Thinking about those old obstacles, Gladys applied her new health and vigor to the question. “I bet I could get down there without driving on the six-lane tollway,” she said. “I might even take a train from Kenosha on down. I haven’t done anything like that for I don’t know how long.”
Katie grinned at the new adventurism in her grandma. It gave her hope, of course, that she might see her more often. It also increased her optimism that she would be seeing her for many years to come. Though she never consciously thought of it, the loss of her grandpa, and the frailty of her grandma’s health, had worried her.
They returned to the supper cleanup. “Will Jesus come shopping with us tomorrow?” Katie said.
“Oh, sure. He likes shopping. He even let me go to the drug store to sign up for the video rental, even though he knew better. Turns out he wanted to help the girl working at the register, and was letting me make a fool of myself so he could set it up.”
“You didn’t make a fool of yourself, Gladdy.” Jesus said. “And Brittany certainly thinks fondly of you.”
“Brittany,” Gladys said aloud, remembering the girl’s name now. “That’s right.” She spoke to Katie. “He just reminded me of her name.”
Gladys could see that Katie was working on a problem, her sunny little face all pinched with perplexity.
“What’s the matter?”
Katie looked around the kitchen. “How come only you can see Jesus? Why can’t I see him too?” Her inflexion pressed into it not as a question of optics, but a question of permission.
Gladys thought about this briefly, even as Jesus remained silent. She ventured a response. “I think it would bug your mom a whole lot more if you came home saying that you saw Jesus in my house, than if you just reported that I claimed to see him.” Gladys consulted Jesus’s expressive face for confirmation, even as she spoke. He seemed satisfied with her guess. “I think it’s really for your protection,” she said, to Katie.
Jesus did add a thought. “She should also keep in mind that you told her the whole story only after she sensed my presence.”
When Gladys relayed this, Katie’s face lit up. “That’s right. I was feeling that happy feeling before you told me everything, and before he moved the curtain.”
“Not everyone is so perceptive.” Jesus noted this, as if speaking directly to Katie. Gladys translated.
Katie looked impressed, and a bit intrigued that she might have some special ability. “Wow, that’s cool.”
“Way cool,” said Jesus.
Gladys laughed.
Chapter 22
VENTURING
When her kids were young, Gladys liked taking them to new and interesting places. From Skokie, that usually meant one of the attractions in Chicago. She liked it when her son, Bill, called her “Adventure Mom.” In going to the Field Museum, or the Art Institute, she didn’t even attempt to comprehend the movement of the tectonic plates, nor to keep track of which one was Manet and which was Monet. She simply loved accomplishing the journey with her children close beside her, and relished seeing their enjoyment of every little sight and every little treat.
Venturing out with Katie on that Saturday morning, with plans to hit more than one mall, and to have lunch in a restaurant she had only heard some ladies at church talk about, marked the return of Adventure Mom, or perhaps Adventure Grandma. When Katie looked behind to see why the car behind them was honking, Gladys even made an effort to increase her speed a bit. She wasn’t feeling so frail and vulnerable now, with two good hips and responsive knees. Besides, she had Katie and Jesus to help copilot the old blue Malibu.
As they neared the mall, they passed a schoolyard, where young men played basketball in the warm sunshine, perhaps for the first time that spring. It was warm for Wisconsin, at least. Jesus watched the distant running, jumping and passing, as if he were checking on how his friends were doing, and even who might be winning. Gladys glanced at him in the rear view mirror a couple of times as they passed that game. She had noticed his constant attentiveness and curiosity, not just toward her, but for everyone they passed.
At ten thirty in the morning, the mall parking lot wasn’t yet crowded. This particular mall had experienced the deflated occupancy that so many shopping centers had seen over the past few years, so it was only truly crowded in the few weeks right before Christmas. After parking the car, the three of them walked toward one of the main mall entrances, in front of which stood a seven-foot-tall rabbit with a basket full of colored plastic eggs.
