Goose bumps raised on Theia’s arms. She had no idea where any of this was coming from. It’s what You want me to learn, too, isn’t it, Father?
“I want to do that, Mom. I want to trust that much in the Lord.”
“Oh, Kate, so do I.”
It’s so hard to let go, Father. Show me how. Saying something and doing something are two such different things.
Again her heart waited, poised, listening. Again the Father answered Theia in a different way than she’d expected. In the midst of her asking to be shown, the heavenly Father was already showing her.
He was using her to teach the lesson to someone else.
Chapter Ten
It was Thanksgiving morning, and the living room at the McKinnis household had been transformed into a room for a family feast.
While overzealous, overdressed television stars gave viewers a blow-by-blow description of the floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, Joe added both leaves to their huge country oak table. He found his wife in the kitchen in her bathrobe, wrestling with the turkey and getting it ready to go into the pan.
He kissed the back of her neck, almost liking the idea that he no longer had to move her mantle of hair to do so. Since her hair had fallen out, first in strands and then in clumps, Joe had fallen in love with new parts of his wife that he hadn’t seen before, the hollow at the base of her skull that perfectly fit the shape of his thumb, the swan arch of her spine that made her seem so beautiful and strong. He loved the way she wore gypsy-colored scarves knotted to look like flowers on her head. He enjoyed noticing her vast array of earrings. And for Christmas, he had already decided to give her diamonds.
“Hey,” she said. He could feel her smiling even though he couldn’t see her expression. “You want to open the oven door for this bird?”
He’d forgotten until he saw Theia struggle with the heavy roaster that her pectoral muscle didn’t work so well these days. “Here, let me get that. You’re trying to do too much.”
“No, I’m not. Everybody’s helping.”
Indeed, they were. The girls would be up in no time and clamoring to get started on the pumpkin cake. Everyone that they’d invited to share in this day had insisted on bringing something: cranberry salad, mashed potatoes and gravy, fresh green beans, sweet potato pie. Even though everyone had offered to help, Theia could not be persuaded to give up cooking the McKinnis family turkey.
“Theodore. Promise me you’ll lie down today and rest if you need to.”
“I promise.” She pecked him on the nose. “Thank you for agreeing to let me do this crazy thing.”
“Not many people give huge holiday parties while they’re battling cancer.”
“I know that. But I want to see everyone.”
“It’s going to be a wonderful Thanksgiving.”
“More wonderful—” a jangle of earrings punctuated her joy “—because I realize how much we have to be thankful for.”
Because so many had insisted on helping Theia with the food, she’d been left free to arrange her table as she pleased. She’d sent her mother’s antique-lace tablecloth off to Blue Spruce cleaners to be pressed. This morning she unfolded it and arranged the lace just as she wanted across the dark grain of the wood. At each place she set an index card with goofy turkey and pilgrim stickers. On each card at each place she’d written a different Scripture.
“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.” (Hebrews 12:28)
“Give thanks to the LORD, call on His name; make known among the nations what He has done.” (1 Chronicles 16:8)
“Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name. For the LORD is good and His love endures forever; His faithfulness continued through all generations.” (Psalm 100:4–5)
She stepped back and inspected her handiwork. The goblets stood polished and gleaming, ready for iced tea. The candlesticks stood tall and proud, a Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim bedecked in Early American finery, a gift from Joe’s mother one November.
Theia came to her own chair, the seat closest to the kitchen where she could jump up and retrieve condiments and refills when necessary. She set the card beside her goblet and read her verse for the umpteenth, glorious time.
“Let your gentleness be evident to all. The LORD is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:5–7)
On the television the parade ended and football began. Kate and Heidi stood at the kitchen counter, arguing over who got to lick cream cheese frosting off the beaters. The doorbell rang. Theia’s father arrived carrying a huge basket of chrysanthemums to sit beside the hearth, an assortment of breads from The Bunnery, and a gift, wrapped the way he always swathed his packages, in ancient tissue paper tied with string.
Before Theia had the chance to ask him about it, Sarah Hodges drove up with her family. Next came Winston Taylor, who shook Joe’s hand roundly and hugged both of the girls. Jaycee appeared at the door with her parents, Lois and Tom Maxwell, and her two little brothers. “Happy Thanksgiving!” Joe welcomed them and took their coats at the door.
“Oh, Theia. What a beautiful table. Look at the Bible verses.”
“Everything’s so pretty.”
“We made the cake.” Kate held up a beater just to prove it.
“And everything smells so good!”
Not one person walked through the door without bearing a dish of something wonderful. Cakes and pies and casseroles vied for position on the buffet, then overflowed onto the coffee table. The very sight of so much food, the aromas, the ingredients, the hearts and hands that had prepared the meal, set Theia’s senses reeling. She’d been having a difficult time eating since chemotherapy started. Even when the nausea subsided, she battled with a metallic tang that stayed in her mouth for days. She lowered herself into a chair in the dining room, gripping the back of it for support.
