When Patsy had finished praying for everyone and the amens were finally echoed, Brenda lifted her head to find that all of the women were crying. Patsy got to her feet to grab a tissue box from her station, but her squeal of surprise startled everyone out of their tears.
“Glory be!” she exclaimed. “Cody, honey child, what are you doing over here? I’ll get that swept clean in a minute. You come on back and have tea with us.”
Brenda stood, concern knotting her stomach as she watched the young man rise from the floor, a broom and dustpan in his hands. His blue eyes focused on her, then on Patsy, and then on the broom.
“I like to keep things span,” he told Patsy. “My daddy said I was really good at it. I can sweep better than anybody, and I like to wash windows and mirrors.”
“But you don’t have to do that here,” Patsy insisted. “You’re our guest. I had no idea you had gone over to my station while I was praying. ’Course, my mother always said if I was talking to the Lord, I wouldn’t feel a tornado suck the house out from under me. Anyhow, you just leave that mess to me, Cody. I’m used to cleaning up.”
“But I’m good at keeping things span,” Cody reiterated.
Brenda had joined them, hoping she could help sort out the confusion. “Cody has washed my windows about fifteen times since he came back to Deepwater Cove,” she told Patsy. “He did a nice job. Last week, he found an old broom on the burn pile down by the lake, and now he sweeps my porch three or four times a day.”
“Mine too!” Esther called out, waving her napkin. “He would have washed our golf cart, but Charlie ran him off. Charlie likes to wash and polish the cart himself. Listen, Patsy, you just let Cody sweep. We need to talk about this video-store problem. I’m thinking of organizing a protest with placards and flags and megaphones and everything. I’ve already looked into printing up pamphlets, and I think we can do them on Charlie’s computer. While we have our meeting, give that boy a chance to do something he likes.”
Patsy glanced at Brenda for her reaction. “He won’t do any harm,” Brenda assured her. “Cody’s very careful.”
The young man’s newly whitened teeth gleamed as he grinned. “I’m always careful. I never touch buttons, neither. My daddy told me not to touch any buttons or switches, because you could fry yourself like a Thanksgiving turkey.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back to the table, Cody?” Patsy asked. “I’ll get you another dessert, and you can listen to us talk.”
Cody leaned over. “It’s the Tea Ladies’ Club,” he murmured into her ear. “Ladies. I know what that means. It means women. And I am not a lady. I’m a man, twenty-one, time to make my way.”
“You certainly are,” she said. “You’re a very fine young man, if I do say so myself. Well, if it’ll make you happy, go ahead and sweep all you want. There’s a bucket of cleaners and sponges under the sink in the back room. Just don’t bother the other stylists while they’re working, and let the customers read their magazines if they don’t feel like talking.”
“Yes, sir,” Cody said, beaming. “I can do that. I can do it all really good.”
Brenda thought of about ten warnings to give Cody; then she recalled having to turn loose of her own children long before she felt they were ready to be independent. As she rejoined Patsy at the table, she thanked her for allowing Cody the opportunity to do something helpful.
“Helpful?” Patsy said, lifting a carefully outlined brown eyebrow. “The boy is a godsend.”
“You couldn’t ask for a finer addition to the community,” Esther declared. “I always knew there was a good person hidden under all that hair. Now, ladies, about my protest march…”
“Hold on a minute.” Patsy crossed her arms the way she always did when she meant business. “I have a proposal to put before the club.”
“What is it?” Ashley asked.
“Hey now, girls, this is not how you hold a club meeting,” Esther protested. “You’ve got to follow parliamentary proceedings and such. We need to get us a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order.”
Patsy gave a snort. “Order schmorder. I don’t cotton to all that folderol anyhow. I have something to say, and my next client will be here in fifteen minutes. Now, do you want to hear my proposal or not?”
“All right,” Esther said. “If that’s the way you prefer it, though I think a few club rules would be appropriate.”
