Love Inspired May 2015 #2

by Missy Tippens

  “I think a lot of people feel that way.” Herself included, despite her efforts to be unbiased. “The public hearing next week should give us answers.”

  “I guess. I don’t know if you remember the Donnelly brothers’ father. Not a stellar citizen. Connor and Josh seem okay, but Jared hasn’t been around here for years. What do we know about him?”

  Leanne’s changing from concerns about the track to concerns about Jared personally rankled Becca and compelled her to defend Jared and his project. “At the Singles Group meeting the other night, Jared stressed that the primary purpose of his project is a racing school for kids, based on tenets similar to those of the Boys & Girls Club organization.”

  “That’s better and says something about Jared—that he wants to help kids. But I’d heard that there’d be regular professional races. No?”

  Becca hesitated, as she remembered Jared doing when she’d asked the same question at Bible trivia. “Yes, there’ll be racing. To bring in money for the kids’ program and boost the local tourist trade.”

  Leanne shook her head. “We put up with that annual motorcycle rally for the sake of tourism. I’m not sure we need more of the same, even if it does bring in money.”

  Despite some of the stories her ex-father-in-law told, Becca hadn’t seen anything herself or read anything in the Times of Ti that indicated the bikers attending the rally caused any more trouble than an equal number of other tourists would. There were just so many of them here at once.

  “A motocross track wouldn’t bring in anywhere near the number of people as the rally.”

  “Then it wouldn’t even be worth it for the money.”

  She could argue that she’d meant all at one time, that the track could bring in that many people over the season. But why was she arguing at all? Leanne hadn’t mentioned anything Becca didn’t have concerns about herself. Instead of saying that, she was answering Leanne from Jared’s perspective, from what he’d said the other evening at church, which made the issues seem less insurmountable. Her thoughts jumbled in her head. Leanne was an open-minded person, unlike her ex-in-laws. And if reasonable people were siding with the Sheriff and Debbie, it would be hard for her to oppose them. Her ex-in-laws would use that against her and, by association, against the kids. Besides she was concerned about having the track, school, whatever so close to her house. She’d go at lunchtime and hear Jared out about his project and be fair when it came up for vote by the Zoning Board. But she couldn’t let her attraction to the man influence her thinking. Her kids came first and always would.

  * * *

  Jared glanced at his bike parked in the driveway of the parsonage. It had been too dark to ride his property last night when he’d left the church. He tapped the cardboard tube with the racetrack plans and survey map against his leg. And he’d spent the morning working on his presentation, so he hadn’t gotten out today, either. The walk to the camp lodge would work the edge off his nervous energy, for now, and let him go over what he wanted to say to Eli and Drew one more time. He’d decided he might as well give them and Becca the presentation he’d give at the public hearing next week, with some additional information about the school that might interest the guys as youth workers and soften Becca’s resistance.

  At the sound of gravel crunching under tires, he lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the midday sun and looked up the road toward the highway. A compact SUV slowed and stopped at the end of the parsonage driveway. Emily rolled down the window. “Hey, want a lift to the lodge?”

  “No, thanks. Not to be rude, but I want the walk time to think.”

  Emily waved him off. “Don’t sweat it. Drew and Eli aren’t going to be a hard sell. Drew barely knows about it and he’s already mapping out how your program can help his program. He’s looking for ways to get some of our scholarship campers who come up from the city to keep coming when they’re older.”

  “Good to know.” But it wasn’t Eli or Drew he expected to be his hard sell.

  “See you up there.” Emily started to close the window and stopped. “I just thought of something. If you want to do any kind of PR media blitz, I have time in my schedule.” She paused. “You look confused. I’m a graphic artist. I worked for an advertising agency in Manhattan before I was married.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” A media campaign made sense. Get his information out like Connor had said.

  “Well, think about it. I can give you a good deal.”

  “Money’s not a problem.”

  “Good to know,” she said echoing his earlier words. She finished rolling up the window and sped off.

  “Hi.”

  Becca startled him.

  “Hey, I didn’t hear you walk up.”

  “I came across the yard from the church, but with all that gravel Emily was throwing, you might not have heard the whole day care walking up the road.”

  “I did notice the lead foot.” He motioned her to the road and stepped around to the traffic side.

  “That was nothing. We took the kids to ride the go-karts at Lake George. You would have thought she was racing a grand prix.”

  “All right. I need to put that girl on a bike.”

  Instead of the comeback he expected, he got silence. Smart move, Donnelly. There’d be plenty of opportunity to start a standoff about motorcycles when they got to the lodge. He didn’t have to jump the gun and get into the conversation now.

  “The trouble is, I can see Emily on a motorcycle.”

  “That’s trouble?”

  Becca frowned.

  Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut? He usually picked his fights carefully, and the last thing he wanted to do was go into the meeting at the lodge at further odds with Becca.

  “Have you always been into motorcycles, even when you were a kid?”

  “You mean like Brendon’s age?”

