The Red Gloves Collection

by Karen Kingsbury

  “At least the jerk’s sending you support,” Aunt Peggy said, and then she shot Megan a glance. “Megan, honey, why don’t you go out and play with your brother?”

  By that point, Megan had felt sick to her stomach going on two months straight, and when her aunt suggested she leave the house, Megan was more than happy to go. She didn’t understand exactly what her aunt and her mother were talking about, but it was something bad, something about her father. And Megan knew deep in her heart that her daddy wasn’t coming home, maybe not ever.

  She wandered outside, past her brother splashing in the pool, and through a thicket of pine trees out onto the beach. It was a private stretch of sand shared by only the houses in Aunt Peggy’s neighborhood. Megan kicked off her shoes and walked along the shore about a hundred yards until she spotted a fallen tree trunk. She sat at one end, stared out at the water, and wondered.

  Why had her father left, anyway, and where was love? Was it real? If people like her parents could split up, how could it be? And what about her and her brother? Since he’d been gone, their dad hadn’t called or visited. Not once. So what was the point of growing up and getting married if it all fell apart in the end?

  If only her father would come home. Then she would know love was real after all, and that God answered prayers.

  “Where are you, Daddy?” Her whispered question mixed with the breeze roiling off the south end of the lake and sifted through the tree branches behind her. But she heard no answer.

  Tears filled her eyes, and she blinked them back. She’d always done her crying in private, and this wasn’t the time for tears. I miss you. She gazed up at the sky to a place she wasn’t quite sure existed. I want him to come home and kiss the top of my head like he used to. God, you can make miracles happen, so please make one happen now for me.

  As she sat there a little while longer she realized something. Her father’s routine—the way he came home each day and showered Megan and her brother with attention—had been something that made her feel safe and protected. Now, without him, Megan felt unattached, like she was falling without a parachute.

  She was about to head back to her aunt’s house when something in the opposite direction caught her eye. A boy, about her age, was walking a white Lab along the beach. He noticed her, and before she could escape, the boy waved and headed over.

  “Hi.” He came up and stood in front of her. “You must be new.”

  Megan shrugged and tried not to feel interested. The boy had clear, blue eyes and something about the way he looked at her made her feel as though he’d known her forever. She struggled to find her voice. “Just visiting.”

  “Us, too. My grandpa lives here. We come up each June.” He sat down a few feet from her on the fallen log. “I’m Kade.”

  “I’m Maggie.”

  He hesitated a minute, and a smile played on his lips. “Okay, Maggie, tell me this. If you’re on vacation, why’re you sitting here looking like it’s the end of the world?”

  For some reason, Megan felt safe with the boy. She tilted her head and felt the pretense fade from her expression. “Because it is.”

  Kade’s smile dropped off like the bottom of the lake. “Ya wanna talk about it?”

  And Megan had.

  For the next week, she and Kade met out on the shoreline and talked about everything from the meaning of life to Kade’s passion for baseball and his dream of playing in the big leagues. But whenever the topic would turn to Megan’s father and her situation, Kade would tell her the same thing: Real love never fails, and where there is that type of love, there is hope. Always.

  Kade’s father was a minister at a small church in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas. His daddy had told him that in a town nicknamed “Sin City” it was important to know what real love was.

  “But what about when love dies? Like it did for my parents?” They were walking along the beach, their arms occasionally brushing against each other.

  “Maybe they never understood real love.” Kade stopped and picked up a flat rock from the sand. He skipped it across the water and turned to her. “You know, the kind of love in the Bible. The love that Jesus talks about.”

  That was another thing. Megan had never met anyone her age so versed in Scripture. Not that he talked about it all the time. In fact, they spent most of their hours playing Frisbee or swimming in her aunt’s pool or splashing in the lake. One day she found a dozen pale purple azaleas growing wild near a clump of bushes just off the beach.

  “Here.” She picked the prettiest one and handed it to Kade. “So you’ll remember me.”

  “Okay.” The hint of a smile played on his mouth, and his eyes sparkled. “I’ll put it in my Bible and save it forever.”

  They teased and laughed and played hide and seek among the pine trees that lined the beach. But each afternoon as the sun made its way down toward the mountains, she and Kade would find their place on the fallen log and he’d say something profound about love or God’s plan for her life. Something that didn’t make him seem anything like a fifteen-year-old boy.

  Late one afternoon, she narrowed her eyes and studied him for a minute. “You sure you’re not an angel or something?”

  “Yep, that’s me.” He let his head roll back, and his laugh filled the air around her. “An angel with a mean fastball and a .350 batting average.”

  She breathed hard through her nose. “I’m serious, Kade. What kind of kid knows about love like that?”

  “I told you.” His cheeks were tanned from the week in the sun, and his eyes danced as the laughter eased from his voice. “My dad’s a preacher, Maggie. The Bible’s like, well… ” He gazed out across the water. “It’s like the air in our house. It’s all around us.”

  “And the Bible talks about love?”

  Megan hadn’t known anything about the Bible, really. Sure it sat on the coffee table, and she and her family had gone to church once in a while when they were little. But never in the past few years. Especially not since her father left.

