by Heather Gray
“Yeah. I’m willing to go to counseling beyond the group sessions here, too, if you think I need it. Whatever you say. I…” Alan’s gaze skipped around the room. “I don’t want to scare people anymore.”
God had done an amazing work in Alan’s life. He still had a long way to go, but he’d turned an important corner, and Sam wanted to bask in that success for a minute. Instead, he still had to write the guy up. He pushed the paper across the table toward Alan. “Read it and sign it. Your sixty days starts now. No write-ups during that time. And I want you to know, Skye almost took my head off over this. She fought hard to stop me from writing you up.”
“Felt sorry for me?”
Sam gave a quick shake of the head. “She sees something in you, something valuable. I can’t help but think that she wants to believe you can change, because if you can do it, she can too.”
Alan grunted. “At least she wasn’t puking out her guts this time. Nothing went the way it was supposed to, but she didn’t panic. Or run away. Or lose her lunch.”
Sam chuckled. “Sounds like progress to me.”
“She came after me today. I was gonna leave. I figured my time here was done, and I hated myself for letting it go down that way. She was scared, too, but she still chased me down.” Alan looked at Sam. “She might look at me and see change, but I look at her and see courage. And hope. I see the kind of person I want to be.”
Without further words, Alan got off the floor, grabbed the pen off the table, and signed his name to the paperwork Sam had brought.
Half the men at Samaritan’s Reach who decided they wanted to go into the leadership program ended up washing out before they even reached their sixty days of qualification. Of the ones who managed the sixty days and started the program, only a third followed it all the way through. Alan could fall anywhere on the spectrum, but praying for his success had just become Sam’s priority.
Saturday arrived bright and sunny. Sam breathed in the fresh air as he and a couple of the guys got out of the van.
The week had passed uneventfully since Tuesday’s incident with Rafael, and today was yard work day. They were visiting Miss Rebecca to mow her lawn, weed her flower beds, and take care of anything else she needed.
Sam knocked on her front door and hollered through. “Miss Rebecca! It’s Sam.”
“It’s unlocked. Come on in.” Her voice warbled with age but managed to sound feisty at the same time. Much like the woman herself.
As he stepped through the door, Miss Rebecca called out. “I’m in the living room, but do you think you could open some curtains on your way in? My house needs more sunshine.”
“Sure thing.” Sam strode through the kitchen and parlor and opened the curtains. Then he made his way around the edge of the living room and did the same. “Need anything else?”
She pointed to a piece of paper on the nearby coffee table. “I talked to a couple friends of mine who are laid up for various reasons. They could use some help, too, if you don’t think your men wouldn’t mind. It doesn’t have to be today. Their names and numbers are there.”
Part of helping the men integrate back into society was teaching them to be civic-minded. Putting in some hours for the benefit of others wouldn’t hurt anyone. “Sure. We can do that.”
Miss Rebecca beamed at him. “Excellent. I told them each to expect a call from you.”
He hadn’t stood a chance. “How are you feeling today?”
“Fair to middling. You?”
Sam sat on the chair oppose the couch where Miss Rebecca reclined. “I’m satisfactory.”
“I heard the police were out at your place.”
He’d been in Rainbow Falls over two years now, but the small-town grapevine still amazed him. “Yep. One of our men had a flashback that got out of hand.”
“Violent flashback from what I understand.”
“How do you hear so much? You have a police scanner in here I’m not aware of?” He stood and lifted his chair cushion to peek under it.
She waved her hand. “Never you mind. The guy was hauled off in a police cruiser, though. Did they arrest him?”
Sam returned the cushion and sank back into his seat. “Got transported to the state VA hospital instead. They have the facilities to deal with those situations. My operation isn’t quite there yet. Besides, the City Council won’t allow me to house any violent residents. If the police are called in, there’s not much I can do to intervene.”
“Hm. I heard the City Council made some changes to the town charter this year.”
“Yeah. They made a few.”
“Seems like they’re trying to run you out of Rainbow Falls.”
“Maybe. What do you think I should do about it?”
“Make friends.”
Sam stared at the older woman. She was telling him something, but he was too slow to catch on. “Friends?”
She nodded. “You need the kind of friends who are there for you when things get tough.”
“I’m not sure where to find those kinds of friends. Most of our donors have pulled out because they assume the city will be shutting us down at the end of the year.”
“Pshaw. Donors aren’t the same as friends. You ought to know that by now.”
What was the woman was getting at? Not that it mattered. He didn’t have time to make friends. He had a shelter that needed all his attention. He rose from his seat and started for the door. “I need to go check on the men.”
Miss Rebecca didn’t say anything until he had one foot out of her living room. “You brought a woman to church last Sunday?”
He regarded her with a nod. “One of our volunteers.”
“You know anything about her?”
“She’s good with the men, is helping me untangle some accounting issues, and has some ideas for fundraising.”
“She a believer?”
“We don’t require our volunteers to be believers. We ask them to sign a paper saying they won’t say or do anything contrary to the Christian faith while on-site or with the residents. There are some legalities involved in that decision. Why? Is that important to you?”
