“Not much farther. You need to stop?”
She laughed. “No. I was just curious. I didn’t hear you say where we were headed.”
“Right.”
“You’re kidnapping me?”
He gave a cheeky grin. “If you want to look at it that way, go ahead.”
Grace stuck out her tongue. She turned to stare out the window as they came into the next city. Charlesvoix perched alongside the bay, its quaint and beautiful Victorian homes lining the street.
Ted seemed intent on stuffing her full of history. “You can probably tell by the name that this part of the state was deeply influenced by the French. Fur-traders, ’way back. That’s where most of the early money was made. The good old days of John Jacob Astor.”
Eventually they wound around the shore to the village of Petoskey which overlooked Little Traverse Bay. Ted drove past the trendy marina, tidy buildings, and ballpark. “We’ll stop at the Historical Society Museum on our way back,” he told her as he pointed out the pretty blue-gray and white painted building. They traveled along the coast to the north until they came to Petoskey State Park. Ted drove in through the gate to the ranger station.
“It’s usually best to come here in the morning, early in the season after the ice is off, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find them anytime.”
Grace didn’t have a clue what he meant. This time she refused to ask for clarification. She began to leaf through the brochures Ted handed her after showing their park tag.
“Petoskey stones,” she read aloud, “are Michigan’s state fossil.”
For a petty second she was pleased at hunting up this answer for herself. “So, we’re hunting for rocks?”
“Not just any rocks. These are special. They were part of an ancient reef off the coast of Lake Michigan, and break off due to wave action, washing in toward shore. They’re gray, anonymous-looking things, actually. The pieces are all sizes. It’s easiest to see the pattern of the reef when they’re wet. It appears like clusters of white rings, or sometimes sorta like broccoli. They’re really cool when polished. People even make jewelry out of them.”
“Oh! I think I’ve seen some at an antique store.”
They drove in toward the beach through the dunes and parked the car.
“Are we gonna find one today?” Eddy asked his father.
“They’re not always easy to spot, remember? Especially with all these people around, looking, too. But we’ll have fun checking out the beach, won’t we?”
Grace admired the way Ted left hope for his son, but also did not promise something he couldn’t be sure of.
They walked along the narrow waterfront, moving at a slow pace. Eddy skipped among the waves on the sandy beach which was filled with people wading up to their knees, eagerly searching in the breakers for the special fossils. After struggling across the deeper gravel to get to the water’s edge, Ted had fairly easy walking where the wet sand gave him smoother ground to travel. Using only one crutch, he held Grace’s hand. Support, she could give.
The sun and whoosh of the waves washed contentment over her. High-pitched squawking of boisterous seagulls lent an otherworldly atmosphere. When they reached some tall beach grass they stopped to watch the little sandpipers cheep and run up to and away from waves rolling inland.
Ted gazed out into the open water. He seemed mesmerized by the scene until he turned to Grace. “You must have felt alone a lot after your husband died, and your parents, too.” He didn’t add her son Sean’s name to the list. She turned to seek out Eddy, a few paces away.
Ted looked lake-ward again. “Do you ever wonder if humans are alone in the universe? With all of the space exploration going on, and everything, it seems so strange to think about.”
She wondered at his mood today. Ted started out cheerful, although he was obviously in some pain shown by his white-knuckled grip on the crutch and how he kept his weight off his left hip as much as possible. He draped himself over the crutch as he swung his head around toward her, black hair falling across one eye, waiting for her to answer.
She brushed a blowing curl away from her lips and stared back into his ocean blue eyes, at the crinkled lines around his nose and mouth, the wind ruffling his loose white shirt. Did he feel alone like that? Should she tell him now how she felt? But where would that conversation lead? Better stick with his question.
She bent her head to stare at the grains of sand and the crawling critters she could pick out. “Do you think those sand lions realize we’re here?” She pointed to the ant lions, insects commonly called “sand lions” around that part of the state. Delicately-winged creatures usually an inch or so long, they made pits in the sand and awaited for the unwary prey to come close enough to be captured and eaten.
Ted frowned at her return question. “So you think there’s something, someone, bigger than us in the universe, and we simply don’t realize it? Come on.”
She didn’t back down. “I know there’s Someone bigger than us in the universe. In fact, this Someone made the universe.”
Ted heaved a sigh. He lifted and set down the crutch. “God. Of course. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone does, indeed. But very few people know God.”
“You can’t know God any more than your sand lions know you.” Ted squashed a few of them with his crutch.
How quickly her gentle love turned to angry pity. “Unlike you, Ted monster, the God of the universe would never crush you without warning and for no reason.”
Ted shifted on the sand, the muscles of his forearm flexing as he resettled the crutch. “What about the wars, and heart attacks, and-and all that other stuff that happens, lots of times without warning? What about me? I deserve at least some answers.”
“What makes you think God causes that to happen? Honestly, that’s such a lame blame.” She set her hand on top of his, inviting him to face her. “People don’t want to admit that we’re the problem. We think we do everything right, and then the Almighty can’t stand it, so he throws us for a loop just to see us dance, and that’s not true at all. No one does everything right. All of us have selfish desires at one time or another.”
