War Room (19 page)

Clara saw the caller ID
and picked up quickly. Any news from Elizabeth was like communication from the front lines of an extended battle. As soon as she heard Elizabeth’s voice, she knew it was good news. Her tone was somewhere between gratitude and amazement.

“Tony just told me he’s gotten right with the Lord,” Elizabeth said. “He asked me to forgive him.”

“This happened just now?”

“A little bit ago,” Elizabeth said. “And he said he wants to start over.”

“He did? Oh, sweet Lord!” Clara was about to jump out of her skin
 
—not surprised at what God had done,
but at how quickly Tony’s heart had turned. “I told you, Elizabeth. I told you God would fight for you.”

“He has, Miss Clara. He has fought for me and for our marriage and for my little girl.”

Clara held it together until she hung up the phone, and then she did her happy dance
 
—if you could call it that. It was something that happened on the inside, even when her outside didn’t have the strength to follow. Then she threw back her head and let Satan know he’d lost a battle.

“Ha-haaaa! Devil, you just got your butt kicked!” she screamed. “My God is faithful! He’s powerful! He’s merciful! He’s in charge! You can’t fire Him, and He’ll never retire! Glory! Praise the Lord!”

Clara imagined angels doing the same thing somewhere in heaven. Then she headed upstairs to her war room to put another check on the wall of answered prayer. She did it as an act of worship and thanksgiving. She did it to make the devil mad that he had lost another fight he thought he was going to win.

The whole thing made her want to pray bigger prayers. She believed anew that God was in the big-prayer-answering business.

Tony knew it wasn’t going to be easy,
moving forward and putting his life back together, but he felt like he had hit bottom and there was nowhere to go from here but up. He’d gone through the valley and now there was just the slow climb out to where he could get a vision for his life again. Things would get better, a day at a time.

The next morning he saw Danielle sitting at the bottom of the front stairs putting on her sneakers. She had noticed the change in him. Her face looked less pained since he’d become real with God and confessed to Elizabeth. Funny how a ten-year-old could have her life changed by a father’s prayer.

He knew he needed to talk with her, to move toward his daughter, but he wasn’t sure how. He didn’t want to make the mistake of revealing too much
 
—that wouldn’t be fair to her. But he also couldn’t second-guess himself the rest of his life. He wasn’t going to get all of this right. Something inside told him to simply chance it
 
—get in the game and see what happened. He greeted her and sat beside her.

“Hey, Daddy,” Danielle said.

“Listen, I need to tell you something.”

Danielle looked at him. Such innocence. She had her whole life in front of her and he had another chance to be involved, to help her. The best thing he could give her was his heart, what was going on inside. These were things he usually couldn’t say because he didn’t know he felt them half the time. But God had done something, had shown him a path to life, so he kept talking.

“I don’t think I’ve been a very good dad to you. And I haven’t been very loving to your mother either. I can do better, Danielle. You both deserve better from me.”

A good start. He hadn’t gone into detail, but if she wanted him to, he would. He just laid things out there clearly and in a way she could understand.

“But you know what? I’ve asked God to help me. And I wanted to ask you if you would forgive me and give me another chance. Think you can do that?”

In a way, this was the same thing he had done with God. At first he imagined God at the portals of heaven, His arms crossed, scowling at him. Tapping His foot,
waiting for Tony to get to the point. He knew this wasn’t how God really was, that God wouldn’t react the way he would. If he could have pictured God with the face his daughter showed him, he might have returned sooner.

For a few seconds, she stared at him. Then the smile came and Danielle nodded, and just that look melted his heart. It said,
“I accept you and love you and always will.”

Just like that. Forgiveness with a smile and no questions. Love looked a lot like that, he thought. If he could love like that, if he could respond like his daughter, the rest of his life would go a lot better.

“I do love you, Danielle,” he said.

“I love you too, Daddy.”

