“The girls had a great time at Connor’s fish fry.” Beth elbows me and wiggles her eyebrows. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.” Her face tells me she’s not buying it. “We’re just . . . hanging out, I guess. Plus he’s still searching for Miss Perfection.”
“Maybe he’s changed his mind. You know, it’s all over town that he’s pursuing you.”
The girlie part of my brain takes these words and seals them with a lipsticky kiss. The logical part of my brain—the dominant part—feels the old fears closing in. Shutting the gates down like a mall shop at nine o’clock.
“I have a job interview tomorrow with National Geographic. I’m too mobile for a relationship right now.”
“That’s probably what the people on the ark said, but they seemed to have made it just fine. Girl, you do not toss someone like Connor Blake away. He is the real deal.”
I flip open my bulletin and pretend to read it. “Yeah, real arrogant, real bossy, and real nosy.”
“And real hot.” She swats my hand and laughs. “And your eyes just followed him to his seat just now, so don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“I’m not sticking around in Ivy. Connor knows that. We’re just—”
“Hanging out.” Beth purses her lips.
He eases into the seat next to Danielle Chapel and a few other people. She hugs him tight and laughs at something he says.
Beth points in their direction. “He and Danielle are in a Bible study together. They’re just friends.”
“Does she know that?”
Beth throws her head back and laughs. “Maggie, when you do fall, you’re gonna fall hard. I just hope you don’t let it pass you by and decide to go bungee off a water tower instead.”
“That is the most ridiculous bit of—”
I’m cut off as the worship minister grabs his mic and the band explodes into jubilant song. The congregation stands, and everyone begins to clap in time to the beat. Beside me, Mark and Beth Sterling lift their hands up high and praise the God they cling to. The God they’re believing will deliver them from debt and foreclosure. The God they’re expecting to keep their babies fed.
The next few songs keep me on my feet and wind my brain down, letting me shut out the things pressing down and focus on the Lord. I block out thoughts of Connor, my parents, my sister, even Riley. God, help me to keep my mind and heart on you.
Pastor Thomas takes the pulpit, and I grab a pen to fill in the sermon notes on the back of the bulletin. But when I flip it over, there’s just an empty page with today’s date.
“Brothers and sisters, I don’t have blanks for you to write in today. Don’t have my thoughts outlined out all nice and neat.” He slowly walks from the left side of the stage to the right. “You know why? Because I want you to just listen. Because I have a message that every person here needs today. And you’re gonna let the Holy Spirit personalize it for you. He’s gonna tell you when you’re being spoken to. And that’s when you write something down.”
A woman behind me shouts an amen. I settle into my seat and prepare to listen. Though I’d rather have notes.
“Do you remember the story of Jonah and the whale?”
A low rumble of uh-huhs go across the room.
“Maybe you heard this story in children’s church—back in the day when we used puppets and felt boards.” I laugh at the old visual. “I want to tell you that story again. Now, God told Jonah to go to Nineveh. And Jonah said, ‘No way am I doing that.’ So he thinks to himself, ‘I’ll just leave. God can’t catch me. I can’t go to Nineveh if I’m on a boat headed somewhere else.’ ”
I doodle a star on my blank page. Then I turn it into a flowering rose.
“So Jonah hops on a ship, and what does the Lord do? He hurls this huge storm over it. It was so bad the crew knew it was going to split the vessel apart. But through all the raging waves, through the thunder, the lightning, do you think Jonah noticed? No! He was down below—sound asleep.”
The pastor steps down to the main floor. Ten rows away from me. His dark eyes roam over the crowd, but when they float over our direction, I’d swear they land right on me.
“Sometimes we are so used to the thunder and the noise and the rough turbulence of our crazy lives, we don’t even think about it anymore. We just go on. We sleep through the storms. My brothers and sisters, is that you today? Those of you who’ve lost your jobs, are you just sleeping through your pain? Or are you giving it to God? Those of you who have lost a child to an addiction—are you ignoring the call of God while the wind rages? Are you running from your past? It’s going to find you. Just like Jonah, you can’t outrun God.”
The pastor reads from the Bible, and I flip the tissue-thin page and follow along.
“When that big whale swallowed Jonah, that was God saying, ‘Boy, you need some thinking time. You gotta quit running and get your head straight.’ Because I’m here to tell you, God’ll get your attention.”
The pastor’s next words have the hair on the back of my neck standing straight up.
“The waters engulfed me up to the neck; the watery depths overcame me; seaweed was wrapped around my head.”
Flashes of color shoot through my mind. Fragments of movement. Hands outreached. Water flooding my ears, burning my eyes. Weeds wrapping around my legs.
And then it’s gone.
I press my hand to my pounding heart. Was that a memory? A piece of a dream? God, help me remember that night my mother drowned. I want to see that moment again. I have to know.
Pastor Thomas holds up his Bible, reciting the rest from memory. “I love the last of this passage. Jonah’s drowning in the belly of that giant fish. He’s all out of places to run. Death has come for him. And yet he says I called out to you one last time. And you heard me and saved me—despite all my running.”
