When I arrived the next morning though, and saw Adrian and Dahlia, laughing together, looking so beautiful, so perfect, my well-planned words escaped me. I returned their waves, but slid behind the protection of the computer at the back of the store, checking for Tracey’s devotion to bolster myself. As I clicked on it, I remembered something—it was Rochelle’s week. Too late. The words filled the screen.
Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.
I stared at the computer screen, blinking through my tears, afraid to scroll down and read the words that followed. The heading, Urgent Grace, had almost escaped me. Though it was copied to the loop, it was my name alone that came next.
Dana,
I write asking your forgiveness and to say that this year has been more difficult than I could ever have imagined. Somehow you’ve been tangled up in the middle of it all. I tried to spend some time with the Lord today. The Lord met me there and took my hand, leading me to this verse in the Word. And so I come, cowardly I admit, writing an e-mail instead of calling or coming over, but it’s all that I have today.
Will you please forgive me? And not just for what’s been going on lately, but for the last few years. I’ve been a controlling maniac over you since you became a Christian. I’ve so wanted to protect you that I put you under rules and systems that I couldn’t even keep myself. And now I fear you’ll become as confused and bitter as I have.
Don’t. You’re a wonderful, beautiful woman. Your own woman. I release you, Dana, from everything that I’ve placed over you. May only the good things remain. I pray our next meeting will be better than our last.
In Him,
Rochelle
P.S. You were right about Shawn. It didn’t work out.
Stunned, I read the message again and yet another time before writing off a quick reply. I wanted to leave it, to write back tomorrow when I wasn’t crying so hard that my contacts were about to pop out, when the words weren’t so true. But I knew how big a step this had been for Rochelle and how I’d be waiting by my monitor for a response if it had been me. So I typed.
Rochelle,
I forgive you.
And thank you.
You wanted me to live a sincere life for God. A life like yours. Though I can say many things about you, I would never say that you don’t do things with both purpose and passion. As much as you’ve tried to change me. I’ve tried to change you, too. Now that you are changing, I miss the old Rochelle that I once ridiculed.
Also, anything that I fell bondage to was my own doing as well. I have a house full of Bibles. You have been my schoolmaster. Without you, who knows what might have become of me. Let us both now be free of the law, free of expectation to conform into each other’s likeness, free to be wonderfully made in the image of Christ. Let’s not speak of it again.
Hush now,
Dana
If only it could be this simple with Dahlia.
Not that the three years of pushing and pulling and praying that had led up to those two e-mails had been easy. Whatever the case, I felt lighter. A weight I hadn’t known I was carrying lifted from my heart, though I still felt a little weepy.
I clicked off my Web browser and spun in the chair, staring at the door, where women prowled outside waiting to get in.
I smiled, now intimate with the morning rhythms of Leverhill’s Mothers of the Brides. Coffee across the street at The Bean Counter, which now occupied Adrian’s old space, and then shopping on my shelves and chatting with friends, old and new. It was hard to believe I owned all the units on this side of the street.
In an uncharacteristic move, I spun my chair around and slipped off my shoes. I walked from the computer at the back of the store to the front where Adrian was on a ladder, lighting the sconces, and Dahlia was counting off the register. Once on the carpet, I dragged my feet through the teal shag one toe at a time. They both stared at me in disbelief.
I was just as surprised, but the simple act of forgiving Rochelle had opened something up in me, the vulnerable part of me that I’d been trying to guard for so long. The seed of who I am. Though I hadn’t realized it, protecting this part of myself had kept others from wounding it, but it had also kept me from accessing it. As a holy stillness settled over the room, I saw Dahlia as God might see her, a little girl with a handful of daisies, walking through the house trying to give them away. Everyone she offered them to declined. Each already had a rose. My rose.
It was an obscure memory, like film on top of a pot of tea, forming then fading, but it was real. Yellow roses. For Mama, Daddy, Jordan and me.
“What about me?” she’d said, crying through her words.
“They’re all gone, but you can have mine if you want it.”
And she’d taken it, both then and now.
“Are you all right?” Adrian was down the ladder and at my side.
He looked like a boy to me again, with a cropped afro and a pocket calculator in his Levi’s. “Want to hang?” I could hear him say, as he so often did back then.
“No. I’m going to ride. You can’t stay up under me all the time. Go and find somebody who’ll be with you all the time. A new friend.”
And he did. He’d married her, in fact.
“I’m fine,” I said, allowing the tears to flow freely down my face, blurring the past into the present. I opened my mouth to try and explain, but a scent strong enough to awake my numb nose and smooth enough to soothe my broken heart penetrated my senses.
A Jesus breeze. I sat down on the floor and rolled onto my stomach.
Adrian pitched onto his knees beside me. “What is it?” he asked, though his eyes told me he knew that God was working, healing.
My fingers closed around his. He kissed them all together, even his own, then cleared his throat as though he’d forgotten himself. Dahlia didn’t say a word.
