by Cronk, LN
“Jordan? Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.”
“They’re good . . . Charlotte’s fine and the baby’s healthy.”
“Good.”
“She had a boy . . .”
He nodded.
“I just thought you’d want to know.”
He was still looking out the window, but he nodded again.
The bus lurched forward and I got back up and went to the front where Laci was sitting, leaving Jordan alone with his thoughts.
~ ~ ~
THE DAY AFTER we returned home Mrs. White invited us over for dinner to hear about our trip. We stopped in to see Ashlyn and Brent’s new baby on the way over.
Andrew, as Laci’s phone full of smiley faces had indicated, was healthy as could be.
All those months of worry for nothing.
Amelia was in ‘big sister’ mode, carting toys out of her room and lining them up on the couch, presenting him with a new one every time he squealed or hiccupped.
“I can tell you’re a big help to your mommy, aren’t you?” Laci asked. She nodded dramatically.
Charlotte, on the other hand, had left the hospital without her baby boy. He had gone home with his new parents.
Charlotte had gone home with her mother.
Dorito chattered endlessly throughout dinner, talking all about his friends at the orphanage and the landfill. Charlotte looked up at him when she had to (“And guess what, Charlotte?”), but most of the time she stared quietly at her food.
After supper, while Mrs. White went into the kitchen to get dessert, Dorito begged Charlotte to take him to the basement to play foosball.
“I don’t think so, Dorito,” she said softly, shaking her head.
“You go ahead on down,” I told him. “Daddy’ll come down and play with you in a few minutes.”
Dorito sighed and headed for the stairs, his shoulders sagging in disappointment. Mrs. White returned as he was leaving and Charlotte asked to be excused.
“I can tell it’s been hard . . .” Laci said quietly when Charlotte had left. Mrs. White looked through the doorway where she had disappeared and then sat down, looking at the dessert she’d just brought in.
“He looked just like Greg,” Mrs. White finally said in a voice barely above a whisper. “Especially his hair.”
She glanced at me and then went on, tears spilling out of her eyes. She turned toward Laci who took her hand. “I remember Greg had exactly the same kind of hair when he was born . . .”
Laci squeezed her hand. I pushed my chair back and headed out the door.
Down the hall and to the left was Charlotte’s bedroom. Her door was open, but I knocked anyway.
“Can I come in?”
She was sitting on the edge of her bed. She looked up and gave me a little shrug.
I sat down beside her on the bed. I was going to tell her that everything was going to be okay . . . that somewhere out there a family was feeling so blessed to have that baby . . . just like Laci and I had been blessed with Dorito and Lily . . . that I knew she was hurting right now though . . . that I was sorry . . . that everything was going to be alright.
I was going to tell her all that, but as soon as I put my arm around her shoulder she started sobbing and she buried her head against me. I wound up just holding her while she cried and I didn’t tell her anything that I’d planned on saying.
But I think she knew.
~ ~ ~
TWO MONTHS LATER our combined youth group attended the annual True Love Waits conference that I’d taken Jordan to a year before.
I was more than a little surprised when I found out that Charlotte was planning to attend. I went again too, and I’ll go ahead and admit that by now I had a much better attitude about the whole “wait until you’re married” idea.
One of the testimonies was given by a young man who said that he’d made poor decisions in the past . . . that he had not remained abstinent, but that he now wished he had. I thought he was going to go on about repercussions, which of course Charlotte already knew all about, but he didn’t. Instead, he talked to the audience about something called “second virginity”.
“In Colossians, Paul tells us that God ‘has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.’ So what does that mean if you’ve already done something that you wish you could take back? It means that God offers second chances. It means that He has offered us the gift of forgiveness even though we don’t deserve it.
“Just because you’ve been sexually active in the past doesn’t mean that you can’t make a commitment to stay sexually abstinent until marriage from this point forward. When you do this, you experience a second virginity. This second virginity comes by asking for God’s forgiveness through Jesus and by committing to stay sexually abstinent until marriage.
“Sin does have consequences and you may be dealing with some of those consequences now, but by reclaiming your purity, you can have a whole new outlook and freedom in your life.”
I’m sure they’d talked about this at the conference the year before too, but I probably hadn’t been paying all that much attention. Now, however, I couldn’t help but glance toward Charlotte to see if she was.
Not only was she paying attention, but it was obvious that she’d known about all this before signing up for the trip.
After lunch, when she took her pledge, I thought how sorry I was that Jordan wasn’t there to see it.
~ ~ ~
AFTER THE TRUE Love Waits conference, Charlotte slowly began to change again. She went back to work at Wilma’s, and any Saturday when we were out doing something, Tanner and I made it a point to stop in for breakfast.
