by Gail Sattler
He gulped down the last of the coffee, then thunked the cup on the table. “I can handle this on my own.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he knew he’d made a mistake. A change came over Patty. The shock in her face softened, her eyes widened, and her mouth opened slightly in the saddest expression he’d ever seen. She felt sorry for him, and that was the last thing he wanted. He didn’t need anyone to feel sorry for him. He had gotten into this mess himself, and he was going to get himself out.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to say anything. Claude also lowered his cup to the table and checked his watch. “This has been good, but I’ve got to get up early for work tomorrow. What about you two?”
Patty checked her watch as well. “Yes, I work as the secretary for our church, and sometimes my hours are flexible but not this week. I’ve got to be in early tomorrow morning.”
Mike stood. “I’ve got to be at work in the morning too.” He wasn’t going to tell them he worked for his father’s company, and he showed up for work at whatever time he got himself together in the morning. He was the office manager, and it was no one’s business what time he got there.
They left together, and Mike followed Patty to her car. On the way home, they passed a large church, which she pointed out was where she worked. He’d known a few people who went to church over the years, but he’d never met someone who actually worked for one.
This time, they actually talked during the drive home. He found Patty pleasant and easy to talk to. He’d meant to shock her with the reason her brother was his probation officer, but now that she knew, she wasn’t judgmental, nor did she turn her nose up at him. She just talked to him like everything was normal.
Mike needed normal. All his friends were laughing at him for being stupid and getting caught. His family, especially his father, was furious, and even though Mike hated to admit it, rightfully so. At work, he knew everyone was whispering behind his back. He didn’t like to admit it, but it hurt.
Too soon, they were parked in front of his house. He politely thanked Patty and went inside. She’d been nice to give him a ride when he needed it and, after all the awkwardness was over, she’d been quite pleasant to talk to. Most of all, she hadn’t snubbed him or talked down to him like he was a low-life, being one of her brother’s cases. He appreciated that right now more than she would ever know.
Since Mike would never see her again, he wouldn’t have the opportunity to thank her properly. Therefore, Mike decided to send her flowers in the morning. He didn’t know where she lived, but he did know where she worked.
Chapter 2
Patricia sat on the secluded park bench, enjoying the warm sunshine. She smiled as the little brown squirrel snatched the piece of bread from her fingers. It ran a safe distance away and held the morsel between its tiny paws. While it ate, it kept a watchful eye on everything around, trusting nothing, not even her.
Just like Mike.
Patricia sighed. She couldn’t get him out of her mind.
She turned her head briefly to glance at the church. She always enjoyed taking her lunch break outside at the park next to the church, but today she needed the escape more than ever.
He’d sent her flowers.
She’d often received flowers for special services and banquets and set them out, but no one had ever delivered flowers specially for her.
The only thing on the note was the word “Thanks,” and his name. She wasn’t sure if it was a simple thank you for the ride, or for something more.
He’d said almost nothing to her until Claude took them out to the donut shop and asked Mike for details as to why he went to the meetings. She knew Mike’s answer was meant to intimidate her and make her back off. She’d been in ministry long enough and counseled enough people to know what he was trying to do.
What had surprised her was the way he’d responded to her in the car during the drive home. She’d only meant to be friendly, recognizing that he felt abandoned by his friends and family. She’d kept the conversation light and carefree, and he’d responded. After he began to relax, she’d asked him a few questions and listened to his opinion, to show him that he had value as a human being. Once he let his guard down, he’d been very pleasant to talk to. She’d actually enjoyed their conversation.
Apparently, when he wanted to, Mike could be quite charming. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she knew he had a severe drinking problem, and that he’d tried to run from the law in an effort to save his own skin, and that drinking and driving appeared to be a habit of his, and that he had tried to manipulate her, she might have fallen for it. She also had no doubt that he was used to getting his own way.
As interesting as she found Mike, she knew it wasn’t smart to get involved in any of Bruce’s cases, especially this one. Just like she wouldn’t get involved when her father was counseling someone, unless she was specifically asked, she was not going to get further involved with Mike, especially since Mike wasn’t a Christian. She couldn’t miss his disapproval when she told him she worked for the church. Still, something about him fascinated her, although it was probably because her heart always went out to those in need, and she could see he needed a friend, badly.
The little squirrel finished his bread and approached cautiously for more. Patricia moved very slowly so as not to scare him. When he took it, she remained bent over, waiting until he was far enough away not to be frightened when she moved to sit up.
Suddenly, the squirrel darted away. She sighed and flopped back on the bench. She’d thought the little squirrel was becoming more used to her because, unless it rained, over the past few weeks she had fed it almost every day.
“Hi, Patty. Mind if I join you?”
Patricia screeched, and all the bread flew out of her hands. At the same time as she turned her head to place the semi-familiar baritone voice, Mike stepped into her line of vision. He was wearing sunglasses, pleated dress slacks, and the same leather jacket he’d worn last night, over a pale blue dress shirt. His cheeks were slightly pink from being outside in the breeze, and his hair was pleasantly mussed. The combination gave him a roguish appeal.
