Everything’s Coming Up Josey
Read Everything’s Coming Up Josey Online
Authors: Susan May Warren
Everything's Coming Up Josey
Published by Steeple Hill Books
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For Your Glory, Lord
Poppies and Eternal Purpose
I
t's important to acknowledge that Chase was right and if it weren't for him I might have never found my answers. He likes being right. And, for the most part, he's consistent in his predictionsâhas been for all of the twenty-four years I've known him. Like the time we raced down Bloomquist mountain on our Radio Flyers. He sat in his wagon, hands white from gripping the handle, and grinned against the sun, a dark shadow of superiority and wisdom. “I'm going to win, and you're gonna get hurt,” he said.
At seven, and full of tomboyish bravado, I tucked my feet into my red wagon, grabbed the handle and pushed off. The world whooshed by my ears as we careened down dirt and gravel. My next clear memory is staring into the glaring sunshine from a sprawled position in the ditch. The wagon lay on its side, wheels still spinning. And pain. I remember pain. Blinding, screaming, burning down one side of my leg where I'd left way too much skin on the road.
And then Chase. He stood broad and tall, blocking the sun, blue eyes full of concern. What came next ignited my love/hate feelings for him for the next decade or two. He picked me up, one hand around my waist and said, “Josey, you just don't know when to quit.”
I took it as a compliment.
I should have paid attention to the gleam in his eyesâthe one that said, “Told you so!” It was the first sign that he would break my heart, and a smart girl would have gathered up her battered wagon and headed for cookies and milk. But what does a seven-year-old know of the shades of love? All I knew is that he ran faster and could eat more than me, and his Tarzan whoop, with that little inflection in his voice, sounded right out of the jungle and left me with tingles.
Most of all, he had the best backyard sandbox on the street. That fact alone made him downright irresistible.
Fast-forward seventeen years. Chase sits down at the linen-clothed table, a scant breeze pushing around that burnished blond hair, that same knowing gleam in his eyes and he says, “You didn't want him anyway.”
Unfortunately he's referring to the groom, who is presently dancing with his new bride center stage behind meâa man who has soft gray eyes and a smile that can turn the right girl to oatmeal. My ex-boyfriend, Milton Snodbrecher.
And oh, the brideâwearing lily-of-the-valley in her blond hair, and a Vera Wang dress off a rack in Minneapolisâis my sister, Jasmine. My younger sister.
Isn't it written somewhere, “Nay shall thine youngest sibling marrieth before thine oldest?” Perhaps, the
Bible?
I'm suddenly feeling a kinship with Leah the morning after, when Jacob realized he'd been hoodwinked.
How could I have believed that Milton might work seven years, let alone seven months, for my love?
Who knew that getting my college boyfriend/jerk a job at our restaurant/lodge in central Minnesota doing the books would slaughter my matrimonial prospects? I thought it sounded like a pretty good idea. Especially since I was just down the road dotting
i
's and crossing
t
's at the
Gull Lake Gazette.
I do get my own attic office facing the lake with the oh-so-picturesque view of the seagulls squatting on the roof and ogling the goodies piled near the back entry to Lou's smoked fish shack. It's breathtaking, to say the least.
It boils down to thisâwhile I was rewriting news blurbs from the AP wire and trying to make sense of eighty-three-year-old Tipsy McKeever's scrawled recipes, Milton was getting familiar with more than the books at the old Berglund resort. “Bring Milton home and we'll give him a job at the family business,” (five acres of shore front, general store and five small cabins) said Dad. My summer-after-graduation, wedding-saturated brain thought,
Yes.
Embraced by the pine and birch, swept fresh by the breeze of Gull Lake, Milton would finally drop to his then-bony knees and declare his love. And we'd all live happily ever after.
Naive me.
I should interject here that I wasn't even supposed to be in Gull Lake. My grand life plan included a stint at a New York newspaper, maybe even a tour as an overseas journalist for the Associated Press. Inside this five-foot-four-inch, slightly over-endowed (I did
not
say fat) body lives a hard-muscled, brave and adventurous, tomb-raiding Lara Croft/Mother Teresa blend, itching to toss the seeds of faith as she cracks open diabolical plots to enslave humanity.