“Charlotte!” Tanner called out to her one morning.
“What?”
“Where’s my sausage?” he asked, pointing to his plate.
She looked at our order slip.
“You didn’t order any sausage,” she said.
“Yes, I did,” Tanner insisted.
“Oh,” she said, biting her lip. “Sorry. I’ll go get you some.”
Four weeks later though he told her that she forgot to put cheese on his hash browns.
“You didn’t order any cheese,” she told him.
“Yes, I did.”
“No,” she said, shoving the order slip in his face. “You didn’t. If you had ordered cheese on your hash browns I would have written ‘cheese’ after the words ‘hash browns’. Do you see the word ‘cheese’ on here anywhere?”
“I ordered cheese.”
“Do you want cheese?” she asked, putting a hand on her hip.
Tanner nodded at her.
“Fine!” she said, stalking away.
“I don’t think you ordered cheese,” I whispered after she was gone.
“I know,” he smiled at me.
She marched back up to our table and threw a cold slice of cheese down on top of his hash browns.
“It’s not melted!” Tanner cried.
“I know you didn’t say you wanted melted cheese,” Charlotte said, turning to walk away.
“Hey, Charlotte?” I called, winking at Tanner.
“What?” she sighed, turning around.
“I wanted scrambled,” I said, pointing to my fried eggs.
“You want scrambled?”
“Uh-huh.”
She marched back to our table and took my fork out of my hand and started chopping my eggs up and mixing them around on my plate.
“There,” she said, handing me back my fork. “Now they’re scrambled.”
It had taken awhile, but our old Charlotte had finally returned.
I was really glad to have her back
When we left Tanner ordered two sausage biscuits to go and Charlotte wrapped them up for him and put them into a paper bag.
“I left your tip on the table,” I told her.
“Great,” she said. “Now I can retire.”
“Here,” Tanner said, tossing the bag into the backseat where Jordan was sitting.
“We’re not choosing between the two of you,” I had told him when he’d realized that Tanner was pulling into the parking lot of Wilma’s. “You can sit out here and sulk or you can come in and have breakfast.”
He had decided to sit out there and sulk.
Now he glowered at us and took a sip of the slushy that he had managed to walk into the gas station to get while he was waiting.
~ ~ ~
GRADUATION NIGHT CAME and Laci’s parents kept Dorito and Lily for us. We sat next to Mrs. White, fanning ourselves with our programs, waiting for the commencement exercises to start. According to the program, Charlotte would be speaking second. The senior class president spoke first, followed by the salutatorian, and finally the valedictorian.
Salutatorian was nothing to sneeze at.
The class president talked for about five minutes . . . I have no idea what about. When it was Charlotte’s turn she walked to the podium and adjusted her tassel. Then she looked to her audience and began speaking.
“I believe I’m the only member of our graduating class who has already stood on this stage once before and received a high school diploma. I remember that I was eight years old and I didn’t know what a diploma was. My mom explained to me that it was a piece of paper that showed you had gone to high school and learned everything you were supposed to learn. As many of you know, my father and my brother were killed a little over ten years ago. The principal wanted me and my mother to accept my brother’s diploma. Even though he didn’t get to finish high school, I guess they figured that he had learned everything that he was supposed to have learned.
“So now I stand here again, about to receive my own diploma. Apparently I have also learned what I was supposed to have learned. What exactly, I wonder, is that?
“One thing I’ve just recently learned is that if you’re going to make a speech at a public high school graduation, it must be approved by the administration first.
“I was going to tell you one of the things I’ve learned is that no matter how dismal things may seem, God is always good and He always loves us more than we’ll ever know. But Principal Fischer told us that we need to leave God out of our speeches. Apparently the School Board gets edgy when kids start mentioning how good God is or how much He loves us.”
She glanced over at Principal Fischer and smiled.
“And I don’t want to get him in trouble or anything, so I’m not going to mention all that.”
Principal Fischer laughed.
Smooth, Charlotte. Real smooth.
“I decided that I wanted to take this opportunity tonight to share with you some of the most important things that I have learned – but don’t panic. I’m not going to be talking to you about Longfellow, or parabolas, or ancient wars, because I’m not going to be talking about things that I’ve learned in school.
“Although school is all about learning, life is where the real learning takes place. Sometimes people make mistakes and those mistakes are usually the most powerful learning experiences that we can have. Any of us can pick up a book and learn the things that are in it, or have a teacher explain to us certain things that we must memorize and then recite back. But the things we learn that matter the most along the way are not things that can be put into books. Often they are things that we cannot even share with each other, because they are lessons that can only occur through the unique experiences we each have.
“A biology book can help us determine if a plant is a monocot or a dicot, but it cannot tell us which seeds will grow when they are planted and which ones will not.
