“Because there’s too much work to do,” he said. “Look at all these people.”
“You can take care of them,” Sylvia said. “And I can take care of her. She doesn’t take away from our ministry. And who’s to say that she’s not our most important ministry?”
Harry looked as if he didn’t know how to answer that. Distraught, he just stared at her.
“Excuse me, Señor Bryan?” one of the Nicaraguan ladies who was helping Sylvia with the clothes said. “Thees man, he talk to you.”
Harry saw the man next to her, standing with his arms full of clothes for his family. He had tears running down his face, and when he saw Harry and Sylvia, he crossed through the people and approached them.
“My name…Carlos Sanchez,” he said, his voice wobbling with emotion. “Want to say…gracias…for clothes.” He was struggling with the right words, and he stopped for a moment and tried to get his voice under control. “You…how-I-say…remind me…that he love me.” He pointed to the sky, and nodded as if they would understand. “Your Jesus…he send you.”
Tears came to Sylvia’s eyes, and she touched his shoulder and smiled. “He loves you more than an armload of clothes,” she said. She set Carly down on the ground at her feet, and straightened back up. “His arms extend even wider than that.” She opened her arms and straightened them out. “Wide enough that they nailed him to a cross.”
The man began to weep, and Harry put his arm around him. “Do you know our Jesus?”
“Priest tell me of him…but you show me.”
That day, they led that man, his wife, and his six kids to Christ. He brought them all to their meeting that night, where Jim, their pastor, baptized them.
That night, as she and Harry fell, exhausted, into bed, he pointed out that her hands had needed to be empty to show that man Jesus’ love.
“They were empty,” she said. “I put Carly down, and he heard what I was saying.”
“But there are many more families like that one,” Harry said. “God sent us here for them. Not for one little girl.”
“Then he’ll have to prove that to me,” Sylvia said. “He’ll have to bring her mother to us, because if he doesn’t, I want to raise her, Harry. I want to be her mother.”
Harry got very quiet beside her, but she didn’t want to entertain his doubts. Instead, she lay on her side and watched the child sleeping in her basket next to their bed.
CHAPTER Forty-Seven
Steve’s house was full of Thanksgiving scents, turkey and cranberry sauce, dressing and gravy, fresh rolls baking in the oven, pecan pie cooling on a trivet. His mother, Lorraine, chattered nonstop with Cathy, talking about everything from home decorations to the dogs they used to raise. She told stories about when Steve was a boy, and tales of Tracy, the cherished grandchild.
Steve had pulled Cathy aside once when his mother left the room. “This relationship has to work out now,” he whispered with a grin, “because I don’t intend to break my mother’s heart.”
His dad sat in a rocking chair in the kitchen listening contentedly to the conversation between the two women. The kids gathered in the den watching television. Cathy was amazed at how quiet they had been. Mark was playing on the computer that Steve had just bought and set up the day before, and like a kid with a new toy, he tried out all the new functions that he didn’t have on his own computer. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the day.
But then she heard Steve’s irritated voice in the other room. “I had a code on that. You’re not even supposed to be able to get that.”
What had her kids done now? Cathy grabbed a dish towel and wiped her hands. Lorraine gave her an uncomfortable look. “Excuse me,” Cathy said. “I think there might be a problem in there.” She headed through the swinging door between the kitchen and the den, and saw Steve standing in front of the television with the remote control.
“Steve, what’s wrong?” she asked.
He glanced up at her. “I had a code on this. They’re not supposed to get MTV. I don’t want my daughter watching it.”
“Why, Daddy?” Tracy asked. “It’s just music.”
Cathy looked down at the screen and saw a half-dressed woman moving suggestively with unholy rhythm. She swung around to her children. “What have you done?”
“Nothing!” Rick said.
“He broke the code,” Tracy told her with a giggle. “He’s been trying all afternoon. He finally figured it out.”
Annie had a guilty grin as she flipped through a magazine. “I had nothing to do with this,” she said.
“Right,” Rick threw back. “Like you weren’t tossing out as many guesses as I was.”
Cathy closed her eyes. Breaking the television’s remote control code was not something they had gone over this morning. It had never occurred to her. Now she realized it was critical. She suddenly knew why God had spelled out Levitical law so specifically. Nothing could be left to common sense.
“Rick, I can’t believe you did that.”
“I just told you Annie helped.”
“Both of you,” she said through her teeth. “You’ve just lost your television privileges at home for a week. It’s going to be real quiet around our house this week.”
“Mom!” they both yelled.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Mark said from the computer.
Cathy wasn’t certain she believed him. Instead, she turned to Steve. “Steve, I’m so sorry. I thought they were awfully quiet in here, but I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” he said. She had never seen his face look quite so tense. “The damage has been done. You can’t undo it.” He had tried hard to protect his daughter from the kind of sexual imagery that MTV offered. She wondered how long they had been watching.
She was about to ask, when the computer beeped an alarm. Both of them turned to see what Mark was doing. “This computer’s a piece of junk,” Mark said. “It doesn’t do anything right.”
