The Carpenter's Daughter (17 page)

“Religion?”

“Yeah.”

Did I do the dance of semantics here? An overdone approach, but true nonetheless, and I didn’t see many other options. “Most people don’t like religion. My relationship with Jesus isn’t about religion.”

“It’s not?” She snorted. “Seems there are way too many churches filled with religious people for that to be true.” Her eyes flashed back to me, bright with silent accusation. “Saints. Pretty people dressed up, with all their ugliness tucked safely away, who scorn the ugly ones who haven’t cleaned up their messes.”

“Saints?” My eyebrow hiked toward my hat. “Like me? Like your aunt?”

Her mouth snapped shut, and she looked away again. I searched for words. Nothing brilliant flashed through my brain.
God, you’re going to have to help me out here.

“I didn’t mean you—I can’t imagine you have anything ugly to hide.” Her voice took on a flat quality. “Some people are just good. Maybe that’s the real issue. Religion is full of people who don’t get my kind.”

I was nice, and that was the issue? Maybe she needed to know how much I resented the way I felt manipulated by people. How I really wasn’t at peace all the time with my dad and mom’s death. How hard it was to forgive the man who’d taken their lives. If she knew the mess inside me, would that change things for her?

I shifted, leaning toward her. “What does that mean, your kind?”

Her head rolled back against the seat, and she glared at me. “The blue-collar, trying-to-make-ends-meet kind. Dirt under the fingernails. Sunburned-and-not-always-put-together kind. The working kind.”

“Oh.” Huh. Not what I was expecting at all. That was a strange resentment. “So church is for rich, cushy people?”

She didn’t look at me as she shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”

I laughed, and she turned a glare to me. Inspecting my hands, I shook my head. “Guess I better scrub my hands a little better on Sundays, then.”

Pink crawled over her face, and she dropped her sheepish look to her hands. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s all right. I live on an inheritance, right? That puts me in the cushy class.” Getting defensive while sharing Jesus. Always a good strategy.

“Jesse, that’s not—”

“I know.” I sighed. “I’m sorry. That was cheap, and I know you weren’t thinking about that. But I think that you have some prejudice—maybe because of a bad experience or something—but you shouldn’t let that paint a picture of what God is like. It isn’t true.”

“He isn’t the perfect God in a pristine heaven ruling over all things?”

My shoulders drooped. “Well, yeah. He is. But—”

“How am I supposed to relate to that?”

“By knowing that’s not the entirety of who God is. You can’t boil down His character to a flippant statement like that.”

“This is a weird conversation.” Sarah frowned at me and then opened her door. “We’re here to work. Let’s do that.”

I looked up and down the street. No one there yet. But she’d already made her escape. A storm of confusing emotions brewed inside me as I stepped out of the truck. Frustrated that she wouldn’t listen—and that she wasn’t making sense. Confused as to why she was so irritated with me this morning—not only about this conversation but all morning. And disappointed. So very disappointed. For her and for myself.

The last part I needed to cut off. This wasn’t supposed to be about me. I’d let this emotion—the powerful one that would grip my whole body and squeeze—take over. Wanting her to know Christ should be about her and about Jesus. I wasn’t supposed to figure into that.

I moved to catch up with Sarah, who had gone to examine the mess we were going to work on. “Sapphira.” I should probably quit calling her that if I was going to remove my emotions from this pursuit. Probably.

She glanced at me, a storm in her eyes. She was confused too.

“Have you considered that Jesus wasn’t one of the cushy people?”

Her eyebrows scrunched together. “What do you mean? He was a religious guy.”

I shook my head. “He was born to a carpenter. Like you.”

The play of emotions crossing her face strangled my heart. Open for a moment, and then she shut it off and turned hard. “What do you know about my life?”

Her cold voice nipped my determination. Another truck turned off the main street and headed our way. Mack’s. Time to shelve all of this and move on.

With my hands shoved into my pockets, I tried stifling a sigh. “Mack wants you to work with him this morning.” I couldn’t summon any positive energy.

We both needed some space, I guessed. I’d spend my morning scraping the roof, and she’d spend hers on the ground.

Her back faced me, but I watched as her shoulders sagged. “He does? How do you know that?”