Miss Rebecca glanced out her front room window before looking back at Sam. The usual snap was absent from her eyes. “Skye Blue.”
Like a moth to a flame, Sam was drawn to Miss Rebecca’s sadness. “Tell me what you know. Pastor Dennis acted all weird when he realized who Skye was, but he walked off before I could ask why, and I couldn’t say anything to Skye. She…” She’s been through a lot. She’s been hurt by someone. She doesn’t like it when I pry. There were too many ways to end that sentence.
“Skye was only here in our community for ten years or so.”
“I thought she grew up here.”
“Not her whole life. Just the worst, wretched years.”
“Tell me.”
Miss Rebecca gave him a sad smile. “It’s her story to tell. It might help you to know that Dennis Diangelo wasn’t always a pastor. I doubt Skye realizes who he is, or who he used to be. But he knows her. You could say it’s because of her that he’s a pastor today.”
CHAPTER 23
Skye took a deep breath as she crossed the church’s threshold. One of the men held the door for her, so she couldn’t very well skip out unnoticed.
Instead of making a run for it, she followed her door-holder to the doughnut line where she picked up a small pastry piled high with chocolate frosting. Okay, maybe not piled, but still, it was covered in chocolate, which was exactly what she needed.
She skipped the coffee line since balancing a cup and a plate without a table and also eating at the same time was a skill she hadn’t yet developed. The shelter’s residents were clustered in a couple of different groups, and at least one man from the church had joined the conversation in each one. Hm. The church seemed to be making a conscious effort to welcome the men.
Yet nobody approached her. Not only that, but everyone gave her a wide berth. What was up with that?
Sam drew n
ear, two cups of coffee in hand. “For when you’re done licking your fingers.”
“I do not…” Oh, bother. “Huh. Maybe I do lick my fingers. That frosting was delectable.” Skye removed all evidence of chocolate with the napkin she’d grabbed from the table before reaching for the cup he held out to her.
“What was it like growing up as one of the Rainbow Girls?” He wore long sleeves today, and the tattoos that no longer bothered Skye were hidden from view. The earring was still there, though, as was the goatee she’d once thought too long to be civilized. Funny how easy it became to judge based on appearance. Sam was far more civilized than most of the perfectly groomed and polished men she’d met.
She sipped the hot coffee. “How do you even know about the Rainbow Girls? You’re not from around here, are you?”
Sam shook his head. “A woman in my battalion. Ginger Schneider. She kept us all entertained with stories about her hometown of Rainbow Falls. I probably know more about the history of this town than most of its current residents.”
Ginger Schneider. A vague mental picture of a skinny girl with red hair and braces came to mind. “Huh. Small world.”
“So if you didn’t grow up here, how did you become a Rainbow Girl?”
The past wasn’t exactly a favorite topic, but since he wasn’t going to let it go… “My mom and I moved here when I was eleven.”
“No dad?” He cringed. “Not my business. Sorry.”
Hm. Questions usually put her on guard. Or they annoyed her. Somehow, his awkward prying did neither. “Killed in Action. Army. We lived in Boise with my dad’s parents while he was deployed. My mom didn’t like it there. She didn’t get along with my grandparents. When my dad died, Mom took me and left.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Loss is a hard thing.”
She met his words with silence. What else was there to say?
“But how did your mom know to name you Skye? You were a ready-made Rainbow Girl when you moved here at age eleven.”
A softball question. Those she could handle. “My mom grew up here. She named me Skye because it reminded her of something. I never quite understood why, but it mattered to her.”
Sam rubbed a hand along his scruffy chin. “Must have been hard on your grandparents to lose you so close after losing their son.”
Hard? Maybe. Maybe not. “I didn’t hear from them again until I was graduating high school.”
“Not a word? It’s not like they were on the other side of the world.”
Music filtering out from the sanctuary rescued her from having to answer. “Guess we should go in.”
She dropped her half-empty cup of coffee into the garbage can as she passed by on her way to the sanctuary doors.
The piano was silent and the pastor stood at the small country pulpit before she shook off Sam’s questions enough to be able to pay attention to anything being said. Even then, she only half-listened as she traveled down memory lane and revisited her years in Rainbow Falls. The memories, every single one of them, were at best bittersweet. If the Rainbow Girls hadn’t adopted her, would she have survived?
“Look at Ephesians 1:7 one more time with me…”
She must have missed the bulk of the sermon because she hadn’t looked at the verse even once.
“It is only by the richness of God’s grace that we can find redemption, only through his mercy that we can know forgiveness.”
Forgiveness was a familiar enough topic in the real world. What about redemption, though? What did redemption really mean?
She thumbed out of her Bible app and went to the dictionary on her phone.
Redemption (noun): the act of regaining something previously lost with payment made in the form of exchange.
Um… The act of? That made it sound like a verb, not a noun, but what did she know? She’d majored in business, not English.
“What has God redeemed for you lately? Your marriage, your relationship with your parents? Your sobriety? A price has to be paid, folks, but it’s not one you and I can pay. To have any staying power, redemption needs to come through Christ.”