In short, I had hoped to make an etching on the spiritual landscape of the world. To follow the Matthew 28 Great Commission (and look good doing it).
Sadly, there isn't a plethora of enslaving despots in Gull Lake, MN. Except, perhaps, my mother, who somehow talked me into working as head of housekeeping (read: the only maid on staff) on Saturdays. Note to self: don't believe it when your mother suggests you come home for a little while until you get your bills paid off and figure out where you want to go next. It's a ploy. Before you know it you'll have an account at the local Java Cup, a library card and a standing order for Jerry's Friday night pizza special, while every available bachelor slinks out of town for greener pastures.
Not that there were many eligibles to begin with. Chase, perhaps, only he doesn't count.
But I digress. Milton and Jasmineâhow did it happen?
While I was bent over the hieroglyphics of the local Dear Ruth column, Jasmine used her formerly unbeknownst charms to wheedle down the road to my man's heart. No, not that road. His stomach. Out of all the pastries in the Norwegian's arsenalâ
lefse, krumkaga, roll kuchenâ
I especially blame the
kringle,
that flaky, almond-frosted pastry that calls to a good Norseman's (or woman's) heart early Saturday mornings. Good old Jasmine, our junior baker, had the boy eating out of her hands. Literally. I should have seen the writing on the wallâor on his face, ratherâwhen I found him, face flaky and dripping sugar within two days of his arrival.
In Jasmine's defense, she can't help it if she can bake like heaven, or that Milton is a true Scandinavian.
He gained thirty pounds in seven months. One hundred and thirty the next year by adding my sister to his list of assets. Remember, he's a bookkeeper. I guess he thought the skinny one with the eager smile and associate degree in Home Economic Arts was the Berglund who offered the greatest long-term benefits.
The sad thing is that I thought Milton and I made a good couple. We loved reading, andâ¦well, reading. He played a cutthroat game of Boggle, and could occasionally smoke me in Scrabble. Mostly, we studied together at college, which I suppose doesn't produce the elements of a good spouse, but rather an excellent quizzerâ“How many lines are in a sonnet?”
On a saner day I might recognize the peril of bringing such a trait into a marriage. “Name for me the leading ways to unclog a drain. Give me the three causes of apathy in a relationship.”
And he had the uncanny ability to spoil every romantic climax in a chick flick, e.g., knuckle-cracking during the tollbooth proposal in
While You Were Sleeping.
I had to fight the gut urge to rip out his eyebrows one hair at a timeâa response that surprised me and should have forewarned of darkness yet to come. And what was with his need to circle the parking lot eighteen times before finding the perfect place? I called it Vulture Parking.
He called me uptight.
The breakup wasn't pretty. And made even uglier by his nearly immediate pursuit of Jasmine. Can anyone say Vulture Parking?
Which brings me to the present, when I'm banging my head on the linen-covered tables, arranged expertly by Susie's Catering on the front yard of the Berglund Acres, thinking, “This is a joke,
right?
” A cool, end-of-May twilight breeze rustles the linen tablecloths and the lily-and-lilac centerpieces. I'm purposely not watching the happy couple circle the dance floor, and wishing that I weren't wearing a dress that makes me look like a poppy.
Oh, yes, marshmallow-me agreed to be the maid of honor. Like my mother said, “Wouldn't the wedding pictures look nice with our whole family in them?” Hello, did anyone elseâGrandma Netta, my brother Buddy, Jasmine the groom-stealer or either of my beaming parentsânotice that the groom used to belong to me? That this moment in my life might be slightly painful?
Not.
I've never been able to outflank my mother. She could teach an online course in practicality. So here I sit, my cleavage pushing out of the princess top (hey, I like
kringle,
too!), wanting to melt into a poppy puddle, or maybe just make a run for the border, when over to my side of misery slides Chase. I didn't exactly expect him to show up at the wedding, but when I spied him an hour ago weaving his way through the receiving line, I suddenly felt as if God might care, just a little. Despite the poppy dress. And, although I've spent most of the last hour hiding in the kitchen, I'm not sad Chase has found me.
