image of her friend—her sister—to her breast.
“Thought you might sleep straight through,” Nathan said, glancing up from his book when Hannah shuffled into the kitchen. She rubbed her eyes, still mildly disoriented. It was pitch black outside.
“Where’s Jake?”
“At a friend’s, working on a history p
roject.”
“Is everything okay with him?”
Nathan hesitated. “Yeah, he’ll be okay. Some older boys were teasing him in the locker room, and I know one of the dads. We got it taken care of.”
The Allen Boys, doing their thing.
He rose to his feet and went to the fridge. “Sorry—we went ahead and ate without you. I wasn’t sure if I should wake you up or not. How about some pasta?”
She shook her head. Cereal, maybe. And some toast. “I’m okay. Not very hungry.”
“You feeling all right?”
“Just tired.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
But when he reached for her hand, her eyes burned. “Hannah?” She pressed her lips together, trying not to cry. He enfolded her in an embrace. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, “I know all of the upheaval has been hard on you.”
She wanted to refute that. She wasn’t unhappy. Was not. She had every reason to be happy, to be grateful. And she was. So grateful. And so sad.
“I was thinking earlier about regular rituals you and I can practice,” he said as he stroked her hair, “like a date night. Something fun to keep that play discipline going. I don’t want to lose that.”
She straightened herself to look him in the eye. “That sounds good. Thank you.”
“And I was also thinking about Sunday nights, how maybe we could light our unity candle and practice the examen. Just as a way of reviewing our life together with God, to see what we’re noticing and talk about it. What do you think?”
“I’ll get the candle,” she said, and kissed him.
While Nathan wrote fluidly in his notebook, stopping periodically to gaze at the flame or close his eyes in a listening posture, Hannah found that her words wouldn’t come. What was she noticing about her life with God? She had already journaled about her grief and disappointment and didn’t feel like writing it out again. She was weary of grief. She flipped back a few pages to see her journal dates. Apart from writing out her reflections at Charissa’s house about Mary and Martha, she had written nothing the past few weeks. Not since Meg’s funeral. Nothing about their wedding. Nothing about their honeymoon. Nothing.
She stared up at the kitchen ceiling, eyes fixed on a red smudge. Like insect blood. A swatted mosquito, maybe. She couldn’t paint over it without painting the whole ceiling. Then if she started painting the kitchen ceiling, she would have to paint the ceilings in the hallway and the family room and the stairwell. And then if the ceilings were freshly painted, the walls would look dingy.
She didn’t like the mint green walls in the kitchen. It looked antiseptic. Her kitchen in Chicago was a soft buttercream yellow. Natural, not artificial. And when the morning sunlight streamed through her eastern-facing windows, the whole room glowed with warmth and welcome.
Nathan wouldn’t object to her painting the walls, and it would give her a project with tangible results. She would pick up some paint color cards while she was out running errands on Monday and experiment with coordinating palettes so that the rooms had more cohesion.
Painting was one of the first things her parents had done together whenever they moved. They would show Hannah colors she could select from for her bedroom—she usually chose pale yellow—and then she would help by covering the baseboards with painters’ tape. Dad would let her work on the first coat, but then he and Mom would finish the second coat together. Hannah would lie on her bed, positioned temporarily in the middle of the room away from the walls, and read her Laura Ingalls Wilder books and pretend she wasn’t listening to their conversations about new neighbors and sales clients and Dad’s travel schedule. She couldn’t remember them arguing while they painted. Wasn’t painting one of those potentially stressful married couple’s activities? Or maybe that was wallpapering. Maybe that’s why they never had wallpaper in any of their houses. Or maybe her parents stripped the wallpaper or painted over it while she was at school. She couldn’t remember.
She remembered getting library cards. That was one of the first places she would go with her mother whenever they moved into a new town. Getting a library card with her name and new address on it helped her feel like she belonged somewhere. Books were her first friends in any new community, sometimes her closest ones. Reading Laura’s stories about moves and adventures gave Hannah courage for her own, and she had read Laura’s stories over and over. Those dog-eared books were still on a shelf at her house in Chicago. There was no room for them here.
“How’s my favorite girl doing?” Daddy would ask, usually a few weeks after a move. He would come into her freshly painted room and sit on the edge of her bed and ask her about school and teachers and friends and the kids who played every day together in the neighborhood. Hannah would grip Brown Bear to her chest and smile and nod and say that school was fine and that she liked her teacher and that she was making new friends. And Daddy would say, “I knew you’d like Colorado.” Or Arizona. Or California. Or wherever else she had landed, with shoes and jeans that weren’t what the other girls were wearing.
