“You can’t believe it? I can’t believe that. Those flowers were gorgeous, if I may say so myself. And for you to have bought them for no special reason or occasion, that’s something in itself. At least, you didn’t indicate it was for a special day.”
“No, it wasn’t for a special day. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she thought I’d done something I was trying to make up for or something like that. But I wasn’t. She’s the one who goes out every night.”
“I’m just glad you seem to be in a better place today than you were yesterday. So no more talk about leaving the state or anything else. Not your marriage. Not your home. And definitely not your girls or ministry. Okay?”
“No more talk about anything, especially now, because I really have to get off this phone before I end up late from my break,” he said.
“Okay. Well, thanks for the update. I’m glad things may be turning around for you. I really am,” I said.
He laughed. “As I indicated earlier: time will tell. But in the meantime, I wanted to thank you for your ear and your encouragement. And thanks so much for being there when I needed someone to vent to. You have no idea how much that means to someone like me. I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “All right?”
“All right,” I said. “Bye.”
He hung up as I stood there holding the phone in one hand and that same gladiolus in the other—happy that he and his wife were on the right track. My only wish was that I could say something to my own husband and get through to him. Because no matter how many times Zeke and I have talked, he has yet to once acknowledge that there’s a problem. He definitely has never said he was going to try to do better.
I’ve told him how I feel about him leaving me at home every night. But the most I’ve ever gotten from him? Instead of him leaving the way he used to without saying that he was going, he now will say “I’ll be back” as he’s going out the door.
Ethan, thinking enough to call me and let me know I had been a blessing to him just by listening, absolutely made my day.
It made my day!
Chapter 12
In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
—Jeremiah 31:29
It had been two weeks since Ethan had called with his praise progress report. I was definitely praying for him and his family while zealously praying for me and mine. It didn’t seem to matter. Zeke wasn’t staying home any more now than he had been before my personal concentrated prayer service began. But at least he wasn’t walking around like he’d eaten a batch of sour grapes.
I’d heard from Zanetta—Zane as her new friends were now calling her. I didn’t really care for that spin on her name, mostly because I’d taken such great care in naming her in the first place. Actually, I’d given great consideration when I named all three of our children. Me being so in love with Zeke in the beginning, I wanted our firstborn to be named after him. So when our first child ended up not being a boy, I held to it as closely as I could by naming her Zanetta.
The name Zanetta was different. I’d taken the name Annetta (which happened to be my best friend’s name in high school), added a letter, and dropped one to come up with Zanetta. By Zeke’s name starting with a Z, the name Zanetta turned out to be a perfect way to tie the two of them together. Dropping one of the n’s in Annetta made sense and it looked much better that way. Who could have foreseen that in doing this, some other folks would decide to be creative and drop the “t-t-a” entirely and start calling her Zane?
Zanetta played it off whenever I had something to say about it. She claimed they called her Zane because of how zany she could be. I will admit that Zanetta is definitely one who knows how to make you laugh. You wouldn’t know that by looking at her. She always looks so serious. But she can have you splitting your sides. That’s just one more thing I was missing with her being gone: there was no one around to make me laugh the way she could.
But she was doing well in the United States Air Force, traveling all around the world, all at the behest and expense of the military. My firstborn was living her dreams. So when she called and told me essentially that she’d gotten serious with this young man and was thinking about getting married, I thought she was merely making another one of her jokes. It took some doing, but she was eventually able to convince me that she was indeed serious.
Hallelujah!
You’d have to know Zanetta to understand why this was such a big deal. Zanetta has always been so laser-focused on her dreams and goals. Since she was in middle school, if a boy tried to talk to her, she just wasn’t interested, not at all. Not if it meant it would get in the way of her reaching her goal. In school, her goal was to make straight As and stay on the A-honor roll. It didn’t take her long to discover that talking to boys somehow took away from her studying time, and she wasn’t having that. Not in middle school, not in high school, and to my chagrin, apparently not while serving in the military.
Being a straight-A student, she could have easily juggled hanging out with friends (girls and boys), going out every now and then. But Zanetta was self-motivated and she wasn’t going to let anything or anyone get in the way of her achieving a set goal. She’d received academic as well as sports scholarships that totaled more than enough money for her to go to college and be a doctor if she’d chosen to, something I had highly encouraged her to look at as a career. I mean, she had the grades, she had the drive, she had the discipline, and here were folks handing her all the finances she would need without her having to pay anything back (unlike those taking out student loans). Her front-end sacrifices had already earned it for her. I could just see it: My daughter the doctor. Doctor Zanetta.
“Do you have any idea how many people you’ll be able to bless as a doctor?” I had said to her when she and I were discussing what she’d like to do after high school.