Lord, help me to be open and aware today. In the midst of my thankfulness, help me to be vulnerable and real. That’s what You want from me, and I know it.
Eleanor Taggart sat beside her and touched her knee. “What can I do for you today, Theia?”
On her lips were the words, “Nothing. Everything’s taken care of.” But Theia realized that wasn’t what she was meant to say at all. She thought for a moment and came up with something. “When the timer buzzes, will you take the dressing out of the turkey for me? Before Joe carves.”
“I can do that.”
“Thanks, Eleanor. For the time being, just sit and talk while I get my bearings, okay? All this food…well, I could use a little conversation.”
“Yes. I will.” A light, gentle smile. “How have you been?”
Theia had begun to understand, during these past weeks, that this was the way she needed to be talked to. She needed to be asked easy questions, questions that let her choose between answering, “I’ve been driving so many dance carpools that I feel like a taxi driver,” and “I had a rough chemo session this week, and my eyebrows fell out.”
She understood that she needed to choose, more often than not, to feel cared for when people bumbled conversations around her and said the wrong thing.
With each passing day, the Father was helping her to know her own self and to trust Him more.
She chose truthful words for Eleanor now. “This week has been a good one, but there’ve been bad ones, too. I’ve been scared, and I’ve been discouraged. And I’ve spent the past days rejoicing that, for however long it lasts, I’m so lucky to be Joe’s wife and Kate and Heidi’s mother.”
“It’s tough going sometimes, isn’t it?”
“You see this pottery?” Theia reached for a casserole filled with sweet potatoes. “It had to be formed and fired, painted and r
efired, for it to turn out as beautiful and colorful and useful as it is now. There are days when I feel like that’s where I am, Eleanor. In the fire, burning up. That’s when I have to remind myself that I’m in the kiln, being handmade into some useful new vessel for the Lord.”
Eleanor squeezed her hand. “Your friends are here for you, to help you walk through this. We may not do it right, but we want you to let us try.”
“Thank you.” Theia hugged her. “I need to let you do that. For so long I’ve tried not to let anybody know that I was afraid. And I’ve been so alone.”
The buzzer on the stove went off. Joe came into the kitchen with a troop full of men who brandished knives and planned to carve the turkey.
“Now that’s a scary sight, all those men in the kitchen with knives.”
“Out, out, all of you!” Theia grinned at Eleanor, rose from the chair, and shooed the men out of the kitchen with her apron like she’d shoo a flock of geese. “Eleanor has to take care of the stuffing first. Then we’ll call you.”
“We can just cut into it, can’t we? The stuffing will fall out.”
“Women have a way that they like to do things, and that isn’t it.”
Between the two genders, the great crowd of people managed to get everything uncovered and cut to serve, ice in glasses, tea poured, dressing in a bowl with a silver serving spoon, and a mountain of turkey sliced to perfection. Everyone oohed and aahed when Joe set the huge platter of meat on the table before them.
Winston Taylor volunteered to eat one of the legs whole.
Jaycee’s little brothers began to shout at top volume for the wishbone.
Theia joined hands with Eleanor on her right and Sarah on her left. From across the way, her husband winked at her and then mouthed, “I love you.” They had prayed together and had decided on the order of things just this morning.
Joe began. “Before we thank the Lord for the meal, Theia has something she wants to say to everybody here.”
Lord, even while I walk through the valley of death, shine Your light through me.
“We invited you all here because we love you. Because the Lord loves you, too, and He’s put you in our lives now, at a time when we need you the most.” Her voice faltered. “We have not been easy to stand beside these past few months, but you have done it anyway. On this day of all days, when we offer up thanksgiving to our Father, we want to tell you that we thank God for you.”
Down the table, Jaycee’s mother, Lois, picked up the index card that had been propped beside her goblet. Jaycee had told her mother about the Lord and had invited her several times to come to church, but so far she hadn’t. “Can I read this?” the woman asked, her voice almost as shaky as Theia’s. “I don’t read the Bible much, but I’d like to read it today.”
Theia nodded. “Oh, Lois. Please do.”
“‘Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before Him with thanksgiving and extol Him with music and song.’”
Lois’s gentle, hope-filled voice encircled the table even as they all encircled it with their hands.
Joe prayed after that, and everyone started passing the feast.
Theia hadn’t been able to get back into her own kitchen all afternoon.
Kate, Heidi, and Jaycee had made quick work of the dishes. Others had served coffee and wrapped up the leftovers and left plates out with goodies for everyone to nibble while they watched football. Theia had even taken a nap.
It wasn’t until almost dusk, after everyone had gone home and she went in to make a pot of tea, that she found the package wrapped in ancient tissue paper and tied with twine.
“What’s this?” she asked anyone within earshot.
“Something your dad brought over when he came this morning. I don’t know.”
She untied the string, tore open the paper.
When she recognized it, her hands started to tremble. She couldn’t swallow past the lump in her throat.