She could see that Steve’s patience was reaching its limit. He turned off the television and put the remote control in his back pocket, then went to the computer. “What is it, Mark?”
“It keeps saying it’s performed an illegal operation.”
Steve studied the error message, then punched a few keys, trying to figure out what had happened. Cathy recognized the problem immediately. Mark considered himself a computer guru, and had probably changed most of Steve’s settings.
“Mark, did you readjust his settings?”
Steve looked up at Mark.
“Just a few,” Mark said. “I was just trying to make it work better.”
Cathy wanted to jerk him out of the chair. “But I’ve told you before, you don’t give it a chance to work better. You just start randomly changing things without knowing what you’re doing. You can’t do that, Mark. You’ve messed his whole computer up now.”
“I’ll fix it,” Mark said. He moved Steve’s hand away from the keyboard and began typing. It beeped again.
Cathy realized that today’s pleasant hours had come with a price. “Steve, is there any way to restore the defaults?”
Steve’s jaw muscles were popping. She had never seen him do that before. “I don’t know.”
She grabbed Mark’s arm. “Mark, get off the computer.”
“I can fix it,” he said, still punching. “I promise. Look.” It beeped again.
“Now!” Cathy said, too loudly. “Get off the computer now!”
Mark swiveled around in the chair at Steve’s desk. “Well, what am I supposed to do? You won’t let us watch TV.”
“Just sit on the couch next to your brother and sister and don’t say a word until we go to the table.”
“Great!” Mark jerked himself up from the chair and plopped down between his sister and brother on the couch. “Some Thanksgiving. I should have gone to Dad’s.”
Cathy locked glowering eyes on him and pointed her finger in his face. “Don’t you say that to me again. So help me, if you do, you’re g
oing to be sorry.”
Steve didn’t wait to hear his response. He just pushed through the swinging door back into the kitchen. Cathy gave her children another threatening glare, then followed Steve.
His mother was humming a Tom Jones song and his father was rocking back and forth to the rhythm. She wondered if the woman had ever been depressed in her life. She reminded her a little of Brenda.
“Steve, I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay,” he said, counting out the silverware and dropping them on the counter a little too hard. “No harm done. Somehow we’ll get everything put back together.”
The swinging door opened into the kitchen, and Cathy turned to see Rick in the doorway. “Is it going to be long before we eat, ‘cause it’s really boring just sitting in there staring at the wall.”
“They’re restless, poor things,” Lorraine said. “They need to be outside playing touch football like Steve and his brothers used to do on Thanksgiving. The whole neighborhood would come over, and we parents would sit out on our porches and watch.”
“Boy, we’ve come a long way since then,” Cathy muttered. “Kids don’t do much of anything outside anymore.”
“Well, Steve, you have a football, don’t you?”
Cathy knew he was still smarting. “Somewhere,” he muttered.
“Well, why don’t you go get it and give it to Mark and Rick?” his mother asked. “Even the girls would probably like to play. Steve, you’d like to get out there, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe after lunch.”
“Sure,” his mother said, “it’s getting too close to lunchtime now anyway.” His mother continued to chatter as if nothing had ever gone wrong, and Cathy marveled at the patience in the woman. Did she really not notice how rude her children had been to crack the code of the television and mess up the computer settings? Was she of the “kids will be kids” school, or was she simply in denial?
Because of his mother’s efforts, Steve’s heavy mood lifted as it got closer to time to eat, and they piled the table full of food. Cathy went back into the living room before calling her kids to the table.
“Tracy, your dad wants you to go wash your hands,” she said.
Tracy got up. “Come on, Annie.”
Cathy stopped her daughter before she followed the child. “No, Tracy, I need to talk to Annie for a minute.”
Tracy left Cathy alone with her children. They all looked up at her with dull, what-now eyes.
“Rick, Annie, Mark, I’m telling you for the last time,” she said. “I expect you to behave at that table. I expect you to be polite. Say please and thank you. Yes, ma’am and yes, sir. Do it for me. Consider it a Thanksgiving Day present.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rick said. She didn’t take the time to examine whether there was sarcasm in his voice. She didn’t care whether there was or not. She was just happy to hear him say the words.
“Now go wash your hands. You won’t believe all the food they’ve got. And please, don’t break anything.”
The children groaned, but thankfully kept their comments to themselves as they headed for the bathroom sink.
After lunch Cathy, Steve, and the kids went to the front yard to play football while his parents sat in the swing watching the activity with glee. The football game had been a good idea, Cathy thought. The kids’ hostility and restlessness worked itself out in the game, and for a while, she didn’t have to worry about them destroying any more electronic items in Steve’s house.
They played boys against girls, and she, Annie, and Tracy held their own. When the men won, Cathy and Annie and Tracy made it look as if they’d thrown the game. The men never knew for sure.
The children managed to thank Steve’s mom for the wonderful meal before they headed home in Rick’s car after the game. Steve took Cathy home some time later.
“I’m sorry again about MTV and the computer,” she said as he pulled into her driveway. “I could just die.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Nothing a couple of hours with technical support can’t work out.” He chuckled. “Actually, it wasn’t so bad.”
