Turnabout's Fair Play (25 page)

While I like the idea of coming up with ways to give my grandfather and your grandmother time to spend together, since it’s your plan, it probably needs some work. I can’t believe I’m about to suggest this—I’m taking a half day off on Friday. We should probably meet for lunch and talk before my grandfather arrives in town. Let’s meet at the Panera in the Target shopping center on Old Hickory Blvd. at one o’clock Friday afternoon
.

Flannery

BTW—Have I mentioned recently that you’re a dork? It’s a sneaking suspicion, not a sneaky suspicion
.

Chapter 18

K
irby left the motor running a moment after pulling in to the parking space in front of Chef Paul’s and prayed for energy. Not since the month before his open-heart surgery and the installation of his defibrillator seven years ago had he experienced this level of exhaustion.

A small blue car pulled up beside him, and he recognized Maureen’s red hair. He climbed out of his pickup and met her on the sidewalk, opening the restaurant door for her. He assisted her with getting seated and then took the chair opposite so that he could see her beautiful grayish eyes as they talked.

After they ordered, Maureen folded her hands in her lap. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I would love to know more about your wife.”

The first few years after she’d died, Kirby couldn’t talk about her. But now, he appreciated it when people asked him about her—it kept her memory fresh and alive. But he never assumed they wanted to hear too much. “Her name was Beatrice. We married young. Had three boys—though we lost one in Vietnam.

Maureen stirred a pack of artificial sweetener into her iced tea. “How did you meet?”

“We both grew up on adjoining hog farms outside Pulaski. The drive up to her parents’ place was half a mile down the road from ours, and I had to pass it on my way to school. Bea was a few years younger, so I didn’t pay her much mind for a while on those walks to and from that one-room schoolhouse. And there were some years there when she downright got on my nerves.” Warm tenderness filled him at the memory of the little girl with the golden braids. “But a few years later, I asked if I could carry her books for her. And then a few years after that, we would stand at her gate talking until her ma rang the dinner bell looking for her. Though she loved learning and reading, Bea hated school. She loved farm living and knew she wanted to be a farmer’s wife.”

“So of course you went off to college and majored in agriculture.” Maureen’s eyes danced. “To be that space-age farmer who was going to revolutionize the agricultural industry.”

He smiled and nodded. “After doing my patriotic duty—I still have the piece of shrapnel in my hip that ended my military career after just nine months. Bea was still just a sophomore in high school when I came back. We would have married the summer she graduated from high school, but there was too long of a waiting list for married-student housing. So we waited a year until I graduated from college. As a graduate student, it was easier to get housing for the both of us. So she joined me.”

“And I would imagine she hated living in Knoxville, on campus, being a farm girl at heart.” No condescension or censure came through Maureen’s voice, only sympathy.

“But she put up with it for the five years it took me to complete my master’s and doctoral work. Because she believed as soon as I was finished, we’d be moving back out to the country and starting our own little hog farm on the piece of property between our folks’ farms that they gave to us as a wedding present. And she didn’t have it easy. All three of our boys arrived in those five years, and things would have been lean
without
three extra mouths to feed.”

Kirby’s reminiscence was interrupted by the arrival of their food.

“I assume, then, that Bea did not take it well when you told her you felt God calling you into the ministry.” Maureen liberally salted her red beans and rice.

Kirby squeezed three of the lemon wedges they’d given him over his grilled salmon and double portion of steamed broccoli. “That’s not exactly what happened. After I finished, we moved back to Pulaski as I’d promised and started the farm. Our fathers had built us a small house while we were in Knoxville and gave us our start with a few prize hogs from their own herds. And I spent that first year wrestling with God. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to follow His calling; it was that I couldn’t break my word to Bea.”

Maureen closed her eyes and shook her head. “I cannot imagine being in such a difficult position—between the woman you loved and the God you wanted to serve.”

“Eighteen months after we’d been on the farm, I came in for dinner one night to find Bea packing suitcases for herself and the boys.”

Maureen gasped. “No.”

“Yes.” After a couple of bites of salmon and broccoli, he continued. “When I asked her where she was going, she said, ‘To Nashville.’ And then she pointed at an envelope on the bed. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a letter of acceptance, addressed to me, from the divinity school at Vanderbilt. Knowing that I would not break my promise to her, but that I was also not obeying God, Bea took the decision out of my hands and submitted the admission application for me. She said she couldn’t live with a man who would willingly disobey God. So either she was taking the boys and moving to Nashville without me, or we were all going together so I could do what I knew I was supposed to do, which was become a preacher.”

“And she didn’t worry that you would be called to preach at a church in a large city?”

Chuckling, Kirby set down his fork, not really full, but simply tired of eating. “That was her sole condition. She agreed to live in Nashville with me while I was in seminary if I agreed to apply for positions only at rural churches, preferably within easy distance of the farm we already had. Apparently God decided to reward her faithfulness, because almost as soon as I finished seminary, I got a church not fifteen miles from the farm. And for the rest of her life, I was never called to a church more than twenty miles from the farm, and I was never without a church. So she got her dream of being a farm wife—though my brother and hers, who eventually took over our parents’ places, ran the hogs—and I fulfilled the call to ministry God had for me.”