  “Mmm-hmm. I don’t remember you having a bike in high school.”

  “No, I didn’t, not until the summer before my senior year. I signed up to take auto mechanics at Vo-Tech my senior year. I thought that was a way out of here. I used to work for Bert Miller.” Bert Miller and anyone else he could to have extra money to give his mom. But he didn’t need to tell Becca that. Considering her family, she’d have no way to relate to his dysfunctional one. “He had an old beat-up dirt bike in his garden shed. I asked if I could have it to fix up as part of my pay. He said I could have it and offered to help me work on it.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “Yeah.” It had been and Bert had never said why he’d done it. Nor did Jared know why Bert had given him the property on Conifer Road or helped out Josh and Connor, other than what his grandmother had said about him and his dad being friends at one time. Since it seemed to involve his father, he’d be better off not knowing.

  “That was the bike Tessa was talking about.”

  “Right.”

  “When you got it running, you decided to race rather than become a mechanic?”

  The inflection in her tone said her choice wouldn’t have been racing. “No, it didn’t even occur to me. But it turned out to have been a lot more lucrative choice.”

  “Then how?”

  “Bert saw me tooling around the fields before I got the bike on the road, and said I was a natural. Apparently, he’d done some racing when he was in his twenties. He still had racing contacts and got me into some local amateur races. After I left Paradox Lake, I supported myself and my bike working as a mechanic until I could race full-time.”

  “Bert Miller was a motorcycle racer?”

  The kaleidoscope of expressions crossing Becca’s face said she was trying to reconcile Bert Miller the local bank manager with Bert Miller the bike racer.

  “Yep, it happens even in the best families.”

  Becca stopped and put
her hands on her hips. “That wasn’t necessary. I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I know nothing about motocross or any other kind of racing, except what I’ve read in Brendon’s magazines.”

  “That’s why I asked you to come to this meeting. I want to show you and Eli and Drew the reasons Paradox Lake is the right place for my motocross school. I need people like you three with me.”

  “I’ll keep an open mind.”

  “That’s all I can ask.”

  But, Jared thought as they walked up the pine steps to the Camp Sonrise lodge, would that be enough to get her behind his plans? His thoughts ran to the other night, how much fun he’d had with her, how well they’d worked together as a team. Against his better judgment, he wondered if her open mind applied to him, too.

  * * *

  “Any more questions?”

  Watching Jared across the table, Becca couldn’t help comparing him with Brendon when he was finishing up an explanation of some accomplishment at school or at soccer practice and waiting for her approval. His energy. The way he perched on the edge of his chair. His excited gestures. No one could question that Jared was one hundred and ten percent behind launching his motocross school.

  “I’m good,” Eli said. “I can see your program being really valuable for some of the students I advise at the high school. It could have been for me after we lost my Dad when I was fourteen. Something like this might have pulled me out of the spiral of trouble that nearly sucked me to the bottom before I joined the Air Force out of high school.”

  “Got my answers,” Drew said. “I’ll work up some ideas for integrating your program with my senior camper program and our youth group activities and get back to you.”

  Jared’s gaze went to Becca, and she wanted to meet it with the same enthusiasm as Eli and Drew. “I agree with Eli and Drew about the premise of the school.”

  “But there’s something you’re not satisfied with,” he said giving her an opening to voice her unresolved issues.

  Several somethings. “I don’t have any more questions.” She’d answer him professionally without letting her personal concerns color her words. “I have some advice for the public hearing.”

  He crossed his arms. “I’m listening.”

  She would not let him intimidate her. “Get the updated traffic studies before the meeting. I know people are concerned about traffic and the possibility of a roundabout. You need to come up with a way to reassure some people that the professional races won’t bring in what they may see as an undesirable element. Among other things, I know people are concerned about the proximity to the Girl Scout camp.”

  Jared uncrossed his arms and she filled her empty lungs.

  He leaned forward on his elbows. “I’m glad you brought up the camp. I hadn’t thought of it. I’ll talk to the scouting council. The racing program is for girls, too. As for the undesirable element, Emily suggested a media campaign.”

  “Good idea. She does excellent work.”

  Drew acknowledged Becca’s recognition of his wife’s ability with a nod. “She’s done a lot of national ad campaigns.”

  Uncertainty waved over Becca. Jared using Emily could work against Becca if she decided she couldn’t support the project.

  “These are good.” He tapped a note into his cell phone. “Anything else?”

  She hated to extinguish the expectation that lit his eyes again. “I disagree about the program being open to kids younger than twelve or thirteen.”

  “You’re a teacher,” Jared said. “You know what some kids are into by the time they’re in middle school.”

  Becca did know, but her kids wouldn’t. She wouldn’t let them.

  When she didn’t say anything, he continued, “I want to get the kids involved before they even start thinking about getting into in trouble.”

  “Racing is dangerous.” She made the only argument she had in her arsenal. The only one besides it scared her, which carried zero weight against any of Jared’s points.