  Kade pulled one leg up and looked at her. “The Bible talks all about love. How it’s kind and how it never fails.”

  On their last afternoon together, Megan admitted something to him, something she hadn’t really understood until then. “I want to believe, Kade. In love … in God … in all of it.” She let her gaze fall to her hands. “But I don’t think I know how anymore.”

  Kade slid closer to her on the fallen log and took her fingers in his. “Then what you need, Maggie, is a miracle. So that one day everything we’ve talked about will really happen in your life.”

  “A miracle?”

  “Yep.” He scooted closer still and tightened the grip he had on her hand. “Close your eyes, and I’ll pray.”

  Then, while a funny, tingling sort of feeling worked its way down Maggie’s spine, she and Kade held hands, and he asked God for a miracle for her, that her father would come home and that no matter what else happened or didn’t happen, one day she would know the type of love that never failed.

  They made a plan then, that they’d meet there on the fallen log every June, so long as their families came to Lake Tahoe. Before she left, Kade hugged her and gave her the briefest kiss on the cheek. “I’ll pray for you, Maggie. Every day. That you’ll get your miracle.” He gave her a sad smile. “See ya around sometime.”

  When she and her mother and brother left for home the next day, Megan couldn’t decide what to feel. She hated leaving Kade, but her heart soared with a hope she hadn’t felt before the trip, and she found herself convinced of several things. First, that God was real, and second, that He was going to give her the miracle they’d prayed for. That one day she’d know for herself a kind of love that didn’t walk out the front door one night before dinner. A love that never failed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Casey pulled open the blinds and stared up between the buildings that surrounded his apartment. Rain, again. Cold, driving rain. He pulled away from the window, padded across the li
ving room, and found his running shoes. Rain was good. Clean and honest and simple, reducing the moment to nothing but Casey and the air he breathed. Besides, the café wouldn’t open for another hour and now, while it was still dark, there was nowhere he’d rather be than running the streets of New York City.

  Rain, sleet, or snow, he would run.

  Three days had passed since his anniversary, and still Casey couldn’t pull himself from the past. Crazy, really, that a calendar day could send him into a tailspin of memories and longing. Anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine’s Day, Christmas. The trigger was any day the two of them would’ve been together.

  Freedom was out on the pavement, where it always was. Running gave Casey a chance to think about life the way he couldn’t at his crowded café or in the confines of an apartment where every square inch held memories of Amy.

  He laced up his shoes and noticed that his shoulders felt lighter, as though the mountain of sorrow and regret he lived under couldn’t follow him out onto the streets. Three flights down the ancient stairs that ran through the core of the apartment building and he was outside. A wind gust slapped him in the face and sprayed his cheeks with rain. The air was colder than it looked, but it was clean, and Casey sucked in three mouthfuls as he set off.

  Five minutes later it happened, the same thing that happened every time he ran. The early-morning commuters and sounds of the waking city faded to nothing, and Casey gained entrance to a world where Amy was still alive and memories of her came easily. A world where he could catch a glimpse of the place where she and their son still lived, where the pain of existence was dimmed—if only for an hour.

  He’d run enough over the past two years that come spring he was going to do a marathon. Why not? He would put in the miles one way or another. It gave him a reason to run more, something to tell Billy-G and the regulars at the café. He was training. Not that he needed the time to relive his past or sort through how he could’ve done something different that awful day, how he could’ve helped save Amy and the baby.

  He had to run to be ready for the race.

  Since Saturday, he’d used his running time to indulge himself in the rarest luxury of all. The luxury of going back to the beginning, back to the days when he and Amy first met. Casey brushed his gloved hand over his face and wiped the rain off his brow. He had to be careful how often he did this, this going back to the beginning thing. Because each time he allowed himself, the sound of her voice, the feel of her hand in his were more vivid. Intoxicatingly vivid.

  And each time it was harder to find his way back to real life.

  But here, on this rainy Tuesday morning, Casey didn’t care. One more time wouldn’t hurt. Besides, memories were all he had left, all he’d ever have. And they were worthless if he didn’t spend time with them every now and then.

  He turned right and headed toward Central Park, no longer seeing steamy manholes and cabdrivers vying for early riders. Instead he was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his sleeves rolled up and sweat beading on his forehead.

  From the time he started high school, Casey had known what he wanted to do in life. He had no intention of becoming a preacher or a doctor or any of the things his parents had figured for him. He would get his MBA and do something different, something where he could keep his own hours and be his own boss, work around all types of people. Then he’d meet a nice girl, get married, and have the kind of life his parents had shared.

  But first, he would travel.

  A month after he graduated from high school, he turned down three track-and-field scholarships for a one-year position working as a driver for an orphanage in Haiti. The job paid nothing but food and expenses, but it taught him more about life than he could’ve learned in a dozen college courses.