She stroked his knuckles to take away some of the sting of her words. “So, the answer to your question, Ted, is ‘all of the above.’ Yes, I’ve felt lonely at times, but never completely alone. I don’t know if humans are the only creatures with a soul that God created in the universe, but no, we’re not alone.”
She removed her hand and faced the breakers, shielding her eyes from the sun and wind.
“Ha! I knew it! You do believe in aliens from outer space!”
Ted changed the subject, as she suspected he would. He was good at starting a conversation, but when things got dicey, or uncomfortable, he ran as fast as she did. And she was perfectly willing to go along with him, not willing to break the bubble of trust developing between them.
“Well, of course. Don’t you? Please don’t tell Eddy, or we’ll never hear the end of it.”
Steamy wisps of bubbly gray fog began to billow in across the waves. The air cooled in a moment, and Eddy came back to them, shivering.
“Let’s go,” Ted said.
“B-but I haven’t found the right s-stone, Daddy!”
Ted didn’t, or couldn’t respond, but stood stiffly, his lips pressed into a narrow line.
Grace offered her hand. “We’ll come back. Pretty soon you won’t be able to see through the fog, anyway. You can hunt as we walk.” She pointed back toward the parking lot. “Look, we have a long way to go.” Eddy dubiously eyed their trail along the beach. He shivered harder. She pulled a towel and shirt from the beach bag slung over her shoulder and rubbed him dry before she tugged the shirt over his head. All the while he stared intently at the waves crashing up next to them, carefully watching each ebb and flow that tickled their toes.
She looked at Ted, hoping he had the strength to walk back. He was breathing hard, but otherwise all right. He nodded at her. “I can make it.
”
Eddy brought a bit of greenish stone for them to look at. “Is this one?”
Ted smiled. “Maybe. We can take it home and look at it better.”
“Yippee!” Eddy skipped ahead.
“I have a stone my mother gave me, when I was about his age,” Ted said quietly as they wandered in the child’s erratic trail. “My dad found and polished it when he was young. You can’t put them in a rock tumbler or anything like that, because they’re so soft. You have to rub them very carefully by hand with different grits of paper.”
They trudged on, stepping in tandem. “Anyway, my dad gave the stone he spent so much time on as a boy to my mother when they started dating.” He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. “He told me it was a symbol of how much he believed that she was the right one. Permanent, yet fragile.” Ted seemed to be quoting, eyes half-closed. “She passed away a few years after she gave it to me. I take it out and look at it when Eddy and I talk about his grandma and grandpa.” He watched his little boy scamper back from a bold seagull. “I even make up stories sometimes,” he confessed, “about what she might have been like if she had lived.”
He cleared his throat, blinked, and stared out over the lake. “I guess it’s time to pass that stone on to Eddy.”
Grace said nothing, but pretended the breeze blew something into her eye to make it tear.
Grace relaxed on her porch swing later, idly pushing herself with her bare foot against the wide painted boards. The sunset rioted in front of her, bathing the yard with psychedelic oranges and mauves. Misty shrouds hung in low clouds out over the lake, which she couldn’t see, but knew was there. Greg Evans’s familiar car nosed up the driveway and the engine cut off.
She stopped her swinging and sat up, wary as a moth around a security light. What now?
“Alone? Really?” Greg got out of the car and challenged her from the walkway. “The Marshalls give you some time off or will one of them show up any second?”
She sighed, composed herself, and slumped back into the seat, toeing the floor to set the swing back in motion. The best way to confront a bully is to ignore him.
Greg sat, uninvited, on her front step. He stared at the remains of the color show in the west, clasping his knee and watching the path through the hedge to the main house, as if considering an attack on anything that crossed through. The sky grew dark.
“I’m sorry, Grace. I wanted to continue our conversation from the other day, and this was not a good way to start. I’ve never, well, at least not since second grade, had this intense experience of dislike for another person.”
She still did not acknowledge his presence.
“All right, Grace. I deserve this. May I humbly request your attention?”
“You’re sounding like a jealous lover. You’re my boss. I don’t want to jeopardize that. I don’t want anything between us but a friendly professional working relationship right now.” She was glad that the gathering dark hid much of his expression, as well as her own.
Greg sat up straight and stared at her. “Can I at least be concerned about you? Everyone who sees Marshall knows he doesn’t have much longer. What will happen when he dies? Have you thought about that? I want you to know that I’m here for you.”
She rocked the swing a little harder. “Thank you.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose, then stopped the swing altogether and stood. “I’m going in now. Goodnight.”
“Wait.”
At his quiet command, she stopped but didn’t turn around.
“I am jealous,” he said. “I admit it. Marshall had the opportunity to know you first, and needs you—sees you—in a way I hope I never will. But I’m whole, Grace, healthy and able to give you what you’ll never get from him. I speak your language and I understand that you have needs, too, needs that I can meet, if you’ll please give me a chance.”
“Don’t beg,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s unbecoming.”
His body heat reached through her shirt when he walked up and stood directly behind her. His hands settled on her shoulders, but she resisted turning in his arms.
