A Morning Like This (11 page)

He tithed regularly, rotated-in whenever they were short-handed on sixth-grade Sunday school teachers and, yes, as Nelson
had mentioned, he often drove up Mosquito Creek to cut firewood with his new Husqvarna for the wood-burning furnace in the
church basement.

Ab, look at me
.

Nelson took the microphone at the altar, led his congregation in one last song, and challenged them to hug one another and
greet visitors and welcome others around them in their seats. For long moments, everyone’s arms became a web of proffered
handshakes, hugs, and God-Be-with-You greetings. Several friends sitting nearby congratulated David. “Happy Father’s Day!
Happy Anniversary!”

And just as Nelson Hull began to signal that it was time to return to their seats and quiet down, here came Viola Uptergrove
shuffling toward them with her walker. She was at least eighty-five years old, hunched and darling in a pink dress with pink
blush powder caught in the wrinkles along her cheeks, pink lipstick staining her lips, and a pink silk butterfly bobby-pinned
behind one ear. The butterfly sparkled and flickered on tiny, spring-balanced wings, as if it had recently flown in and alighted
itself in Viola’s white, sugar-spun hair.

Viola Uptergrove, David knew, was always the one to pray.

She finished traversing the aisle and came near to him right as Nelson Hull took to the pulpit again and brandished the microphone.
David glanced up and saw Nelson waiting, watching Viola’s progress with his patient, loving smile.

When she spoke, her voice was so gravelly David had to bend close to hear her. She patted his hand a long time. “You have
such a beautiful family,” she said at last, her rheumy blue eyes shining up at him like stars. “Happy Father’s Day.”

He waited for more, but that was all she said before she began her journey to her seat again, trundling her walker back across
the aisle.

As soon as Viola got back to her seat, the sermon began. Because Nelson Hull had long been his friend, David felt in harmless
hands whenever Nelson preached. He settled into the pew, making himself comfortable. But for some strange reason, Nelson’s
eyes caught David’s from the pulpit. And David didn’t feel quite so safe anymore.

“Often, we are convicted in our lives that something needs to change,” Nelson began as David sank lower into his seat. “But
a man who hears and feels convicted of something, and equates that with having changed and
done
something about it, is like a man who sees himself in the mirror and then walks away and doesn’t remember what he looks like.”

On the back of David’s bulletin, flat against a hymnal, Braden began to sketch timid outlines on paper. Desperate to break
eye contact with his pastor, David focused on Braden’s drawing instead. At first he thought Braden was drawing a picture of
a pitcher on the mound. But as the shape began to take form, David recognized a man crouched in a warrior’s stance with a
huge belt, sword drawn for battle, shield upheld.

A little boy’s picture.

“The more we know our heavenly Father, the more we love Him. The more we love Him, the more we trust Him, and the more we
trust Him, the more we want His advice and counsel. The more we seek His advice and counsel, the more He’ll give it to us.”

David wondered what sort of a picture a little girl would draw in a church pew on a Sunday morning. Little girls liked to
draw flowers, didn’t they? They liked those little houses. Or those big green scribbles of trees.

He raised his eyes. Unbidden, they locked immediately onto Nelson’s. “You get stuck,” the pastor’s voice rumbled in much the
same tone and manner as the thunder on the mountains the other day, “because you think hearing something and being convicted
of it are equivalent to the
doing
.”

Samantha’s face swam before David, the way it had appeared in Susan’s wallet photograph: sunny and irrepressible, her dark
eyes studying him as if she could see into the core of his soul.

Desperate, David squeezed his son against him in a stupid, transparent gesture of fatherhood and held him there against his
will until Braden squirmed away.

It wasn’t only the thought of losing his family that left David longing and afraid. It was the thought of losing his courage.
Of losing himself.

What happens to me, if I bury this? What happens to an innocent child if I cover my own transgression from the one it will
hurt the most?

For a moment, just one moment, David felt Abby’s chin brush against his shoulder and smelled a waft of her familiar perfume,
the scent Braden called the smell-of-Mom. She uncrossed her legs, settled back, and placed her hand possessively upon his
knee.

The poignant mixture of Nelson’s words, of Abby’s touching him, of Braden sitting beside him on a pew, swinging his legs and
doodling, pushed David to a chasmic edge.

Trapped. I’m trapped. I jump here, and I die
.

The truth seemed to come from every part of him at once, crying out in silence from the back of David’s throat. It came from
his heart, and from someplace larger than his heart, something beyond him that knew him to the very depths of his soul.

You’re standing still, aren’t you, and letting mistake heap upon mistake? You’re standing still and letting rubble pile upon
rubble
.

Here today in their pew where they sat every Sunday near the front in the center of the third row—today while Nelson’s sermon
words pounded out over the loudspeaker—David felt the church members were surveying the knobs protruding from his backbone.
They were measuring the flush of color that crept past the collar of his Teton Pines golf shirt. They were comparing the way
he had clutched Abby’s hand last week, how she made a point to reach for him today, and how he didn’t respond to her now.

Guilty. Guilty
.

God was telling him to do something impossible.

And everyone would see his deceitful heart.

E
very Sunday afternoon Abby called her mother, Carol Higgins, to have a weekly chat.

