Until the End of Time: A Novel

by Danielle Steel

  “Where did you get that?”

  “At the mall two days ago,” Jenny beamed. “I love it. I know it’s kind of crazy, but it’s fun. If you need a lift sometime, call me, although there’s probably only room for one car seat.” So she could only give her a ride with one child, but maybe even that would help her, if she had someone to babysit the others, maybe her mother. “Try to come Sunday,” Jenny encouraged her. “Bring your husband, or your mom and the kids. And your sister. Everyone is supposed to bring one dish, but I’m sure there will be enough to go around. It will be fun.” At least she hoped so. Debbie looked like she needed some fun in her life. She appeared tired and disheveled, she was wearing chipped nail polish, and her hair was greasy. She had no time for herself, and her eyes told Jenny that something was wrong, even if Debbie didn’t say it. She didn’t tell her about the abuse group she was contemplating. She didn’t want to let her know that she had guessed. And she could be wrong.

  Debbie waved as she drove off, and Jenny looked pensive as she walked back inside, and a few minutes later Bill came home for lunch.

  “Everyone’s talking about your potluck lunch on Sunday,” he said, pleased. They were off to a great start in the community, thanks to Jenny. And he had been working hard to meet everyone for weeks. Together they were an efficient team. But that was Jenny. Days after she’d gotten there, it seemed like she’d been there for months. He had seen the notices for the AA and Al-Anon groups at the church, and he approved. She was reaching out, or trying to, wherever it was needed.

  She told him about Debbie over lunch, and he looked sympathetic but warned her again to be careful. “Let her come to you, Jen. If her husband thinks you’re on to him, he could hurt her.”

  “I think he already has,” Jenny said firmly. She didn’t believe Debbie’s first story about falling off a horse.

  “Then he could hurt her worse. You’re doing the right thing, letting her come here. Domestic abuse is a very dangerous thing.” She nodded, and believed what he was saying. He had counseled abused women during some of his internships while he was training, and he knew the risks to those women. Two of the women he had counseled had been killed. It had given him a healthy respect for how dangerous some of their men could be.

  She spent Saturday cleaning the church hall and setting up long tables for people to put the food on. There were other tables where they could sit to eat. And she put out tall stacks of paper plates and cups, and disposable utensils. They had everything they needed, right down to the paper napkins. By Saturday evening, everything was ready for the next day.

  And on Sunday, she was excited to hear his sermon. He had chosen the topic of gratitude, and how being grateful for small things, instead of lamenting big ones, could turn your life around. And he had cited several examples in his own life. And as they had been with his first three sermons before she got there, people were impressed by the simplicity and strength of his message. And they liked the fact that he was a very humble man, who had a strong affinity for people. He was intelligent, compassionate, and warm, with deep convictions about his beliefs. He was someone who lived his faith as well as preached it.

  And as soon as the service was over, people went downstairs. They had left their food offerings there before the service. The church had been packed that day, with people looking forward to the lunch. The church hall with the long tables had been turned into a feast. Gretchen came to find Jenny halfway through it. “Well, Mrs. Sweet,” Gretchen said to her with a look of open admiration, “your potluck lunch is a huge success. And all the women in town are in love with your husband. He’s a very handsome guy.”

  “Yes, he is.” Jenny looked at him from across the room. “And he’s all mine.”

  “They’re falling in love with you too,” Gretchen reassured her. “This was a great idea. I don’t know why we never did it before.”

  “Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to see the obvious. I think we should do this the first Sunday of every month.”

  “I second the motion,” Gretchen said, keeping an eye on all five of her kids, who were running around with countless others. “I see people here today who haven’t come to church in years. They like Bill, and if you feed people on top of it, you’ll have a real winner. Maybe we should do bingo nights too,” Gretchen said thoughtfully.

  “And an abused women’s group,” Jenny said quietly, and Gretchen nodded. Although they might not have been otherwise, and their paths would never have crossed, Jenny felt like she had a new friend. The two women got on well, although their lives had been very different to that point, and Gretchen was teaching Jenny a lot about their new home, how to fit in there, who people were, and how it all worked. There was so much Jenny wanted to do. And Gretchen loved it. She had already infused new life into Moose, which was just what it needed.

  The lunch was almost over, when Debbie appeared with all four of her kids. She said Tony had gone out with his friends, and they had walked over. It was a long way for the kids, and Jenny heaped food on plates for all five of them, and sat down to chat with her while they ate. She had served the kids hot dogs and a burger, and gave Debbie a good assortment of delicious foods on her plate. The fare was simple, but there appeared to be plenty of good cooks in Moose. Jenny had enjoyed the lunch herself. And Bill had made a point of greeting everyone who had come and stopping to talk to them. And he had met a number of new people he hadn’t seen in the past month. Several of the people he’d visited came as well, including Timmie, who’d given them the dog, and his sister and aunt.

  “I feel like Jack Kennedy when he was married to Jackie,” Bill said, smiling at her. “I have no illusions. I think they all came here to meet you. I’m the guy who came to Moose, Wyoming, with Jenny Sweet. But whatever gets them through these doors works for me. After that, it’s up to God. You can be my shill any day.”