“Joe, this is my mother’s Bible.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know. Dad must have found it somewhere.”
Theia set her teacup down in the precise center of the saucer. She lifted the huge, leather book from its wrappings, and the pages fell open. Pencil notes, gleaned from her mother’s favorite sermons and studies, lined the margins. In almost every chapter, verses had been underlined and some of them even dated.
“All of her notes are here. All of the things she was learning when she—”
Joe came up behind her and captured her shoulders. “When she got cancer?”
Theia nodded. “And before.”
Her hands drifted to the brittle yellowed pages, fingering them as if they were gold. Out the window she could see the light in her father’s greenhouse, his dark silhouette stooped over the gardener’s bench.
“I’ve got to talk to him.”
Joe nodded, and she saw in his eyes that he understood. Love for her husband, for all they were becoming together, overwhelmed her.
She rose and went to find the other man in her life who loved her above all else.
Her father glanced up when she knocked on the screen. “Anybody home?”
He raised a trowel in her direction and gestured for her to enter. “That was a fine meal today, Theia. A fine meal.” The light from the bulb above him seemed to catch in his eyes and gleam there.
She went inside, taking a deep draught of the smells of her father, of old fabric and of loose, dark soil in the greenhouse, of potash and bone meal and nitrogen and of new warm things growing outdoors. She held up the Bible in her hands.
“I found it, Daddy. Thank you.”
He drove the trowel deep into the dirt. “Thought you could put that to good use right about now.”
“I thought her Bible had gotten thrown out with the rest of her things. It’s been missing for years.”
He told her the story of how he’d sealed it away in the box.
“The more I kept praying for you, Theia, the more I kept thinking about that box. I swept your mother’s life away before I’d scarcely even given you the chance to grieve for her. It was the wrong thing to do.”
Theia laid her head against the rough flannel of her father’s work shirt. It became difficult, at the moment, to discern who was holding whom for comfort. Her own father seemed so much smaller, so much more feeble, than she’d ever noticed before. As if he were withering away somehow. As if she’d become the parent and he, the child. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“Should have learned a long time ago. When you push aside the bad things, you also push aside God’s power to heal and reconstruct.”
“Maybe that’s what God’s doing now. Giving us both a second chance to heal.”
Now that he’d dug all the dirt out of the pot, her dad selected a begonia from a plastic flat, turned it upside down, and emptied the squared soil and root into his gnarled old hands. “There’s more inside that Bible than you’ve found.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just look.”
She began to thumb through the pages.
“There’s notes all in here. And a church bulletin from some service back in 1979.”
“Keep going.”
At first Theia didn’t see the envelope. But the page fell open, and she recognized the scalloped edge, the tiny pink roses, the paper as thin as an autumn-cured leaf. She picked it up. “What’s this?”
“Maybe you can tell me.”
She flipped the envelope over and saw her name written there in her mother’s strong, slanted script.
Theia ran her fingernail under the flap and with the greatest of care opened a letter from her mother that had been sealed away for twenty-two years.
Dearest Theia,
If you are reading this letter now, it means that I have gone home to be with the Father, and you are looking through my Bible.
It is the most difficult thing I have ever done, thinking of lea
ving you and your father behind. But leave you behind, I must. I have faith in God and I have faith in the two of you. I know that, after I leave, you and your father will make it just fine. But you’re going to have to help him a little bit. He’s going to be lonely for a while, until he gets used to being without me.
I remind you now, and someday you will know, that healing is more than what some people think it is. To be healed is to be made whole. And I have been made whole, even though my body is against me, because cancer has made me realize that Jesus is here with me, loving me, telling me about myself, holding my heart. This has been, because of that new discovery, a most glorious time.
You, my precious daughter, are the one who has prayed the most for me. As I go, I stand firm on the belief that God does not cause cancer in this world. We humans mess up all of the time, but God never fails. Prayer must be, in the end, as in everything else, the perfect act of trusting God. Isn’t relinquishment of everything to God very much the same as acceptance that God is in everything?
You have grown up so fast. You haven’t worn these ribbons in your hair in a long time. I found them on the shelf beside my hairbrush today and thought you might enjoy having them to remember our mornings by. Being your mama is the joy of my life. You are a beauty, dear heart, inside and out, and I am so proud of you.
Mama
Two blue satin hair ribbons fell out of the folds of the letter, making two perfect curls in the flat of Theia’s hand.
Theia held the strands of blue satin ribbon high for her father to see. They represented so much to her. A childhood that she’d almost let herself lose because parts of it were painful to remember. A loving mother who had done her best to teach her to grow and walk in courage and in freedom, despite the obstacle of disease.
Her father hoisted his latest potted begonia high upon the shelf. “Anything in that letter that an old man might get to hear about?”
“Plenty.” Theia laid her head in a careful place, against the broad of his back where he still seemed powerful and young, where she could feel the strength of his heart beating. “She had faith in us, Dad. She knew we’d be okay.”
Mothers and Daughters: An Anthology Page 9