Feeling a sting in my palm, I look down and find my hands clenched, nail marks in my skin. I rest my hands on my skirt and take a breath.
“You can run, folks. But you can’t hide.” The pastor looks right at me. This time there’s no mistake. His words sink into my heart like seeds in the ground. “Fear is the opposite of faith, and where does that get you? Swimming in the guts of a fish. You can’t outrun God. But you know what the good news here is? You also can’t out love him. So when you’re up to your neck in water and all the other things you’ve let hold you down, you just call out to him.” He smiles and scans the room. “You may have years of fish gunk in your life . . . but it only takes a second to be spit out into freedom. I’m asking you today—stop running from your past, your fears, and his call. Surrender right now.”
The pianist plays a familiar hymn as we’re led in a prayer of invitation.
All around me people move down front. The woman beside me tips over her purse getting out. A man across the aisle brings his baby daughter and weeping wife.
And I just sit there.
My mouth silently shaping the words.
All to Jesus, I surrender;
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.
I surrender all . . . I surrender all . . .
Chapter Twenty-Five
Quit looking at me like that.” My dad jerks open the refrigerator door and pulls out a bottle of Coke.
“Like what?” I watch Riley play with the puppy in the backyard. She runs a few feet, then turns around and waits for Matilda to attack her ankles. The most heavenly sound of giggles follows. I can hear her all the way inside.
Dad pours the drink in a jelly glass. “Like you’re waiting to see if I’m going to change my mind and take that dog away from Riley.”
It had crossed my mind. “I just don’t want her getting all attached and then you remember how much you dislike animals.”
“She’s past the point of being attached, and I’m glad Connor asked me about it. Riley would’ve been heartbroken if the dog had gone to a
nother family.”
I guess in his own way, Dad loves Riley. She’s the closest thing he has to my sister. Speaking of that—“Have you heard from Allison?”
Dad takes a long drink from his glass. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
“How can she stand to be away from Riley? How can she just be content that Riley’s being taken care of?”
“Drop it, Maggie.”
“What if . . . what if we needed one of Allison’s kidneys?”
“We don’t.”
“What if Riley had a rare blood type, and her mom was the only match?”
“She’s not.”
“What if—”
Dad’s elongated sigh could blow over a tree. “There’s no reason for Allison to not have peace of mind that her daughter’s being well taken care of.”
“Well, I couldn’t leave my child.”
He sits down in a chair at the table. “You never did understand your sister, so there’s no reason why you’d start now.”
“Don’t you hold her responsible at all, Dad?”
Riley squeals outside, and he shifts his attention to the window. “She’s not like you. Allison’s always been fragile, like your mother.”
This mention of Mom has me on alert. Dad never mentions my mother. Ever. It’s like after the funeral, she was not only gone to him, but she was forgotten. It was the sprinkling of nuts on top of our dysfunctional family sundae. Sometimes I’d pull out old photo albums just to remind myself that indeed, at one point, I did have a mother.
“Mother was not fragile. Eccentric, maybe, but she wasn’t weak.”
He rubs a hand over his five o’clock shadow. “Forget what I said.”
“No.” Heat crawls up my neck as I hold my ground. “You can’t just say something like that about Mom and let it go.”
Dad looks at the clock hanging on the wall. “It’s five-fifteen. Don’t you have a date to get ready for?”
I study the man beside me. His dry, cracked hands, worn from years of work and his refusal to take anything but the occasional vacation day. The strong angle of his nose and chin, always tipped slightly down, whether from a sign of respect or just to make it easier to glare. And those eyes that would widen as he yelled when I was a child. I spent very little of my youth making any sort of eye contact with the man. But now I’m thirty. And I’m staring him in the face.
“Why’d you marry Mom?”
Dad looks at me like I just sprouted a top hat and belted out a show tune. “What kind of question is that?”
“An easy one, I would think.”
His eyes follow Riley as she runs back and forth across the yard. “I was ten years older than your mother.” He straightens a small stack of bills on the table. “Just got out of the service when I met her. Here I was, this small-town guy. An average Joe. I was in a bar with some navy buddies in San Diego, and I had a week until I went home to Ivy.” His hands wrap around the glass in front of him. “Your mother was eighteen at the time. Too young to be in a place like that. I saw her as soon as she walked in.”
I try to picture my mom as an eighteen-year-old. I can almost see her curly red hair. Wearing that favorite lipstick that made her look like she had been eating strawberries off the vine.
“She was beautiful. Had a laugh that could turn a man’s head.” Dad spares me a glance. “You’ve got that same laugh.”
I want to embroider his words on my heart. That my dad noticed one single quality about me is a rare gift. But to have it be something I shared with my mother makes my head spin in childlike giddiness.
He takes a drink of Coke and continues, “Out of all those men in the place, she zeroed in on me. I didn’t know why. Maybe I’ll never know for sure. But she approached me, introduced herself.” He chuckles. “Gave me some ridiculous made-up name. Called herself Gigi Fontaine. I didn’t know her real name until the next week. When I was applying for a marriage license.”
I blanch. “You asked Mom to marry you after a week?”
