Mending Places

by Hunter, Denise

  “He’s still with you.”

  “I don’t feel Him. I don’t feel His comfort. I don’t feel any comfort at all.”

  Hanna squeezed her hand. “Have you been going to church or to your women’s Bible study?”

  Guilt pricked Natalie’s conscience, not for the first time. “I haven’t been keeping up with my study guide, so I haven’t been going to study group, but I have been going to church.” And my mind has been miles away from the message. Maybe she should start her study again. She’d done a few days’ worth before she’d found out about the affair, and she’d been enjoying it.

  They talked awhile about Gram and the divorce proceedings before Hanna looked at her watch and said she needed to run.

  After Natalie shut the door, she went to the bookshelf and scanned the titles. She might as well make use of the quiet moments before Taylor woke. Finally she found it, A Woman’s Heart study guide. She went to the garage to get her Bible, feeling guilty again that it was still in the car from last Sunday.

  She wondered why she was even bothering with the study. The women’s group must be almost finished with it by now.

  When she sat at the bar and began thumbing through the first finished pages, she saw she’d done a good job of keeping up with the daily worksheets, but on week two, day four, her penned-in answers stopped. She grabbed a pen from the junk drawer and went to work.

  She began reading through the day’s lesson about the manna the Israelites received from God every morning. Turning to Lamentations 3:22—23, she read the verse and then the question: How often are God’s mercies new? She filled in the blank: every morning.

  Another characteristic of the manna spoke beautifully of God’s mercy: It would always be given in perfect supply for the need. God’s measure of mercy is offered according to the need. That is why we often say the words, “I could never endure it if that happened to me.”

  How many times had she wondered that when other women had found out their husbands were having an affair? It had always been her worst fear, next to losing one of her boys. She quickly read on.

  In the moment we say those words, our ratio of mercy matches our present need. True, on that exact amount of mercy, we could not survive. But when the time arises and the need escalates, so does the grace required for us to make it!

  Then why didn’t she feel God’s presence, His mercy? She didn’t feel like she was “making it” at all. Glancing down at the workbook, she looked up the next verse and wrote it in the blanks: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

  Her eyes perked at the next paragraph in the guide.

  Although I rejoiced greatly over what God taught me about the manna, one thought kept occurring to me: “Precious Father, I’ve known a few Christians who did not appear to make it very well through their crises. If Your mercy is always sufficiently given according to the need, what happened to them? I have known Christians who had nervous breakdowns. I have even known Christians who committed suicide.” In His great tenderness, God led me back to the wilderness and instructed me to do exactly what I am going to ask you to do.

  Natalie’s eyes skipped to the next blanks, where she was instructed to look through Exodus 16 and list every verse in which the word gather appeared. She listed seven verses, wondering about its purpose. What did gathering manna have to do with Christians finding strength to get through difficult circumstances? She read on, looking for an explanation.

  I finally understood the nature of God’s mercy and grace. They are always there, available every day prior to our need, and in direct proportion to every moment’s demand; but we must gather them. That part is completely our responsibility. What do you think would have happened to the Israelites if they had stayed inside their tents with their stomachs growling? They would have starved to death with the provision right outside the tent!

  Natalie stared at the page. Why had she never seen it before? Of course. She needed to gather the manna. But what had she been doing all these weeks? She’d been cooped up in her tent complaining she was hungry. Didn’t Jesus call Himself the “bread of life”?

  She bowed her head. Thank You, Father God, that You’ve opened my eyes to a new teaching. I will begin gathering, and only then will I expect to find the mercy and grace You intended me to have for this time in my life. Forgive me for forsaking Your provision. Amen.

  Natalie read through the next day’s lesson, then the next, filling in blanks and gleaning nuggets of wisdom from the Scripture. By the time Taylor called to her from his crib, she’d read a week’s worth of lessons and gained new insight that strengthened her and cloaked her in the grace and mercy of her Father.

  Somewhere in the lodge, a door slammed shut, and the muffled sound pulled Hanna from the depths of sleep. She rolled over and tugged the comforter over her shoulders. A stray hair dangled over her nose, tickling her, and she swiped it away.

  Then she started thinking about bills. Specifically those she’d received in the mail the day before. Had she received a bill for the magazine ads this month? She mentally reviewed the stack of mail on her desk tray and couldn’t raise the image of the bill. Had she gotten last months bills for the ads? She didn’t remember paying them, but surely she had.

  Hanna cracked open her eyes, blinking at the light from the bedside lamp and peering at her alarm clock. She groaned. Four thirty-seven. Why was she wide awake when it was practically the middle of the night?

  She turned over and shut her eyes, but after ten minutes of trying to lull her brain to sleep, she gave up and tugged on a pair of sweats. She may as well get some things done before church.

  The door made a loud click behind her as she turned into the hall, guided by the exit lights. She hadn’t even brushed her hair or teeth, but then, she wasn’t likely to see anyone at this hour.