I took both our hands and pointed upwards toward the candle above us. “What is that?”
He dropped back onto his heels. Though he knew I loved his candles, I rarely spoke of them and hadn’t commented on a scent since I’d been there. “Island Wedding,” he said, lowering his head closer to mine. “My pineapple with a splash of your jasmine.”
A fat, crazy laugh escaped my lips. Dahlia froze at the sound of my joy. Our happiness seemed to accuse her, assault her. I kept laughing and sniffing until she braved a giggle herself.
“Island Wedding, huh?” What a man, this guy. Though jasmine was my favorite, it wasn’t a great seller. Too sweet. I didn’t make much of it except for myself and I hadn’t been doing much for myself of late.
“A little bit of both of us,” I said, drinking in the words.
Adrian nodded. He looked so pleased that I was pleased. I hadn’t seen him smile like that in a while. “I didn’t plan on it. Just started mixing something for myself and you fell into it.” He shrugged and kissed my forehead. “Like always.”
The bionic music started in my head. There were many things I wanted to say to him, but we had thirty minutes before opening and we weren’t alone. I kissed his forehead, too, leaving a heart-shaped print of coral lipstick behind. He wore it like a crown. I waved toward my sister. “Dahlia, take a load off and come and sit with us real quick before we open.”
She moved cautiously, reaching us just as the candle’s aroma reached full swell. Daddy’s triple-thick pineapple shakes with warm berries and whipped cream and a drizzle of orange juice slid across my mind. My sister’s favorite. I hugged her with my free arm. “I appreciate everything you’ve done here.”
“But it’s time for me to go, huh?”
Adrian answered before I could say a word. “Basically. I hired you at Kick! to help you out, but it’s become—”
“Confusing?” she offered.
He laughed a little. “Yeah, that.”
Here I w
as all ready to love up on my sister instead of firing her, like I wanted to for so long, and she decides to leave on her own. God was funny like that. Sometimes He just needs to know you’re willing.
Dahlia started for the door. “Funny, I was going to quit today and I didn’t know how to tell you two. I was praying about it all morning. I have an idea of my own for a business. I’m going to go for it.”
I sighed, this time in a good way. “You do that.”
“We’re here for you,” Adrian said. “We’ll miss your skills.”
He’d better not miss anything else. As my sister let herself out and the new customers in—who’d seen the whole exchange but seemed to be growing used to our weirdness—I turned to Adrian and took another sniff. “Rename that. Island Wedding just doesn’t do it justice. That stuff smells like peace, pure and simple.”
Adrian smiled. “Peace it is. For them anyway. It’ll always be Island Wedding to me. It’s what my dreams smell like.”
By noon, I’d come up with a whole new line of peace products—body gloss, bath milk and scented eye pillows. Maybe I’d even have Tracey design some scented drawer liners…Anything to keep my mind off what I would say to Adrian, who gave me the puppy dog look every few minutes. It was going to be a long lunch.
Unable to wait that long, Adrian assisted the last morning customer, flipping the closed sign behind her and pulling down the blinds.
“What are you doing?” In all the time he’d been here, I’d never seen him close during business hours even if nobody came through. He believed a business should be open during its scheduled hours. Period.
The next blind fluttered down. “I’m conducting real business. Something I should have done a long time ago.”
I swallowed hard, trying to sort through the determination and regret battling in his voice. Before I could sort out my thoughts, he snuffed all the candles but one, which he grabbed before dragging me to the back room.
He pulled out my chair and set a tall white pillar with gold chunks on a pewter saucer between us. He trimmed the wick to almost a nub and lit the flame, his eyes focused on the flickering light and then on me. “I need to tell you something.”
“Wait. I—”
“Please.” His voice was firm. “Let me get it out.”
Realizing that he needed to receive forgiveness as much as I needed to give it, I sank back into my chair for the second time in one week and listened to a tale of seduction, sin and sorrow. Only this time, it was much harder to hear. Adrian hung his head as he told of his baby Christian pride and how he’d allowed himself to be alone with Dahlia in hopes of “ministering” to her. And that’s just what she had done, but to him instead.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Yeah, right.”
I nodded. God had really helped me restrain my emotions in the past few years—a little anyway—but back then? Who knows what I might have done? And he had been a snob about his spirituality. I’d considered myself a Christian and he’d gotten on my nerves. Jesus makes all the difference. “But Sandy? Why get married?”
He dropped into the chair and leaned over, his elbows gouging his thighs. His head rolled into his palms. “When I got up from that bed with Dahlia, it was like I’d killed somebody. Murdered something. How could I face you? Face your mother? Your father?” He stiffened. “I could barely face myself.”
His hands slid to his ears as though he were holding his head on his body. “So I stayed away—from your family, from our church family, from everything that I knew. And Sandy, well, she filled the gap. Eventually, I told her everything and she convinced me that marrying her was a way out.”
My head rolled in a circle the way it had during the cool downs for my workouts at the hospital.