After glancing back over her shoulder, Patsy leaned forward. “I propose we change the name of our club. Cody’s helped me see the light. Calling ourselves the Tea Ladies’ Club comes across as downright narrow-minded. I don’t care if a person is male, female, red, white, black, or blue, smart or dumb, tall or short, fat or skinny—if they want to be a club member, we should let ’em join.”
“But TLC has such a nice ring to it,” Kim said. “Every time I think about all of you, I see tender loving care written all over your faces.”
“Me too,” Ashley said. “I like TLC.”
“Then how about something similar….” Patsy thought for a moment. “We meet in the tearoom, so that’s important. And we’re a club, too. So…”
“The Tea Lovers’ Club!” Brenda burst out.
“There you go!” Patsy cried. “It’s perfect. The only rule or requirement of our club is that you have to love tea. And we might even bend that one if someone’s partial to coffee.”
Ashley lifted her teacup, and everyone joined in the toast. “To the Tea Lovers’ Club,” she said. “May we give each other nothing but tender loving care.”
As the china cups clinked together, the women chuckled. “In that case,” Esther said, “I recommend we add one new member right away.”
The group turned as one to study the tall, handsome young man who was polishing the mirror in Patsy’s station while admiring his shiny white teeth.
“To our newest member,” Kim said, raising her teacup a second time. “Here’s to Cody Goss.”
After taking a sip of tea, Esther leaned forward on the table and said, “And now, ladies—and gentleman—I have a plan for how to get rid of that adult-video store.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As he eased onto the highway, Steve looked in the rearview mirror. A glimpse of his own face startled him and caused him to glance back at the mirror for a moment. He hadn’t slept well since his return to Deepwater Cove, but he didn’t realize he looked so haggard. Turning his attention to the road again, he prayed that he could keep his mind centered on holding up his end of the agreement he’d made with his wife.
Steve had told Brenda he would try. He would work with her to restore their relationship and rebuild their marriage. Since then, he had come home early every evening, eaten dinner with her and Cody, walked with her around the neighborhood in the evenings, and done his best to be pleasant.
But each hour of the day brought a new assault in the exhausting two-front battle Steve was waging. Not only did he fight to block out the name of Nick LeClair, to erase the mental image of Brenda in another man’s arms. He also labored to love his wife for who she had always been, even though part of him wanted to despise her for the one thing she had done to hurt him so deeply.
He’d heard Pastor Andrew say that forgiveness was a decision, not a feeling. Steve thought it was a great concept. But he’d never had a life-shattering offense to forgive before.
It was hard. Sometimes he thought it was too hard. There was a barrier standing in his way, and he didn’t even know what to call it. Yet he ran up against it every time he tried to move on.
When he wasn’t distracted by work, the newspaper, a book, or television, he struggled against the gag reflex that always hung at the top of his throat. Anger and hurt had formed into a ball lodged inside him, and he didn’t know how to get rid of it. He needed to say something, but he wasn’t sure what. It was about Brenda…but it was also about himself. He wondered if he had been part of the problem. Could there be any truth to Brenda’s accusations that he had abandoned her for his job?
No matter how he tried to sort through it all, he kept coming back to Brenda’s betrayal. Finally he realized that all he actually could do about it was to pray. So that’s what he’d been doing.
But it wasn’t working, Steve realized as he drove into the garage, let the door drop, and got out of the car. Everything he trusted had been shattered in a single instant. His wife, God, even his own confidence in himself as a good husband and faithful family man.
Leaning one arm on the roof of his car, Steve once again tried to find the words to pray. All that came out of him was a deeply uttered “Why?”
Hearing no answer, Steve put his head down on his arm and shut his eyes. At that moment, a verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans drifted through the fog in his brain. Though the passage hadn’t made much sense to him in the past, now he understood exactly what the apostle had meant when he wrote about people not knowing how to pray or what to pray for. Paul had promised that at such times, the Holy Spirit would pray for believers with groanings that could not be expressed in words.