  A noise sounded in the lobby near her office. She stopped just short of the wide doorway, hugging the wall. What if it was the person who’d been breaking into her office? Her heart thumped heavily in her chest. Should she go back to her room? Go wake Micah?

  Before she reached a decision, someone rounded the corner. Her breath caught. He turned the other direction, walking away from her.

  It was Micah’s silhouette, his build, his gait. She released a breath and started to call out to him, then stopped. What was he doing out here in the dark of night?

  Suspicion crowded her mind. Could he have been doing it all along? He was here; he had the opportunity. She watched him amble down the hall and slip inside his door. If he’d been up to no good, wouldn’t he be in a hurry? Wouldn’t he be looking around, sneaking around? He’d been walking as if he’d been out for a midnight stroll, not breaking and entering or stealing confidential information.

  Discomforted and anxious, she turned back to her room. Her heart rejected the notion that Micah could be betraying her. That he could be feigning feelings just to secure his convenient position. She had initiated the relationship, she reminded herself. And he had fought the attraction at first.

  She didn’t know what to believe anymore. Closing the door behind her, she entered her bedroom and slid under the covers again. She thought of their last outing together, the day they’d spent fishing and hiking. The kisses by the lake, the frolicking in the grass. The moment she’d realized she loved him. Had she fallen in love with her betrayer? Her heart argued no, but her mind refused to ignore the compelling evidence that said otherwise.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Her sleeplessness showed at church later that morning. She’d had trouble keeping her mind on the sermon; instead, it was filled with bills, suspicions, and questions. She needed to resolve this whole mess. After lunch Hanna keyed the reservations into the computer, including names, addresses, and specifics about their room and shuttle service. Next, she deleted the two guests who’d called to cancel. As she keyed in shuttle-service information, she heard Devon enter the lodge.

  “Hey, I’m back.” He leaned against the
doorframe. “Did you say you needed the keys to the van?”

  “Yeah, just toss them on the counter. Your schedule for this week is over there too.”

  Hanna hit the shift key, but her finger slid off, and she inadvertently pressed a couple of keys at once. The program closed out without saving any of her changes.

  “Shoot!” She looked at the keyboard, wondering how she’d made her work disappear.

  “What’s wrong?” Devon peeked in.

  “I don’t know. I accidentally hit one of these keys, and everything disappeared.”

  His footsteps neared as she stared at the screen in frustration. “What did you hit?”

  She told him what had happened. He leaned over her with one hand on the mouse, the other on the keyboard, surrounding her with his body. The space grew claustrophobic. Her pulse drummed in her ear. The heavy scent he wore brushed her nostrils, and she turned her face away from his neck.

  “Here. Just click here and do this,” he said.

  No longer was she concerned about the information she’d lost. She’d type it in ten times over if only he would remove himself from her space.

  “Hanna, I have—” Micah’s voice penetrated her senses.

  She looked at the doorway as he stopped on the threshold.

  “There we go.” Devon straightened proudly. “All taken care of.” He squeezed her shoulder.

  “Hey, Micah,” Devon said on his way out the door.

  Micah jerked his chin upward in greeting and watched Devon saunter away before stepping inside the office and shutting the door. “You all right?”

  She drew a deep breath and let out the tension. “I’m fine. He was helping me retrieve some documents.”

  “When do his classes start again?”

  “Two more weeks. I’ll be glad when he’s gone, even though I’ll have to start running the shuttle.” She gave him a sad smile. “If there are any guests to pick up. Our reservations are dismal.”

  “I know. Hang in there, baby.”

  He squeezed her shoulders, and she relaxed under his hands.

  “You look tired.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled sarcastically. “Actually, I was up early. I mean very early. But then, you should be tired too. I saw you walking down the hall toward your room as I left my room.”

  His hands stopped and his eyebrows inched upward. “I didn’t come out until just before church.”

  She felt as if she’d walked through a fuzzy web of confusion. Why would he deny it unless he had something to hide? “No, I saw you in the hallway at four-thirty.”

  “Hanna, I didn’t come out of my room until eight-thirty.”

  She shook her head. “It had to be you. I even saw you going into your room.”

  His jaw slacked. “You saw someone going into my room?”

  “Micah. It was you. I’m sure of it.”

  His gaze shifted around the office as if searching for the answer. “I guess I could have been sleepwalking.”

  She breathed a laugh. “Sleepwalking?”

  “I don’t do it very often, but I hope that’s what it was. The alternative isn’t very comforting.”

  “I’m sure it was you, so relax.” Hadn’t he mentioned before that he was a sleepwalker? That explained it all, didn’t it? She pushed away the thread of doubt and rolled her chair closer to him. “So, you sleepwalk, huh? Got any interesting stories to tell?”

  He laughed and pulled her chair even closer. “Well, there is the pizza story.”

  “Do tell.”

  He folded his arms across the back of the chair and laid his chin on his arm. “When I lived with Jim and Jan, they had this brown Lab named Snickers.”

  “Snickers?” She grinned.