“And when did God call her home?”

“Eighteen years ago, a few weeks after our forty-sixth anniversary. It was her third recurrence of cancer, and it metastasized and spread to her liver, kidneys, and stomach. All of the children and grandchildren were able to be there with her at the very end to say good-bye. She had a beautiful, peaceful passing. And her last words were to thank me for giving her the life she’d dreamed of.”

A tear trickled down Maureen’s cheek. She blotted it with her napkin. “I think I would have liked her very much.”

Kirby nodded. “Everyone did.”

“You’re blessed that you had all the extra years of your childhood together. James and I met in high school, and I made him wait for three years after I graduated before I’d agree to marry him. He’d trained to be a pilot in preparation to join the Army Air Corps as soon as he turned eighteen, but the war ended a month before his eighteenth birthday. I was determined to go to college here, at James Robertson, but there weren’t many opportunities for a young, green pilot in Nashville. So he went off to Atlanta to fly for Eastern Air Lines while I stayed here and became a nurse. After a couple of years, Eastern allowed him to transfer to Nashville, and after almost a year of making him wait and ask several times, I said yes, and we married. James wanted a large family—we’d both been the only child in our families—but that wasn’t to be. Our son, Jimmy, came a year after we were married. We had fifteen more years with James before his heart failed and he died driving home from the airport late one night. Three years later, Jimmy enlisted in the Marine Corps, but unlike his father, he turned eighteen during the height of the Vietnam War. He served three tours of duty but was then discharged for health reasons—a weak heart, they said—and he came home and enrolled in the police academy.”

“You said before that your son was angry at God over his father’s death. Did joining the military or the police force help him with that?” Kirby had seen it so many times—young men distraught over the loss of a parent finding their way to healing through the discipline and order military service provided.

“No. He came home a changed man. Still angry, but it presented in a different manner. He developed notions about men’s and women’s roles, both inside the home and publicly. And he became very controlling. I believe that’s why he married a woman so much younger than he—Jackie was only nineteen when they married; Jimmy was twenty-six. Jamie was born a year later.”

Kirby’s back began to ache—these chairs were not designed to encourage long conversations. “And where do your son and daughter-in-law live now?”

Maureen looked down at her plate, pushed it back, and then looked back up at him. “Like his father, Jimmy’s heart was weak—and he refused to acknowledge it or see a doctor. Medical intervention earlier in his life could possibly have prolonged it. But he died of heart failure on Jamie’s thirteenth birthday. Jackie was still quite a young woman—only thirty-three—and she needed to deal with the grief in her own way.”

Maureen pressed her lips together. “And she had not only the loss of her husband to grieve, but she needed to grieve the fact her marriage had not been happy. Jimmy was a hard man, making unreasonable demands of both his wife and his son. Frankly, I was surprised Jackie hadn’t left years before. I loved my son.” Maureen’s gaze pierced Kirby’s, and he knew she needed him to believe her. “But Jackie deserved better. She went out to Utah to live with a friend. She ended up meeting someone else and remarried two years later.”

Kirby did understand and believe Maureen’s complicated feelings for her only child. “And when did Jamie move back to Nashville?”

“He never left. Like Jimmy and me, Jamie and his mother had problems after his father’s death. I offered to let Jackie leave Jamie with me—I needed Jamie as much as he needed me.”

Given his own health crises and issues, fear niggled the back of Kirby’s mind. “And does he share his father’s and grandfather’s health problems?”

Maureen glowed with pride. “He was raised by a nurse and received regular medical checkups. As science progressed, they were finally able to discover a congenital defect—a small hole between the two upper chambers of the heart—that would eventually make his heart fail. He had corrective open-heart surgery when he was eighteen. And though I’m not certain he’s as cautious as he should be with what he eats, he gets plenty of exercise and monitors himself and sees his doctor regularly.”

Kirby didn’t know quite what to say. He’d been in his late seventies when he’d gone through open-heart surgery, already a widower. For Jamie to have needed it so young …

“I know what you’re thinking, Kirby.” Maureen reached across the table and wrapped her knobby fingers around his. “I don’t want Flannery to end up a young widow, either. But if they are meant to be together, nothing we can do will stop them. And would you give up the years you had with the love of your life if you had known how soon she would be taken from you?”

He did not know that forty-six years of marriage was “soon,” but he understood her meaning. “No one is guaranteed tomorrow, but everyone deserves a chance at finding true love.”

Flannery pressed her fingertips to the ache just above her left eye. “Tell the production designer to stop work. If the single quotation marks were replaced with double quotes all the way through, the entire thing will have to be proofread again and fixed manually. Find a freelancer who doesn’t mind working over a holiday weekend, and tell them we’ll add five dollars an hour to the regular rate. We’ll need it back before start of business Tuesday if we’re going to keep our production schedule.”

Pacing the sidewalk in front of Panera, Flannery talked with the assistant editor—who managed their stable of freelance copy, content, and continuity editors—for a few more minutes about the issue the production designer had discovered in the manuscript that the proofreader had missed—and shouldn’t have. She’d have to deal with the in-house editors who also missed the error on Tuesday.