That's his specialty, actually. Chase-Me, I called him (not to his faceâ¦
please!
) in high school. Most of the time I meant it in a good way.
“What?” I say in greeting, not able to look at Chase full in the face.
“I saw Jerry.”
Oh, thanks, Chase.
Could you please bring up every small-town mistake I've ever made? I shrug, as if this is news but I don't care, although, yes, I know my senior prom date/successful lawyer is back in town. I still track his movements like a panther, lifting my ears with every mention of his name, my nose to the wind, hoping to catch his scent. He's arrived for the wedding, good friend of the family that he is. Good thing I don't have another sister.
Suddenly I feel a little sick.
“You're lookingâ¦what color is that exactly?” I hear him chuckle.
“Get away from me.” I lower my head onto my arm. It's a beautiful day out, waves from the lake lapping the shore, the smell of summer in the breeze. The sun, of course, is totally on Jasmine's side. Okay, I admit it! Evil me did walk in the smallest of circles this morning saying, under my breath of course, “Tut tut, it looks like rain.” But Jasmine must be much holier than I, because God heard and answered her prayers.
Okay, I'm not that mean to really want it to rain. But a little ripple of thunder might have been nice. Just to shake things up.
“You look good,” I say, to lessen my bark. I don't actually look at Chase, but he always looks good, so I'm being honest. Thankfully, Chase alone understands the knife-in-the-gut affair this is. He, too, is a last fish in the sea. I figure that in our geriatric years, we'll be hobbling to the local library from North Shore Acres, still trying to race each other down the hill.
I'm thankful for some consistencies in my life. He told me, sophomore year, as he hid out at Berglund Acres during one of his parents' many skirmishes, that he'd pull out his fingernails one by one before he even thought about trudging down the aisle.
Yet, here he is, at the scene of the crime to help me through this moment of need. I find a smile.
“It's not really all that bad, is it?” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I mean, c'mon, G.I., the guy has three chins.”
“He didn't when I was dating him.”
I'm moved by both Chase's touch, his warm, strong hands, and the use of his nickname for me. He couldn't bear to think of me as a girl when we were seven, so he called me G.I. Joe. Not that I minded, but I didn't so much love his later embellishments, Gastro-Intestinal, The Great I, and my least favorite, Gone Insane. But his tone is sweet, and the G.I. term makes me warm in a way that has nothing to do with the sunny May day.
“And aren't you glad you know now the price you may have paid?” Chase tucks his finger under my chin (thankfully I still have only one, despite my
kringle
weakness), lifts my gaze off my arm and onto him. Hidey ho, what happened to the boy next door? Where are the braces? And I distinctly remember acne. Lots of it. He looks, I might add, totally not the anthropologist he says he isâsmart and even sexy in his wire-rims, black suit pants and pressed silk shirtâ¦And those eyesâstill blue, still friendly, still gleamingâ¦
Sorta makes a girl wanna run for her Radio Flyer and have another go. What do I get if I win?
“You didn't want him anyway,” he says.
Who? Oh, yeah, Milton.
“I didn't?” I say. Who exactly did I want?
“No,” he says, chuckling. “You're better than that.”
“I am?” I moan, not wanting to sound pathetic, but after all, this is the same guy who saw me necking with a boyânot my dateâat senior prom and covered for me. He knows a few secrets. “I don't feel better.”
“Well, you are.” The music changes. Now, the crooning of Roberta Flack. Is this necessary? Movement toward the dance floor, laughter. Oh, everybody's happy. But Chase is staring at me, an odd look in his eyes, and I see our past flash in them.
I'm glimpsing a moment, a rip in the fabric of this horrific day, exposing hope. In fact, my life has suddenly changed tempo. Old promises play in my mind. Chase and I, nine years old, ensconced high in the trees, the sun kissing late autumn leaves. A crisp wind rustles the canopy around me as Chase turns around, hammer in hand. His curls are long, poking out of his homemade knit cap. “Will you marry me?”
