by Chris Fabry
“The Lord.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah. I got a strong impression from the Lord that he wanted me to give you a ride. A cup of cold water and all that.”
“A cup of what?”
“I don’t want to pass up the chance of entertaining angels, you know. In the Bible it says that some have welcomed angels by being kind to strangers.”
“I can assure you, ma’am. I’m no angel.”
“Well, neither am I, so we’re even. Now where do you want to go?”
Tim pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and gave her the address.
“Land sakes, and you were going to walk? Must be gold in this place. What is it?”
He told her.
“A storage place? You bury treasure there?”
Tim chuckled. “It’s just some stuff of my dad’s I wanted to look at.”
“Your father’s away?”
“Yeah.”
“Does your mother know you’re out here?”
Tim hesitated, then turned to the woman. Her hands were wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, her eyes glued to the road. “You’re not with the FBI, are you?”
“Goodness, no.” She laughed.
“Good, because I was beginning to wonder. You must watch a lot of those police shows on TV.”
The skin underneath her arm jiggled as she chuckled. “Well, the least you can do is tell me your name.”
“Tim Carhardt,” he said.
“I’m Mrs. Rubiquoy, but all my students used to call me Mrs. Ruby.” She thought a moment. “You’re not related to the Carhardts up in Opelika, are you?”
“Don’t believe so, ma’am. Guess I could be and not know it.”
She had a Christian music station playing with songs that sounded like they were a hundred years old and were going about as slowly as she was. He didn’t know a car could go so slow. It was at least 10 years old, but the upholstery looked almost new.
“You were a teacher?”
“Librarian. Worked 26 years at Briarcliff Elementary until they had to lock the door on me.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, every now and then I go back. You like to read?”
“Don’t have much time for it with school and all. Just what they assign us.”
“Hmm. Let me see.” Mrs. Rubiquoy glanced at him, then squinted and maneuvered her mouth into a thin line. “You’re probably reading Great Expectations. Or maybe To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Close,” Tim said. “I’m a little older than I look. The teacher assigned us The Old Man and the Sea last week.”
“Oh, what a marvelous story. You know, I always hated it when teachers would assign something and take all the fun out of it for the students. Tests and quizzes and such. I guess you have to do that to motivate them, but young people should learn that reading is fun. Don’t you think reading is fun?”
“Sometimes I read the back of the cereal box, and that makes me laugh.”
She clucked like a chicken, and Tim made a mental note not to make her laugh again because she nearly hit a light pole.
“Your husband hasn’t been around for a while, has he?” Tim said.
“Died two years ago February. Traffic accident. He was coming home from a fishing trip and just swerved off the road. They said it was a heart attack, but I think it was because he was so excited to show me what he’d caught. They found the fish on ice in the trunk.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The Lord gives and he takes away. It’s all for a purpose. But that doesn’t make it easier late at night or when you read something and want to tell your husband about it and you realize he’s not there.”
Tim just stared at the road.
“What about you? You have a relationship with him?”
“I didn’t know your husband.”
“No, I meant the Lord.”
Tim turned and looked out the passenger window. “God’s never had much time for me, and I guess I returned the favor.”
They came to a red light, and Mrs. Rubiquoy looked left to watch the traffic. Her purse was open beside her, and Tim noticed a $100 bill sticking halfway out.
“Now you keep an eye out for that storage place because it has to be up here somewhere.”
They drove another mile before Tim spotted it on the right.
She pulled over and let him out. “The Lord knew you needed a ride, didn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am, I guess he did. And I thank you for your kindness. Now look after that antifreeze plug real soon.” Tim got out but leaned back in before he shut the door. The woman had a concerned look on her face. “Everything all right, ma’am?”
She looked at her purse, then at him. “Let me give you some money to help you get back home.”
“No way.” He locked the door and smiled. “I’ll be fine. You and the Lord just get home safe, okay?”
Chapter 6
The Notebook
A MAN WHO LOOKED LIKE a grizzly bear opened the front gate and ushered Tim past barking dogs to a six-story building. It had broken windows and wooden floors and smelled like somebody’s dirty laundry. Surrounding it were smaller buildings that resembled garages.
The man looked Tim up and down. “You don’t look old enough to have a locker here. You gotta be at least 18.”
“It’s my dad’s stuff. He passed last October, and I haven’t been able to get here.”
The man ran a hand through his graying mane and paused. “Your locker’s on the fourth floor, all the way to the back.”
Tim took the freight elevator to the fourth floor and walked by rows of what looked like locked cages packed floor to ceiling with boxes. A few doors were draped with covers, but most he could see in. Some had lawn mowers, gardening tools, and even motorcycles. Bikes hung from the ceiling, tool chests were shoved to the back, and a few had old car parts in them.
The hall was dark with only a few lights strung here and there. The bare bulbs made the whole place look eerie, as though there were white puddles of light every few yards.
He found his father’s number and stared through the holes. While other lockers were packed full, there was only a bed frame, a mattress, and a few boxes here. He opened the lock and walked inside, the floor creaking. He pulled the mattress out, placed it near a puddle of light, and sat.
