Waterfalls (17 page)

Frustrated, Meredith turned on her heels and marched inside, slamming the door behind her. She glanced at the stack of dirty dishes on the kitchen counter and knew she was not going to spend the last hour of her birthday cleaning the kitchen. Instead, she headed for the bathroom, where she took out her contacts, washed her face, pulled back her hair with a wide stretchy headband, and crawled into her favorite pajamas. She stomped back into the kitchen, found herself a diet soda, and made a bag of microwave popcorn. Flopping onto the couch, she switched off the music and turned on the TV. The volume was so loud that poor Elvis nearly jumped from his bowl.

Switching channels until she found an old John Wayne movie, Meredith smiled contentedly to herself and settled in with a fistful of popcorn. Nothing like the Duke’s swagger to take a woman’s mind off her woes. She fell asleep on the couch and didn’t wake up until three-fifteen when a loud commercial roused her. Turning off the noise box, she snuggled under the soft throw comforter and spent the rest of the night on the couch.

Meredith woke at seven-fifteen, stiff and with an aching stomach. She felt awful and wanted to go to bed, this time her own bed. Stumbling out of the living room and into her bedroom, Meredith crawled between the sheets and tried for more than an hour to fall back to sleep. It was useless. She might as well get up and enjoy the sunshine that was pouring through the windows.

A shower helped. The fresh breeze from her open bedroom window helped. A look at the mess in the kitchen didn’t help.

Meredith decided to take herself out to breakfast. This
trick had helped her more than once feel as if she had a life when the home office became stifling. After all, it was Saturday. She didn’t have to work. She had promised Helen she would look at Jake’s manuscript, but she could do that later, after she felt a little better.

Grabbing her purse and heading out the front door, she saw a car turning into her long driveway. It was a Buick, a familiar, steady old Buick with her dad at the wheel. Mom was right beside him.

Meri waited in the warm sunshine on the front deck until he stopped the car. Mom waved pleasantly.

Unsure how she felt about her parents’ arrival, Meredith casually waved back. She loved her parents and enjoyed their company, but couldn’t they have called ahead? Just this once. The trip from their house to hers was nearly an hour. Meredith could have spent that hour cleaning up the kitchen.

“Hi, what are you two up to?” Meredith asked, shading her eyes from the sun as they came toward the house.

“I didn’t get your card in the mail,” Mom said holding out a card-sized envelope. “We had to come over here to camp anyhow to drop off the steaming trays we borrowed last week for the men’s breakfast. It was such a nice day we thought we would combine the two errands.”

“Were you about to leave?” Dad asked, noticing the purse slung over Meredith’s shoulder.

“I was going to take myself out to breakfast,” she said. “You want to join me?”

“Breakfast!” Mom said with surprise, checking her watch. “Perhaps a late brunch or early lunch. Were you up late last night with your guests?”

“Not too late,” Meri said. Everything inside her had gone on alert. She refused to melt down into a child in front of her mother.

“Did you have a happy birthday?” Mom asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m interested in going out to eat with you, Meri. But I was hoping for a little walk along the lake.” Dad had on his casual clothes and what looked like a new pair of tennis shoes. “What do you say we walk first and then go out for a bite?”

“I’m not up for a walk today,” Mom said. “You two go ahead, and I’ll wait here. Do you have any coffee on, dear?”

Meredith clenched her teeth and tried to understand why this was upsetting her so. She had been all set to take herself out to her favorite little coffee shop, Brewed Awakenings. There, she would have indulged in a full morning of French roast with lots of sugar and cream and at least one, and maybe two, wonderfully decadent pastries. Her mind would have leisurely wandered through all the information she had gathered about Jake, and she could have sorted it into neat piles the way she stacked the abundance of manuscripts in her office.

Now she was under her parents’ rule. How could she not walk along the lake with her dad? When was the last time he had wanted to do that? Never in the almost two years she had lived here.

And how could she let her mom see the disastrous kitchen? Meri suddenly understood why one sister had moved to Brazil, another to the east coast, and why Shelly had gone to Los Angeles right after she graduated from high school.

Her parents stood there, waiting and looking pathetic in their eagerness.

“Okay.” Meredith relented. “A walk and then food, but you’re paying.”

“Of course,” her father said, not giving any indication that he understood she was joking.

“We’ll be back in a little while,” Meredith said to her mom, who was heading up the front steps as Meri was going down.
“And no, I don’t have any coffee on; yes, I know my kitchen is a mess; and no, I don’t want you to clean it for me.”

They were only a few yards away from the house when Mom said, “Meri, the door is locked.”

Meredith walked back, handed the keys to her mom and said again in fair warning, “Brace yourself. The kitchen is a disaster area.”

Mom gave her a funny look. “We didn’t expect you to clean things up for us.”

“How could I?” Meredith said. “I didn’t know you were coming.” She said the words nicely without changing the sweetness of her tone.

Dad read meaning into her words and brought them back for examination the minute they hit the trail. “Did it bother you that your mother and I didn’t call before coming over this morning?”

“It’s okay. You’re both welcome, of course, anytime. I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

Dad continued to walk at a brisk pace. “It’s beautiful here,” he said. “Just beautiful. Fresh air, sunshine, and look at that water. Might be a fish or two waiting to be caught in there. What do you think?”

“Maybe.”

“Have you ever fished the lake?” Dad asked.

“No.” It seemed a funny question to Meri.

“Then let’s go fishing next time I’m up. Just you and me. Can we rent a boat from the camp?”