Gladys released Katie to go and collect one of the eggs from the bright white bunny. Jesus made a joke out of it.
“Tall, white rabbit? Gladys, you say are you’re seeing a tall, white rabbit?”
It had been a long time since Gladys had seen an old black and white version of the movie Harvey, so she didn’t get the joke immediately. She only started laughing after they entered the mall, when she suddenly made the connection.
“What are you laughing at?” Katie said.
Gladys relayed Jesus’s joke, and found that Katie was quicker to pick up the reference. The bouncy little blonde kicked her feet up and pitched her head forward even as she walked, laughing at Jesus teasing her grandma for having an invisible friend. Jesus laughed along with Katie, amused by her reaction more than his own clever joke.
“I’m glad you two are having a good time,” Gladys said with some missing enthusiasm.
“You don’t have to worry about people thinking you’re crazy anymore, remember?” Jesus said, a bit more soberly, before returning to chuckling along with Katie.
“It’s an old habit,” Gladys said aloud.
“What is?” Katie said.
“Worrying that people will think I’m crazy,” Gladys said, before remembering that she hadn’t discussed that struggle with Katie. “Me claiming to see Jesus, when he’s invisible to everyone else, is a little hard for some people to believe.”
Katie read into that explanation. “You mean, like Mom?”
Gladys took a deep breath.
Jesus inserted a thought. “Be careful not to dishonor Patty in front of Katie.” He said this in the low tone of a golf tournament TV announcer, his voice absent any anger or anxiety.
“Oh, it’s not just your mother. She does pretty well for herself,” Gladys said, opting for a generic comment.
Katie noted the restraint and followed her grandma’s example, saying no more on the subject.
Gladys led the way to one of the big department stores, where she wandered the girl’s section, monitoring Katie’s interest in what she saw. After doing this for a half an hour, with no clear indication that Katie was craving one clothing item over another, Gladys finally put the question to her. Katie offered a noncommittal response.
Jesus helped with some insight. “She’s torn between wanting to make you happy, by being excited to get something new, as opposed to following her mother’s words of restraint, from when she dropped her off. She doesn’t know how to split the difference.”
“Oh,” Gladys said internally, not seeing the solution either.
Jesus seemed to offer a distraction, instead. “You see that woman over there, in the red workout jacket.” He pointed, just like Gladys would have told Katie not to. But invisibility seemed to make that social breach acceptable.
“Yes,” she said internally.
“Would you be willing to give her a message from me, and pass on a blessing?”
This was the first time Jesus had worded one of these promptings as a question. Gladys decided to include Katie in the decision.
“Jesus says he wants me to give a message to that woman over there,” she nodded her head sideways. “What do you think? Should I do it?”
“Of course. Why not?” Katie said. Where her mood had sunk under her bind about whether to let her grandma buy her something, it hopped back up at this prospect.
“Jesus thinks this is why we go shopping,” Gladys said, teasing him this time.
“It’s
a good enough reason for me,” Jesus said. Gladys relayed that response as she wound her way through the racks of fluorescent and pastel colors.
Crossing the white tiles from the girls department to the juniors, Gladys fell to perusing the same rack that the woman in the red jacket was examining. The bright pink t-shirts, with cute little animals and cute sayings on them, didn’t interest Gladys. Unlike some of the gray and white-haired women she knew, she didn’t deviate into the new brighter colors. The woman in the red jacket had dark brown skin, and would look much better in bright pink than Gladys, she assumed. Katie looked with more genuine interest than Gladys. At five feet tall and less than eighty pounds, she could carry it off. Besides, Katie was already wearing bright orange running shoes, a statement of her generation’s unrestrained color choices. The stranger was looking in the large section of the circular rack, Katie shuffled through the extra-smalls.
Jesus didn’t pretend to want a bright pink t-shirt, for himself or anyone else. He went and stood next to the woman who was just noticing Gladys and Katie. Jesus looked at her like he couldn’t be more pleased, yet he kept his hands and words to himself, apparently waiting for Gladys to make a move.