But Zanetta didn’t want to be a doctor. She wanted to be a pilot. She wanted to fly planes. And apparently, not just any old planes, but fighter jets. She’d been saying things like this since she was old enough to talk. In fact, I used to get under Zeke’s skin by telling him that instead of her first word being “Daddy,” it was “jet,” or more to the way she pronounced it “det.” Zeke accused me of lying, but I promise you, she was saying “jet.” If she was watching television and a plane appeared on the screen, it didn’t matter what she was doing, she would giggle and jump up and down while pointing at the TV, speaking what Zeke called “zibber-jabber.” And when she was old enough to tell us what she wanted for Christmas, there was always at least one plane on her list.
They say when children are young they usually let you know by their actions or they’ll tell you what they want to be when they grow up. It’s just many parents don’t always pay close enough attention. I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked when she told us that she was joining the Air Force and planned to fly their planes.
My second child, Zion, has always been somewhat tempered and quiet. As a baby, she watched people, but was content to play by herself if she had to. I used to feel bad because it appeared she was alone a lot, possibly mistreated. If she tried to play with Zanetta and her older sister wouldn’t play with her, Zion would, without any drama or fanfare, merely get something she liked, and off she’d go by herself. It didn’t seem to faze or bother her as much as it bothered me. I suppose that’s the case, since she never complained or said anything otherwise, at least not to me.
I’d chosen the name Zion because of my sudden love of reading scriptures. Our Sunday school class had decided we were going to read through the Bible in one year. So I read my Bible every single day during the time I was pregnant with her. Originally, I thought it was going to be hard. But since there wasn’t a set time I had to read (as long as it was before I closed my eyes for the night), I would read at least one of the suggested sections we were given on “How to read the Bible in a year” a day.
Sometimes I would read when I first woke up. Someti
mes I would read while at work during my breaks. When I got home from work, the only time I would have most of the time, was right before I went to sleep. The biggest problem with bedtime and reading the Bible is that it seemed to put me to sleep that much quicker.
But I had loved the name Zion. During that time, it even appeared to be a sign from God. I would randomly open the Bible, and there was the name Zion. Right before she was born I was reading scriptures talking about Zion. And it didn’t hurt that Zion began with a Z, a perfect name for our second girl. Since I’d named our first child using the letter Z, I decided to name the second one with a Z as well.
And of all things, Zion grew up and decided she wanted to be a missionary. I don’t know how that happened. I believe I was more upset about it than her father. And one would think he would have been since he’s not even that much of a churchgoer.
Zeke laughed at me as I fussed to him about her plans to join a missionary group, essentially likening it to her “becoming a nun.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “Lots of missionaries marry. Nuns don’t, unless you count their marriage to Jesus.”
Zeke was right. People who did missionary work did get married. I think that was what was bugging me more than anything: the idea that so far, two of my daughters were seemingly avoiding men and relationships altogether, and the fact that I might not ever become a grandmother if they did. Not that I wanted to be a grandmother anytime soon (not saying that I would have minded, either, in the proper marital context). But I did want to believe that somewhere down the road, I’d get to hear a little one call me “Grandma,” “Grandmother,” “Granny,” “Nana,” “Mee-mee,” “Meemaw,” or something along that line.
Zeke shut me down from that grandmother talk when he cleverly said, “You’d better be careful what you wish for. You do know we still have our baby girl. And she definitely is not shying away from boys. She just might make you a grandmother before you know it.”
At that point, I directed my energies into making sure that our youngest child wasn’t working to make us grandparents anytime soon—accident or no accident.
My baby.
Of course, after you’ve named the first two children using the same letter, you have to keep it going. Otherwise, there will be that one child who questions why he or she was the odd child out. The problem with this was that our third child was another girl, and I was running out of nice names that began with the letter Z. I’d almost decided to go with the name Zabrina when a visiting preacher spoke a “Word” over me and the child I was carrying. He said the child was going to be unique. For some reason, I couldn’t get that word out of my head: Unique.
Well, as also could have been predicted, when the baby came, Zeke was nowhere to be found. By that I mean: neither I nor anyone else could find him. Keep in mind that this was before everybody owned their own cell phones. And granted the baby did come two weeks before her projected due date. And she’d chosen, of all times, to make her entrance at night, during the time when her father was normally gone (as opposed to her two older sisters who came, one in the afternoon, and the other at four o’clock in the morning).
Zeke had come home as usual around one that morning and found me gone. I didn’t even leave him the courtesy of a note as to where I was going. I’d called my friend and neighbor up the street, Kelly Posey. She’d been the one to take me to the hospital, first dropping off my two girls at her house, then staying with me through the whole birthing thing, which didn’t even take long enough for me to take off my coat and shoes before the nurse said, “I caught her.” My having waited around, hoping and praying that Zeke would come home before the baby came, and I almost didn’t make it to the hospital in time.
