The guitar was forgotten. “Will you call him back? Tell him I’m on my way?”
“Yes, I will.”
As Sam ran out past her, he saw Mary Grace was already dialing the phone.
The Central Medical Center’s family conference room on the second floor was anything but comfortable and inviting. The gold tweed couch leaned to one side, favoring a broken leg. A bulletin board was still covered with meeting notices, their dates long-since come and gone.
One telephone sat in the middle of the floor, its naked cord snaking toward the wall. Sam stared at Joe’s doctor in disbelief. The hum of the air conditioner made Sam feel like he was swimming through a blur.
Babesiosis was what the doctor called it, Sam learned. Joe had not noticed the tick bite for far too long.
“You can take care of that, can’t you? I thought these days they could treat tick bites with antibiotics.”
“Yes,” the doctor said, nodding. “That is something we can try. But antibiotics may not be enough since we didn’t catch this when it began.”
From that moment on, Sam’s call to pray for Joe’s recovery became a physical stirring. A trembling along his skin. A moving current that traveled the length of his bones, buzzed his ears, warmed his fingers. I’ll pray, Father, Sam promised. I’ll fast. I’ll do anything you ask. I’ll do everything the right way if you’ll just keep Joe from dying.
So, he did. Sam prayed, fasted, read one particular verse from 2 Samuel aloud at least fifty times—the one about God being strength, a shield, a stronghold when David stared death in the face, whenever Brenda called with more discouraging news. Finally, when the doctors ordered Joe moved to critical care, and Sam grew too frustrated to do anything else, he donned his shorts and shoes, and started running.
The trail followed the Des Moines River for miles toward Saylorville Lake and each time he went out he ran like he wanted his feet to punish the pavement. While others walked their dogs or lingered beside daffodils that grew like bright springtime teacups in manicured beds, Sam pounded along, pushing his lungs to the limit, every footfall echoing the cry of his heart.
Please, Lord, not Joe.
Oh please, Lord. Not Joe.
How could he feel so stirred, he wondered, if the heavenly Father hadn’t planned to do something profound about his praying?
Sam spent his time at Joe’s bedside thinking No, God. Not this. Not this, while he tried not to notice that the skin beneath Joe’s Iowa State ring had turned pale and translucent, as fragile as parchment, as if he might die.
“You’ve got to promise me—” Joe struggled weakly to prop himself up on an elbow. “—you won’t tell people about after the bachelor party.”
“Don’t try to talk, bud. You just get better. Save your strength.”
“I know you’re going to want to tell stories at my service, but I don’t want you to tell how you wouldn’t leave me by myself that night, and I didn’t have money for the taxi so I gave the driver my belt.”
“There won’t be any service, Joe. You’re going to get better, I’m sure of it.”
“Brenda can’t hear that story about the belt. That belt was real Canadian leather. Brenda picked it out.”
“There won’t be any stories.”
“Well, if Brenda hears that one, she’ll kill me.”
They both stopped to ponder that, and laughed.
“Remember—” And it was the last time they would laugh together although neither of them knew it. “—how that driver made me take it off so he could measure and see if it fit before he gave us a ride?”
“That was ridiculous, trading your clothes for transportation.”
“I didn’t see you offering to pay.”
“No.”
“I would never have acted like such an idiot with somebody who wasn’t my best friend.”
When the sky is a cloudless larkspur blue on the morning of a funeral, a person can feel like the heavens are mocking him, too, for what he believes. The heat fell so heavy outside that it rippled in the air. As Sam stood in the pulpit at Covenant Heights (his sister had begged him to do the service) with that senseless sunlight streaming in across the crowd, he watched Brenda’s hand tracing helpless figure-eights across her son’s shoulders.
Sam gripped the sides of the pulpit like the railing of a pitching ship. He controlled his own breath, drawing air into his lungs, slowly letting it out again, because breathing was the only thing that felt real.