“Don’t lie.”
He laughed. “Your kids have a lot of potential,” he said. “I see great strengths in them.”
Her eyebrows shot up suspiciously. “Really?”
“Sure. Mark has a natural curiosity, and I think that once he gets used to homeschooling with Brenda, he’s going to blossom. He’s got a very determined nature.”
Cathy gaped at him, amazed that he could see the good in the boy. “Some people call that stubbornness.”
He smiled. “And Annie has that innate nurturing ability that women are supposed to have. Watching her with Tracy makes me think she’ll be a great mom someday. And she has that sharp wit that could take her far in life.”
“Sharp wit, huh? Not to be confused with smart mouth?”
“Often confused with that.” They both laughed. “And then there’s Rick, and I see in him a keen mind and a lot of strong leadership skills.”
“Not manipulation?” she asked.
“It’s all in how you look at it,” he said.
She regarded him quietly for a moment. “Well, thank you for looking at it the way you do,” she said quietly. “I see the problems in them, but when I think back to when their father left, and all the stuff they went through…” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed. Her own emotion when she talked about the divorce often surprised hen So many times, she had given her bitterness to God and asked him to heal her. But whenever she saw the effect it had had on her kids, that bitterness took hold of her again. “Annie was devastated,” she said. “She had been a Daddy’s girl, and then he was gone. She cried all the time. Rick couldn’t talk about it at all. Just held it all in. For a while there, I hardly ever heard a word out of him. And Mark got angry and broke a lot of things, and did just about anything it took to get attention from his father. I think it really only pushed Jerry farther away. He didn’t want to be bothered with kids who were in emotional turmoil, especially if it brought any guilt on him.”
“Did you talk to him about it? Tell him what it was doing to the kids?”
“Sure, I did,” she said. “He got defensive. One time he said, ‘How do you think it makes me feel when you tell me these things?’ As far as he was concerned, it was all about him.”
Steve turned the car off and sat there quietly for a moment, turning it all over in his mind. He took her hand. “I can’t say I know how you feel, Cathy, since I haven’t been divorced. When a spouse dies, at least we’re able to have good feelings about them. It’s not like they’re still around, constantly reminding us of past failures. But, you know, the problems in your children’s past don’t have to dictate how they’re going to turn out. That’s up to you.”
“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “I know too well that it’s all up to me.”
“I didn’t mean you, alone. You’re not alone, you know. God is a parent to your children, too, and he’s teaching them stronger lessons than you could ever dream up. Your mistakes aren’t going to thwart God’s plan for their lives.”
“So I’m off the hook?” she asked facetiously.
“No, not off the hook, but out of the hot seat, maybe. I think the Lord shows special mercies to single moms and their families. It’s critical that you keep your focus on him.”
She couldn’t help thinking that he was the wisest, most wonderful man she had ever met. “Steve, how do I teach them the Bible when I’ve waited so long to start? How do I catch up on all the values and the morals, and all the things they need to know and understand, when it took me this long in my life to realize it? I can’t start over. I can’t change everything. But I want so much for them to have what I missed.”
“You pray a lot,” Steve said, “and I’ll pray for you. And then you just look for opportunities in everything. Don’t try to make them memorize passages. Just read to them from Scripture. Pick out some of the most fascinating stories. Get them tied
up emotionally in what’s happening in them.”
She let her gaze drift out the window. “I’m just so insecure with my own knowledge of the Bible.”
“Then start it together,” he said. “You told me that Brenda was teaching Mark Genesis and the gospel of Matthew. Why don’t you start with the same things and reinforce it at home?”
“Mark will just get mad and think I’m forcing him to do more homework than he has to.”
“Maybe at first, but after a while the kids will start asking you for it. If you miss one day, they’ll remind you. You’ll see.”
“I can just see it now. They’ll probably go blind rolling their eyes at me.”
“Cathy, God promised that his Word would never return void. If you believe that, then you’ll just go with it anyway and not worry about the eye-rolling. They’ll realize that the worst thing that can happen is that they have to sit with you for twenty minutes. From where I sit, that would be a major perk.” He winked at her, and she returned a wistful smile.
“I appreciate your advice, Steve. I consider you one of the best parents I know.”
“Don’t,” he said, bringing her hand to his lips and kissing the knuckle. “That wouldn’t be very fair. I only have one to take care of, and she doesn’t have rejection and abandonment issues in her life. Her mom died, but she knew she loved her before she did, and she was real involved in her life until then. She has good memories, even though she still cries over her loss sometimes.”
Cathy’s heart broke. “Really? I thought maybe she was past that now, since she was so young when her mother died.”
“It’s tough. A little girl needs her mom.”
Cathy saw the pain on his face, and knew that he still missed his wife, as well. There were grief and loss in both their lives, and the lives of all their children. Could anything good ever spring from that loss? she wondered. Could anything whole come from broken lives?
As Steve brought her hand against his jaw and held it there, she thought it just might be possible. Maybe God had a plan to put all the pieces of these two families together. Maybe there was hope, after all.
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