Kelly told me later that Zeke had called her house when he came home and discovered I wasn’t there. She laughed as she said, “Do you know that fool husband of yours had the nerve to ask my husband when he called if you and I were out partying somewhere. My husband said he couldn’t believe he’d called our house saying mess like that. Here you are nine months pregnant, and he thinks you and I are out getting our party on at some club.”
Kelly told him I’d given birth when she carried the girls home so they could get ready for school. He arrived at the hospital that morning a little before eight, I guess after Kelly dropped the children off and they were safely at the bus stop.
Kelly had been absolutely wonderful. She’d stayed with me until three that morning and was up early enough to take my children home. Kelly laughed at how Zanetta, as young as she was at the time, was the driving force in ensuring that she didn’t mess up her perfect attendance record at school. Zanetta made sure Kelly got up in time to get her home so she could get ready for school. Kelly tried to tell her she could legitimately be off from school after having a new baby sister born during the morning hours. Zanetta almost started to cry because she wanted to go to school.
I hadn’t been surprised Zeke had said something crazy like that. He didn’t like the fact that I had any friends at all. Here he was gone every night of the week, but he didn’t want me going anywhere, except to work and church functions. And even church stuff got him going. He thought my church attendance was extreme. But to have a friend to talk with, to do things with—Zeke did everything he could to keep that from happening. He’s the main reason my friend Danielle and I are no longer best friends.
If I wanted to go somewhere, he wouldn’t stay home and keep the girls. If there was somewhere I had to be, I had to either take the girls with me or find a babysitter. And the few times that Kelly and I did go out, he clowned so, it wasn’t even funny.
The first time Kelly and I went out, Zeke came home, found I wasn’t there, and started drinking as he waited on my return. When I walked through the door, he started with his drunken talk, asking me who I’d slept with while I was gone. I didn’t even bother dignifying his crazy talk with an answer. When that didn’t work, he started crying, saying he had lost me and he didn’t know how he was going to go on without me. If it hadn’t been so pitiful, it would have been funny.
The next time I went out with Kelly (keep in mind that I probably went somewhere fun maybe twice in two years), he decided to stay home that night and wait for me to come back. I couldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t stay home with me when I was at home. He wouldn’t stay home and keep our children for me to go somewhere. He wouldn’t stay home from his normal routine to even take me out. But this particular time when I go out, he stays home and waits for me. It was crazy!
As before, when I walked in the door, he’d been drinking. He must have decided to approach things from a different angle this time around because he really attacked me for having been gone so long. He called me names because I’d “chosen” to leave our children instead of being a decent mother and staying home the way a good mother should. He then got in his car, drove off, called me from a pay phone, and proceeded to say, “Did you have fun with your lesbian friend?”
I slammed the phone down, hung up in his face.
I knew Zeke was trying to isolate me. Why? Now that was the question that I really couldn’t answer. But then, Kelly’s husband didn’t like that she and I were friends much, either. Oh, he pretended to like me. And whenever I’d stop at their house and he was there, he was always polite and cordial to me. But I could tell he would have preferred I not be there at all, ever.
Kelly and I both concluded that our husbands were trying to control us. And the two of us having a friend outside of them just didn’t work in their favor. Controllers know that if a person has someone to talk to outside of them, the person they are trying to control just might find the courage to make things better for themselves.
Kelly and I finally came to the conclusion that neither her husband nor mine truly wanted things to be better. Not for us.
* * *
But all of that was the past. And for whatever reason, today when Zeke woke up, he wasn’t as nasty as he normally was. Today, he’d even smiled and said, “Good m
orning.”
Ironically, something like that starts messing with your mind, starts you to wonder what exactly might he be up to.
What?
Chapter 13
Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
—Ephesians 6:1
Christmastime turned out to be busy for The Painted Lady Flower Shop. I was too excited about that! Forget how much we needed the money (and we really did need the money), it boosted my confidence tremendously. I was starting to question whether I’d done the right thing in leaving my job to do something as “irresponsible” (that’s how Zeke refers to it when he thinks I’m not around to hear him) as to pursue my dreams. After all, I wasn’t footloose and fancy-free like my daughters; I had responsibilities with my name on them. Zeke’s lack of support had only added to my frustration.
He never seemed to have a positive word for me or what I was doing. Never. He didn’t call me a loser outright. But I picked up on the words not said . . . the invisible words in between what was said. Zeke definitely resented that I’d left my great-paying job (a job that had taken some of the pressure off of him) with wonderful benefits (that included dental insurance), to pursue what he’d referred to as “the unknown.”
So when the phone at the shop started ringing off the hook with people placing orders for floral arrangements and plants such as poinsettias for Christmas, I couldn’t do anything but thank God.
And if all of this wasn’t enough, I was given the gift of another surprise: all three of our daughters were home for Christmas. With all of this, you’d think this would have been a great Christmas.
Forever Soul Ties Page 6