“I can’t pretend that you don’t appeal to me,” she said, speaking toward the empty doorway. “And it’s nice having someone to talk to at the end of the day, someone who can appreciate what you’ve tried to do, anyway.” Grace let her head droop. “We both owe Ted a lot of leeway here. He’s been good to me when I needed it. There’s still something important that I have to do yet, something that I don’t completely understand. But I know that I have to wait.”
Greg’s hands gripped her shoulders convulsively as he pulled her back to rest against his chest. His voice ruffled her hair. “Okay,” he managed in a slightly choked voice. And then he was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
Matty filled in the place of a mother figure for Grace, the one person on earth she could talk to about these troubling personal issues. Yet it was risky to talk to her about the men in her life, as she was her co-worker as well as friend.
“I hoped I read more into it last week at the clinic when Greg told me he’d been waiting for me since Christmas,” Grace said as they walked around the chicken yard the next day. Under Harold’s watchful attention, Eddy scrambled after the latest litter of puppies.
“But last night, when he came over and said those things to me… I just don’t know what to think. He’s such a good man. I’d be a fool to throw away a chance at a normal relationship with someone like him, wouldn’t I? Especially since…since I’m beginning to think Ted might not get better.”
“I’ve never known the doctor to be so smitten,” Matty admitted.
Grace drew in a breath, stopped, and held a hand up to shade her eyes from the glare of the sun. “Smitten? With me? You don’t mean that others think that… That?”
“Well, only if they know him so well.”
“Nancy?”
“Yup, prob’ly!” Matty said cheerfully. “He’s not exactly been a lady’s man about town. Nancy, too, she can see it, I’m certain.”
“Oh, Lord. I can hear it now. They think I’m a man-eater or something like that.”
Matty grinned. “I think they’re still taking bets about the poor man being gay.”
Grace rolled her eyes.
“Always the whispers about things they don’t understand. You have feelings for young Marshall, yes? And only this year now since losing your beloved. Tch, tch.” She shook her head. “People jus’ don’t understand. You help Mr. Marshall to face God with dignity now. That is the greater need, I think. Greg—well, he is waiting to be convinced that God has meaning in this place. He has waited many years for the right mate. He can wait a little longer, yes? Perhaps even the watching you with young Mr. Marshall will help him. So.”
She grasped Grace at the waist and pulled her close in a little motherly hug. “We trust in the good Lord to sort things out in His time.”
Grace nodded and let herself be comforted. Even if Matty as well as Greg believed Ted had no chance to live she was not ready to abandon him to his mysterious illness. Routine care could help him for now. Maybe that’s what God had been trying to tell her.
Wait, wait, wait, the breeze whispered through the leaves on the big willow tree. Wait on me.
Mrs. Vanden Heuvel finally caught on. Grace had conjured a record number of excuses to constantly avoid her turn to lead devotional for the monthly meeting of Helping Hands, the venerable ladies’ society at First Covenant Church. The ten or so ladies who met enjoyed each other’s company, and Grace gradually developed a comfortable if not close relationship with many of them. But she had avoided taking a turn to lead.
She provided baked goods when called upon and took Eddy with her when they helped at the annual “used but nice” yard sale in the church’s parking lot.
She had come regularly to worship with the Marshalls, and while it wasn’t anything like the dynamic experience of practicing faith at her home church, God was everywhere, even in the quiet contemplation and slig
htly dry but quaint liturgical readings. She taught Eddy the words to the Apostle’s Creed, earning his uncle’s praise.
When Mrs. Vanden Heuvel made a loud comment about how much the group looked forward to her leadership the next month, Grace had to give in. The assigned passage was from the letter to the Hebrews, chapter six. “Hope is an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.”
The other women simply read out of the book they used at prior meetings. But hope was something she experienced daily. She decided to speak from her heart on the appointed day. There didn’t seem to be any reason to hide anymore, to keep secrets like Sean, to worry about not being accepted if they knew her past.
“I want to share with you a little about how I feel about hope, instead of reading out of the book,” she told the women after cake and coffee. “You can read the message yourselves, anyway, right? I like to think about that—that hope is secure and firm. Sometimes that’s all we have, you know, when we’re hanging on by our toenails, watching that next giant wave heading our way.”
A couple of the stylish gray-haired ladies nodded and encouraged her with self-conscious smiles, encouraging her.
“‘Hope does not disappoint us.’ That’s from the book of Romans, you know. But I think it refers to our hope of salvation, of seeing God when it’s the right time and right place. Those are the things that we shouldn’t be afraid of. Like sickness and death.”
This time there were a few looks exchanged among the ladies.
“Here’s another verse we should all know: ‘perfect love casts out fear.’ I’m only just beginning to realize what that means. I’ve never really had to hope before, you see, and I’ve never had to be afraid. I wrapped myself in my own little perfect world, doing perfect things. Nothing really went wrong, until—well, until everything went wrong. Even then I didn’t understand that I should have been afraid—that I didn’t have the proper fear of the Lord. You see, I went one day from being a daughter, wife, and mother, having the perfect career, being popular and well-known with several friends, to having nothing.”
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