“He told me to get you here.” When had things between us gotten so…complicated? What happened to easy dinners at the burger joint? Maybe we’d find our normal selves somewhere in the work. We’d grab a burger tonight and everything would be fine. “He’s got some ideas for the redesign, but he wants your input.”

“Mine?” She turned, her face pinched as if any of her input would be inconsequential.

How did she not know what a valuable asset she was to Homes For Hope—to anyone in construction? “You do drafting, right? Know the codes. Know what walls can go, what needs to stay, and how to make the place livable again. Right?” I glanced at her but wouldn’t connect with her eyes. That lost-woman look would be too much, and I’d forget why I was supposed to be her friend. “Mack wanted you here. Said he needs you.”

I might need you too.

Whoa. Need? My chest locked down hard. I couldn’t go there with her. Needing Sarah in a way that physically hurt was a blueprint for a long spell of recovery. I’d been through one of those in the not-so-long-ago past. Didn’t feel up to another one.

With her mouth drawn down, Sarah stepped away. Almost as if she knew what I had been thinking and was making her opinion known. She didn’t want me to need her either. I wasn’t her kind.

Sarah

Mack wanted me here. That was the reality I needed to grasp. I left home because Dad and I had a fight. I came here because Mack wanted me on this job. Jesse had nothing to do with it.

Jesse had everything to do with it. I looked back at him, hungry for those green eyes. He met my glance, but his expression was closed. In less than twenty-four hours everything had changed between us, and I guessed he wished we’d never met.

Another truck pulled up, and the two guys from the hotel stepped out. Troy and whoever Troy’s buddy was. Without actually looking directly at Jesse, I checked his reaction. He didn’t acknowledge either one of them, but strode up the chunked-up sidewalk and pushed through the grimy wooden door. I followed him because I didn’t know what else to do. Troy and his sidekick cut a trail right behind me.

“So you’re a Homes For Hope donor too, huh?”

I glanced back at Troy. Conceit slathered his grin.

“Do you travel with Chapman?”

“No.” Wait. How much should I let him know about me? Jesse didn’t like him, and no matter what I’d said earlier, that was a big fat black mark against him. I reached for the door and pushed. The hinges had long since rusted, and the top had pulled away from the frame.

With a big hand anchored on the trim, Troy stopped right behind me. “Huh.”

I looked up. He smelled like he’d bathed in some kind of junior-high kid fragrance, and that confident smirk met my inspection.

“Good to know, Sarah.” He sealed his implication with a wink.

“You here to work?” Mack’s normal bark came from the epicenter of disaster within the house. Broken furniture, boxes, outdated clothes, and heaven knew what else littered the room off the entry. It looked like a crime scene. Maybe it was. Jesse stood beside Mack. Jesse crossed his arms—the muscles tight against his short sleeves. He nailed an ice glare on Troy.

“We’ll start on the roof.” He spoke without moving his stare. “It’s a no-brainer. Needs to be stripped and redone. Once the layers are off, we’ll be able to tell how much repair the skeleton needs.” After a slight pause—I was pretty sure meant as a silent challenge to Troy—Jesse turned back to Mack. “Let me know what you and Sarah decide after lunch, and we can plan demo from there.”

Stepping around the obstacles, he moved toward the door. His shoulder brushed mine as he passed, and I fought a crazy impulse to lean into that little bit of contact. What would he do if I lifted my hand, trailed my fingers over his arm?

Put up more distance. Exactly the way I’d seen him inch away from Laine last week. Was this a game to him? That didn’t add up. Jesse the Saint who traveled around building other people’s houses for free? Not probable.

With a long breath as an attempt to clear my unreasonable thoughts, I picked my way around the battlefield toward Mack. He smiled, but not with an actual smile. Hard old men did that. They had a way of looking at you with approval that wasn’t really a facial expression.

“Glad you came.”

A generous amount of words, and complimentary at that. If he was anything like my dad, which I was pretty sure he was, in construction-man world that was equivalent to an elaborate thank-you speech.

“Jesse said you wanted me to.” I pushed my hands into my pockets and let my inspection wander the condemned dwelling. “This doesn’t look like a Homes For Hope job.”

One nod. “It’s what we got.”

Yep.
So let’s get to it.
“Jesse said you wanted me to help with the reconstruction design?”

“You do that?”

