“I’m going up to my room,” Myles said. “That’s where you’ll be staying. I’ll show you when the squirts go to bed at eight-thirty. Rose and Opal are supposed to be finishing up their homework in the dining room.” Myles shot Opal a stern look before turning heel and heading upstairs.
“Come on.” Opal grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the dining room. “I have my homework done. You can check it. Mommy always does.”
Eli glanced up the stairs as they walked by. Once Opal and Rose were in bed, he was going to have a talk with Myles man-to-man.
“Hi, Mr. Payton.” Rose was seated at a large oak table, her math book open and a paper in front of her.
“Hi, Rose.” He’d been in the kitchen and the living room and upstairs, but he hadn’t been in the dining room before. He glanced around the room taking in the matching china cabinet and hutch. His perusal stopped at a photo of a younger Jamie gazing at a man about the same age in an army uniform with a dreamy look in her eyes. His heart twisted. Her husband, John. Rose looked a lot like him, more so than Opal or Myles.
“These are my spelling words.” Opal shoved a paper at him. “I wrote them three times. Now I need to study them. Mommy always asks me and I spell them out loud.”
He took the sheet, glad for something else to look at. “Let’s do it.”
Rose looked up at him. “Can you ask her words in the living room? My math is kind of hard, and I need to concentrate.”
“Sure thing,” Eli said. “Do you want me to check it over when you’re done?”
Indecision clouded Rose’s eyes. “Myles said he would.”
“Then it sounds like you have it covered. I’ll quiz Opal on her spelling words.” He walked Opal back into the living room and sat on the couch with her. They ran through her words with Opal carefully spelling each one correctly.
“Father.” Eli read the last word.
“F-a-t-h-e-r,” Opal said, looking up at him with wide, serious eyes. “My father’s dead.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Myles and Rose get mad at me because I don’t remember him too well.”
“They just feel badly because they have good memories of him and want you to, too.”
She tilted her head, one side of her mouth pulling down. “I think you’d be a good daddy.”
Her words hit him smack in the middle of his gut. “I hope to be some day.”
“I mean my daddy.” She snuggled up to him and he put his arm around her shoulders. “I pray that every night, even though Mommy doesn’t sit and listen to our prayers anymore. She says they don’t do any good.”
Eli’s chest caved in. None of his counseling courses or experience had prepared him to respond to a seven-year-old saying she wanted him to be her daddy. He’d been trained to work with recruits and teens.
“That’s not going to happen, is it?” Opal asked. “Like Mommy says, God can’t really give you what you ask for.”
Eli swallowed back the flash of anger that Jamie would discourage her daughter’s belief. A wave of sadness flowed over him and filled the gulf that separated him and Jamie spiritually.
For with God all things are possible. The end of Mark 10:27 blanked out his other thoughts. But he couldn’t let Opal think that if she wished it hard enough, he would be her father. “We pray to God and He gives us what’s best for us because He loves us.”
“Like Mommy.”
“Yes, a lot like your mother and my mother, too.” Although he hadn’t always appreciated her efforts.
“I’m all done.” Rose’s appearance in the room gave Eli a welcome interruption. “I’m going to give Myles my paper to check, and then Opal and I get to watch TV.”
“Yep, we do,” Opal agreed. “Ask Myles.”
“What?” the teen asked from the bottom of the stairway behind them.
Rose walked over and handed him her homework paper. “You told Mom you’d check my problems. And Mr. Payton said to ask you if we can watch TV now that our homework is done.”
“Yeah, Mom lets them watch some show on Nickelodeon before they have to go to bed,” Myles said, his eyes narrowing when he saw Opal snuggled up next to Eli.
Opal slipped out from under his arm and pressed the remote to turn the TV on. “Are you going to watch with us, Myles?”
“No, I just came down to get a drink. I have more computer stuff to do.”