She pressed one hand to her pounding heart. “Mike! You scared me. What are you doing here?”
He smiled as he scanned the ground, noting the scattered pieces of bread. “I needed to go for a walk, and before I knew it, I was here. May I sit down?”
She knew his home was a fair distance away, not what she would call a leisurely walking distance. She wondered how he got there. “Of course you can have a seat.” She shuffled over to give him room. She knew Mike also had a job, yet they were miles from downtown or any industrial estates. She knew he wasn’t driving, and again wondered how he got there.
“This is a nice little spot. I went inside the church, but the pastor told me you were on your lunch break, and that I’d find you here.” He sat beside her, leaned back, rested one elbow on the back of the bench, crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, and smiled.
She stared into his face. Even with the sunglasses hiding his eyes, he was quite a handsome man. Different from last night, today he oozed confidence and poise, and he was even more attractive when he smiled.
“I was just feeding the squirrel,” she said, looking past the bread on the ground, and into the trees. The squirrel was gone, and she doubted it would be back today. She checked her watch. “It’s almost time for me to get back to work.”
At her words, which she had meant only as a hint that she couldn’t stay outside much longer, Mike’s expression changed. His smile dropped, he sat straight, then slumped. Resting his elbows on his knees, he picked off the sunglasses and buried his face in his palms. “I’m not going back to work. My dad fired me today.”
“Oh … Mike … I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head, not removing his hands from his face, his sunglasses dangling from his fingers. “I shouldn’t have come here, but I needed someone to talk to.”
Her heart went out to him. If he had
come to her, a virtual stranger, then she would stay with him on the park bench and let him talk. If she was late getting back to work, she knew her father would understand. She knew Bruce would also understand her involvement, since it was Mike who had sought her out, not the other way around. She could always do the church bulletin tonight, or come in Saturday to finish it, although she hated leaving things until the last minute. However, people were more important than the bulletin. She waited in silence to let Mike continue when he was ready.
“I don’t understand. Dad has always stuck up for me and helped me out before. He paid my bail and made arrangements to have my car released from the impound yard. Now, since I can’t drive it, he also arranged to have it fixed. Everything was fine, just like usual. But today, when I told him I went to another AA meeting, and without my probation officer this time, he changed. He told me what a disappointment I was, and that my services were no longer required. He told me to clean out my desk and get out.”
He paused to draw in a ragged breath. “You know the first thing I wanted to do? My first thought was how bad I wanted to go home and have a drink. I was desperate for the quickest way to get home. Then I caught myself. My first meeting, one of the speakers said he knew he had a problem when he admitted that the most important thing in his life was getting that next drink. That’s all I could think of. The quickest way to go home and drink myself into oblivion. So I came here instead.”
Patricia sat still, watching Mike, and thinking. If she understood correctly, his father’s company was apparently quite large and successful, judging from the way he was dressed and the exterior of his expensive home. From what Mike had said yesterday, this was the first time he’d been arrested, but from his comment about his relationship with his father, it sounded like this was not the first time he’d been in trouble.
In her experience with counseling, she’d seen many times when a parent or spouse, by excusing wrong behavior, covering it up, and even making excuses for it, unwittingly encouraged it to continue. She suspected Mike’s father was such a person.
However, she couldn’t understand why Mike’s admission that he had started going to AA meetings would cause the support to stop. In what seemed an ongoing pattern, Mike finally admitted to having a problem and was actively doing something about it, even though it had initially been forced on him as a condition of his probation.
Patricia thought it was a tremendous step forward for Mike to want to talk about going to the meetings, now that he admitted he needed help. Help he apparently wasn’t going to get from his friends or family.
“Do you believe in God, Mike?”
He sat up and looked back at her, squinting in the sunlight. “Yeah, I believe in God,” he mumbled. “I’ve even been to church a number of times with, uh, well, someone I used to know.”
“Going to church isn’t the same as believing in God.”
“I said I believed.”
“But in what? Look at all of this.” She swept one hand through the air, encompassing the serene park with the stately church building behind them, the magnificent trees in front of them, and the beauty of the brilliant blue sky above. “Acknowledging that a supreme God created all of this, as well as you and me, and knowing it up here,” she tapped her index finger to her head, “isn’t the same as knowing this same God loves you, no matter what you’ve done. You’ve got to know it in here.” She pressed her palms to her heart. “God loves you enough to have sent His Son, Jesus, to take the punishment for your sins, and the slate can be wiped clean. That’s what you’ve got to believe. God can help you overcome this, if you let Him.”
Mike blew out a breath of air tersely between light lips. “What is this? Touched by an Angel? Should I call you Monica? Are you going to start glowing?” He put his sunglasses back on and scowled.
Patricia sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She refused to let his sarcasm affect her. He was hurting, so he was striking out at her in a misguided attempt to deal with what was happening to him.
