A Gift of Trust (5 page)

Rory looked from Lisa to Betty and his face
turned red. “N-nothing,” he stammered. “I forgot until a few
minutes ago that the café closed early tonight. I-I just wanted to
talk to you before you left for Austin.”

Lisa felt her lips tighten, but before she
could answer Betty banged down her trunk lid. “You know, I really
need to get all this home before Joe-Bob thinks I’ve run off with
the mailman,” she said, a knowing smile on her lips. “Lisa, thanks
again for waiting. Merry Christmas, both of you.”

She jumped in the car and was gone in a
flash, and Lisa and Rory stood on the sidewalk looking at one
another.

“Okay, you’re here,” Lisa said slowly. “You
want to talk. So, talk. I’m tired and want to go home.”

“I, uh…” Rory looked around the town square,
still decked out in all its Christmas finery but almost completely
deserted. “God, I don’t want to talk here.”

“Why? Don’t want those folks over there to
hear you when you get up in my face again?” Lisa knew she sounded
snide but didn’t care.

To her surprise, Rory hung his head. “I don’t
blame you for feeling that way. No, what I have to say…well, I…” He
looked at her helplessly. “Look, can we please go somewhere and sit
down and talk about some things?” He glanced over at the café.
“Maybe in there?”

“Not the café. I don’t want someone to think
we’re still open and get mad when I can’t serve them.”

Rory thought a minute. “How about the beach
at Heaven’s Point?” he asked quietly. “It’ll be private out there,
and the moon shining on the water will be really pretty,” he
coaxed.

And you know I have
memories of all the time we spent out on that beach
together,
Lisa thought as she started to shake her head.

“Please, Lisa.” He stopped and gulped, and
Lisa could swear there were tears in his eyes. “Come with me.”

Lisa didn’t know if it was the tears or the
desperation in his voice, or the expression of complete desolation
that convinced her, but she nodded slightly. “I’ll take my own car
so you don’t have to bring me back to town.”

She locked up the café and moved her car out
of the alley onto the street, where Rory waited in the cruiser to
follow her to Heaven’s Point. She was crazy, she thought to herself
as she made the too-familiar drive to the little lake community
through the moonlight-dappled, hilly ranchland sprinkled with
sleeping cattle and the occasional horse and white-tailed deer
doing their annual winter mating dance. She and Rory had nothing to
say to one another. For whatever reason, he would never be able to
trust her and she refused to live with his constant suspicion. So
why was she going with him? Was it because she’d promised Angie she
would talk to him? Was a part of her hoping for some kind of
miraculous reconciliation? Or was she just hoping that tonight they
could find some closure so that they both could get on with their
lives?

Lisa pulled up on the grassy parking area and
looked around for a moment at the gaily decorated houses of the
Point. Widower Jimmy Adamcik’s huge ranch house was decked out
royally, probably to please his young daughter Carrie, and
someone—Russ, probably—had put lights on Holly’s front porch.

Rory parked next to her and got out of the
cruiser with two brightly-wrapped packages in his hands. Lisa
started for the concrete wall flanking the sandy swimming beach,
but Rory pointed instead to the picnic bench underneath the
streetlight. They sat down across from one another, and he placed
the Christmas presents between them on the table.

Lisa looked at the packages with suddenly
intense curiosity. “I don’t have anything for you,” she
blurted.

“That’s all right. One of these has my name
on it, and I’m hoping that after we talk you’ll be willing to give
it to me,” Rory said quietly. He looked out at the frothing,
silvery water of Lake Templeton. “You never told me about your
father.”

Lisa could feel her eyebrow shoot up. “You
never told me about your mother.”

Rory looked across the table ruefully.
“Touché. I never said anything about it to you because I was
ashamed, Lisa. She was my mother, and I loved her, but at the same
time I was and still am horribly ashamed of the way she treated my
father. Dad’s a good man and he didn’t deserve that. He deserved a
woman who was faithful to him, and instead my mother would come in
after being gone all night, smelling like booze and another man’s
aftershave, and when he’d ask her where she’d been she would just
stare at him, knowing he knew damn well where she’d been and daring
him to say anything about it.”