“Not what I normally do. But I can work up the drawings if that’s what you need.”

“Good.” He turned to the wall opposite the entry. “Take that wall out.” He swiveled and then pointed. “And figure out how to make this more open.”

I didn’t have a chance to ask what was behind those walls. Mack tromped over the mess, set on a mission, and I followed, mentally tallying everything he wanted done. Two more rooms—could we make them bigger? Check the header, make sure the load-bearing joists would hold. Make the front window wider. Stairs needed redone—wider and more open.

We stopped at the front door, near the area where we’d started. I surveyed the mess again. “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build new?”

“Don’t know the story.” He spit into a box near our feet. “The town wants this place cleaned up and made useful. The local Homes For Hope committee took on the financial planning for it, and they have buyers. We’re here to make it happen. So make it happen.”

Got it. This kind of communication I knew—I understood. Direct. Simple. Clear. No guessing, no wondering what the guy was thinking and if I measured up to whatever standard he had. Why’d Jesse have to go and get all complicated on me?

Mack moved out of the house, and I trailed him again, glad to breathe in clean air rather than the stench of must, decay, and urine. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked back at me. “Make sure it passes inspection.” His gaze traveled up and settled on the guys scraping layers of beat-up shingles, and then swooped back on me. “And whatever you did to Chapman, fix it. Three years, I’ve never seen him go dark. Boy doesn’t deserve it, and you ought to have enough sense to know that.”

Hold up there. Why would he assume Jesse’s sour condition was my fault? I settled back on my heels and crossed my arms. “Jesse’s not my problem.”

“Yep.” He spit into the mostly bald lawn and then walked away.

I rolled my head back and huffed toward the sky. Just like my dad. Could say a whole mouthful of insults with one little syllable.

Whatever. I had work to do. A few more pickups and a handful of cars had smattered the street in front of the project house. Mack made his way to the far corner of the yard and called for attention. My cue to get busy.

Smacking the cracked concrete with the soles of my work boots, I set off for Jesse’s truck to retrieve the tool belt I’d tossed in this morning. I snapped the hook around my waist, ripped out the small notepad I kept behind my tape measure, and moved back to the house. After I had a rough footprint sketched and all the things Mack wanted done listed, I got down to the dirty work.

Sweat rolled down my spine by noon. With the help of a few volunteers, the front room was cleared by chucking junk out of the broken window. Mack instructed the crew to continue the cleanup. Maybe he meant me too, but my frustration needed some quiet space and demanding work. I took a crowbar and a sledge to the plaster wall, slamming pockmarks and tossing debris as I went. The morning rolled over in my mind as my muscles slid into autopilot.

Jesse
had
been in a mood. And I’d pushed him there. But it wasn’t my fault. Didn’t he understand how humiliating it was to be someone’s project? Not a lot of difference between me and this ugly old house, apparently. Both in desperate need of a redo. Or a teardown. With that thought, my nose stung. I threw my energy into the demo because crying over my injured pride in front of a bunch of strangers wasn’t an option.

I had a six-by-six opening well underway when Jesse came in and picked over the mess.

“Lunchtime.”

Great, now he was down to minimal communication too. Before long, we’d be at the grunt-and-point level. Men.

“Is there a gathering out there?” I kept pace with my destruction, unwilling to look at him. “I don’t do those, remember?”

Jesse bent to grab the crowbar I’d thrown on the floor and went to work on a stud that I hadn’t cleared yet. “I remember.”

He worked silently after that, which was worse than his prying at breakfast.

Why did his lack of attention matter so much? Every sensible wrinkle in my brain told me his interest in me wasn’t really in me at all. But somehow I’d snagged onto some dumb hope that he saw me—not only all of the things that were wrong with me—but me. Stupid butch girl. Why would he do that?

Moving away from him, I reached up to the highest part of the wall, whacking the jagged plaster that still clung to the joint at the ceiling. The chunk shook on impact, and the plaster crumbled into a fall of white ash. I moved back, but even before the flakes landed, I knew it’d been a dumb move.

Safety glasses. Should have had them on the whole time. Dust covered my face, and as I squeezed my eyes shut, tiny granules scraped against my eyeballs like sandpaper rubbing against soft paint.

