by Kimberly Rae
The boy peered at the road as if seeing it for the first time. A car raced past, its speed ruffling the boy’s hair. His eyes widened.
Ryan looked up where Kayla stood, hand on her heart. He smiled and held up the prized frog.
She approached. “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.” Ryan looked at the boy. “What’s his name?”
“Frog.”
Kayla giggled, and Ryan’s smile widened at the sound. “Good name.”
“And what’s your name?” Kayla knelt down to be on eye level with the boy. “Mine is Miss Kayla and this is Mr. Ryan.”
“I’m Jose. No Mister. Just Jose.”
Ryan held out his hand to shake it, but instead of reaching for that hand, Jose reached for the other one from which Frog was trying hard to extricate himself.
“Can I have him back?”
Ryan rubbed his chin with his free hand.
“Eww, frog juice,” Kayla said.
Ryan quickly wiped his hand against his pants, then wiped his chin with his sleeve.
“Tell you what Mr. Jose, I’ll—”
“No mister. Just Jose.”
“Right. Tell you what, Jose, I’ll give Frog back to you on one condition.”
“What’s a condition?”
“Um, it’s when you promise something as trade for something else.”
Jose looked him over. “Isn’t that called a bribe?”
Kayla bit down a laugh, and Ryan coughed. “Let’s get to the point. I’ll give Frog back to you if you promise not to play near the road with him anymore. Okay?”
Jose reached for the animal. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“No money involved?”
Ryan laughed, then sobered at Jose’s serious expression. “No, Jose, I don’t want any money. I want you to be safe.”
“Why would you want that? You don’t even know me.”
“I know that your name is Jose. And you like frogs. And you’re smart.”
Jose almost smiled.
“And I know God made you, and He loves you. That’s enough for me.”
Jose reached out. “Okay, I promise.” He clung tightly to the frog Ryan handed over. The frog’s legs extended, and he gave a distressed croak.
“Not quite so tight there, buddy.”
“Well, you don’t want him to jump out in the road again, do ya?”
“Good point.”
Jose walked away. Ryan heard him talking as he pointed a finger and held the frog close to his face. “It’s not safe playing near the street. What were you thinking? Haven’t you seen those squished frogs in the middle of the road? They weren’t paying attention, and now they’re totally flat. Do you want to be flat?”
“I think they’ll be okay now.” Ryan backed away, rubbing both hands down his jeans again. “You still up for our walk?”
“Definitely.” Kayla joined him, but kept looking back. “I wonder where he lives. Where his parents are.”
“I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him again.”
Kayla smiled. “And Mr. Frog too?”
“No mister. Just Frog.”
Kayla laughed at his words. The sound echoed around them and right into Ryan’s heart.
He set a lazy pace, though it was soon clear that for Kayla it was still a strain. He slowed even more.
As they talked, she hid it well behind her words, but he could tell she was nervous about getting her test results back. So was he. Just the thought of her having cancer, or some other disease, made him break out in a cold sweat. The added thought of her suffering through treatments curled up his insides, and the thought of her maybe dying… He would not even think about that.
“Hey, mister, if we’re racing, I forfeit.”
Worries of her sickness had unconsciously sped his steps. “I’m sorry. Here, let me help you past this section. These rocks running alongside the creek are damp and can get slippery.”
“The moss growing on them is pretty.”
“Pretty, yes, but unsafe at times. It camouflages the moisture on the rocks and gives a false sense of security.”
“You make me sound as unaware as Jose and his frog.”
“Well, you did come from Michigan. I hear they don’t have any mountains up there. Only lakes.”
“This isn’t exactly a mountain we’re climbing here,” Kayla pointed out, stopping and leaning against a tree. “Which is a… good… thing.”
She slumped down to a sitting position, and Ryan was instantly at her side. “I knew this was a bad idea. Do you want me to carry you down?”
“Stop — overreacting, Mr. Knight-in-Shining-Armor. Just — get my inhaler — my pocket — please.”
Well, that was an uncomfortable request. Not that she would care about him sticking his hand in her pocket when she couldn’t breathe, he reasoned. He was so not good in a crisis.
He put fingers into the left side pocket of her pants, feeling like a third-grader about to get slapped for getting fresh, when she half-giggled, half-coughed. He looked up, his face already red, reddening even more when she pointed down toward the pocket beside her knee. The one with the little bulge shaped like an inhaler.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Forgot you were wearing cargo pants.”
She started to laugh, but it came out as only a wheeze. By the time he had extricated the inhaler, she was doubled over, gasping for breath.
He took the cap off the inhaler. “The air is thinner up here.”
Why was he explaining that? What did she care? He shook the inhaler as he remembered to do from reading the instructions the day she had brought it home, then handed it to her.
She inhaled a quick puff and tried to hold her breath the ten seconds required, no easy feat when struggling for breath in quick, small gasps. A second puff. She held her breath, and he held his with her, counting to ten inwardly.
When she breathed out, he did too. “Are you okay?”