“Her name is Beatrice,” Jesus said.
Because Gladys could see Jesus poised there next to Beatrice, she just assumed he would tell her what to say as the need arose. She made the sky-divers leap, counting Jesus as her parachute.
“Pardon me,” she began, “is your name Beatrice?”
Simultaneously, three people reacted to that name. Katie had not heard Jesus provide this insider information, so she was impressed. Jesus lit up like a roman candle, as if Gladys’s obedience nearly sent him shooting through the roof. And Beatrice looked confused, and a little startled.
“Do I know you?” she said.
“No. Jesus just told me your name, ‘cause he wants me to give you a message.” Again, this was a first for Gladys. Previously, she had some idea what she was supposed to say, before promising a message from Jesus. Her growing trust in Jesus, made the variation almost worry-free.
“Jesus?” Beatrice said.
Katie rounded the display rack and took her grandma’s free hand. The fresh-faced girl with the golden pony tail, was even less threatening than the slightly hunched old woman with the fluffy gray hair. Beatrice was only doubtful, not alarmed.
“Yes, he tells me what to say to people, when he has a message for them sometimes.”
“You mean, like a word of prophecy?” Beatrice said, looking at Gladys, with her head turned away forty-five degrees.
Now, Gladys had never called it that, and Jesus had not used the word prophecy either. She had heard stories about prophets in the Bible, of course, and she could see a sort of correlation between that and what she was doing. But she wasn’t comfortable with the label. It sounded too ominous.
“Well, I like to just call it a message,” Gladys said.
But, as she said that, Jesus spoke up. “Prophecy is a good description, in this case,” he said.
Gladys corrected. “He says, you can call it a prophecy.”
Beatrice looked toward the rack of lavender dresses behind her, where it seemed the old lady could see Jesus. “Okay,” she said dubiously.
Now Jesus started to fill in the content. “Tell her that I have not forgotten her desire to teach and preach. My promises and my gifts don’t expire.”
Gladys repeated this nearly word for word.
Beatrice’s eyes grew until you could see white all the way around her black irises. “My Lord,” she said. Gladys and Katie couldn’t tell whether she meant that literally or just as an exclamation.
“Tell her, if she gets back into the Word, I will bless what she finds there, and she will know where to begin using her gifts.”
Gladys relayed this as well.
Beatrice stood like a pillar of salt, except her head, which swiveled from side-to-side. The impression was odd, because her side-to-side motion was so unconscious and constant that it almost looked mechanical, like a wind-up toy with only one moving part.
“Ask if you can pray for her,” Jesus said.
Gladys did. Beatrice agreed. Katie grinned and breathed rapidly, clearly getting an adrenalin rush from the experience.
Just like in ladies Bible study, Gladys prayed along the lines of Jesus’s message, but she let her mouth run ahead of what she knew consciously. This resulted in prayers about people she didn’t even know, and obstacles she couldn’t name, all of which melted Beatrice into tears, and a long refrain of “thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus.”
The whole encounter seemed as if it was ending, with a tussle for tissues and more thanks. Then Beatrice provided a surprise of her own. “I think I’m supposed to buy the little girl one of these shirts,” she said.
This bothered Gladys in a couple of different ways. First, if Beatrice was saying she had heard from Jesus, Gladys thought she should have heard it too. Second, it seemed wrong to receive any kind of financial reward for delivering a message from Jesus. And there was a third, something about accepting gifts from strangers, but she wasn’t sure if she had disqualified that one by starting this whole encounter as she did.
Jesus, on the other hand, seemed not at all bothered by the offer. Though he didn’t say so directly, he acted as if he agreed, and maybe that he really had told Beatrice to do this. He just stood by smiling and nodding his head. It was hard for Gladys to derive any other message from that than that she should accept.