  “You know, like the candy bar. Anyway, Jan woke up one morning to find an empty pizza box on the kitchen floor—we’d had pizza delivered the night before. She knew Snickers couldn’t open the refrigerator door, and Jim swore he didn’t do it, so …”

  “You fed the dog pizza in the middle of the night?”

  “Hey, I didn’t remember doing it, they just laid the blame at my feet.”

  “I think you ate the pizza in the middle of the night and laid the box on the floor so they’d blame the dog.”

  “And I think you need another good tickling.”

  The last days of August approached, and Hanna’s mind was muddled with worry. Natalie’s court date approached, and she prayed every day for God to give her sister peace. And there was Gram, who appeared to be doing fine, but Hanna knew she must be in turmoil about the months ahead. Then there was this business with the lodge. Soon she would need to do the bills, but a sense of dread had made her put off the task. Business was sluggish, and she knew when the last subtraction was punched into the calculator, there would be a minus sign in front of the numbers. Not a good place to be when skiing season was still two to three months away.

  The one good thing was that Devon was gone. With his departure, there was one salary she wouldn’t have to pay. But if business didn’t pick up, it would be a moot point. Just the thought that someone might succeed in sabotaging their lodge made her heart seize with anger. If they did go under, she would make every effort to find out who it was and keep the property from their dirty hands.

  Finally, on the last day of August, Hanna sat at her desk and pulled the bills from the tray. She did the payroll first, then proceeded to the dreaded expenses, starting with the mortgage payment and subtracting from their bank balance as she went. By the time she’d paid the mortgage, their money was gone. And she still had a stack of invoices.

  She propped her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands. Had it all come down to this? What had happened to her plan to save the lodge? It had started out so promising with reservations galore.

  A sudden thought struck. Where were the bills from the magazines that were running her ad? She flipped through the ledger and looked for the last payment to those magazines. That was strange. She hadn’t paid the monthly fee since June, which meant they hadn’t billed her.

  Should she call and straighten it out or count her blessings that she didn’t have to pay those bills? She debated a moment, then flipped her Rolodex open to the Travel America card and dialed their number. After listening to messages and being transferred from one department to another, she finally got through to the right person.

  “Hi, Cindy, this is Hanna Landin from Higher Grounds Mountain Lodge.”

  “Hi, Ms. Landin, what can I do for you?”

  “I placed a full-page ad to be run in every issue until the end of the year, but I just realized I hadn’t received a bill the past two months.”

  “Hold on a moment, and I’ll pull up your account.”

  She heard Cindy tapping the keyboard for a moment, then silence.

  “Yes, here it is. Your ad ran in June’s edition, then you asked us to cancel the ad in mid-June—”

  “What?”

  “You canceled the ad in June, so it hasn’t run since that first time, that’s why you haven’t been billed.”

  “But—but I didn’t cancel the ad.”

  “I’m sorry. I have a notation right here on the screen, and I remember taking the call. Would you like to begin running the ads again?”

  Hanna’s mind spun. She hadn’t called. Maybe Gram. “I know I didn’t make that call. Did the caller identify herself? Maybe it was my grandmother.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happened.”

  Well, Hanna did. She clenched her jaw. Her pulse sped, and heat spread to her face. Their little interloper had done it again. This prank had no doubt cost them in reservations, but at least it could be remedied.

  “Could you please restart the ad as soon as possible?” She’d have to worry later about how to pay for it. At this point, if the business didn’t turn around, it was all over.

  “Sure, I’ll do that. The deadline for next issue is tomorrow, so we still have time to get it in there. I’m really sorry about
the mistake.”

  “That’s all right; it’s not your fault.”

  She got off the phone and flipped through the Rolodex again, this time looking for the other magazine representative. She had the extension number for him, so she got through right away. Sure enough, the same thing had happened there. She requested that the ad begin running again and hung up the phone.

  How long would this go on? How many other ways had this person interfered with their business that they hadn’t discovered yet?

  “Knock-knock.” Micah’s voice called from the doorway.

  Hanna turned. “Hi there.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  She sat back in her chair. “Am I that transparent?”

  She saw him take in the stack of bills, the payroll envelopes, and the desk calculator. “Uh-oh. It was as bad as you thought?”

  “Worse. I haven’t even paid two bills, and we’re already in the red. And that’s not all.”

  “Don’t leave me in suspense.”

  “I just found out that someone canceled our magazine ads. Remember how we were busy through June, but business slacked off in July and August?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, my ads ran in June, then someone phoned the magazines pretending to be me and canceled the ads. They haven’t run the past two months.”

  “But can you start them again?” Micah asked.

  “I did, but that doesn’t solve this problem. I can’t even pay the bills.” She gestured to the desk.

  Micah picked up the payroll envelopes and shuffled through them. “Paychecks?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  He pulled his own from the pile and tossed the rest on the desk. Then he ripped the envelope in half.

  “Micah—”

  “There’s one you don’t have to worry about.” He pulled his wallet from his pocket and sifted through it.

  She watched, confused.

  He pulled two paychecks from his wallet and ripped them in half too.

  “Micah, you can’t do that!”