Steve took comfort in the knowledge that the Spirit understood exactly what he needed and was pleading with God on his behalf. But it didn’t resolve the problem he encountered every evening after work. Steve still had to step inside his house in Deepwater Cove and face the woman he could barely think of as his wife. Since his return from Arkansas, Brenda had done her best to be cheerful, kind, and supportive, but Steve’s heart felt like a chunk of rock-hard ice.
Pushing open the door from the garage to the kitchen, he immediately smelled the dish that had graced the Hansen family table every spring. At the first appearance of fresh asparagus in the grocery store, Brenda whipped up an enormous pot of pasta primavera. But instead of stirring his appetite, today the aroma sent a pang of regret through his chest. All those years, all that love…
“Hey there, you!” Brenda sang out as she looked at him from her cutting board. “I just put the water on to boil, and I’ve chopped up everything but the basil. You should smell this!” Stepping to his side, she lifted a sprig of the fresh herb to his nose.
Steve sniffed and mustered a smile. “Nice,” he said.
“Charlie Moore gave it to me.” She returned to the counter, but kept talking. “The asparagus is from his garden too. At the TLC meeting today, Esther heard me mention pasta primavera, and she insisted on giving me the makings for more than we can possibly eat.”
“Oh,” Steve managed.
“You won’t believe what Esther has up her sleeve this time. She wants all of us to stage a protest march in front of the new adultvideo store at the Tranquility mall. It hasn’t even opened yet, but she’s found a megaphone, and she’s figured out a way to print flyers. Charlie is going to plaster his golf cart with signs and drive it around and around the parking lot, tooting the horn, while the rest of us walk behind him carrying placards.”
Realizing he couldn’t escape and shouldn’t want to, Steve set his briefcase on the floor. “Who’s going to be participating in this protest?”
“The TLC. I told you about us, remember? We meet at Just As I Am. We used to be called the Tea Ladies’ Club, but now we’re the Tea Lovers’ Club, and Cody is a full-fledged member. Does this tomato look fresh to you?”
She crossed the kitchen floor to him again. Steve inspected the tomato, which had a suspicious hole near the stem. “It’s either a worm or the birds have been at it.”
“I’m not taking any chances,” she said, swinging away from him and tossing the tomato into the garbage can. “Speaking of the TLC, did I tell you that Ashley Hanes and I are making bead necklaces? We’re going to give them as Christmas presents. Ashley and Brad have invited us to dinner on Sunday, by the way. And Brad has agreed to build a bridge over our drainage ditch.”
As Brenda spoke, Steve studied his wife. He recalled the weeks when she had dragged around in her bathrobe, and he almost wished that woman were back. It would make his misery a lot easier.
Today Brenda looked pretty, he had to admit. Her blonde hair was bouncy and soft, cut just the way he liked it. She wore a pale pink top and a pair of shorts. Her bare feet had always intrigued him with their tiny toes and pink polish.
Throughout their courtship and marriage, Brenda’s petite figure and shapely legs had always been able to stir something inside her husband. If he weren’t so confused, Steve realized, he could almost start feeling that way about her again—his heart beginning to thump and his hands itching to trace over her shoulders and down her silky arms. Brenda had impulsively hugged him once and they made a habit of walking hand in hand, but Brenda still kept to her side of the bed, and Steve never made any attempt to touch her.
“None of us could believe what a fantastic job he had done,” Brenda was saying as Steve tried to refocus his attention. “He polished all the mirrors, swept the floor, scrubbed the sinks, and mopped the back room—and that was just during the meeting. Patsy was thrilled to death. Cody wanted to keep working, so I said that was fine and came on home to start the pasta. Patsy’s taking him out for supper, and then she’ll bring him back here later tonight. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Cody?” he asked.
“You saw how he washed our windows over and over. He’s like a cleaning machine once he gets going. Esther is going to have him shake out her rugs and do some dusting. She said she’d pay him minimum wage.”
