by Tim LaHaye
“Granted. But you got way ahead of me.”
“Fine, my bad. I’ll reel it back in. I’ll return the ring and we can slow down. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought we were on the same page.”
“We’re not.”
“But we can be, right? You just want to concentrate on your studies and your flying. We don’t have to get serious about the wedding until the end of the school year.”
“No, Kitty. I’m done.”
“Done with what? With me?”
“Done with us. I’m telling you I’m not ready, and I don’t think I’m—no, let me be clear. I owe you that.”
“You sure do.”
“I am not ever going to be ready. I don’t want to marry you.”
Her face twisted into a grimace, and she had to fight to be understood through her tears. “Why? What have I done that was so awful? I got ahead of you? Forgive me for loving you that much! I’m sorry I didn’t notice you weren’t on board. I can learn from this, Ray. Don’t dump me.”
“I just did.”
“Ray!”
“I don’t mean to sound so cruel, Kitty, but I’ve been pretending far too long, and I’ve been wrong.”
“Pretending to love me?”
“Yes. I mean, I thought I loved you; I really did. But I don’t. I don’t see us together in the future, and you need to know that. I know it’s my fault. If I hadn’t been sending the wrong signals, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
“Ray, I’m begging you. Just step back a little. Give it some time. Think it through. We’re perfect for each other. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.”
“Kitty, stop. You must stop. I’m so sorry; I really am. But it’s over. I don’t mean to be harsh, but you have to hear me. The easiest thing in the world would be to keep trying, but that would just prolong the inevitable.”
“You hate me that much?”
“I don’t hate you at all. I’ll miss you. I will. But I can’t pretend anymore.”
“Is this the let’s-be-friends pitch now? Because I can’t—”
“Neither can I, Kitty. We’ve been way too close for that to ever work. This has to be it, and we have to become a memory of something that almost worked.”
She buried her face in her hands. “I just don’t understand,” she said, shoulders heaving. Ray wanted to put an arm around her, to hold her. But he must not. “What will I tell people?” she said. “Dumped the day after I showed off my ring?”
“Tell them I was a scoundrel, not what you thought I was. I didn’t want to say this, but you can do better. Guys will be lined up around the block.”
“Well, I may not be here,” Kitty said, wiping her nose. She pulled the ring from her pocket and handed it to him. “There’s nothing I can do?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
“I wish I could say I hate you.”
“I wish you could too. I take all the blame, Kitty.”
“That makes no sense. Something made you fall out of love with me.”
“It’s-not-you-it’s-me is such a cliché, but—”
“Yeah, it is,” she said. “So please, Ray, spare me that.”
He nodded. “We don’t have to be friends, but let’s not be mean, okay?”
“Why would I be mean?”
“Because you’re angry, and you have a right to be. I’d understand. But I won’t be bad-mouthing you. And we will likely run into each other. I’d like to think we could be cordial.”
She forced a smile. “I can’t promise I won’t be bad-mouthing you, Ray. But, yes, if we ever see each other again, you can expect me to be cordial.”
TWENTY-FOUR
BY THE TIME Nick Carpathia was twelve years old he was president of the international Young Humanists, despite being the youngest member by two years. He chaired meetings in Luxembourg (where he learned enough Luxembourgian to add a smattering of it to his fluency in French and German) and spoke at two international conventions—one in the United States, where he spoke English, and one in Hong Kong, where he spoke Chinese.
He was featured in Time magazine, where it was noted that he wore stylish suits and tied his own neckties. He was also asked about his plans.
“I want to serve mankind,” he said. “I will support myself in some kind of business, because I am entrepreneurial by nature, but I expect I will wind up in some sort of public service.”
“Entrepreneurial,” the reporter said. “Where does a young man learn a word like that?”
“The same place an old man like you does,” Nick said without a smile. “By reading with a dictionary handy.”
The story made him a hit in Cluj-Napoca and at his school, but when Viv Ivins tried to make a big deal of it, he sniffed. “It means nothing if it is not the cover story.”
Irene was true to her word. She made Ray Steele wait exactly two months before she agreed even to go out with him. In the meantime, Kitty Wyley had become the talk of the campus, at least in sorority and frat circles. She quit showing up to class, and within a week she had left the university and moved back home.
Ray reluctantly accepted calls from both her dad and her mother, as well as her stepdad, having to rehearse for each the incidents that led to his decision. “I accept the blame,” he said. “I handled it all wrong. She’s a wonderful girl, and I wish her only the best.”
Her father was the only one who seemed to understand. But then he was the one who had had an affair and left Kitty’s mother, probably inflicting upon himself many of the same travails Ray faced. Both her mother and her stepdad tried to shame Ray and tell him what a scoundrel he was.
Word soon came from northern Indiana that Kitty Wyley was engaged.
Though not officially dating yet, Rayford and Irene spent time together as they had before, only more now because he didn’t have the other “obligation,” which was how they came to refer to Kitty. To her credit, Irene did not allow Rayford to bad-mouth his former girlfriend.