  “More dangerous than drinking or drugs or vandalism?”

  Eli and Drew had faded into the background. This was between her and Jared.

  “No, and don’t think I have my head buried in the sand. I know what goes on.” She did. But she was a good parent. A Christian parent.

  Eli snapped shut the notebook he’d used for notes, bringing him and Drew back into the picture.

  Eli’s mother, a single mother, had been a good parent. From what Jared’s grandmother had shared with her, Jared’s mother, a single mother for all intents and purposes, was a good mother. Both had raised their children in the church. Pain split her chest. They probably prayed for God to watch over their boys as hard as she prayed the same prayer for Brendon and Ari. Obviously, the Lord’s plan for her was to be a single parent. But in her now-broken plans for her life and having kids, that had never even been a blip on the radar.

  “Then you know how young some of them are. Part of the problem is the lack of activities, outside of school, for the kids as they get older. And for kids like I was who aren’t involved in school.”

  He was so earnest. Her resolve softened. She was thinking in terms of Brendon, not other kids it could help.

  “The program will be different for the younger children, with scaled-down, less powerful bikes.”

  A knock sounded on the lodge door. “Hi,” Leanne said. “We’re here with the kids for swim lessons.”

  “Which means I have to get back to work,” Drew said.

  “Me, too,” Becca said.

  “Think about it. I’ll send you the curriculum. Connor has your email?”

  “Yes, and I will think about it. Everything we talked about.”

  * * *

  Becca was still thinking about Jared and his plans when she stepped out of the church hall into the humid evening air. Despite her having left the front windows cracked open, the air in the car was even more stifling than it was outside. She turned the key and got nothing but a clicking sound. It couldn’t be the battery. She’d just had it replaced. Becca tried again as the thick hot air threatened to suffocate her.

  She pulled the hood lever, threw open the door and walked to the front of the car. A quick check showed the battery cables were tightly connected. No belts looked to be broken or missing. She grabbed her phone from her pocket and punched in the number for Tom Hill’s garage. As the phone rang, she prayed it wasn’t anything major. The car needed to make it until October. That’s when the home equity loan Matt had given her along with the house would be paid off, and she could afford to buy a new one.

  The line went dead before anyone answered, typical of the spotty cell phone coverage in the mountains. She walked to the different corners of the parking lot to see if she could pick up a connection, stopping when she heard the crescendoing sound of a motorcycle turning off the highway onto Hazard Cove Road. Becca looked around at the tall pines that lined the parking lot and stiffened. She was alone. The church hall blocked any view Connor might have of her from the parsonage, if he were home. She breathed in and out and shook her hands. She shouldn’t let Leanne’s comments this morning get to her. This was the parking lot of the church. She walked back to the car. Duh! She could call Tom from the phone inside.

  As the sound of the bike continued to grow louder, she glanced toward the road, expecting to see it fly by toward the lake. Instead, the rider slowed and turned into the parking lot. Her heart raced. A gray face guard obscured his features. Becca judged the distance to the hall door and how long it would take her to grab the keys from the car and unlock it. She pushed her hair back from her eyes and stared hard at the rider. It was Jared. Relief and embarrassment pooled inside her. If she’d looked at the motorcycle, she would have recognized the distinctive green color. The heat, the car and Leanne’s words had set her nerves on edge.

  He slo
wed to a stop next to her, shut off the engine and removed his helmet. “Hi. What’s the problem?” He lifted his chin toward the open hood of her car.

  A bubble of giddiness rose inside her. Her knight in shining chrome.

  “I don’t know. It won’t start. The battery is new, and I checked the battery cables to make sure they weren’t loose.”

  “I’ll take a look. The keys?”

  “In the car,” she said, waiting for the look of disapproval she would have gotten from her ex-husband. “I should have grabbed them.”

  Jared shrugged as if it were no big deal. He lowered the kickstand of his bike and swung his denim-clad leg over and off. Becca stood by the side of the car while he folded himself in and moved the seat back. He turned the key with the same result she’d gotten.

  He turned it back. “Sounds like the alternator went.”

  “When you drove up, I was going inside to call Hill’s Garage. Guess I’d better.”

  “I can replace it. I’d have to go into Ticonderoga to get the part, so it wouldn’t be until tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, but you don’t have to. I usually take it to Tom’s.”

  “I know I don’t have to, but you’d be doing me a favor to let me.”

  Was Jared flirting with her? Her heart thumped. It had been so long since she’d been in a situation where that would happen that she was unsure if he was or if it was wishful thinking on her part.

  “I have lots of time on my hands. I’ve got my bikes in top running order, my truck tuned, Connor and Josh’s cars tuned, new brakes on Grandma’s car and a new catalytic converter installed on Harry’s car.”

  “Tom had better watch it or he’ll have no customers left.”

  “That’s not a problem for the next few days. He and his family are on vacation until Tuesday. The garage is closed through Wednesday. I called him there with a zoning question and got that message. Connor filled me in on the vacation part.”