The first box clattered as he dumped old car parts and gadgets onto the floor. A generator. A side mirror. Nuts and bolts. Tire gauge. An old drill and a box of bits. Stuff his dad just couldn’t bring himself to trash and Tyson evidently didn’t want.
When he’d scooped all the debris up and put the pile back in the box, he moved on to the second, which was filled with papers and file folders. Numbers on a hospital bill. Tim’s birth certificate along with his footprints. Could my feet have ever been that little? He poked through a pile of newspaper clippings—obituaries with faded pictures, lists of the dead and their families. People who had been gone so long that no one missed them anymore.
Tim took out a coffee-stained marriage license. His parents’ names stared back at him. As if they’d always been together. As if nothing had happened between the time they signed this and now. He looked over the license, their names, the seal of the State of Florida, and the name of the pastor who had married them. It listed his father’s full name, Martin Clancy Carhardt, and his mother’s maiden name, Alexandra Lee Burton. He remembered his dad calling her Lexy when they were getting along, which wasn’t very often.
He closed his eyes and tried to bring her face back, but it wouldn’t come. Just a blur of an image, hazy in his mind—brown hair, nice smile.
He stuffed the pages back inside and turned to the next box. Pictures. Not in albums or arranged in any special way, just stacks of pictures in haphazard piles. People he didn’t know. Places he couldn’t remember. All lumped together like fishing worms in a tin can. He leafed through the ones at the top, many of them black-and-white, some stuck together. Toward the bottom they turned to colo
r, and he finally found a few of his mother. His mom holding him wrapped in a hospital blanket. His dad asleep on a couch, with Tim asleep on his chest. His mother mugging for the camera with a stomach the size of a basketball. Tim in a Halloween costume—a sheet with two holes cut out for eyes.
Tim found a brown envelope and filled it with some pictures he wanted to take with him. He pulled the fourth box close and stared at it. He’d dreamed he might discover a videotape of his dad looking into a camera, telling Tim he loved him, assuring him that he’d make something of himself someday. But if his dad hadn’t even put together a will, how would he have made a video?
He opened the box. Inside were a few books, some NASCAR magazines, and an autographed picture of the King, Richard Petty. That might bring some money on eBay. At the bottom were trophies and an old baseball glove. Tim opened it, put it to his face, and smelled the leather. Best smell in the world—right up there with the oil-and-gas smell of the garage.
The trophies were mostly third-place finishes in local races from his dad’s hometown. They were ordinary. Even cheap. But of all the things he could keep, his dad had hung on to them. At some point in his life, had his dad dreamed of driving?
The magazines in the box had one thing in common: each featured the death of a celebrated driver. Some had been killed on the track. Others in airplane or helicopter crashes. It seemed strange that his dad had kept those issues, though he knew his dad had been at some of the races and venues where the drivers were killed.
Inside the magazines, Tim found other memorabilia—autographed pictures and programs, plus a few photos of famous drivers standing with his dad.
The only thing that surprised him was a spiral notebook at the bottom. He’d seen one like it in his dad’s glove box, but he always thought he was just writing down mileage, oil changes, and stuff like that. He didn’t expect to find a diary.
His dad hadn’t been the most talkative man on the planet. On trips across the country, Tim had gone hundreds of miles without his dad so much as grunting at him. But here in the notebook, it looked like his dad had poured out his heart about a lot of things. The writing wasn’t neat by anyone’s standard (another thing Tim had inherited), but deciphering it made Tim feel a connection he hadn’t felt in months.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lexy any prettier than in the moments after Tim was born. I couldn’t believe what a miracle a baby’s birth is. I can only hope I’ll be a good father to this boy. I’m so scared I’m going to mess things up just like my old man did. Maybe I can break the cycle. At least, I sure hope to give it a good shot.
Tim closed the notebook and cradled it to his chest. As he put his head back on the mattress, he shoved his bandaged hand into his pocket and felt the $100 bill and wondered what his dad would think.
Chapter 7
Pepperoni People
JAMIE FELT THE JUICES of competition stirring at church that night. Funny how they could just come up. Not exactly like when she was racing but pretty close.
She’d been blindfolded and spun around a few times, then had to balance a raw egg on a spoon, walk to the center of the room, and drop it into a pot of water. Her teammates behind her were shouting directions, telling her when to walk straight, left, or right. The only problem was, there was another team trying to do the same thing on the other side of the room.
“Keep going straight!”
“Turn left, Jamie!”
“Five yards right in front of you.”
“Which one?” Jamie said.
“Straight, Jamie!” It was Vanessa Moran, a new girl in town. “It’s right in front of you.”
“Stop!” someone yelled.
“Now! Drop it.”
She couldn’t tell if it was her group or someone else.
“Go, Jamie!” Trace Flattery yelled over the din. She could always tell his voice. It sounded like he had about a hundred marbles in his mouth when he talked.
Jamie bent a little and tipped the spoon. She heard a splat, then another, and groans rose from both sides of the room. She reached up and took off the blindfold. At her feet was a broken egg. Ahead of her stood Gary Edwards, a hulk of a guy who played defense on the football team and center on the basketball team. He stood over the pot of water, grinning from ear to ear, his egg on the floor.
