Tender Grace (9 page)

“So,” I said while he made short work of replacing the old tire with the spare, “do you live around here?”

“Over in Nazareth,” he said.

“Nazareth? Well, my goodness.”

We didn’t talk much after that, but when he had the tire on, the jack removed, and everything where it was supposed to be in the trunk, every bit as neatly as I would have done it, he said, “Well, you’re fixed up.”

I wanted to hug him, but that seemed rather inappropriate. “I’d like to pay you,” I said, reaching through the driver’s window for my purse.

“I won’t take nothing,” he said, heading back to his truck.

“But, sir,” I said. He turned and looked at me, and I wondered why I had stopped him. He wouldn’t take recompense, and I had no words to thank him for coming to my rescue, for saving me more trouble than I could imagine. But I had to say
something.

“I hope someone helps someone you love someday.”

“They already have, ma’am. You be careful now.”

“I will. You too.”

I stood waiting for him to leave until I realized he wasn’t budging until I was on the road. He followed me a few miles to the next intersection, and I waved when he turned off, and I asked God to go with him to Nazareth. The cowboy in black actually made me glad I had a tire to replace, time to make up, and an unwarranted scare.

It was late when I hauled my stuff inside the hotel and ate peanut butter and cheese sandwich crackers I’d purchased from a machine down the hall. I was starving. Relishing the crackers, I thought it was appropriate that I flipped to John 6, where Jesus is feeding over five thousand hungry mouths with no vending machine, just a little boy’s five small loaves of bread and two fish.

After everyone was fed, Jesus tells the disciples to “gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.”

In God’s economy, it appears nothing is wasted. Could that include the nothingness of my last fifteen months? Could that mean a flat tire, or even a warning ticket? Could it mean a frightening clerk or a friendly one? An Indian sculpture or a grieving mother? A cowboy from Nazareth?

When I opened my laptop to tell Molly and Mark about tonight’s reading, there was a message from Willa. I had answered her last night in as few words as possible, a study in short, simple sentences: “I’m fine. I just needed to get ‘out.’ I decide where I’m going from day to day. I’ll be in Amarillo tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.”

I should have realized she’d have a message waiting for me.

“If you don’t stop in Phoenix, I will hate you forever!!!”

After that introductory statement, she went on to tell me they had just opened the house. She and Ed, who is semiretired now and consulting when something good comes along, still spend their summers in Iowa, but they built a house in Phoenix two years ago and spend the other nine months there. She had seen Andrew when they were out to dinner last weekend. She had forgotten he lived there, if she ever knew it.

“Until he literally backed into me in the crowded vestibule,” she wrote, “I hadn’t seen him since our twentieth reunion, the one you refused to attend.”

Willa always has her own take on things.

“Anyway,” she said, “when Drew asked about you, I told him about Tom. I hope that’s okay.”

“No problem,” I wrote back. “And I’ll see about Phoenix.”

I could have said,
I wish you had told him nothing about
me. If he ever asks again, tell him I don’t exist.

He doesn’t either.
Tell him that too.

ten

August 27

I designated today as Weird Day, and not counting what I’d call a wonderful church service in a beautiful and expansive new structure not far from my hotel, it was.

For years I’ve seen a billboard on a stretch of I-44 near home advertising a free seventy-two-ounce steak. The first time I saw it, I turned to Tom in amazement and exclaimed like Willa, “It’s in
Amarillo
, Tom!” I just couldn’t fathom an advertisement for something that far away. The size of the steak, of course, struck me as amazing too. Make that horrifying. I usually have to work at eating an eight-ounce fillet.

Today I made it to the Big Texan Steak Ranch and felt like I had done something. I walked through the doors and thought,
Here I am, Tom.

It was long before the dinner crowd would descend, so the man behind the bar, dressed much like the cowboy who had rescued me on the side of the road, looked up and gave me an Amarillo welcome.

“So,” I said, flopping my purse on the bar between us, “can I get a hamburger basket to go?”

He handed me the Big Texan menu, shaped like a giant trifolded one hundred dollar bill. “Oh, honey, we can do better than that!”

I looked at the brown and white menu he handed me and had to smile at the
Rick Was Here
scrawled across the front of it in green crayon. Well, Rick, so was Audrey.

“Look here,” Bar Guy said, opening the menu and pointing at a row of appetizers, “why get a plain ol’ hamburger when you can have fried rattlesnake or buffalo quesadillas.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m rather craving a hamburger.”

He was much too pleasant to press it, and soon he called over a cute little waitress to take my boring order back to the kitchen. That’s when I learned Bar Guy’s name was Wayne, as in “Sure ’nuff, Wayne.” While I waited, Wayne took me into the huge dining room and showed me the table, center stage, where thousands of people have tried to eat the seventy-two-ounce steak with all the trimmings in an hour, the requirement for getting it free. I don’t recall the sign I’d seen back home mentioning that technicality.

“You sure you don’t want to try it,” he asked, “instead of taking home a measly hamburger basket?”

“I’m sure.
So
sure.”

“Well, at least let me take your picture sitting behind the table with that timer over your head. It’ll make a good one.”