He touched my shoulder. “Don’t hate her. I think she believed that.”
Okay. Maybe Dahlia as the villain was easier than dealing with the first wife thing. “I don’t hate Sandy, Adrian. How could I? She loved you. You loved her.”
He shrugged. “She was a good wife, Dana. She helped me a lot, especially with my mother. I don’t know why things happened the way they did, but we were happy together.”
A chuckle cracked the tension, surprising us both—especially me, since it came from my mouth. “I have to hand it to her. She wanted you bad.”
He didn’t laugh. “I guess. I grew to love Sandy and I mean no disrespect to her memory. I forgave her for some of the things she said and did without my knowledge and I asked her forgiveness for using her as a way out, though I grew to love her. I would have liked to never revisit all this, but I needed to come clean with you. Especially about your sister.”
My head moved up and down a bit. Not quite a nod, but close enough. “Dahlia told me anyway. At Tracey’s shower.”
He froze. “All this time? You knew? Is that what—”
“No. It probably didn’t help, but the stroke was the result of many things.” I rolled my shoulders back. “You know what? We’ve both done some shaky stuff. I never should have left your wedding with Trevor. The real questions we have to answer are about right now.”
A knock on the glass interrupted.
We ignored it. The customers would have to heed the sign today.
Adrian rotated the candle plate, watching the pool of wax widen around the wick, now curled over like a bent reed. “Can you forgive me—can you love me—knowing, well, everything?”
I smiled. “I do forgive you.” I paused. “And I couldn’t stop loving you if I tried.”
A relieved look passed over his face.
“Building a relationship though is going to take some time and effort, on both our parts.”
Adrian nodded and kissed my hand. “And a lot more candles, huh?”
I laughed and opened my arms to him for a brief, sweet hug. Hand in hand, we walked to the front door, to find Dahlia, crying.
As Adrian clicked the lock and pulled back the glass, my sister tumbled into his arms and wadded his shirt into her fists. “It’s over. Trevor’s called off the wedding. What am I going to do?”
“What? Why?” Adrian pulled his cell from his pocket and flipped it open, dialing furiously.
I clicked it shut. “What happened, Dahlia?”
A fury of microbraids streaked with blond tumbled over her fingers. “He overreacted. He—he came by the house and I had a friend over. It was innocent—”
Adrian threw up his hands. “Who was it?”
Not that I wasn’t curious myself, but why did he care?
Don’t go there.
She bit her lip. “Bob.”
Adrian pinched the bridge of his nose. “The Visa guy?”
I shook my head. “You didn’t.” And what was up with Bob? He was better than that, though evidently he didn’t know it yet.
She paced back and forth in front of the door. “No, I didn’t. It was just a kiss. I was lonely. Upset. Confused. I kept trying to talk to Trevor, but he’s so scared of doing something wrong that he wouldn’t even be alone with me….” Her voice broke up. “He says maybe we’re not ready to get married if I’m kissing somebody. That maybe we should get rooted in Jesus first. How long does that take?”
Adrian and I grabbed hands, trying not to count how much time we’d spent apart. I touched my sister’s hair. “You don’t want to know.”
“Looks like that karate is doing some good.”
I shoved the leftover salad into the refrigerator, then dumped the leftover red velvet cake into a disposable container and slid it across the counter. Dad would have to take that home with him. I popped another cube of honeydew into my mouth. “It’s kickboxing, Dad. And thanks. I think so, too.”
My father came closer, smelling of figs and fried potatoes, a refreshing change from the years of beer and Old Spice imprinted on my memory. Caught up in memories, I tread on our moot subject. “Would you like to go back to church this evening?”
He stroked his beard.
“It’s a singing.”
I shook my head.
“I’ll tell you what, moppet. If you and your sister sing a duet for me tonight, I’ll come.”
The refrigerator door slammed on my finger. “I don’t even know if she’s going tonight—” Since Trevor had called off the wedding two weeks ago, Dahlia’s church attendance had been scarce.
Dahlia’s perfume entered the kitchen ahead of her. “I’m going to church tonight,” she said. “And I’ll sing if Dana will.”
Now you’ve done it.
Daddy did a little jig. His laughter filled the kitchen as the scent of his dinner had an hour earlier—fried chicken, baked pork chops with an apple-onion sauce, au gratin potatoes, snap beans, red velvet cake, and my dessert, a wedge of the biggest honeydew melons I’d seen in many a summer. He tugged his beard once more. “Be sure and sing it a capella now. No music. I want the real thing.”
I took a deep breath and nodded in agreement as my sister’s eyes met mine. She smiled. I tried to, but she’d hopped on Adrian’s lap after church. He pretty much pushed her on to the floor like she was a giant bug, but I still wanted to knock the taste out of her mouth. Instead, she’d knocked the taste out of mine. I hadn’t been able to eat a thing until this melon. Now I was starving, but we were out the door and at the church before I could think about eating more. I didn’t like to sing on a full stomach anyway.
Made of Honor Page 25