Skye frowned at the words on her screen, clicked back over to the Bible app, and tried to at least pretend to listen to the message.
Of course, just as she did that, everyone bowed their heads. The sermon had ended while she’d been fiddling with her phone. Oh well. She hadn’t actually wanted to listen anyway. Pastor Dennis kept looking at her, and it was starting to give her the creeps. At least she wasn’t scared. That was progress, right? Instead of running from him, she wanted to use a can of pepper spray. On a pastor that Sam seemed to like.
Thank goodness the people in church couldn’t read her mind. Otherwise they’d be collecting their pitchforks.
A couple of days later, Skye settled back in at the office. She was close to finding the accounting problem. She had to be.
The shelter’s first years of receipts all checked out against the software. No mistakes there. Both years balanced, too. Which made sense. They’d balanced when Sam had done his taxes those years, too.
The error had to be from the current year, and she was two months into those receipts. She wasn’t leaving until she found it.
“Hey. Mind if I share the desk?”
“Um, sure.”
He scooched around to the other side and sat down in the chair that had never been put back out in the foyer. He set down a printout and picked up a pencil.
Skye fiddled with her pen, put it down, picked it up again, and started turning it over in her hands. Some subjects were taboo. She knew that better than most. “Can I ask you something?”
Sam cast a quick glance her way. “Sure.”
“Where’d you get the scar?” She winced. It had sounded natural in her head, but out loud, the question came across as invasive and nosy. Which it kind of was.
Sam leaned back in his chair, his blue eyes studying her face before they stared off into the distance. “Firefight. Bullet skimmed the side of my head. Another millimeter or two in one direction, and I wouldn’t have a scar at all. The other direction, and I’d be dead.”
She’d asked, but now she didn’t know what to say. “Was anybody else hurt?”
A whole winter’s worth of clouds passed through Sam’s normally pale blue eyes. “Yeah. We went in to rescue an Air Force pilot that’d been shot down and was being held by rebels. Our intel was solid, but so was theirs, apparently. They knew we were coming. We got the pilot out, but we lost one man. Two others ended up with a medical discharge. I got off easy. I was patched up and back at work a week later.”
“The men who got discharged… Were they okay?”
Sam’s gaze snapped back to her face, and he gave her a small smile. “‘Okay’ is a subjective term, and I don’t have the right to determine whether or not another man is okay. I can’t peek inside his head.”
Skye bit her bottom lip. “That makes sense. I… I’m sorry if I brought up bad memories.”
“Don’t be. It’s a fair question. I’m surprised it took you this long to ask.”
“You don’t like to talk about it, though.”
“No, I don’t like to, but I talk about it anyway. It’s important to these men that I’m able to share the ugly stuff in my past. It gives them the freedom to share their own nightmares and memories.”
She nodded, still at a loss for words. Then she saw the papers he’d brought in and set on the desk. “Calling donors?”
“Yep. That’s the plan.”
Skye pushed the desk phone in his direction. Hopefully her question hadn’t put him off his game. He was going to call those previous donors who had given at some point in the past but had stopped for one reason or another.
He had a different list for the donors that had pulled out since the City Council’s crackdown. They were all highlighted in green. When she’d joked and asked if the green was for money, Sam had denied it. “The green is from traffic lights, to remind me to keep going when I’m discouraged. I have a f
eeling there are going to be a lot of depressing calls once I start on those.”
Thank goodness he wasn’t working on that particular list today, especially after she’d opened a door into the past that he might have a hard time closing.
With one last glance in his direction, Skye blocked out his conversation and got to work on the accounting.
Thirty minutes later, Sam put the phone down for the umpteenth time, a sigh passing his lips.
“I found it!”
He looked at her, eyebrows drawn together.
“I found it!”
Sam glanced from her to the receipt she clutched in her hand. “You found it?”
A grin split Skye’s face. “I found it. You have a food purchase here for $236.89, but in the computer, it’s $896.32.”
“And that balances everything?”
“It’s not quite as easy as that. You let your receipts pile up. I need to enter a three-month backlog to get everything caught up, but I should be able to get to that this coming week. Then we’ll see where we stand. I’ll go through the rest of the receipts that have already been inputted, too, just to make sure nothing else is off.”
Sam stretched his legs out in front of him. “I’d treat you to ice cream or something, but we’re a little low on treats these days.”
“No worries.”
“So, tell me how you know all this stuff? I took classes on running a nonprofit, and I can grasp all the basics, but accounting makes me feel like my brain’s rotting. How come it’s so easy for you?”
“I studied business in college.”
“Yeah, but you run the business. CEOs don’t generally handle accounting issues, do they?”
Ugh. Did she really have to talk about the company she didn’t want to own? On the other hand, this was a fairly safe enough topic. “No, not on the job, but it was my favorite of all the business classes. Numbers and I clicked. We got along well. I’d rather work on a spreadsheet than write an essay any day.”
Sam chuckled. “Isn’t it ordinarily the men who struggle with words? I hated writing papers because I could say in two paragraphs what the prof wanted me to take five pages to explain.”