“She never hid who she was,” Irene would remind him. “You knew what you were getting into, and you contributed as much to that mismatch as she did.”
The truth was, Irene drove Rayford crazy with the waiting. The most she allowed were occasional embraces, a peck on the cheek. She wouldn’t even hold his hand.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her, and his attention seemed to have a positive impact on her. She appeared to have an extra spring in her step, and she always looked her best. The closer the time came to their first real date, the more anxious Rayford became. He wanted it to be perfect, but she kept reminding him that just being with him was all she cared about.
That first date went off without a hitch, and they were soon deeply in love, but Irene made it clear she didn’t plan to sleep with him until they were married—and they weren’t planning that until the end of his senior year. He accepted this at first, but the more time they spent together and the more amorous he felt, the more he became convinced he could wear her down, weaken her defenses, make her succumb to her own love and desires.
When she didn’t, he grew sullen. Finally she told him, “If this is going to become an issue, I’m going to quit looking forward to being with you.”
“Because I want to love you?”
“There are all kinds of ways to show your love for me, Rayford. Including waiting. We’re going to talk about this, because it’s important to me. And what I care about, you need to care about, or this will never work.”
“Since when did you become a virgin, Irene? I mean, in this day and age? You’re not telling me . . .”
“I didn’t say I was a virgin. But I can’t say I was ever really in love before either. I just want us to wait. And if you love me—”
“Got it,” he said. At times he still tried to push her, but he soon realized she was resolute.
__
Rayford had long been embarrassed by his cumbersome name. But Irene liked it and never called him Ray. When she short
ened it, it became Rafe. And so he began introducing himself as Rayford, signing that way, having it sewn onto his shirts and printed on his name badges.
When Irene’s mother endured a rough patch with her new husband—a career military man like Irene’s late father—Rayford decided he would spend as little time in the air force as possible. He couldn’t be sure it was the milieu that made some men hard to live with, but he didn’t want to risk it. Anyway, the real money was in commercial piloting, and that was where his heart lay.
Because Irene had been a military brat and had never sunk roots anywhere else, she was content to be married in Indiana. They had the wedding in the spring of Rayford’s final year of school, so the crowd at Wayside Chapel was made up mostly of school and ROTC friends.
Rayford was alarmed to detect the first stages of dementia in his father. He kept getting lost in the tiny church, and he told his son the same stories over and over. When Rayford got his mother alone, she burst into tears. “I’m losing him,” she said. Rayford feared she had become fragile too. Having parents older than his friends’ parents had been an embarrassment when he was young. Now it was a real problem.
“I suppose it would be too much to ask,” she said, “that you help your father sell the tool and die.”
Of all things to bring up on his wedding day. “Yes, it would be too much to ask,” he said. “I know nothing about the business end. And with me there he would get it into his head that he didn’t have to sell. He would be on me every day to just take it over, and that’s the last thing I want. Mom, if his mind is fading as fast as it appears, you’re going to need me making as much money as I can to help take care of him.”
Rayford could have had no idea how prophetic that was. Within six months of their wedding Irene was pregnant. Rayford was logging as many hours in the air as he could every day at a small air force installation near O’Hare Airport in Chicago.
And then he and Irene were invited to his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary. What a sad event that turned out to be. Distant family members unable to attend his wedding somehow made the effort to get to Belvidere for this, some curious about Rayford’s wife but most—he was sure—believing they were seeing the last of the elder Mr. Steele as they knew him.
Saddest for Rayford was watching his parents sit for their formal photo. He read panic on his mother’s face, as she was already burdened with not letting her husband out of her sight. He had deteriorated even since the wedding. Having married late and waiting to have Rayford, his parents were already pushing seventy and looked older than that—nothing like the youngish parents of Rayford’s contemporaries. The best photo showed Mr. Steele with a childlike smile of wonder, and Rayford knew he would not likely remember posing for it.
If Rayford heard it once, he heard dozens of times that day his father asking lifetime friends and relatives, “Tell me your name again.” Mr. Steele greeted his own younger sister three times as if she had just walked through the door. “I know you!” he said. “So glad you could come.”
The anniversary cake had thirty candles, of course, and Rayford’s father watched with curious glee as his wife blew them out in three great puffs. “How old are you?” he asked. “Aren’t we going to sing the birthday song?”
The party was almost over. Rayford’s father had gone to take a nap even before some of the guests began leaving. Rayford’s mother pulled her son into a corner. “There’s something I want you to pray with me about, Son,” she said.
His eyes darted. This was not like her. Surely she wasn’t going to ask him to pray right then and there.
“You still pray, don’t you, Rayford?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure. ’Course I do.” He couldn’t remember the last time. And what God was allowing to happen to his father wasn’t likely to change that. Irene resented God for allowing her father to be killed. Well, this was worse. It would have been easier to hear that his father had been hit by a car or died in his sleep. “Just don’t ask me to pray for Dad’s healing, because that’s not going to hap—”
“That’s not it,” she said, fighting to keep her composure. “It’s just that Daddy and I had a goal. The odds were against us because of how old we were when we married, but we’ve talked about it since the day we fell in love.”