He kissed her on top of the head and walked away, as light as a feather. She followed him outside with her jump rope and did some warm-ups, explaining their routine and what Trish had been teaching them. When she sat on a step beside him, he decided to pick up the subject again.

“Danielle, is there anything I could do better? Something that would tell you how much I love you?”

She made a face and got wrinkles in her forehead. It was clear this wasn’t a question she’d considered. “You mean like buying me a present?”

“I guess it could be that. But I was thinking more
 
—is there anything we could do together that you’d like?”

She shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”

It was another moment of unbridled childhood. She couldn’t think of anything and that was okay. He had
offered a lamp with only one wish attached and she didn’t seem to want to rub it at the moment.

Tony smiled. “All right. You think about it. If something comes to mind, you let me know.”

Elizabeth came outside and sat beside him, and they watched Danielle jump rope. With all of his anger at his wife, all their bickering, he had forgotten how beautiful she was. No, he hadn’t forgotten
 
—he’d just pushed the truth aside and allowed the clouds of life to cover it.

“Your little girl seems happy with her daddy again,” Elizabeth said.

“It honestly doesn’t take much. I just asked her to forgive me for being such a cruddy father and she said yes like it was the easiest thing she’d ever done.”

“Kids will give you a second chance. It’s the grown-ups who have a harder time.”

He looked at her. “Is that so?”

She smiled. “What?”

“One of my big fears in asking you to forgive me was that you’d hold all the stuff I’ve done over me. And you’d come back in a day or a week or a year and bring it all up again. You haven’t done that.”

“Well, it hasn’t been a week or a year, either,” she said.

“No,” he said, “I can tell you mean it. I can tell this is not about me getting everything right and living up to some list of rules and regulations.”

“I’m glad you said that,” she said, digging into the pocket of her jeans. “I just came up with a list this morning.”

They laughed and he realized it had been so long since they had genuinely laughed together. He couldn’t remember the last time. It had probably been the last time they had . . .

Danielle stopped jumping and caught them talking together. She ran to them, out of breath, and jumped in front of them. “Kiss her, Daddy! Kiss her!”

“Now don’t rush things,” he said, laughing and waving a hand at her. “Your mama and me are working on not fighting. That’s the first step.”

“Kiss her!” Danielle said, swinging her rope and jumping. She got into a rhythm and sang, “Kiss her, kiss her, kiss her . . .”

Tony shook his head.

Danielle stopped and her face turned glum. “You asked me to tell you one thing you could do, didn’t you? Well, this is it.”

Before Tony could object again, Elizabeth said, “Go ahead and give the girl what she wants.”

He raised his eyebrows and leaned back, looking at Elizabeth’s face. She turned her head to offer a cheek and he leaned in and gave her a peck.

“On-the-lips,” Danielle said, talking in time with her jumps. “On-the-lips!”

Tony looked in his wife’s eyes, studying them. He didn’t want to take things too fast. He wanted to give Elizabeth time to see his genuine heart.

“Kids these days,” he said playfully. “They ask so much.”

“You’re the one who asked her the question,” Elizabeth
said, matching his gaze. She moistened her lips with her tongue.

He leaned closer. “It is cheaper than a new jump rope.”

He kissed her on the lips. It wasn’t the longest or most romantic kiss of their marriage, but the feelings it stirred inside Tony surprised him.

“Yay! Yay! Yay!” Danielle said, continuing her jumping. “Do-it-again! Do-it-again!”

Jennifer and her mother drove up. Tony put an arm around Elizabeth and they walked to the car, greeting Jennifer’s mom.

“It’s Sandy, right?” Tony said.

The woman smiled.

Elizabeth knew real estate was kind of like marriage. You could have the best house in the world but if you didn’t have an interested buyer, you’d sit alone at the open house. But you could never tell what a new day would bring. The right person in the right situation who came along could make all the difference. One phone call from someone driving around who saw a nice neighborhood and a sign was all it took. A friend of a friend knew somebody who was looking and suggested they call. It was all part of an unseen network of people and needs and wants.