“Asked her on the second date. I stuck around in San Diego a little bit longer. After knowing each other for one month, we were married. I picked her up at her parents’ house and moved Connie and her one orange suitcase back to Ivy.”
“What did Grandma and Grandpa have to say about it?”
“They stuffed a fifty in my pocket and told me I had to keep her forever.” Dad jingles the ice in his glass. “And I tried. I really tried.”
I let his words soak in, glad to have a normal conversation with my father—to hear something, anything about my mom. “And then you got home and realized you were night and day?”
Dad slowly nods. “Your mom wanted adventure. She wanted dancing and parties. I wanted a pot roast on the table when I got home.”
“I remember she would watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s over and over,” I say. “She would shut herself in her room all day and say she had the mean reds.” The locked-away memory unfurls in my mind. “And then the next day she’d be waking Allison and me up with singing and take us to the park. She’d slide and swing like she was one of us. The other kids would gather around her as if she were Glinda the Good Witch.” And I would stand back as she dazzled them all and think, That’s my mother. That’s the woman who would pick me up when my father would find a way to bring me down. She was my champion. My lifeline. My oasis from misery.
Dad stands up and carries his empty glass to the sink. “That’s enough boring talk. Go get ready. I need to start supper for Riley.”
I stay in my seat for a few more moments, not sure what my next line should be. How do you transition from that? I want to ask him if he ever really loved her. If he ever truly loved me. And why I was never good enough, but Allison could do no wrong. She was the golden child. And I was the kid left to find my acceptance from others. While Allison crashed and burned, I would fly ninety-to-nothing, looking for that next daredevil stunt that would win me the love and adoration of friends.
“You know I don’t like someone in my kitchen when I cook.” Dad settles a skillet on the stove, the metal clanking against the burners. “Go on, now. Connor’ll be here soon.”
There’s a shift in the air. And though I can’t define it, it’s there all the same. I have no idea what good our little talk did, but it definitely did something.
“Thanks, Dad—for the story.”
He harrumphs. “You’re welcome. Now get out.”
At six o’clock, the doorbell rings. As Connor chats with Riley and Dad, I come down the stairs, my nerves bundled like a wad of computer cables. Forgoing the flatiron, I let my hair cascade in loose waves. I wear a pair of Rock & Republic jeans topped off with a fitted Gap tank, and slip my arms into a lavender cardigan as I reach the bottom step.
And there stands the cutest veterinarian in all of Texas. Waiting in the doorway. For me.
“Hey.” His smile is sexier than any leading man Hollywood’s ever dished up, and I fight the flutter in my chest.
“Hey, yourself.” I wonder if he notices the nervous tremor in my voice. I mean, we’ve been out, he and I. But this is a date. A real date. No caves. No bats. Just a man and a woman who know there’s an undeniable attraction.
This pretty much scares the crap out of me.
“You look nice,” he says.
Nice? I’ve given stronger compliments to a pint of ice cream. “Thanks.”
He leans in and inhales. “You didn’t wear the perfume.”
“Must’ve forgotten.” And it’s too early in the game for Dr. Blake to think he can snap his fingers and I’ll dab on cologne in all the right spots. I’m sure.
But the bra’s new.
Not that he’ll see it.
But I’ll know.
I walk into the living room and kneel down beside Riley. As the dog gnaws on my purse, I pull my niece in for a quick hug. “Behave for Grandpa.”
She rolls her eyes. “Save the squeezing for the date.”
“Connor and I don’t do that stuff.” I stand up and dust t
he dog slobber off my jeans. “I save that for all my Chicago boyfriends. Now you call me if your grandfather makes you watch the fishing channel all night. I’ll leave wherever I’m at and come and get you.” I bend down and kiss the top of her head. “Children have rights too.”
Connor bids everyone good night as he gently pushes me out the door. He interlaces his fingers with mine as we walk to the truck. And though there’s not a shot in heck of this going anywhere, I let him hold it again when I’m all buckled in.
“Where are we going?” I ask as he pulls the vehicle onto the road.
“It’s a surprise.”
“It better not be the kind that ends up with me picking out a Happy Meal toy.”
His lazy smile sends shivers up my arms. “Close your eyes.”
“No.”
He shakes his head. “You seriously have some trust issues.”
“And you have overblown ego issues. I have enemies all over this town for things I can’t even remember. So the odds of me closing my eyes and letting you lead me around blindly are about as good as your being drafted as a backup dancer for Britney Spears.”
Connor whips the car over on the shoulder of the road. He reaches into the glove compartment, his hands brushing my knee. “Here. Tie this on.” He tosses a black bandana in my lap. “And if you don’t put it on, I’ll do it for you.”
“Is that supposed to intimidate me?”
“If I can wrestle a cow, I can sure handle you.”
“Such pretty words. You turn my head, Dr. Blake. Surely you do.”
“Do it.”
“Can’t we just do dinner and a movie like normal people?”
Connor rests his hand on my leg. “Maggie, we both know you’re not normal. Now tie the thing on.”
Just Between You and Me Page 19