She held up a finger and he waited, watching closely as she rested her head back against the tree and took in deep breaths through her mouth. A minute passed while he thought of five questions to ask and swallowed every one of them.
Her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be relaxing. He lightly touched her hand. “You okay?” His voice came out trite. If he were analyzing his teens’ actions and words, he’d say he was worried.
When she nodded and smiled, he felt his own tight lungs relaxing.
“Wow,” she said. “That thing actually works.” She breathed in deeply, then out several times.
His voice held a teasing note. “Well, that is the idea of medicine.” He felt his smile grow tender. He was turning into a complete sap. “Should we go back now?”
Her nod this time was to the negative. “No, this worked. I feel better. Let’s keep going.” She reached to put the inhaler in her side pocket, then grinned at him before putting it back in the lower knee pocket of her cargo pants. “Just in case I need you to get it again.”
Ryan felt his face flush again, and she laughed. “Come on, Knight in Shining Armor. We’re wasting daylight.”
He stood and helped her up. “No knight ever said that. John Wayne did.”
“I know.”
His eyebrows lifted. “You do?”
“Sure. I grew up with just a dad, remember?”
They resumed their climb, him behind her just in case. “Miss Madison, you are full of surprises.”
She looked back over her shoulder. “Mr. Cummings, you have no idea.”
He caught himself staring. Grinning. When she moved on ahead, he shook himself and rushed after her, determined not to miss a minute.
Chapter Thirteen
“Okay, Ryan Cummings. You know that I planned to live my life as a missionary. You know I love blueberry muffins, and I get crabby when I don’t feel well. You know I have asthma, and my stomach problems haven’t gotten better, even though I’m not eating spicy curry and rice anymore. But I don’t know—”
>
“I didn’t know you had stomach problems.” Ryan was struggling to keep up with a suddenly rapid Kayla. “Are you aware that you’re walking a lot faster now?”
“Am I?”
“And talking faster, too.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting.” She kept moving forward. “I thought my stomach issues were just because of the food overseas. You know, third world germs and all that. But they haven’t gotten better despite Aunt Lavender’s amazing homemade food. And as much as I hate to admit it, they’ve gotten worse.”
“So what exactly are your stomach problems?” He was having a hard time keeping up with her on the trail.
She scrunched up her face. “Ugh. Yucky subject. You don’t want to know.” Her hands flapped, gesturing the topic away. “Anyway, what I was saying was that you know all this stuff about me, but I don’t know anything about you, except that you used to work with teens and now you’re the associate pastor of the church Aunt Lavender goes to now.”
“Which you have yet to attend again.”
“I wasn’t feeling well last Sunday. Oh, and I know you build things, and you’re sweet to little boys with frogs, but other than that you could still live at home with your mom and drink milk out a carton for all I know.”
He laughed out loud. “Trust me, if I lived with my mother, I would not be drinking out of the carton.”
Kayla smiled. “Okay, but—”
He grabbed her hand from behind. “Why are we suddenly going so fast?” He held her hand up. “You’re shaking.”
She put both hands in front of her face and watched them flutter. “Yikes. I am.” Then she put both hands against her heart. “And my heart’s racing too.” Her eyes went wide with fright. “Do you think I’m having a heart attack or something?”
“Kayla.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s the reaction you’re having from the inhaler. Didn’t you read the instructions when you got it?”
She shook her head in a jittery fashion. “No.”
“Well I did.”
Her laugh was high-pitched. “You did? What for?”
“Apparently for such a time as this, so you would know you weren’t having a heart attack.” He sighed and took her hand and started up the trail again. “Woman, you need someone looking after you.”
“Seems someone already is.”
He glanced back to see her blush. It pleased him.
“So back to you and life with your mother and your milk carton.”
“Ah, yes. My mother, along with my father — who does not particularly care if I drink out of the carton as long as I don’t do so while leaving the refrigerator door open — live in Florida at present. My dad was in the military, and even though he’s retired now, he just can’t seem to stop moving every couple of years. We all came to Lenoir when I was in high school, and I liked it so much here that after my years in seminary I decided to come back to stay. Wanted to develop some roots.”
“Seems like a great place for settling down.”
“I agree.” He chuckled. “Especially if you feel like being ‘helped’ by every woman within a forty-mile radius who has a single granddaughter.”
“Or great-niece, right?” Kayla grinned. He noticed her words weren’t quite as fast as before. The shaking was lessening, too.
He smiled over at her. The path was wide enough that they could walk side-by-side for now. “Exactly. If the women in my church had their way, I’d have been married and settled ten times over by now.”
“Well, don’t let Aunt Lavender’s plans get in the way of your unsettled root developing,” she teased. “So then where do you live?”
“In the parsonage, actually — the house next to the church meant for the pastor to live in.”
He watched her start to roll her eyes then refrain. “I know what a parsonage is. My dad was a pastor, remember? But why do you live there instead of the pastor?”
“He has five kids, and the parsonage is big enough for about one and a half. So he got his own place, and the church let me live there when I was the youth pastor. And they’ve been nice enough to rent it to me now that I’m not in ministry full-time, per se.”