Rayford was already uncomfortable with this, whatever it was. He had never heard his parents talk about being in love. They were nice enough to each other, didn’t argue or fight much, but neither had they ever been terribly affectionate.
Rayford and his mother kept being interrupted by people saying their good-byes. “Mom, we’re being rude. Can this wait?”
“I shouldn’t burden you with it anyway,” she said.
“You’re the hostess. You should—”
“Fine,” she said, abruptly moving toward the door.
Rayford couldn’t deny he was relieved, but he felt guilty watching her do her duty with a tight-lipped smile, her face red and her eyes full.
Irene slipped her hand into his. “What was that all about?” When he told her, she said, “Rafe, you must pursue it. She won’t get back to it. Convince her it’s your top priority. You’re all she has left. She has to know she can unburden herself to you.”
“Irene, whatever it is is going to require something I don’t have to give. You and I are trying to get established. I want a house, a decent car or two, a good job . . .”
“Don’t you believe in karma?”
“Karma? Hardly.”
“Sure you do. We agree that what goes around comes around, don’t we?”
He backed away and squinted at her.
“Don’t look at me that way, Rafe. I’m just saying that if you don’t do right by your parents, the same thing is bound to happen to you someday.”
When everyone else had left, Rayford noticed his mother pointedly ignoring him. He approached her and said, “Mom, I want to get back to that conversation.”
“No, you don’t.”
He looked at Irene, who nodded at him and pointed to the other room.
“Yes, I do. Now come sit down. You were telling me what was so important to you and Dad.”
He could see in her eyes that his lie had convinced her. He wanted to have this conversation the way he wanted to spend an afternoon at the mall when the Bears were on television.
She took his hands in hers and led him to the couch in the living room. “Here’s what I want you to pray about, Rayford. Though it’s clear Daddy’s mind is going and it’s likely Alzheimer’s, the doctor says he is otherwise healthy as a horse. I don’t know why they always say it that way, like horses are healthier than other animals. They aren’t, are they? I never heard that they were.”
“I don’t know, Mom. Back to your story.”
“Sorry. Anyway, Daddy and I always said we wanted to celebrate fifty years together.”
“Fifty years?”
She nodded.
“He probably can’t even remember wanting that,” Rayford said, regretting it as soon as it was out of his mouth.
“Don’t be cruel.”
“No, I’m just saying . . . if there’s a benefit to this malady, it’s that he will not likely be disappointed by missing those things he can’t even remember hoping for.”
“Well, I’m hoping for it, okay?”
That was so like her. And it made Rayford feel bad.
“The doctor says it’s possible he will live another twenty years,” she said. “We’ll have to institutionalize him eventually, which should make it easier for me to last twenty more years.”
“Why is that so important, Mom? I’m not disparaging it. I really want to know.”
She dabbed at her eyes. “Besides raising a fine son and wishing for all the best for you, being married fifty years was our life’s goal. I’d still like to make it, whether he’s aware of it or not.”
Rayford could only imagine their fiftieth anniversary photograph.
“So will you pray with me about that?” she said. “Maybe
when you go to bed at night.”
He nodded, not wanting to put this lie into words.
“You still pray when you go to bed, don’t you, Rayford?”
“Sometimes.”
“I believe in prayer,” she said.
I don’t.
__
Rayford’s impatience for the good life grew into frustration as he and Irene slogged through their days in a tiny apartment. He was excited about the impending child, of course, but though he loved all the flight time he was logging, life seemed to drag. Irene became more tired and irritable while the baby grew within her. Rayford’s mother became needier when his father was sent to a facility that required as much of Rayford’s monthly income as he could afford to bridge the gap between the cost and his parents’ insurance.
It wasn’t that Rayford begrudged helping. But his own dreams were on hold. How would he ever afford a house, cars, all the things that made life worth living?
As thrilling as the birth of their daughter, Chloe, was, Rayford had to admit that even that glow didn’t last. He was flooded with love for her, but he had envisioned more fatherly things than just helping Irene with chores, changing the baby, and fetching her in the night so Irene could nurse her. Rayford hated himself for feeling that way. He still loved his daughter and his wife, of course, but the fact was that his life was not yet what he dreamed it would be.
Then there was Irene’s eagerness to start going to church again.
“I thought you had learned your lesson about all that,” Rayford said.
“All I’ve learned is that I don’t know so much,” she said. “I miss the best things about it, and I told you years ago I didn’t want to raise a child without religion in her life.”
And so they began attending a big church where Rayford could easily get lost in the crowd and slip out as soon as it was over.
Irene seemed pleased enough. She appeared to enjoy being a wife and mother, spending time with Rayford and helping him in his career. But that wasn’t enough for him. Rayford applied to all the major airlines and devoted himself to qualifying on bigger and bigger jets.