“Oh, Abigail,” the woman said. “It’s so good hearing your voice.”

“Yours, too, Mom. How are you? Have you had a good week?”

“Russell Smith came over and painted the shutters this week. They look so pretty from the street. Much better than before.”

“Oh, nice, Mom. I’m glad you’re pleased.”

“Frank planted petunias in the big pot by the front door yesterday. Pink ones. They add such a nice splotch of color.”

“How
is
Frank?”

Frank Higgins was her mother’s second husband. It had been such a blessing, having Carol find someone special like him in
her retirement years. Someone who would finally take care of her the way Abby’s father never had.

“Oh, Frank is fine. Just fine. He’s out washing the front windows right now. I’ll go get him in a minute. I know he’ll want
to talk to you.”

“I want to talk to him, too.”

Carol lowered her voice a notch, as if she was worried someone might overhear her. “It means so much to Frank, Abigail. Having
you treat him the way you treat him—”

“Well, I wouldn’t treat him any other way.”

“—almost as if he were your real father.”

Abby let this conversation taper off into nothing.

But Carol found something else to say. “He didn’t wait to open those gifts you sent. He ripped into them yesterday, right
after the postman left them at the door.”

“Shame on Frank.”

“And you chose for him real well, honey. Those huckleberry chocolates were just the thing. He’s already eaten half the box.”

“Good.”

“And to have Braden sign the card in his own handwriting. That was really something.”

“I’m glad he was pleased.”

“Honey, thanks for working to make everything right with him.”

Oh
. A sigh. Abby shifted the receiver to her other ear. “It’s like Frank is my dad, Mom. It’s easy.”

At that, neither of them could come up with anything more to say on the subject.

“How’s David, dear? Is he having a good day?”

“I think so,” Abby said. “Yes, he is.”

“Well.” A long pause. “I should get Frank.”

“Okay.”

“Honey—”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

“I know Father’s Day is always a hard day for you.”

“Mother, it’s really okay.”

“I’m sorry for the part I played in that.”

“It’s gotten better. It has. I hardly think about that part anymore.”

“Abigail—”

“I just focus on David, Mom. I think about what I have to look forward to instead of what’s happened in the past. That makes
everything a whole lot easier.”

David pulled the lawn mower out of the garage. He yanked the pull cord as hard as he could and took morose satisfaction when
it wouldn’t start. It meant he got to yank it again.

He had been waiting all day for the “right time.” Only there was no right time to do something like this to his wife.

Every time he went inside she and Braden would tell him, “Happy Father’s Day.” And when he wasn’t suffering through that he
was remembering Viola Upter-grove’s shining eyes, that surreal, flapping butterfly, and her frail hand patting him.

You have such a beautiful family
.

When the engine finally chuffed to life, he aimed the mower at the ragged grass with hawkish precision and went after the
lawn. He made one violent slash past the window, then another, widening his course, the mulch shooting out like coleslaw around
his ankles.

He ran over a pinecone and took perverse pleasure in chopping it to smithereens. He shredded aspen leaves that lay like playing
cards in the grass. Back and forth, on and on across the yard. On his last pass, he made a fierce right-angle turn and began
again, cutting across the grain, one resolute swathe after another, dividing his lawn into checkerboard squares.

His shoes were green when he stepped inside, and he stopped to pick up a grass clump that had stuck to the carpet. He wiped
his hands on the kitchen towel and realized he’d left grass there, too. Oops. Abby would go after him for leaving grass on
the tea towel. He tried to brush it off and made a bigger mess of it instead. It left a green stain and landed in the sink
drainer on top of clean silverware.

“Abby?” He heard her tromping up the stairs from the basement. “I need to talk to you.”

Up she came with her full wicker laundry basket in both hands, headed toward their bedroom to put clean clothes away. She
balanced the basket on her hip for a minute and poked a strand of hair behind her ear. “What, David?”

“Let me have that.” He tried to take the basket from her. “I’ll help you.”

“You’re going to get green all over everything. These are clean.”

“See, I knew you’d be worried about grass getting on things. I cleaned it up in the kitchen.”

“I’ve got this.”

“You sure?”

“What is it? You’re helping with the laundry now? That’s a surprise.” She stood on her tiptoes and gave him an unsuspecting
little peck.

He hated that she was teasing him, hated that she didn’t have any cares or any awful intuitions about him as he followed her
into the bedroom. “Abby.” He waited until she dumped the basket on the bed and began to sort through the laundry. Then he
shut the door.

That stopped her.

She stood beside the trappings of their everyday lives—one masculine gray sock with a hole in the heel, her own frayed nightshirt,
a tea towel from the kitchen that read “
Kindness is a special art of giving with a loving heart
”—and said, “You’ve shut the door. This must be serious.”

He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t blurt it out and destroy everything they’d ever had together.
Father, if this is what You want from me, then You’ve got to help me do it. You’ve got to help me know what to say
.

“What is it, David? Why are you staring at me like that?” Her smile shone unprotected, as happy and un-wary as a child’s.

Braden and his friends went dashing around the side of the house. David heard skateboards rasping over asphalt and the slam
of wheels on the plywood incline that he had hammered together beside the garage. The thump of a hard landing, the tumble
of a fall.