Opal thrust out her bottom lip, making Eli want to tell Myles that he could take some time out of whatever he was doing upstairs to watch the half-hour program with his little sisters. But he decided to save his words for what he wanted to say to Myles later when the girls were in bed. No need to antagonize him now.
“Okay,” Eli said when the program ended, “time for bed.”
“We could watch another program,” Opal said. “Mommy wouldn’t know.”
“Yes, she would,” Rose said. “I’d tell her.”
“Tattletale!” Opal unfolded her legs from underneath her and stood in front of him. “Do we have to go to bed? Mommy could be home any minute, and then she could tuck us in.”
“If your mother was here, would you be asking to stay up later?”
“No,” Rose answered for her sister. “Because if she did, Mom wouldn’t let her watch any TV tomorrow.”
“I see.” He pointed across the room. “Upstairs. I’ll be up in five minutes to tuck you in.”
“Will you read us a story?”
Rose shook her head at Eli. “Mom only reads her a story if she goes to bed early. Come on, Opal, before Mr. Payton gets mad because you’re bugging him too much.”
Opal looked up at him. “Are you mad at me?”
“No.” She was such a cute little imp. He’d have a tough time getting mad or staying mad at her, even if he had a good reason to. “But it is time for you to go to bed.”
Five minutes later, Eli went upstairs and almost collided with Myles in the hall outside of the girls’ room.
“I’m making sure the girls are in bed,” Myles said, with the clear meaning that Eli didn’t have to. He stepped in front of Eli and walked into the room.
“It’s okay,” Opal said as if she were the one in charge. “Myles is a better tucker-inner than he is a cook.”
Eli remembered Opal complaining about Myles’s cooking the night he’d taken Jamie out to the diner.
“But you can tuck me in, too.”
He lifted his foot to step into the room and stopped. “I think Myles can handle it. Good night, Opal, Rose.”
“Good night,” they chorused.
“When you’re done, Myles, please come downstairs. I’d like to talk with you.”
“Yeah,” Myles said without turning around.
Eli flexed his tight shoulder muscles as he descended the stairs to the living room. Maybe he should leave well enough alone. As Myles had told him, he certainly wasn’t the teen’s father, wasn’t really anything to him, except his guidance counselor. And his mother’s friend.
Myles clambered down the stairs. “You said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yeah, sit.”
Myles took the recliner and Eli sat on the couch. “I want to clear the air between us.”
Myles leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms.
“You don’t like it that I’m seeing your mother. That’s your prerogative. But the choice as to whether your mother and I see each other is hers and mine, not yours.” Or Opal’s. Eli’s thoughts drifted back to earlier in the evening.
Myles glared at him.
“I’m not your father.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Nor am I trying to be. And you’ve told me that you’re not me. That couldn’t be truer. But we do have some things in common.”
“Like what?”
“My father was killed in a trucking accident when I was your age.”
Myles shrugged.
“It was hard. But I was used to taking care of certain things for Mom because Dad was away making long-dist
ance hauls so often. My mother isn’t as handy as yours, so I was responsible for repairs and stuff around the house. After Dad died, I was really protective of Mom. You wouldn’t believe what I did to the first guy she dated.”
Myles unfolded his arms. “Try me.”
“Mom was fixing the guy dinner at our house. My sister was at a friend’s house, and I was going to ride my bike down to the lake and meet up with a couple of my friends. I certainly didn’t want to stick around and have dinner with them.”
That got a half smile out of Myles.
“The guy got there before I left. Mom was upstairs getting ready, so I had to let him in. He’d gone all out with candy and roses. I told him I’d get a vase for the flowers and had him follow me into the dining room, where Mom had the table set with her best dishes and Grandma’s silver.” Funny how he could picture that table perfectly.
“I went in the kitchen, took out the kitchen shears and snipped off all of the roses into the garbage. Then I filled the vase with water, stuck the flower-less stems in and came back into the dining room. I put the vase in the center of the table, smiled at the guy and called up to Mom that I was leaving, grabbing the candy as I left.”