“Why didn’t you listen to us?” Vanessa said. “What a klutz.”
“Okay, hold it down,” Pastor Gordon said. “Good job, Jamie and Gary. Take a seat.” The man was in his late 20s, newly married, and looked more like a model from one of those ads at the mall than a youth pastor. Theirs wasn’t the biggest youth group in town, but Pastor Gordon had a way of getting kids involved. When more kids heard about it, Jamie felt sure they’d come.
“All right, Jamie, tell me what happened out there,” Pastor Gordon said.
“Everybody was yelling so loud—I couldn’t tell which ones were on my team and which ones were yelling at Gary.”
“So you got mixed up by the voices?”
“Yeah. It’s like they were all jumbled up together, and I didn’t know which one to follow.”
“So when you dropped the egg . . . ?”
“I thought I heard my team tell me to.”
The kids around her groaned. First pick at the pizza was on the line.
“All right, how about you, Gary?”
“I listened for Jimmy’s directions because he has the biggest mouth.”
Laughter.
“I knew his voice would boom out over everyone else’s. And he’s on the basketball team, so I figured if he messed me up, I’d get him back during a game.”
“You’d actually do that?” Jimmy said, incredulous.
“Knew I wouldn’t have to.”
“You were closer than Jamie, but you still didn’t get the egg in the pot,” Vanessa said.
“Close counts, doesn’t it?” Gary said.
“We’ll sort that out in a minute,” Pastor Gordon said. “But this proves the point we were just talking about. See, in life, you’re going to hear a lot of voices telling you what to do and not do. Who are you supposed to believe? Advice from over here might sound good, but it may be bad. And like this egg, your life might crash and break.
“Now suppose, since we’re right in the heart of NASCAR country, that you were out there on the track listening to your spotter, but somehow the wires got crossed and you were actually hearing someone else’s communication? Can you imagine what would happen if the voice on the other end of that microphone said to go low and there was a car there?”
Trace raised a hand. “You know what? I heard that happened once in an old Busch Series race at—”
Pastor Gordon smiled. “Let’s save that one for around the table. Trace, why don’t you read that verse printed on the handout.”
Trace held up the crumpled piece of paper. “‘My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.’”
“That’s right,” Pastor Gordon continued. “Jesus was talking to people about who he was. In fact, at the end of his answer to them, they actually picked up stones to kill him.”
“What for?” Vanessa said. “Just because he mentioned sheep? Talk about prejudice.”
A few people snickered.
“No, look at verse 30. Jesus says, ‘The Father and I are one.’ Those people knew that Jesus was saying he was equal with God. Now, who are the sheep he’s talking about?”
Cassie Strower held up a hand. “Well, Jesus is known as the Good Shepherd, so I think that anybody who follows him is one of the sheep of his flock.”
“Excellent,” Pastor Gordon said.
“Good one, little miss sheepherder,” Vanessa mumbled.
“The question is, how do you hear the Shepherd’s voice over all the noise out there in the world?”
“You have to listen?” someone said.
“Spend time with the Shepherd so you really know his voice,” another said.
“We had a dog once who went deaf,” Trace said
. “No, it’s true. And the only way you could get him back to the house was to bang a bunch of trash cans on the back deck. He only responded to the vibrations.”
“They should change the verse,” Vanessa said. “‘My dog hears me bang the trash cans.’”
When the laughter subsided, Pastor Gordon spoke again. “Those are all good answers . . . well, mostly . . . but the truth is, you have to be connected to the Shepherd to really hear his voice.”
“What do you mean?” Gary said. “I don’t get it.”
“Jamie, come back up here.”
Jamie stood and put on the blindfold again. Pastor Gordon turned her around a few times and let her get her balance. She took a spoon and an egg and steadied it.
“In a minute, I want you all to yell at the top of your lungs. Give Jamie bad advice; tell her to go left or right or stop. It doesn’t matter.”
“That’s not fair,” Trace said.
Pastor Gordon put something over Jamie’s head. Enclosed headphones. “Can you hear me?” he said through a microphone as the kids began yelling.
Jamie nodded.
“All right, I want you to turn to your left. . . . Good. . . . Now walk straight ahead about five steps. . . . Good. A little to your right. That’s it. You’re about a foot away from the pot, so take a half step forward and lean over. Excellent. Put your spoon out just a little. There. Now tip it over. . . .”
Applause and hoots broke out in the room as the egg plopped into the water. Jamie took off her blindfold. Vanessa sat with her arms folded.
Jamie sat with Cassie Strower. They were both pepperoni people—opposed to the sausage crowd on the other side. Jamie had told her all about the race in Alabama, especially what happened at the end.
“Your dad pretty busy?” Jamie said. Cassie’s father was an engineer with Upshaw, one of the best teams in town and known for building fast cars.
“They caught a design problem with the new engine right before Christmas, and they’ve been scrambling ever since. Don’t tell anybody I said that.”