Only a smattering of spaces remained in the church, all of them in the front three pews. Mourners were even crowded into the back foyer. They jostled for position in the space beside the sound booth. Standing room only. Joe would have liked that.
After Sam delivered a short eulogy, he began to hand the microphone around. So many raised a hand to speak. So many, trying to make sense of it.
How numb he felt, standing before this flock of believers. Thank heavens he didn’t cry. But the feeling of not grieving, not feeling, was awful, too. He felt as dry and brittle and deserted as a drift log left on the beach by high tide.
The void didn’t fool him, though. He had stayed with Brenda and Hunter during the four days after Joe’s death. He knew that the emotions would return in vicious gulps and waves, surges that would bowl them all over like a child caught in an undertow.
The morning of the funeral, he’d found Brenda with her nose pressed inside Joe’s toilet kit as if she wanted to disappear inside it, to cling to these items that had been touched daily by her husband—his small black comb, his nail clippers, a lip balm still shaped by the curve and lines of his mouth.
“You know what gets me?” Brenda had asked him when he found her. “It isn’t Joe’s chore lists or his notes to himself I find lying around. It isn’t bits of his handwriting I find everywhere. It’s thinking that I can tell him things.”
They exchanged another hug. There had been so many now that Sam had lost count.
“I forget that he isn’t here. I’ll be right in the middle of something totally unrelated and thinking, Oh! Wait until Joe hears about this. And then I remember that he’s gone.”
She’d begun crying again, a grieving so personal and primitive—soft helpless moans that struck Sam as too private to be viewed. He wished he could step away. He wished he could grieve for Joe that way, too.
A slide show played on overhead screens at the funeral service now, the same screens where words to praise songs ribboned past on Sundays. Sam watched his congregation’s faces and knew what they were watching attentively. He had learned to count on their reactions. He had learned to measure their eyes and see their hearts.
Joe, still a toddler, beside the tree on Christmas morning.
Joe, grinning beside Brenda in her satin bridal gown.
Joe, toting his new baby the same way he’d tote a football, completely enthralled and amused.
Hunter, shrieking with joy while he rode piggyback on his father’s shoulders.
Hunter, beaming, holding on to one end of the fish stringer while his dad held on to the other end, five small trout dangling from the chain like charms dangle from a bracelet.
Why didn’t you intervene, Lord? Why didn’t you change this outcome?
When the service ended at the church, the mourners stepped into the parking lot and released bouquets of silver balloons into the aching blue. Sam watched the balloons longer than others did, yearning to see them go higher. Muted, somber conversations began all around him and still he didn’t look away.
He watched until they looked like bubbles in the ocean of sky. Until they caught a high current and moved as one toward the northwest. Until the balloons looked like pinpricks. Until there was nothing more to see.
Sam asked his question to an empty sky.
Why couldn’t I summon your power, Lord, when it was my own family that needed it most?
“Come inside, Pastor Tibbits.” Dottie Graham swatted at a bee that had been interested in his shoulder. “The women’s ministry is serv
ing refreshments.”
I know you are the faithful one, Father, so what is it about me that was wrong?
“We asked Mary Grace about serving something and she said it would be okay.”
Inside, lemonade in a Gatorade dispenser and towers of Dixie cups awaited the parishioners. There were brownies dusted with sugar, oatmeal-raisin cookies, slices of poppy seed bread, a deli tray of cheese. Coffee gurgled out of a gleaming, stainless urn. A portrait of Jesus, faded by the years, looked down on them from the wall.
People who weren’t standing close had more animated discussions. The ones who remained nearby tempered their voices as they murmured condolences, struggling to say the right thing.
“Good service, Pastor. You did a fine job for Joe.”
“Your dad was a fine man, Hunter. Oh, how he bragged about you.” The teenaged boy, his shoulders set as square as a cabinet, shaking more hands than he’d ever shaken before. “You made him proud, don’t you ever doubt that.”