“You blew it, Mike, and you blew it real bad. Now you’ve got to do something about it.”
“Well. That was certainly what I came all this way to hear.”
Patricia crossed her arms over her chest. “You know that it’s time to take a good look at yourself and do something before you ruin your whole life.”
“Thanks for the encouragement.”
“I’m telling you this as a friend, Mike.”
“My friends would feel sorry for me, not rub my face in it.”
“I’m not rubbing your face in it. If I saw one of my friends starting to get involved in something wrong or harmful, I would say something. I trust that if I started to do something bad, I know many people would say nothing, but my real friends would tell me I was doing something wrong, even though I might hate them for it. They would try to steer me in the right direction, no matter what the cost, and I’d do the same for them. That’s true friendship.”
“Is this your way of saying you want to be friends?” His face brightened. Mike straightened his shoulders and shuffled closer on the bench. He removed his sunglasses and smiled so that one corner of his mouth tipped up a little more than the other side. Patricia’s breath caught. His utterly masculine appeal and the teasing twinkle in his eye would have most women melting at his feet.
Patricia wasn’t falling for it. The stakes were too high. Mike needed someone to push him in the right direction and to keep him out of trouble while he reevaluated his life and allowed himself to be touched by God’s love.
She cleared her throat. “Yes, I think we can be friends.”
He reached forward and picked up a lock of her hair, rubbing it between his fingers. “Or is there something more? I think I see the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
Patricia slapped his hand away and crossed her arms. She wasn’t playing some kind of foolish dating game, she didn’t play hard-to-get, and she certainly wasn’t into his macho routine. “Forget it. I meant as a platonic friendship, and you know it. One false move and it’s over. Capiche?”
“Capiche.” He grinned, which made her doubt his sincerity, but she had to take him at his word, such as it was. “How would you like to cement our friendship by going out for dinner with me? Just to talk. Then maybe we can go out somewhere afterwards. It’s Friday night. I never sit home alone on Friday night. You wouldn’t want to be the one to cause me to fall into temptation and start drinking, would you?”
Patricia narrowed her eyes. “I’ll join you for dinner, but don’t read anything into it. If we go out anywhere else, it’s going to be to another AA meeting.”
His smile dropped to a frown. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Wrong. If you want to go out for dinner, fine, but only if you go to another meeting after.” A meeting where she knew they would see Claude. Claude had slipped her his phone number in the parking lot of the donut shop when Mike wasn’t looking. After she’d mentioned at the coffee shop last night that she worked for the church, Claude whispered to her that he was a Christian, too, and that he wanted to help Mike. Between Bruce and Claude, Mike would be in good hands. Tonight, however, it was up to her to take Mike to the AA meeting, because she knew Bruce had a committee meeting.
He smiled again. “Okay, you win.”
Patricia stood, being very obvious about checking her watch. “One more thing. I’m way behind since I’m so late getting back from lunch. If you really want me to join you for dinner, you’ve got to do my filing.” She smiled as sweetly and convincingly as she could.
He leaned back on the bench, crossed his ankles, and linked his fingers behind his head. At his broad smile, a dimple appeared in his left cheek. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Wrong. If I’m going to get out on time, I need help. Besides, unless you call a cab, you don’t have a way of getting home. You’re stuck here until I take you home, so you might as well do something constructive.”
“The pastor won’t mind?”
/> “He won’t mind at all.” Above all, she couldn’t let Mike go home, at least not yet. Her father would understand that Mike needed something to do to keep his mind off his troubles until he got a handle on things. “You can start by doing some photocopying, then sort and file clippings and notes for future sermon topics, and then you can file the week’s receipts.”
He shrugged his shoulders and thankfully followed her inside without protest.
Mike dutifully did what he was told, but he watched Patty constantly out of the corner of his eye.
The woman was sharp. Usually he had women eating out of his hand by now, but not Patty. He knew this time he wasn’t exactly a prime catch, considering the reason they’d met in the first place. She made it more than plain he wasn’t going to win her heart by playing for sympathy. Not that he wanted her to feel sorry for him. That was the last thing he wanted.
The first time he met her, he thought she was shy and reserved, but when he met her on her own turf, she stood her ground and called it like she saw it. More than anything, she made him think.
He tucked the last receipt into the folder and closed the filing cabinet drawer, then stood back to watch her work. The woman was organized and efficient but at the same time, warm and friendly when she answered the phone. Likewise, she radiated sensitivity when someone wandered in to ask a question or arrived for an appointment with one of the pastors or the church counselor.
He could see that everyone liked her. He liked her too. However, the fact that she was his probation officer’s sister complicated the issue.
He’d always thought someone who worked in a church would be more subservient, but he was wrong on that one. She could take it and dish it right back. The way she showed up on his doorstep to take him to the AA meeting without being asked should have given him the first indication of what he was up against. He’d always thought he picked up on people quickly, but he could now admit that when he’d met her for the first time, his brain had been too foggy to process everything clearly. She’d only been quiet and demure because she’d been out of her element.