  “Happy to oblige,” she said, as Debbie went off to chat with some of the friends she hadn’t seen since high school. She was laughing and talking and having a good time, and so was everyone else.

  Jenny and Bill stood in the doorway and thanked everyone for coming, as they left. Jenny was pleased to see that Debbie looked relaxed and happy. She said she’d had a really great time, and it was obvious that she meant it. Although she’d said they weren’t frequent churchgoers, she seemed totally at home.

  It was after four o’clock, and they all spent an hour cleaning up. Bill and Jenny, Gretchen and Eddy and two of their kids, and three women and two high school boys made up the cleaning crew. They got the place back in order in no time.

  That night Bill thanked Jenny again for everything she’d done.

  “You are turning out to be the perfect pastor’s wife,” he told her, and she beamed.

  The AA and Al-Anon groups were harder to get started than the potluck lunch had been. No one wanted to be identified as an alcoholic, or living with one, so it took time for people to show up for the groups. There was no one present at the meeting the first week, and Bill mentioned the two groups gently from the pulpit the following Sunday. And that time two women showed up for Al-Anon, and Gretchen came too, to share her experiences about her father. She did it to help Jenny get it going. Jenny was holding the groups in the rectory, which was small and cozy and had enough chairs if more people came.

  And it took two more weeks for one woman to show up at AA, and no men. But it was a start, and Jenny conducted the meeting just for her. The woman who came said she had been drinking heavily since her husband died two years before, and her married children thought she should join AA, as she had embarrassed them several times recently, drinking to excess at family events. She had passed out cold at the dinner table at the last one, and she wanted to get some support before she did it again at Thanksgiving. Jenny told her that it was smart of her to come, and the woman looked pleased. She had identified herself only as Mary, according to the rules of AA. Last names were never used, since anonymity was the cornerstone of the program. The purpose of anonymity in
the groups was that people could feel safe there. Jenny knew to remind them each time, at the end of a meeting, that they were not to disclose whom they had seen there, nor what was said.

  At the end of that week, Bill and Jenny shared a quiet Thanksgiving in their kitchen. They’d had several invitations but didn’t want to offend one person by accepting the dinner invitation of another, so they decided that it was wisest to stay alone, and they really enjoyed it. Jenny had cooked a small chicken for them with all the traditional trimmings. And they got up from the table afterward, feeling like they were going to explode after a delicious meal. They called her mother in Philadelphia, and she was planning to spend the evening with friends. She missed Jenny, but was pleased that everything was going so well. And she told her mother everything she had done in the past weeks. It was only when she told her about it that she realized herself how much she had accomplished. She and Bill were both very busy in Moose. He was counseling and visiting people, preparing his sermons, and trying to spend time with everyone on repeat visits. And he was surprised by how many of his congregants he had to visit on his borrowed horse. A lot of them lived well off the main roads and said they were snowed in for months at a time in winter. Bill had found an old horse-drawn sled in a small barn behind the church, and he was planning to try and use it that winter if Navajo was willing. Bill hoped he would be. The sled was so picturesque.

  And after Thanksgiving, the time flew by until Christmas. Jenny organized a Christmas potluck lunch again, and a bake sale, to raise some money for the church. And after Thanksgiving, attendance at both her AA and Al-Anon groups had picked up. People who had behaved badly over Thanksgiving, due to alcohol, had turned up for the AA group, and those who had been impacted by it went to Al-Anon. The congregation was talking about both meetings, and after a strong reminder each time, about preserving the anonymity of those who had attended, people were being remarkably good about not divulging who they saw. By Christmas both twelve-step groups were noticeably larger and well attended. She had moved the meetings to their living room, so they’d have room for more participants. They had outgrown the rectory in less than two months. Bill could hardly believe it. And Jenny’s goal for the new year was to start the women’s abuse group, but just before Christmas, she got an unexpected request from two teenage girls. They talked to her after Sunday school, before they left church, and they said they loved the way she did her makeup, and the way she dressed, and they wanted to know if she would do classes to teach them how to look more like her. And they said they had other friends who wanted to join them too. Jenny was their new hero. She was shocked and flattered, and since the theme was more frivolous in nature, she asked Bill what he thought she should do. And much to her surprise, he loved the idea.

  “But it’s not religious based,” she reminded him with a look of concern, but Bill wasn’t worried.

  “Who cares? You’re a minister’s wife—you can teach them how to do their makeup, and you can be talking about values and drugs and sex and all the issues that are important to them at the same time. What a great way to reach out to local kids and get them to church!” He was fully in favor of the project, and she contacted the two girls who had approached her, and said she would meet them at her home after the new year. She suggested Friday afternoons after school. That way it wouldn’t interfere with their weekend social life, or their homework, and parents were less likely to object, which made perfect sense, and the girls liked it too. They were fourteen and fifteen, and their friends were roughly the same age, although one of them knew an eighth grader who wanted to come too, which sounded fine to Jenny. Bill had made a good point about the value of the group.