I told him I didn’t have my camera with me. He thought that was a shame, but a party of eight or so was coming through the door, and he had to get back to his post. I was able to escape with my burger basket a few minutes later, waving at Wayne on my way out. The home of the free seventy-two-ounce steak is quite a colorful place, and I’m not sorry I went there.

I can’t say that about the Cadillac Ranch on down the interstate. According to Wayne, it was something I should see, and I did, but from behind my windshield. Getting out of the car didn’t seem necessary. For once, I’m not sad that Tom missed something I’ve now seen.

My level of activity has increased dramatically since I left home, but I still seem to tire easily and I want to curl up on the bed and watch television. That is what I planned for tonight, what I still plan for tonight, but first I read a passage from Tom’s Bible and checked my e-mail.

Checking e-mail isn’t as simple as it used to be. Now when I click on the envelope icon, I don’t assume I’ll hear from only Mark and Molly. I expect Willa to continue badgering me until I write in my blood that I’ve put Phoenix on my list of destinations. And although his note gave no indication that he would, I’ve been afraid Andrew would write again.

Today he did.

“I didn’t hear from you,” he said. “I hope you’re okay.”

Two lines came to me from the old Phil Collins song “Separate Lives”: “You have no right to ask me how I feel; you have no right to speak to me so kind.”

I thought about writing those lines as a reply. But I chose no reply at all. Doesn’t silence mean
go away
?

Probably not to Andrew. His picture is by the word
charm
in Webster’s. No one ever sent him away. I doubt that has changed.

He used to tell our eleventh-grade language arts teacher every single day that she had on a “lovely ensemble.” And every single day she laughed. It was their little joke, though the rest of us laughed along with them. He was the president of our junior class, and it seemed like every student and teacher knew Drew Ackerman and liked him. Language arts was the first class I had with him, though I was hardly aware of it since Mrs. Henry, hard as this is to imagine, seated us in alphabetical order. He sat in the first seat of the first row. I landed three seats behind him, after Sarah Allen and Billy Atwood. Willa, my main entertainment in that class, sat behind me.

It was in Mrs. Henry’s class that he first noticed me. We were starting a poetry unit, and Mrs. Henry asked if we could name an emotion a poem had aroused in us.

I thought of one in two seconds and took the opportunity to raise my hand.

“Miss Austin?”

“Fear,” I said.

“Fear?”

She must have been expecting something else.

“When I was in the eighth grade,” I explained, “my English teacher, Mr. Belk, closed the blinds, turned out the lights, and walked up and down the aisles quoting ‘The Raven.’ In the blackness, he bent down and stage-whispered a
nevermore
right behind me, and I almost fell out of my desk.”

“So, you’re saying Poe’s ‘Raven’ had the power to elicit fear from you?”

“Yes, I think it did. But not as much as Mr. Belk did.”

“No kidding!” Willa said, evidently caught up in the image.

Mrs. Henry smiled at both of us and moved on to the next raised hand. Meanwhile, Drew Ackerman leaned out of his seat, looked back at me, and smiled. He looked at me so long and so intently that Willa nudged me when he turned back around.

That was our only meaningful encounter until our senior year.

It was a lifetime ago.

I do not want to go there.

Instead I’ll think about the passage I read earlier.

The disciples are in rough waters three or four miles from shore on the Sea of Galilee when they see someone walking toward them on the water. They are terrified until Jesus says, “It is I; don’t be afraid.”

The comforting words of Jesus resonated with me.

Two other verses came to me, also perfect for calming the rough waters of my soul, and I added them to my promise verse of the last fifteen months. Together, I think they have the capacity to dispense the calm and courage I need so much: “I will fear no evil, for you are with me”; “It is I; don’t be afraid”; “I am with you always”; “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

When I find it hard to sleep, these verses will be the sheep I count.

August 28

“When do you think you’ll be here?” Willa asked.

I read that and gasped.

“You know the casita is like your own little apartment,” she continued. “You know I’ve always supported whatever you need to do. You know I’ll give you your space.”

The last time I stayed in their casita, Tom was with me. The four of us played golf in the mornings, though Willa and I merely rode in the golf carts and putted, played cards in the evening after dinner, and relaxed in their hot tub under the stars late at night before Tom and I took ourselves out to the casita and made love like we were at an upscale resort on an exotic island. Can I enter that suite without him?

Willa was right, though, she does give me space, and given an exuberance that almost matches little Helen’s, that’s saying something. And she has always supported my decisions, most notably the one to transfer to SMSU in Springfield after our sophomore year at Oklahoma State University. This support was no small thing for Willa; we were two of four girls sharing an apartment together and loving it. The fact that she had met Ed Foster and was spending any free time with him might have made my decision easier for her; nevertheless, I appreciated her making that break less painful for me.

She put Ed on hold while we worked in our room, gathering my things, packing them in suitcases and boxes.

She attempted conversation. “I can’t believe you’re leaving me here alone. Summer school will be horrible without you!”

“Ed is still here. It won’t be horrible.”

“Your aunt won’t be as much fun as I am,” she said.

“That goes without saying, but she’s very nice. You know that.”

Actually, we talked little during the hours we packed up two years of my college life. We both knew this move was drastic, but I would not put myself in the position of running into Andrew again.

I stared at Willa’s message for a while; then I wrote her that I would come for a few days, but I could not tell her when. That would have to be good enough.