“Get out. You didn’t.”
“Sadly, I did.”
“It got rid of the guy.”
“Sure did. It turned out that the guy wasn’t keen on kids to begin with, and I validated all of his misgivings about them.”
“Did your mom yell at you?”
“Worse. She grounded me for a month and signed me up for group counseling.”
“Rough.” Myles pushed out of the chair, obviously anxious to make his escape. “I got to go finish my homework.”
“But first, we’re straight.”
“Yeah, it’s Mom’s choice if she wants to go out with you and I have to be nice to her about it whether I like it or not.”
That wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but it was good enough for Eli.
“You want to come up and see where you’re sleeping? I hope you don’t snore.”
“I went through twenty years of maneuvers with no complaints. But if you get me a blanket, I’ll sack out on the couch, in case your mother gets home sooner than she expected.”
“Sure, I’ll toss you one down from the closet upstairs.”
Eli caught the blanket, folded it over his arm and went into the dining room to turn off the light Rose had left on. Before he flicked the switch, his gaze went to the photo on the wall of Jamie and John. The shadow of the man that seemed to have hung over the house all evening had dissipated.
He stared into his comrade-in-arms’s fixed eyes. “I’ll take care of her, all of them, for you. If she’ll let me.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jamie sang out loud as she vacuumed the living room rug. She missed choir. There was no denying it and nothing she could do about it. Nothing, except going back to Hazardtown Community Church. She shoved the couch away from the wall with more effort than necessary and pushed the vacuum back and forth until she was satisfied she’d gotten every bit of dust and dirt up, and had worked away the spark of conflict that had ignited in her about her abandoned faith.
She blamed it on Eli and the easy way he lived his faith, like she once had. At dinner the other evening, it would have been so easy to have bowed her head and joined him in his thanks. But she would have been joining him out of habit, not conviction. Her conviction had died with John. Or did I simply bury it?
She turned off the power and heard the vroom of the school bus pulling away. The kitchen door opened and slammed shut, followed by the sound of boots and other winter gear being shed. She put the vacuum in the hall closet and waited. Opal raced in with Rose a few steps behind her.
“Myles wasn’t on the bus,” Rose announced.
Jamie closed the closet door. Weariness pressed down on her. Tonight was the first night of bowling league since the alley had reopened after the fire. She hoped Myles’s absence wasn’t a replay of the other night when he’d “lost track of time” at the garage and she hadn’t been able to go to the Career Day committee meeting with Eli. From Myles’s attitude lately and from what Eli had said, she’d thought Eli’s talk with Myles had diffused a lot of the animosity Myles had for Eli and about them seeing each other.
“Maybe he’s getting a ride home with one of his friends,” Jamie said. “I bought bananas when I went shopping if you’re hungry and want a snack. We’re going to have dinner early today because I have bowling.”
“Is Autumn coming?” Opal asked.
“No, Myles is going to watch you.”
“He’d better get home, then,” Rose said.
Exactly what Jamie was thinking. Eli’s ringtone chimed on her cell phone. She walked over to the table to pick it up.
“Maybe that’s him,” Rose said.
“No, that’s Mr. Payton. That song always plays when he calls.” Opal crossed her arms, obviously pleased that she knew something her older sister didn’t.
Jamie didn’t even want to contemplate how Opal had figured that out. “Hi,” she said into the phone.
“See?” Opal pointed at her. “She’s using her nice voice like she always does when she talks to Mr. Payton.”
Jamie moved into the hallway, hoping the girls would go get their snack in the kitchen. Did she really use a different voice when she talked with Eli?
“You still there?” Eli asked.
“I was escaping Opal.”
“Good luck with that.”
She laughed.
“I have Myles here with me.”
Jamie’s stomach sank. What had he done now?
“Liam’s car wouldn’t start, and Myles said he’d take a look. Liam had said he’d drive Myles home if he got the car running, but Myles couldn’t and he missed the bus. Turned out the battery is dead. We tried jumping it, but no luck.”