Nathan looked up from writing. “Done?” he asked quietly.
She supposed she was. She closed her journal before he noticed the blank pages in front of her.
She would invite him to speak first. And then she would speak about what she was noticing. Some of it. The deepest truth she would keep to herself: that even with all the blessings and gifts of her new life, she missed the familiar comfort of the old.
Mara
Mara flipped through her five ingredients or less cookbook, searching for something easy that Charissa could try to make for dinner. She had suggested a pasta dish, but Charissa said she would have to make her own tomato sauce from scratch. Way too much trouble. So Mara had suggested tacos. But John liked spicy salsa, and she would have to make that from scratch too. “I’ve got it!” Mara said to her on the phone Thursday afternoon. “Stir-fry. And don’t tell me you’re not allowed to use soy sauce.”
“But I—”
“You made the rules for this thing, you can bend them. We can go shopping tomorrow afternoon, get all the veggies, and make it with rice. You know how to cook rice, don’t you?”
Charissa took too long to reply.
“Ohhhh, girlfriend.” Mara made sure there was no hint of condemnation in her voice. But seriously. How did someone live to be twenty-six without knowing how to make rice? They had come from two different worlds, the two of them. “Okay. I’ll teach you how to make nice, fluffy rice.” They would have to make it without a chicken bouillon cube. She wondered how the boys would react if she told them they were having a vegetable stir-fry for dinner. Cooking a double portion at Charissa’s house made more sense than coming home to fix something else. If they didn’t like it, they could eat cereal.
“You see Jeremy this week?” Mara asked, changing the subject as smoothly as possible. She had only talked with Jeremy once since the whole basement apartment debacle, and it hadn’t been a long enough conversation to determine how he was doing. Abby was fine, he said. Madeleine was fine. They didn’t need her to babysit that week because Abby had a few days off, and they were managing okay. She tried not to take it personally.
“He’s been working on the bathroom,” Charissa said, “and I think he’s almost done. It looks great in there. Amazing what a few small changes can do.”
Mara hesitated. “Does he seem”—what word did she want to use? Depressed? Angry?—“okay?”
“A little on the quiet side, maybe, but I don’t really know him well enough to say for sure.”
If there weren’t such a language barrier with Abby’s mom, Mara would have tried fishing for information. She had sent Ellen an email under the pretense of sharing some “grandmother photos” of Madeleine. She had also thanked her and her husband for their financial help, hoping that Ellen would divulge more details about their support. But the only reply she received was a brief email thanking her for the pictures and saying she was continuing to pray for their children an
d granddaughter “in all times.” Mara wondered what Abby had confided to her.
“Is there anything John and I can do to help?”
Mara couldn’t think of anything. “You’ve already done so much. Thanks for giving him projects.”
“Wish we had some more. John is scheming for a deck, but so far, I’m holding my ground. For budget reasons,” she added quickly, “not because of anything to do with Jeremy.”
“No, I know. I keep praying for his company to land some big contracts. Maybe once spring hits.” She eyed the clock on the microwave. “I gotta go. The boys will be done with basketball practice soon. But I’ll see you tomorrow at Crossroads, right?”
“I’ll be there about ten-thirty. Not that I’ll be much help in the kitchen.”
“I’ll put you to work,” Mara said. “We’ll have you chopping veggies like a pro in no time. Just you wait and see.”
Bailey, his shaggy little face pressed against the passenger side window, wagged his whole body with excitement as Mara backed her SUV out of the garage. She had only planned to take him for a car ride once, but a single trip to the school to pick up the boys had attracted so much enthusiastic attention from some teenage girls that Kevin had asked if she could make a regular habit of it. “You little chick magnet, you,” she said as Bailey spun in the seat.
All along the cul de sac, spring was emerging. With the temperature above fifty degrees for the first time in months, the neighborhood had burst into life. Soon the über-mowers would begin their twice-weekly obsession with maintaining their lush carpets of weedless checkerboard lawns, and her flaws would be even more noticeable, with the brown patches of dog pee and unruly crabgrass. So be it. Since she was staying in the house for the next few years, she might as well stop worrying what people were whispering about her and manage as best she could.
An Extra Mile Page 6