“Why didn’t he leave?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, and I never
will, because I would never hurt him by asking,” Rory said quietly.
“All I know is that morning, when you came out of that house and
just looked at me like you did, all I could think was that you had
done the same thing to me that she used to do to him. Never mind
that I knew you better than that, never mind that you’d never given
me a reason in the world to doubt you, I just thought it was
happening all over again.” Rory stopped and took a deep breath.
“And I just couldn’t go there.”

He reached out and took Lisa by the hand.
“Lisa, I’m sorry. If I’d been thinking that morning and not
reacting to old memories, I would have known you’d never do that to
me, even with a good-looking stud like Russ Riley. I should have
trusted you.”

Lisa felt wetness on their clasped hands and
realized that the falling tears belonged to them both. She said, “I
could have explained that morning and I guess I should have, but I
just couldn’t.” She pulled her hand away from Rory’s and clasped it
in her lap. “I never told you about my father because I wasn’t
really proud, either. How my sweet, loving grandfather could have
raised such an asshole for a son is beyond me, but asshole doesn’t
begin to describe it. My mom never did a thing to make him doubt
her. She never went anywhere or did anything or associated with
anybody she shouldn’t have, but my father constantly suspected the
worst and made her life a living hell because of it. I have the
most horrible memories of him up in her face, just like you were up
in mine”—Lisa stopped and wiped her eyes and took a breath—“and her
begging and pleading with him to believe her that she hadn’t done
anything wrong.”

She tried and failed to break the sobs that
she felt coming. “He broke her, Rory,” she added as the sobs tore
free. “H-he broke her s-spirit, and he b-broke her health, and
f-finally she couldn’t take it anymore and left him and we n-never
got to see grandpa anymore.” Lisa knuckled away the tears while
fresh ones spilled down her cheeks. “I-I can’t go there, Rory. As
much as I love you, and I do love you, I can’t live like she did. I
promised her the day she died that I would never let a man treat me
like my father treated her.”

“Oh my God,” Rory breathed. He slid off his
bench and came around the table to where Lisa was curled up with
her head in her hands. “Shh, it’s all right,” he crooned as she
sobbed her heartbreak. He gathered her in his arms and rocked her
back and forth as she cried out her anguish, his own eyes
overflowing with the tears of her painful past and his own.

Finally, her tears spent, Lisa sat up and
scooted a few inches away from him on the bench. “I’m sorry,” she
said. “I’ve never cried like that over them.”

“Maybe you needed to. Maybe we both did.”

“But that doesn’t solve the problem,” Lisa
said sadly. “I want something you can’t give me.”

Rory bit his lip. “Lisa…” He scooted back
around to the other bench and sat facing her across the table. “I
think it’s time to open the Christmas gifts. Here, you go
first.”

Christmas gifts? He wanted to open Christmas
presents?
Now?
Mystified, Lisa took the
large box labeled To Lisa from Rory and tore off the paper,
wondering what could be in the box from an office supply store. She
carefully opened the box and stared down at stacks and stacks of
old-fashioned receipt books with something written across the top
receipt.

She picked up one of the books and angled it
directly under the streetlight. Trust me was written boldly there.
Curious, she flipped through the receipt book and found the same
thing written on every page.

Lisa picked up another book and flipped
through it. Sure enough, Trust me was written on every page of that
book too, and the next one, and the next one after that. “It took
us all night to fill them all out,” Rory said quietly. “Dad and
Benny and me. I couldn’t have gotten them all written out by
myself.” He gestured to the other, much smaller package. “It’s your
turn to give that one to me.”

Lisa did. She handed Rory the smaller
package. He ripped off the paper and removed the lid then scooted
the box across the table so she could see inside. There was a very
small stack of receipt books there, just a handful, really. Lisa
picked up one and held it to the light. The receipts were labeled,
Please, please, tell me about it.