Surprised to hear the animation in Brenda’s voice, Steve instinctively responded. “Cody could clean the offices at the agency for me,” he said. “That woman I hired doesn’t show up half the time.”
“Really? That’s awful. But good for Cody.” Brenda’s green eyes shone as she looked at Steve. “You’d really hire him to clean? I could drive him over in the afternoons—”
“And I’ll bring him home with me at night.”
“Oh, honey!” Brenda threw her arms around Steve and gave him a kiss on the cheek. As if suddenly catching herself, she stepped back quickly. “That’s so nice of you. I think Cody can accomplish a lot if he gets the chance to try.”
Still reeling from the kiss, Steve discovered he couldn’t make his mouth form any audible words. Brenda had hugged him. Kissed him. Just like the old days.
He had to sit down.
“I’ll be in the living room,” he called to her over his shoulder.
Did he want Brenda’s affection? He sank into his favorite chair and leaned his head back. Trying to please her had meant cutting into his profits at work and annoying some of his agents. One had told Steve he was quitting when he found another place to work. Was all that loss and trouble worth it? Were the sacrifices going to pay off in something he even wanted?
“I don’t know what to think about that protest march,” Brenda said from the kitchen.
She had always spoken to him while he thumbed through the lake area’s daily newspaper—checking his ads and scanning those of the competition. This felt so normal. Eerily normal, Steve thought as he shut his eyes and tried to relax.
“I don’t mind making some kind of public statement,” she was saying. “But I doubt a protest march will do any good. Pete Roberts told Patsy that the new tenant is getting boxes of stuff delivered at his store every day. Nothing is going to make that man move. It could affect the school-bus route, you know. Oh, and I have the worst news. Luke Lockwood—one of the cute little twins?—well, it looks like he has diabetes. The worst kind too. Kim told us about it today at the TLC meeting. I felt so awful for her. Our kids had the usual colds and broken bones, but we never went through anything that serious. I promised we would pray for the Finleys, and the club wants to do whatever we can. Do you know much about diabetes? Doesn’t your cousin have it?”
Steve cleared his throat. “Yeah, Robbie. He doesn’t talk about it much.”
“Kim sounded so scared.” Brenda’s voice grew louder suddenly, and Steve opened his eyes to find that she had walked into the living room. She held out a glass. “Would you like some iced tea?”
He t
ook it and set it on the table beside his chair. “Thanks.”
She stood for a moment in silence. Then she squared her shoulders, circled his chair, and dropped down into his lap. “Tell me about your day.” She leaned her head against his neck. “Did you sell any houses?”
Steve couldn’t move. He had longed for this. Physically ached for it. And now here she was, in his lap, snuggled up next to him. Yet he felt cold, stiff, unable to budge.
“No,” he said. “Not today.”
“Did you show some?”
“A few.”
“Where?” she asked, her voice shaky and slightly breathless. “In town or lakeside?”
He forced his hand up from the arm of his chair and set it on her shoulder. “Lake,” he said, feeling as though he were an actor playing a part in a rerun of their former life. “One of them should go in a few days. Price is right.”
She was trembling. “Does it have a nice view?”
“It looks out over the main channel,” he mumbled, letting his hand slide down to her elbow. “It’s on a point, though, and the home’s lake access is in a quiet cove just off the channel. It has huge windows, a paved driveway, a stone fireplace, and a two-slip dock with lifts.”
“Wow.”
As Steve allowed his arm to move around Brenda’s back, he felt something damp on his shoulder. She was crying. As hurt as he was—as painful as the reality that wouldn’t go away was—he couldn’t stand to think of Brenda’s tears. Lifting his other arm, he encircled her and drew her close against him. “Oh, honey.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “Brenda…I’ve made it my goal to work toward a happier marriage.” He looked at her. “I know it may take a long time and be very hard, but I’m determined.”
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