One hand flew over my eyes as the other flung the hammer against the partially demoed wall. “Damn it,” I hissed, still unable to blink the invasion clear.

“Whoa.” The crowbar clattered to the floor, and in the next instant, Jesse’s hands gripped my shoulders. “Stand still. Let me see.”

He turned me, and I tried to pry open my eyes. The intrusion felt like blades, and I squeezed them shut again.

“Forget it.” I pushed his fingers away from my face. “I’m fine.”

With one eye squinted open, I followed the wall I hadn’t yet destroyed to the nasty bathroom I’d seen on my earlier tour. Not that it’d help much, but maybe I could extract the foreign offense on my own. Stumbling over the warped floorboards, I made it to the germ-laden sink and leaned toward the wall. No mirror. Only a sliver of reflective glass still clung to the stained wall.

By then tears had dropped from the eye I was squinting, and most of the dust had washed from that socket, so I could see a blur of reality. But something large and abrasive was stuck in my right eye. After brushing away the tears seeping from my left, I pressed my fingers against the other.

“Don’t rub it.” Jesse slid into the tiny bathroom space behind me. “You could damage your eyeball.” With one hand, he turned me away from the sink to face him. In the other, he had a water bottle. “Silly girl. Plumbing’s been shut off for years.” He twisted the cap, and holding the bottle over the sink, he dumped some water over his fingers.

Thanks. I feel less dumb now.
“I know that,” I snapped. “I was after a mirror.”

His fingers cupped my chin and held fast. “Don’t move. Let me get it.”

Water droplets transferred from his thumb to the corner of my still-closed eye and seeped between the lids. I blinked, but the sharp burn of the chunk of plaster still scratched my eye.

“I see it.” His hand left my chin, and the next thing I knew, he’d taken my hat and turned the bill backward. “I can get it.” With two fingers he pried my lids open, and then the pad of his finger came straight at my eye. “Do you wear contacts?”

“No.” It took a concentration of discipline not to pull away.

“So your eyes are really that blue all on their own?” A smile carried in his voice.

I didn’t know why that annoyed me. Probably because it was drawing that soft spot inside of me to the surface again.

“I told you they’re from my mother. The only thing she left me.”

His first attempt at removing the offending body proved unsuccessful, but he’d moved the speck over my retina, and I blinked.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

For not getting the flake out of my eye or for the fact that my mother ditched us?

He reset my eyelid and brushed his thumb over my vision again. Felt like he’d pulled a branch out of there. His hands left my face, and my fingers covered both eyes, rubbing as moisture smeared over my cheeks.

“Better?”

I expected he’d have backed off. He didn’t.

“I’m fine.”

Again, my chin became captive to his hand, and he lifted my face to inspect it. “You’ve got black all over your cheeks.” Shaking his head, he grinned. “Why’d you wear makeup to a job site anyway? You know better than that.”

Heat crawled up my neck and oozed into my cheeks. I pulled away from his fingers and looked to the puke-yellow sink still clinging to the wall. My eyes burned again, but the tears weren’t helpful this time. The air between us became heavy, almost painful. That had happened a lot that day.

“Sapphira…”

His nickname for me—spoken with a warmth I’d never heard or felt—sent a rush of tingles over my arms. When his fingertips slid over my cheek, I couldn’t resist his silent plea to look back at him. Intensity burned in the green eyes focused on me. My breath hitched somewhere between my lungs and my throat as he grazed my cheekbone with his thumb. I swore his head tilted toward mine first. I was sure of it, because warm moisture fanned my lips when he whispered “You’re beautiful” right before his mouth brushed mine.

Kissing Jesse was nothing like kissing Aiden. Aiden had been forceful. Demanding. Jesse was warm and gentle. Safe. In a pulse-throbbing, make-my-knees-weak sort of way.

My hand covered his and then followed the bend of his arm to his shoulder. His other palm slid over my hip to my lower back, and I was pulled against him. Heat traveled over me, and my heart hammered as he slid his fingers into my hair, sending my hat tumbling to the ground.

The stiff bill clattered against the hardwood, and suddenly our kiss was over. Jesse stood straight, breaking all contact. His nose flared, and his eyes, wide and bright, had a wild and alarmed look.

“Sarah.” His voice cracked, and his hand cupped his neck. He studied his feet and rolled his lips together. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”