“We’ll be praying for ya’ll.”
“Brenda, I’m sorry.”
“Let us know if there’s anything we can do.”
“If you need help cleaning out everything, will you call?”
“Joe will be missed.”
“Oh, yes. Good job, Sam. Sam?”
Somewhere during this, Sam had stopped listening. The words all ran together after awhile. He’d turned himself off and gone on to something else. He was lost inside the hum, that familiar blurring. The question of his heart would be something he would ask over and over again as he lay awake during the nights to come.
Why does love always end?
CHAPTER NINE
Wouldn’t you consider spending some time with him, Sam?” Brenda asked as they sat across from each other at her kitchen table, their knees almost touching, as the fresh light of morning shimmered on the curtains. “Maybe taking him somewhere?”
They were sharing chocolate éclairs and vegetable soup for breakfast—balanced diet of champions, provided by a mixture of the Covenant Heights Women’s Fellowship and the local Ladies Guild. Sam had been rattling around in his own kitchen, feeding Ginny, when he’d started to wonder if Brenda had gotten into their safety-deposit box yet. The safety-deposit box led him to wonder if she had notified the bank that carried their mortgage yet, which led him to wonder if she’d thought to turn over Joe’s records to their tax accountant. So here he’d come, checking on her.
She gestured with her spoon. “After everything that’s happened, a change of scenery would do Hunter good.”
“It would do you good, too. Why don’t you two do something together?” Sam leveled his eyes at his sister pointedly, lifted his coffee mug and tilted it toward his mouth.
Brenda bit into an éclair, closed her eyes, chewed slowly. Watching the way she gingerly ate her pastry made Sam want to destroy his in three brutal bites.
When she swallowed finally, she said, “I’m worried about how this is affecting him. He holds everything in and then he explodes.”
“Right.” Another slurp of coffee. “We’ve seen that.”
“Right.”
Sam had not gone to the police yard to view his ruined Mustang. He’d decided that would be for the best. Sam cared for his nephew, would stand and support him as he faced his list of consequences. Sam also knew himself well enough to know this: his resentment was there, lying in ambush. He felt it rumbling, heard it whispering, and he tried not to listen. He did not want to close his eyes and see crumpled red steel.
Lord, I don’t want to feel this way, but I do. There isn’t anything I can do to make it go away, so you’re going to have to take it.
As Sam sat across from his sister, the silence stretched to an uncomfortable length between them. He realized he was jiggling his knee. He picked the mug up, tilted it, and found nothing there.
“Where is Hunter, anyway?”
“Upstairs asleep. He’d sleep until three if I let him.”
“But you don’t let him, do you?”
“Sometimes.” Brenda kept babbling away. “There isn’t any way for me to leave. We’re behind on what stores have preordered.” She worked for a cottage industry that made scrapbook paraphernalia—Gilded Memories, as it was called— offered tiny plastic suitcase stickers that said Bon Voyage, 3-D yellow duckies with umbrellas, white cartoon blurbs so a person could write what someone in a photo might be thinking. “I missed so much work with Joe sick. They were wonderful. But I can’t ask for any more time now. I need to help them a lot this summer. Make it up to them.”
“You could go when the orders are finished, couldn’t you?”
“Hunter couldn’t go then, though. School starts.”
“Oh.” He leaned back in the kitchen chair and when Brenda furrowed her brows and frowned, he thought she was going to chide him. Once a mother, always a mother, he wanted to say. Their mother had lectured them about it, too.
“I’m not just talking this time, don’t you realize? I’m serious.” Then, “You’re the one who knows so much about people, Sam.”
He straightened right up in the chair.
“You’re the minister, the one with all the answers. You’re the one with all the training to know what to say.”
The only thing Sam wanted to say to Hunter this minute was that he was furious at him for stealing the Mustang and for driving like a maniac. Brenda’s plea tumbled into him like a stone.
Lord, she’s right. You called me to pastor. I’m supposed to be better than this.