As usual, Gladys let loose the next thought that came to mind. “Well, that will solve our problem of your mother saying I shouldn’t buy you anything,” she said to Katie. And all four of them laughed.
Jesus did allow the girls to get some shopping done. Mostly, they just looked at things. Gladys eventually kicked over her restraint, and insisted on buying Katie a pair of shoes for more dressy occasions. They were just too cute to pass up. Shoes for girls that age are, by definition, too cute to pass up, of course.
Instead of a fancier restaurant, they ate lunch in the food court, so Katie could try the Chinese. Gladys took a chance on some pizza. Though she had planned exhausting that mall and heading to another one, reality met Gladys at about two in the afternoon. Healthy hips or no, she was tired, feet sore and feeling sleepy. The cinnamon roll for dessert/snack probably didn’t help on this last score. That was one of those times when Gladys couldn’t easily accept not feeding Jesus. She even bought a third roll, but they took that with them, instead of subjecting Katie, and the rest of the mall, to the visible confirmation of Gladys’s invisible friend.
Jesus offered a bit of encouragement in the car on the way home, along with keeping Gladys focused on the road, and alert, when that became a struggle. “Don’t be discouraged, Gladdy,” he said. “Even Adventure Mom has her limits.” Katie had transported into her phone, to text some friends, leaving her copilot post for a few minutes.
Though it seemed odd timing, Gladys suddenly realized that it might be inappropriate to go shopping on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, especially if your shopping companions included the one who lay in the tomb on that day.
Jesus heard that thought, and mystified Gladys by his answer. “Oh, I didn’t just lie there in that tomb on Saturday, Gladdy. I had some venturing out of my own to do on that day.”
It occurred to Gladys again, that she needed to make more effort to stay awake and focused in church from now on.
Chapter 23
AWAKE
Gladys had insisted on forgoing a nap Saturday afternoon, determined not to sleep through any more of Katie’s visit than absolutely necessary. On the way home, they had exchanged Friday night’s movie for two more. And Gladys slept all the way through one film, before rousing herself to make supper, with Katie and Jesus by her side. Then she slept through the last half of the second movie after supper, and before waking up to serve pie. Her venturing ambitions were not quelled that night, but she did note the need to make more realistic
plans in the future.
On Easter morning, everyone was up bright and early, even if the weather was mostly cloudy. They were up almost early enough to attend the sunrise service, at seven a.m. But Gladys had no intention of rushing off to that farmers’ service, as she always thought of it. She had spent over fifty years adjusting to a city sleep schedule, waking a little later every year. She was still an early riser by most people’s standards. Jesus seemed always to be awake, waiting for her in the morning, with a smile that welcomed her to the day.
Gladys made pancakes and sausage for breakfast. Jesus had one of the early pancakes, before Katie made her way into the kitchen. He patted Gladys on the back, kissed her cheek and complemented her on it. “That was the best pancake I ever had,” he said.
“You probably shouldn’t tell tall tales,” Gladys said. “You might ruin your reputation.”
Jesus just smiled and said, “I never lie.”
The sausages were browned just in time for Katie’s arrival, but she was bummed that she didn’t get to help with the cooking.
“You shoulda woke me up earlier, Grandma,” she said, sitting down at the table and noting the third chair pulled out, as if Jesus were sitting in it.
“I thought you’d like the extra sleep,” Gladys said. “But, I guess you’re not a teenager yet, are you?”
“Yeah,” Katie said, still looking at that chair. “Danny and Becky can sleep until lunch, if you let ‘em.” Then she changed the subject. “Is that where Jesus is sitting?”
Gladys diverted her attention from flipping a pancake to Katie’s eyes on the chair. “Not right now. He was sitting there before. Now he’s standing here next to me, watching me cook.”
“Just like I like to do,” Katie said. She rested her head in her right fist, her elbow on the table.
“He does remind me of a kid sometimes,” Gladys said.
“That’s because of the rules,” Jesus said.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 21