The kiss from Tony was one of those things the new day had brought. The feeling lingered all day. The touch of his lips, the closeness she felt. Kissing was as much
about the heart as about the lips, and her heart had done a backflip when he leaned in and connected with her. Still, she felt some reservation. She had been grateful that Tony had turned to God, but she’d also been hurt by what he’d revealed.

Elizabeth had wondered about Tony’s decreased interest in intimacy in the past year. When they had first been married, she worried that she and Tony would have different levels of longing. She heard married women talking about husbands who wanted sex every day, and that had sounded good at the time. But the wives had complained, at least most of them. A few had said their husbands didn’t want sex at all, and that troubled her. Would she and Tony be compatible in this area?

That question was quickly put to rest when they discovered both had a fairly equal level of desire. But after Danielle was born, things changed. Her body changed. Her energy level fell and she was emotionally tied in with her daughter. She supposed it was hormones and all the changes her body had gone through.

Soon she and Tony got in a groove as a couple and moved forward. They were at least going in the same direction. They would find each other occasionally
 
—nothing planned
 
—and enjoyed each other, but their intimacy was hit-or-miss at best. In the last year Tony had backed away from her and had thrown himself into the gym, working out and staying fit seeming to fill some inner need. She read articles online and found a book at the library on the
subject, but the content troubled her. It said a husband who backed away from his wife sexually could be a flashing light on the marriage dashboard. Maybe he was getting toned for someone else?

That night, after Tony had gotten Danielle to bed, he came to Elizabeth as she sat on the chair in her bedroom. She had picked up the marriage book she’d been reading but lowered it when he walked into the room.

He knelt in front of her. “I need to tell you something.”

She closed the book. The look on his face telegraphed a message she wasn’t going to like.

“Sounds ominous,” she said. She meant,
It sounds painful.

“Not really,” he said. He took a moment, then looked her in the eyes. “I think we need to see somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like a counselor. A pastor. Somebody who can help us take the next step.”

Elizabeth searched his eyes. She’d been in enough Bible studies with other women who had marriage problems to know that getting a man to go to any kind of counselor was like getting a wild horse into a minivan. Through the window. And the seat belt buckled. That he was suggesting it felt like a huge gift.

“Okay,” she said.

“I just think there are some things a third party could help us work through, you know? Somebody who’s been through this kind of thing before.”

She nodded. “Yeah, of course. I’m in. You choose.”

“I was thinking of calling the church,” he said. “They have a family pastor, don’t they?”

“Yeah, Pastor Wilson.”

“Good. I’ll call in the morning.”

She put the book on the edge of the chair and balanced it. There was something behind this. It felt like the tip of the iceberg was showing above the choppy waters they’d been through. “Is this because there’s something else you need to tell me?”

Tony said he hadn’t been unfaithful. But he’d been on the road a long time. Elizabeth had prayed earlier that day that God would help both of them uncover their hidden thoughts and feelings so they could get them out in the open and deal with them. Kind of like finding the edge pieces of a puzzle. If you got those on the table and connected, you could find the middle easier.

“I know you heard about Raleigh,” he said. “The lady I had dinner with. When I came back from the trip, I saw the message from Missy.”

“You looked at my phone?”

“It was out when I was getting changed that night and the phone dinged. I saw what she said and the whole conversation. I wasn’t trying to spy. I didn’t go through all your messages, trust me.”

“That’s what this is about, Tony. Trust. And I’m working on forgiveness and trying to build that trust, but when I hear you saw that and never said anything about it . . .”

He sat back on his heels. “Look, don’t read too much into it. I’m telling you now, okay?”

“Don’t tell me what to read into something. I’ve been fighting for you, for our marriage, and this hits deep. It’s one of the things I know we have to work out.”

He set his jaw. “This is what I’m talking about. This is what I’m afraid will happen. I come to you, I try to talk, and you throw up a wall.”