“He’s too hurt to listen to anybody else, but God would speak through you to him. He would listen, I know he would.”
“Brenda.”
“Have you even talked to Hunter since the other night?”
“No.” He set his mug down hard. “Did you expect me to? After what happened, I thought Hunter would be the one to speak to me. I thought an apology might be forthcoming.”
“I apologized,” she said inanely.
“No,” he said. “I expected an apology from him. He owes me that much.”
The anger in her face was unfair, yet it didn’t surprise him. He knew her emotions were raw and any small thing could set her off. But it was his life, too, not some appointment he could walk away from toward the end of the day. Brenda’s reaction was contagious. Or maybe, really, she had caught the anger from him. Because it was there, knotting inside him, taking his breath away.
“For heaven’s sake, Sam. We’ve been through so much. Don’t you think you could be less concerned about what he owes you?” She splayed both hands on the table, bit her lower lip, and leaned forward as if she were measuring him. She sighed, her shoulders rising, staying raised, until they fell like a beach toy being deflated.
The plate of éclairs sat like a blockade between them. On the counter to Sam’s left, the Mr. Coffee made one last spit, its hot plate hissing. The clock hand above her head ticked off the seconds with sharp, stiff jerks.
“I’m not asking you to take Joe’s place, you know. Nobody could do that.”
“I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”
Sam had a sudden flicker of his life with Brenda, little sister tagging along behind him, pesky as always, giving her opinions of everything he did, organizing things, asking for things, slowing him down.
She had tricked him, yes, she had, plain and simple. All those years when he’d wanted Brenda to get out of his way, and here she was, still needing things from him. Here she was, still calling on him at every turn.
“You know how things can happen with boys this age. They do everything to impress their friends. They hide what they’re feeling behind drinking and being aggressive and going wild.”
“Yes.”
“You know how easy it is for them to do something wrong and that one wrong choice can affect them forever.”
Sam got up to pour more coffee. He held the carafe toward her. When she didn’t respond he drained it into his own mug.
“Maybe he’s feeling that God took
his father away because God’s angry with him about something.”
Sam set the mug soundly on the table, stared at it, turned the handle until it pointed toward him.
“You know how thin that line is,” Brenda went on. “Kids fall off the ledge on either side and can’t recover from it. It depends on what they feel about themselves, what they think they’re capabilities are. That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Sam agreed with all she was telling him. Brenda’s reasoning pinned him to the wall the way a dart zinged in on a bull’s-eye. There was only one thing she was wrong about, only one thing that she did not see: he’s too hurt to listen to anybody else, but God would speak through you.
God doesn’t seem to be using me much lately. Did you notice that?
“I’m afraid he’ll keep making the wrong choices. You know what happens, Sam. Once a teenager starts going downhill, he goes straight down if there’s nothing to stop him.”
Sam felt suddenly light-headed, not knowing if it was from early-morning éclairs or from being tired or from the weight of her request. “Brenda, you asked me to do Joe’s service when I would have rather been beside you in the pew, and I did the service. You wanted me to take your cat to the vet when it was time to put him to sleep, and I did that. You asked me to be in the room with Joe when Hunter was born and I did that.” Sam was just getting warmed up. “You call every time you need help moving Mom’s piano, and I do that. You wanted me to talk to Joe about buying a house and I did that. You asked me if I’d be the one to find the right place for Mom and I did that.”
“I know.”
“You’re so busy thinking of things I can do for you that you don’t realize I’ve lost a best friend, too.”
“I know I asked you all those things.” He hated the way she sounded betrayed. Her words were smooth and dry. “I didn’t know you’d been keeping score.”
“I wasn’t.”
Spending time with Hunter might not have been too much for him any other time. But being responsible for his nephew right now felt like the last straw, something that would break him. It felt like too much while Sam struggled with this doubt in himself, his misgivings about in his own capacity to access God’s power.
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