  He drove a twenty-year-old pickup truck with boarded sides and an engine that started only half the time. At first the road conditions terrified him. Traffic ran in multiple directions without any clear sense of right-of-way, and people honked their horns as often as they hit their gas pedals. Vendors littered the roadways, and children darted into traffic at every intersection waving rags and squirt bottles, hoping to make a dime or two by cleaning a dirty car window.

  The food was rice and beans and an occasional skimpy chicken leg. Meat wasn’t refrigerated in Haiti, showers were scarce, and hot water unheard of. Every mosquito bite carried the threat of malaria. During the day, when Casey was driving the streets of Port-au-Prince, not only was he an oddity because he was American, but he was often the only white person amid hundreds of thousands of teeming people on the main thoroughfare. Casey knew enough Creole to say, “I’m here for the supplies,” and “I’ll be back next week,” and a few other key words, but the language barrier felt like the Great Wall of China. Rats ran the floor of the orphanage at night, and at times the adjustment period felt as if it would stretch on forever.

  But after a month in Port-au-Prince, Casey felt more comfortable. He no longer noticed the strange looks he got from people he passed on the streets, and the traffic was somehow invigorating. When he took the time to smile, people treated him kindly. He spent his days getting supplies, shuttling children to various appointments, and helping the ministry team when they staged out-reaches on the street corners.

  At the end of the first year, Casey signed up for a second.

  “What about college?” His father had been worried, but not nearly as much as his mother.

  “Have you gone mad?” Her voice was pinched with fear. “Universities won’t wait forever.”

  Casey figured they would. He was still in great shape and ran the hilly side streets at the far end of Port-au-Prince four times a week.

  Halfway through his second year, a group of high school youth-group students came to the orphanage for spring break. Casey had been in the driveway on his back, working on the muffler of the old pickup truck, when the students filed through the high security gate. He paused, taking in the group of them as they made their way into the complex.

  That’s when he saw her.

  She was at the end of the line, listening to one of the counselors point out details about the orphanage, and Casey did a double take. Even looking at her upside down, he could feel his breath catch in his throat. She wasn’t striking in the typical sense. Her hair wasn’t streaked with blonde, and she wore no makeup. She was a simple kind of beautiful, like wildflowers scattered across an untouched mountain pasture. Casey’s hand froze in place, the wrench poised a few inches above his sweaty forehead. She didn’t yet known he was alive, and already something in her light brown eyes had worked its way into his heart.

  Casey picked up his pace, ignoring the way his legs screamed for relief. The pain of running felt good, especially now. He blinked and allowed the memories to continue.

  Her name was Amy Bedford. By that evening Casey had found out enough about her to know that his first impression had been right on. She held no pretense and spoke with a wisdom that was far beyond her sixteen years. The youngest of five girls from central Oregon, her father was a science teacher for a small public high school, her mother a homemaker. Amy’s sisters were in college, anxious to get degrees in something other than education and move on to anything more lucrative than a teacher’s salary.

  Not so Amy.

  “My dad’s the best man I know,” she told Casey that night. “He’s touched a thousand hearts in his lifetime, and I want to do the same.” She rested her elbows on the old wooden table. “How ‘bout you?”

  “Well … ” He gripped the bench he was sitting on and straightened his back. “I want to open a café.”

  “A café, huh?”

  “Yeah.” He gave a few thoughtful nods. “I can be my own boss, make my own hours, and meet new people every day.” His heart felt light at the prospect. “I’ve been drinking about it for a while.”

  “Wow. I never met anyone who wanted to open a café.”

  Quiet filled the space between them for a moment. “My parents aren’t real thrilled abou
t the idea.”

  She smiled then and said something Casey would remember for the rest of his life. “Someday I want to eat there, okay? At your café.”

  Casey wasn’t sure if it was her faith in his dreams or the sincerity in her voice or the way her skin glistened in the hot, humid night, but with every passing hour he felt himself falling for her. The week passed in a blur of painting the orphanage kitchen and talking late into the night. Three years separated them, but Casey didn’t notice a minute of it. Amy was as true as an orphan’s smile, guileless and able to speak her mind. Something about her made Casey want to wrap his arms around her and protect her from anything cold or cynical, anything that would dim the warmth in her smile.

  They finished the kitchen and moved into the room where twenty-two orphans slept on eleven small wire cots.

  “Let’s paint the door red,” Amy told him.

  “Red?” Casey made a face and flicked his paintbrush at her. “Why red?”

  “Because.” She tapped her brush on the tip of his nose. “Red is the color of giving.”

  And so they painted the orphans’ bedroom door red.

  On Amy’s last night in Port-au-Prince, Casey asked if he could write to her.

  “Yes.” They were sitting on a bench in the orphanage courtyard just before midnight and the air around them was stagnant, silent but for the sound of a distant drumbeat. She lowered her chin and locked eyes with him. “I’d like that.”

  He wanted to kiss her, but he didn’t dare. He was on staff, and she was a student, a minor. Instead he swallowed and tried not to notice the way their shoulders brushed against each other. He dropped his voice a notch. “Know something, Amy?”

  “What?” She leaned back against the crumbling façade of the orphanage wall and met his eyes again.

  “I had fun this week.”