  Before she started the group, she had Azaya send her several books about how to apply makeup, since Jenny wore very little, and had never applied it to anyone else, although she had seen lots of models being made up for shoots, both in her recent work and in her years at Vogue. Azaya promised to have Nelson send her a bunch of cosmetics samples, and she was impressed but not surprised at how enterprising Jenny was. And much to Jenny’s relief, Azaya said that none of her clients were complaining, although Jenny called them once a week to touch base, and more often if there was a problem. So far dealing with them from a distance had gone well, with Azaya and Nelson meeting their needs, and there was no reason to think that would change.

  Bill held a special service at the church with Christmas carols the day before Christmas Eve, and they had a midnight service on Christmas Eve, which was heavily attended, and on Christmas Day Bill and Jenny visited many people in the congregation, particularly the sick and elderly. It was a very rewarding day. And that night, they wished each other a merry Christmas and exchanged presents. They had agreed to buy all their gifts for each other at the mall that year. Bill bought her a new warm jacket, a cowboy hat, and a beautiful pair of black lizard cowboy boots with a matching belt, and a set of fuzzy dice for her yellow truck. And she had gotten him cowboy boots very similar to the ones he gave her, and two warm sweaters to wear when he visited people in the congregation, a camera he had wanted, riding gloves, and a black Stetson just like Clay’s, which he had admired, and which looked great on Bill. They bought a new collar for Gus, who was growing by leaps and bounds. Timmie had come to visit him several times, and he had gone riding with Bill a few times, and they were becoming good friends. Timmie seemed to revel in the company of a man, and admitted to him how much he missed his father.

  They were enjoying their new life in Wyoming, and they called Tom, and Jenny’s mother, on Christmas Day. Their old life seemed light-years away, and it was hard to believe that Bill had been there for only three months, and Jenny for two. And when she went back to New York in late January before the shows, it felt like another planet. But she was relieved to see that her clients were doing well. They were happy to see her, and grateful that she had come back to help them with their shows. She had consulted with them frequently about their selections and was fully prepared when she got to New York. She had even helped them choose the models for their runway shows from the distance, with Azaya’s help. And the clients were all pleased to be working with Azaya too. She had been well trained by Jenny and had good ideas of her own.

  Jenny was happy to get back from New York and everyone in Moose said how much they’d missed her while she was away, particularly Gretchen. Jenny brought some clothes back for her, which fit her perfectly, and a bracelet she loved. Gretchen was thrilled with her new fashions from New York.

  As soon as she returned to Moose, Jenny started her teenage group on Friday afternoons. It was more fun than she had expected. The girls were outspoken and funny and open about their concerns. They wanted to learn more from her than how to put on makeup—they wanted to learn about fashion and style. And they wound up talking about boys, and sex and drugs, birth control, and how to deal with their parents. Some of them talked about college and wanted to leave Wyoming, while others were terrified to leave the womb they had grown up in. And every week a few more girls joined them.

  There were fifteen girls in her group within a month, and in February there were so many, she split them into two groups, and she was impressed by how great they looked and how much they were learning from her. They looked cleaner and sleeker, got better haircuts, did their nails, wore less makeup, and saw the merits of simpler clothes. She bought them makeup herself and went to the mall to shop with them. They looked so pretty and fresh, even their parents were impressed. And so was Bill. Jenny had a wonderful way with them, and they all loved her.

  On Valentine’s Day, after she returned from New York, they surprised her and gave her a party to tell her how much they appreciated her. They made cupcakes with her initials on them, and had T-shirts made with their pictures on them inside a big heart. They called themselves “Jenny’s Girls,” and it was a status symbol in Moose to be one of them.

  Also in February, Jenny started her abuse group, under the heading DVA, Domestic Violence Anonymous, and like the other gr
oups, she held it at her house. And just like AA, it took time to get started, but word of mouth traveled fast, and by the end of February, there were six women in her living room on Monday nights. They told their husbands that they were going to an embroidery class at the church. And they all referred to it as the Embroidery Group. But the women in town all knew what it was. It was a secret code that allowed them to attend and discuss it among themselves. Jenny was disappointed to see that Debbie never joined them. She had talked to her about it, but Debbie said her husband would kill her if he found out, so she didn’t push it. By then, Jenny had seen her with blackened eyes and bruises several times, and Debbie no longer pretended that she had walked into a door or fallen off a horse. They both knew how the bruises had occurred. Her husband Tony beat her up every time he got drunk, or anytime the kids annoyed him, made noise, or woke him up, which they did often, but Debbie never left him and was afraid of his reaction if she did. She had a sister in Moose, and another one in Cheyenne, but they couldn’t take her in with four kids. And history was repeating itself. Her mother had been beaten by her alcoholic husband until he died. Debbie had grown up watching that and thought it was her lot in life to be abused whenever her husband felt like it. She had no money, no job, and nowhere to go, and four kids to take with her if she left. Her life was a dead end at twenty-four. It broke Jenny’s heart seeing that, and she spoke to Bill about it often, but they were afraid to interfere and make it worse.