“An economics teacher can help us to earn tremendous amounts of money during our lifetime, but he doesn’t teach us that the person who chases after money will never have enough.
“In debate class we learn to construct powerful arguments that can sway an audience to agree with a point that even we ourselves may not agree with, but we learn the hard way that once words leave our mouths we can never take them back.”
As Charlotte spoke I realized that these were thinly veiled passages from Ecclesiastes. I doubted if the atheists in the audience were going to recognize that though.
“We’re swamped with articles in magazines and newspapers that share with us the latest research on diet and exercise so that we can live long and healthy lives. I agree that it’s important to learn to take care of our bodies, but we would do well to remember that they will only be able to serve us for a limited amount of time, no matter how we treat them. If only we put as much time and thought into preparing for that moment when our bodies will inevitably fail us.”
Even the atheists were going to be able to figure out what she was talking about there . . .
“I still have a lot to learn . . . both in school and in life, but one thing I know that’s the most important thing for us to learn is how to love. That is why we’re here . . . it is the reason we were created.”
She was really skating on thin ice now, but she probably figured the superintendent of schools wasn’t going to dart across the stage and tackle her mid-speech or anything.
“When I was eight years old I thought that the most painful thing in the world was to lose somebody that you love, but I’ve since learned that this isn’t true. The most painful thing in the world is to hurt somebody that you love.”
It wasn’t my imagination . . . she was looking straight at Jordan when she said that.
“I have also learned, however, that the most wonderful thing in the world is to have someone in your life who loves you enough to be able to forgive you after you do hurt them. I have been blessed enough to have people in my life who love me that much.
“Oops,” she said, looking over at Principal Fischer again. “I probably shouldn’t have said blessed.”
He smiled at her.
“One last thing I have learned is that each day is a precious gift and that tomorrow is not promised to any of us. Because of that I will tell you now that I care for each of you and that I love you and that I’m glad we’ve shared these years together. And I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I don’t care. I pray that God will bless each and every one of you. Thank you.”
Before she escaped with her friends to celebrate, I found Charlotte and I hugged her and I told her how proud I was of her and I told her that I loved her. I looked around for Jordan because I wanted to tell him the same thing, but I couldn’t find him.
He was already gone.
~ ~ ~
GREG AND HIS father had been killed during a lock-down at our high school, right before Christmas of our senior year. The young man who had killed them was named Kyle Dunn and he had been executed not long before Laci and I were married.
It had been a long process for me to forgive Kyle for what he’d done. Every time I thought that I’d completely forgiven him I would find out that I really hadn’t and time and time again God would work through someone to show me that.
One of the first people He’d used had been Greg’s mom.
She’d asked me to come over to her house. She’d made me promise her that I would go and visit Kyle in prison. At the time I had honestly thought that she’d been doing it for Kyle’s sake.
“David,” she’d said, looking into my eyes and laying a hand on mine. “Have I ever asked you to do anything for me?”
I’d shaken my head at her.
“I’m asking you now. I want you to please go see Kyle over your Christmas break. Will you do that? Will you do that for me . . . please?”
I had waited for a long moment and then I’d finally nodded.
“Promise me.”
I’d nodded again.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“I promise.”
“Promise what?”
“I promise I’ll go see Kyle . . .”
She’d looked at me, wanting me to say more, but I had j
ust stared at her.
“Over Christmas break?”
I’d nodded again.
“Say it,” she’d insisted. “Over Christmas break.”
I’d nodded one more time and answered. “Over Christmas break.”
Two weeks after graduation, Charlotte flew to Florida with her mom to visit her grandmother. When she got back there would be only four weeks left before she went off to State and before Jordan went off to Houston. When I realized this and I thought about how Mrs. White had convinced me that I needed to go and forgive Kyle, I knew what I had to do and I wandered across the street.
Jordan was in the shop, running on the treadmill. The sweat was pouring off of him.
“Hey, David. What’s up?” he asked, pushing a button on the treadmill. He slowed down to a jog, and then came to a complete stop.
“I just wanted to talk to you about something for a minute,” I said, sitting down on the weight bench.
“Okay,” he nodded, reaching for his water bottle. He took a few long swigs and leaned back against a handrail of the treadmill, breathing heavily and looking at me expectantly.
I finally decided to just get right to it.
“I want you to go and talk to Charlotte when she gets back from Florida.”
He turned away from me, put his water bottle back in its holder, and started jogging again.
“You know, Jordan,” I said over the noise of the treadmill. “Everybody makes mistakes.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You’ve made mistakes . . .”
“Yeah,” he admitted, running harder. “But I haven’t managed to get pregnant yet.”
“You have to forgive her Jordan.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