Jamie leaned against the wall listening to the rhythm of Eli’s voice.
“I’m going to drop Liam off at Patrick’s. Then, if it’s okay with you, I’ll swing by my place and change. Myles and I can pick up subs for everyone at the General Store. He says he knows what you all like. You won’t have to cook, and we won’t be late for bowling.”
“We certainly wouldn’t want to be late for bowling. Should I expect you here at seventeen hundred hours?”
“Affirmative.”
“See you then.” Jamie closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall.
“Mommy, are you sleeping?” Opal stood at the head of the hallway.
“Of course I’m not sleeping.” She hadn’t felt this awake and alive in a good long time.
* * *
Eli walked Jamie from the bowling alley to his truck. “I think tonight went pretty well.”
“You would. You beat me and almost everyone else in the place all three games.”
He opened the door for her. “There is that. But I meant getting the subs, dinner with Myles and the girls, and things in general.” He closed the door and walked around to his side of the truck. This wasn’t the smooth, cool segue he practiced.
“Yes, I think Myles is finally warming to you,” she said as he climbed in and shut the door.
But was Myles’s mother warming to him? That was the question Eli wanted answered. “The Singles Plus and the youth group at church are sponsoring a concert by Resurrection Light a week from next Thursday during school break. They’re a Christian country band from Glens Falls who are making a name for themselves on the national country scene.”
“I’ve seen the signs—everywhere. And I’ve heard them on Sound of Life. They’re good.”
“I like them, too.” Lame, Payton, lame.
Jamie’s eyes lit. “Did Myles enlist you to talk up the concert to me so I’ll say yes when he asks to go?”
She was still on Myles. “No, I’m talking up the concert so that when I ask you to go with me, you’ll say yes.”
Jamie opened her mouth.
“You don’t h
ave to give me an answer right now. With the concert being at church and the type of music the band plays, I realize you may want to think about it.” Although, the fact that Jamie tuned into Sound of Life was a sign in his favor. A sign that, whether she realized it or not, she was open to letting The Lord back into her heart.
“Yes,” she said.
His heart pounded. She hadn’t hesitated at all.
“I’d like to think about it and let you know. Do you need to buy the tickets in advance?”
The pounding slowed. “They’re going to sell fast. I’ll go ahead and buy two to make sure we get seats.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I decide, so you can line up someone else for the second ticket if I can’t go.”
“If I don’t have anyone to use the second one, the cost will go as an additional contribution to the church. No big deal.”
She nodded. “Of course, I’ll need to line up a babysitter for Rose and Opal if Myles will be going, which I know he’ll want to.”
She made it sound like it was almost a done deal. “Anne and Neal and Emily and Drew are going. Neal’s folks are watching the kids. They’d probably watch Rose and Opal, too.”
Jamie pressed her lips together and furrowed her brow.
He was pushing too hard. Much as he wished it different, he understood that she might be uncomfortable going to a function at church. Lately, he’d been praying that Jamie would see her way back to the fellowship that Community Church had to give her.
“I’ll let you know by next Friday.”
“Great.” He leaned back in the seat and stifled an impulse to whistle one of Resurrection Light’s songs.
* * *
Over the next few days, Eli’s invitation was never far from her mind, especially last Sunday when she’d driven Myles to confirmation class. She’d dropped him at the door. Several people she’d been close with at church waved as they made their way in for adult Sunday school. The waves triggered the vacant feeling she’d had the other Sundays she’d dropped Myles off for his class. If she came to the concert with Eli, would the void fill or would it grow larger?
Jamie cleared the thoughts of church and the concert from her mind as best she could. She had other things to think about right now, namely Career Day. She had to be at the school to set up in twenty minutes. The positive response Becca had gotten from the Scouts, 4-H and other local youth organizations about participating in Career Day had neutralized much of Jamie’s opposition to the American Legion youth activities being represented.
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