“Per se? What—”
“Kayla, look.”
Kayla stopped walking. They were nearly at the top of the hill. “At what?” She gazed upward. “The top of the hill?”
He took her hand and led her three steps around the bend. “No, over here.”
She followed and gasped. “Oh, Ryan. It’s beautiful!”
Miles of blue-tinged mountains stretched across the horizon. The periwinkle blue sky stopped sharply at the deep, darkened blue of the mountains’ peaks and ridges, which bled down into a lighter, faded blue down the mountains.
“Now I see why they’re called the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
“Pretty amazing, aren’t they? Nothing like this in Florida.”
“Or Michigan, either. I can see why you wanted to stay.”
He turned to view her profile. Something within him wanted to ask if she’d ever consider wanting to stay, too. It was a good place to settle down. Have a family.
“So what do you mean that you’re not in the ministry full-time, per se?”
Her question interrupted his thoughts. “What? Oh, well, I went to seminary to be a youth pastor, but since I was working my way through school by doing construction, it took four years to do two years of schooling. I got called by this church and asked to go ahead and come be the youth pastor, and they would help me finish getting my seminary degree. I agreed because I knew the experience would help me get started doing what I had planned to do.”
“Sounds like your plan was going like clockwork,” Kayla said, her eyes still out toward the mountains. She sat and he joined her. “What happened?”
“Well, sometimes God surprises you.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
He wanted to hold her hand.
“So… what happened?”
“Things got so busy with the teens that I didn’t have time for seminary, and by the time the teen group had grown and was up and running, I realized something important.”
She turned toward him. “What?”
“I missed my construction ministry.”
She cocked her head. “Construction ministry?” She chuckled. “I’ve been in church all my life and never heard of that.”
“Me neither,” he admitted. “But I realized that, in the church setting, my work for the Lord was good but usually limited to the group of society that particular church was focused on.”
“You mean like types of churches — rich-people churches, kid-focused churches, race-based churches — that sort of thing?”
“Yeah, pretty much. And outsiders aren’t comfortable coming to a church unless they fit the demographic. I noticed though, when I was in construction, I’d go to a job and do my work well, but often when I’d take a lunch break or — this being the South — be invited to stop for a glass of lemonade or sweet tea, people would open up to me. I hadn’t knocked on their door as a stranger with an agenda, so they didn’t feel threatened. They would tell me their stories, and I would listen, and get to offer hope, or pray with them.”
He looked out over the majestic view. “I decided maybe God hadn’t called me to work inside His church, but out of it, reaching more people by having a ‘regular’ job than I might be able to as a minister with a title.”
“But you’re an associate pastor.”
“Yes. I didn’t want to leave church ministry altogether. I love serving God’s people.” His face warmed as he faced the sun. “I had never envisioned myself being a part-time church worker and a part-time construction worker, but I’m finding that it’s more fulfilling than what I thought I wanted.”
He looked over at Kayla’s face. “God has a way of doing that, you know.”
“What?” She picked up a handful of fallen pine needles and held them up, palm open for the breeze to carry away in swirls.
He wa
tched her stand and brush the dust from her pants, looking everywhere but at him.
He rose as well and took her hand. When her eyes lifted to his, he spoke. “Of giving us dreams that are better than the dreams we’d had for ourselves.”
Her frown surprised him. “So is that why you took Aunt Lavender’s jobs, so you could fix my spiritual issues during your lemonade breaks?”
“Kayla.” His hand lifted her chin, and he ran his thumb across the smooth skin of her cheek. “In the first place, I didn’t even know you were here, remember? In the second place, even if I didn’t have work to do here, I think I’d be coming up with reasons to come over… and they wouldn’t have anything to do with fixing your issues.”
Her eyes were locked on his. His own ran over the contours of her cheekbones, arched eyebrows, cheeks brightened by the setting sun.
The setting sun. How long had they been talking? “We’ve got to go,” he suddenly said, dropping her hand and motioning her back around the bend toward the trail. “We need to get down the hill before it gets dark, and especially before the cool air makes those rocks more slippery. It’s probably not good for your lungs either.”
She regarded him as he helped her along the trail. “You don’t need to worry about me, you know.”
Not worry about her? He couldn’t seem to help it. Unfortunately, his desire to help seemed equally matched by her resistance to it.
Something would have to give. He needed to call for reinforcements.
Chapter Fourteen
Teenagers. The only people Ryan could think of more stubborn than Kayla.
After the Sunday morning service, another one in which she refused to come, stating she did not feel well, Ryan asked the teen group if they could drop by and visit on their way to their monthly pizza lunch together.
“It’s about time!” Jainey stated.
“Of course we need to see her. Is she better from whatever was making her sick?”
Ryan chuckled. “I’ll let you ask your questions yourself. We’ll be at her aunt’s house in less than fifteen minutes.” There would be no way Kayla could clam up with this group. “They’re up in the Zack’s Fork area.”