“I suppose so,” Meredith said. She had the feeling her dad was trying to make up for lost time from her childhood or something. Some hobbies he had never managed to transfer to his four daughters. His love for fishing was one of them. They had all gone with him a few times during their formative years, but none of the Graham girls took a liking to the sport. So Dad
had kept all his hooks and lures to himself.

“Perfect day for fishing,” he said, looking up at the clear sky. “Wish I would have brought some gear with me. Didn’t even think of it.”

They walked on, Meri trying to keep up with her dad’s quick strides.

“Look. Over there.” He pointed to the flat surface of the water near the shore. “Did you see it jump?”

Meredith looked but didn’t see anything.

“Come over here,” Dad urged, heading for some smooth, gray boulders near the shoreline. He sat down in the shade and kept a steady eye on the water. “This would make a nice fishing spot,” he said.

“Yes,” Meredith agreed. She didn’t feel connected to his thought processes at all. Why was fishing so important all of a sudden?

Dad turned and looked at her. A pleased smile spread across his face. “We’re proud of you,” he said suddenly. “You know that, don’t you?”

Meri smiled.

“Your mother and I are proud of all you girls. No matter what, we can always point to the four of you and feel confident that we did something right.”

“You’ve done a lot of things right,” Meredith said.

Dad looked down. He sighed and said, “Not according to the board.”

Meredith felt a catch in her throat. Her whole life the worst nights at the dinner table were those right before or right after a meeting of the church’s board of elders. They were the ones who made the decisions as to how things were run at the church, even if their choices were completely opposite to her dad’s ideas of how things should be done. The board was to her what the boogeyman was to other children. It wasn’t that her
dad ranted and raved about specific people or specific issues. It was the way his demeanor changed when he was about to defend himself to the board or when he came home defeated after a board meeting.

“What happened?” Meredith asked. She knew her dad wouldn’t share specifics. He never did. It was obvious, though, that he was disturbed about something.

“They voted last week for me to take early retirement and for a new, younger minister to take my place.”

“You’re kidding!”

Dad shook his head. “We’ve known about if for some time, but your mother and I kept hoping that when the vote was taken the motion wouldn’t pass. We wanted to stay on for another three or four years. But there’s concern about my not attracting young families. They’ll hire a man right out of seminary.”

“Daddy, this is awful.”

“It’s not so awful. It’s just a change, and changes are hard the older you get. We believe God is working out his plan, and we don’t question him.” He sighed again. “It’s been the hardest on your mother. She’s held it in for several weeks now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed how it’s worn on her. It’s been, well …” He looked out at the water. “It’s been hard on her.”

“What are you going to do?”

Dad squared his shoulders and said, “Since the vote is final, I’ll have to make the announcement from the pulpit tomorrow. We’ll be at the church another month or two until the new minister and his family can move here. Next week a gentleman from the district office is coming to meet with us. It’s a new program the denomination has to assist pastoral staff and their families as they cycle out of ministry.”

“Cycle out of ministry?” Meredith repeated, folding her arms across her chest. “How do you cycle out of ministry?
That’s all you’ve done your whole life—and at the same church. What are you supposed to do now?” It angered her that anyone would try to patronize her parents. Didn’t the denomination recognize that her parents had both given their lives to this church? This was their home. How could they be cycled out of their home?

“We aren’t quite sure what the next step is. We’re praying about it and, of course, talking a lot about different options. That’s why we decided to drive out here this morning. We thought it would give us some good thinking and talking time.”

“I’m so sorry to hear all this, Dad. It seems so unfair.”

“I suppose it seems that way. Your mother and I are trusting that this is God’s timing, and we’re trusting him for the next step.”

It seems like pretty lousy timing to me
.

As if her father had read her thoughts, he said, “Of course we know that God’s timing isn’t always the same as our timing.” He rubbed his hands together and said, “His ways aren’t our ways. His thoughts aren’t our thoughts.”

Meri remembered memorizing that verse long ago. The verse after it said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” She tilted her head toward the silent sky. Not even a wisp of a cloud flawed the seamless blue.

What are you doing up there? Have you forgotten about us down here?

“Is there anything I can do for you and Mom?” Meredith asked as they started back to the cottage.

“Pray,” Dad said. “Just pray for us.”

M
eredith hadn’t prayed a lot for her parents over the years. That seemed to be their job—to keep the church running and to pray for everyone, especially their four daughters. Mom was a capable woman. The only time she had hinted at needing prayer was when she had had a hysterectomy during Meredith’s second year of college. Megan had come home for a week to help around the house, and Meredith had helped for a long weekend. Aside from that, her parents had never “needed” prayer for anything she could remember. They never needed anything.

“Would you like me to be there tomorrow when you make the announcement at church?” Meri asked.

Dad thought a minute. “Yes, I think that would mean a lot to your mother.”

As Meredith shuffled through the pebbles along the lake trail, her head down, her heart heavy, she thought of how irritated she had been with her mom these past few weeks. It
made sense now. Mom had been under an unusual amount of stress. Her natural response would be to try to fix or control the few areas of her life where she felt she still had some power. Meri, as the youngest and only unmarried daughter, probably seemed the logical choice of someone who needed “fixing.”

Now that Meredith realized how much tension her mom must have been feeling, she understood why she had been so overbearing. After all, how do you go about everyday life knowing that with a show of hands “the board” has altered your life forever? Why couldn’t they have let Mom and Dad stay a few more years as her parents had planned? They could have retired joyfully, with a big party and their future goals set. Now the church would be transitioning out of the old, and the big party would be to welcome the new pastor and his fresh, young family.