Speechless, Lisa looked over at him.

“This is how it’s going to work if you’ll
give us another chance,” Rory said softly. “I’m not going to change
overnight, and I know that sometimes those memories of Mom are
going to reach up and bite me in the butt. So this is what you’re
going to do. I start crap like that, you’re going to hand me one of
your receipts. You’re going to use it to remind me that I can trust
you and that I do trust you. This is my trust, Lisa. I’m giving you
my trust.”

Lisa’s head was spinning as she looked down
at the big box of receipt books in her possession. “Just like that?
I hand you a receipt and you trust me, just like that?”

“Just like that,” Rory assured her solemnly.
“I do trust you, and that receipt is just to remind me that I
do.”

Lisa looked across the table at the receipts
in front of Rory. “What about those? I know the box is smaller, but
how do you plan to use them?”

From across the table, Rory looked her in the
eye. “Lisa, no matter how much I trust you, and trust you I do,
there are going to be times, not many, but definitely a few, when I
am going to have questions and I will need to know what’s going on,
for my own peace of mind if for no other reason. Or maybe just
because I love you and I’m worried. Ten thousand dollars disappears
out of the checking account or you lose twenty pounds and are
barfing all the time, yes, I’m going to want to know. But I promise
you that those times will be few and far between. And I will never,
ever hand you one of my receipts because of another man. I will
never distrust you that way ever again.” He pointed to the boxes.
“I mean for these to last a lifetime, Lisa. That’s why you have so
many and I have so few. I love you, Lisa, and I mean to trust you
every day for the rest of my life.”

He paused, waiting for her to respond. When
she didn’t he asked, “What do you say, Lisa? I’m giving you my
trust tonight. Can you do the same and give me yours?”

Lisa looked down at her huge stack of
receipts then over at Rory’s much smaller one. He
was
giving her the gift of his trust, his promise that
he would let go of the baggage of his past and accept her as the
honest woman that she was. And he was asking her to give a little
too, to promise to explain to him when he really, really needed to
know.

She again compared the size of the stacks. He
was doing most of the giving, most of the compromising and asking
her to give him back very little. Could she do it? Could she accept
the gift of his trust and offer him the same, her trust that he
would trust her and ask for an explanation only when he felt he
must?

She looked over at Rory, his love for her
shining in his eyes as he begged for her answer. And the answer
became apparent: How could she not? Given the gift of his trust for
her, how could she not give the same gift to him?

Lisa smiled and reached for his hand across
the table. “Yes, Rory, I can give you my trust.”

Together they stood. Rory reached out, and
Lisa flew into his arms, wrapping her arms around his neck and
meeting his lips with hers. They clung together as their tears of
joy and promise mingled on their cheeks, and with their kiss they
pledged their love and trust to one another forever.

Finally they broke off their kiss and stared
into one another’s eyes. “Come home with me tonight,” Rory
whispered. “Let me give you the gift of my love.”

Lisa nodded.

Rory took her hand, and together they walked
down the street to his cabin. Someone’s Christmas bells tinkled in
the chilly wind, and the Christmas lights adorning the houses
nearby winked brightly, but brighter still was the hope in Lisa’s
heart. They stood on Rory’s porch for a moment before she wrapped
her arms around the man she loved and planted a tender kiss on his
cheek.

“Merry Christmas, Rory. Merry Christmas from
the bottom of my heart.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of twenty romance novels, Emily
Mims combined her writing career with a career in public education
until leaving the classroom to write fulltime. The mother of two
sons and grandmother of three, she and her husband live in Central
Texas but frequently visit grandchildren in eastern Tennessee and
Hawaii. She plays the piano, organ, dulcimer, and ukulele, and
belongs to two performing bands. She says, “I love to write
romances because I believe in them. Romance happened to me and it
can happen to any woman—if she’ll just let it.”