Beyond 4/20 (25 page)

As he was heading up the walk, she backed through the front door and was locking up behind her. She had not seen him yet, so Tuck moved quietly toward the stairs, dreading the conversation ahead.

When she turned and found Tuck standing at the bottom of the steps, Hailey startled but then quickly recovered.

“How’s Sara Beth? I worried most of the night.”

When he never called, she had naturally assumed he was staying the night at Chelsea’s. That was the thought that really kept her up most of the night.

“Better this morning. Lucy ended up just as sick. It was a long night, though, a whole lot of mess to clean up.”

“I’m so sorry. That was strange how…”

Hailey trailed off once she saw the look of pity in Tuck’s eyes. He was getting back with Chelsea; it was written all over his face.

“I know this probably isn’t the best time, but we need to talk.”

Looking away, she said, “No, I don’t think we do.”

“I care about you. Really, I do.”

Under different circumstances, if he actually did have a heart to give away, he would have given it to Hailey. She was a wonderful woman, one any man would be lucky to find.

Hailey held her hand up to stop him from going any further. “I saw it last night.” Sighing, she admitted, “I saw it on our first date.”

“I really thought it was over, or I would have never asked you out. I’m not playing games here. It’s just that,” he stopped, trying to decide how to best explain what he was feeling. “I feel like I’m abandoning my family, as if maybe I haven’t given it enough time to work out as it needs to.”

“Tuck, go back to your family. You are an incredible guy and an amazing dad.”

Reaching up, she kissed his cheek. “Chelsea is a lucky girl. I think maybe the rumor is true after all.”

“What rumor?”

“You have this epic love story that needs to be completed. I think this was just another plot twist of your story.” She laughed rather sarcastically. “I was a plot twist. Go figure.”

“I’m so sorry.”

The look on her face was clearly one of disappointment even though she was trying to appear as if she were taking it well.

“I’m not sorry, Tuck. I’m just glad to know guys like you exist. I wasn’t so sure.”

Because the girls had been so sick, Chelsea kept them home from church. All piled up on the sofa, still wearing pj’s, Chelsea included, they were surprised when the front door swung open and Tuck entered.

Sara Beth was the first to scramble off the sofa and across the room. Jumping into his arms, she shouted, “Daddy!”

Tuck walked with her to the sofa, demanding, “Make way!” Sliding girls out of the way, he settled in closest to Chelsea. Looking at her, he asked, “Well, what did I miss?”

For a second she couldn’t say a word, so she simply shook her head. Smiling broadly, feeling content beyond anything she had known in months, she finally said, “Not much.”

Looping his pinky finger around hers, he sighed, saying, “Feels good to be back.”

At his touch, her heart began racing so fast she felt a little light-headed.

Wondering aloud, she asked, “I thought you needed time.”

“I said a little time.” He grinned. “It’s been a little time.”

Sara Beth moved out of his lap and over to watch Lucy as she played a game on her phone, so Tuck inched a little closer to Chelsea and whispered, “There’s no one else. I took care of that.”

Grinning, biting at her lip, she reminded him, “I’m glad. It’s supposed to be me.”

“So I hear.” The look on her face gave him a sense of hope that terrified him. “But I need to know it’ll someday be me.”

“It always has been.”

If she had ever known anything with real certainty, it was that. No matter what came against them to alter the course of their lives, it always came back to them.

Lucy kept track of her parents out of the corner of her eye. When her dad first came back, she assumed he was checking in on them since they were sick, but when he sat by her mom and they began whispering, almost holding hands even, she just knew. God had heard her after all. Handing her phone to Sara B., she crawled across the sofa and kissed his cheek. “Welcome home.”

He grabbed her face with both hands and kissed her back. “It’s good to be here.”

Later, when they were finally alone just before Tuck was about to leave for home, Chelsea said, “I would like for you to listen to this.” Handing him the sheet of paper, she explained, “This is where I’ve been and where I’m going. It’s just the lyrics. I’ll get you a CD if you would like.”

When Tuck began to open the paper, she reached out and closed it back. “Wait ‘til later.”

It was something so deeply personal that it embarrassed her to think of him reading it in front of her. Smiling up at him, she admitted, “I don’t know exactly where I am right now on this journey, but I promise to keep working on it.”

Tuck wrapped his arms around Chelsea and sighed a deep and heavy sigh. He had not done this since early on when she was still so depressed. Once she was feeling better and they had started doing what he considered playing house, it had seemed as if holding her would be inappropriate considering she was still grieving her dead husband. Until this day, he had done it only when she was hurting most. This time, however, he was holding her simply because he loved her. He could hardly think back to a moment when he felt so full. For so long, he had been so completely empty. Having her in his arms filled him.

As Chelsea rested her head on Tuck’s chest, she sighed too. “Tuck?”

“Hmm?”

It was as close to a holy moment as he had ever experienced. Hope had fully returned, and with it, a sense of being at the right place at just the right time, or at least on the verge of the right time.

“Please wait for me, just a little while longer.”

Her voice was so soft and sweet, it reminded him how worth it she was.

“I’ll never stop waiting, never again.”

Tuck was lying on the hood of his truck, looking up at the sky. There weren’t many stars out that night, and the cloud cover cast a gloomy layer over the earth, but Tuck was far from affected by it. Inside, he felt as happy as he could ever remember feeling.

As soon as he had gotten in the truck he read the lyrics to Chelsea’s song. He had heard it before but never really listened to the words – thankfully. If he had, he would have been broken on the spot. The lyrics were the most beautiful outpouring of absolute surrender to God that he had ever read. There was a progression of the song that went from brokenness to emptiness to loneliness, but ultimately it was asking to be made ready for God to be her everything. It was exactly Chelsea’s story; it was his story.

After leaving Chelsea’s, he had pulled into a parking lot before heading out of town and downloaded the song onto his phone. The rest of the way home, he played it over and over, weeping so hard that he nearly had to stop the truck. Instead of going straight home, he had come here, to the place where he would someday build his family a home. It might not be anytime soon, but it would happen someday. For as long as she asked him to, he would wait.

Having been an eye witness to at least part of their love story, John and Chelsea’s, he could see how she became lost in it. He was a millionaire tycoon who could have had most any woman in the world, but he only wanted her. With unlimited resources, he was able to give her the moon; nothing seemed out of reach for him. For her, he walked away from a prestigious and fast-paced life to just be hers. In the end, John’s only thought was what was best for her and how she would be cared for once he was gone. He loved her in a way few men can love a woman. How could she be anything but lost in him? And how could a regular guy ever follow that?

As near as Tuck could figure, the answers had something to do with the song. It was obviously what God was using to rescue her from drowning in her love for John. In that moment when God gave Tuck what seemed to be his release from her, He was preparing the way to claim Chelsea’s heart for Himself. She went from loving John to depending on Tuck and living in a make-believe family. Tuck could see how stepping in and allowing her to turn to him instead of God was a mistake. How wise was God to remove him for a season. No wonder he felt such peace over walking away. Chelsea needed to fall and land. John’s death was the fall, and losing what seemed to be her comfortable family was the hard landing that forced her to open her eyes and turn to Him. All that time Tuck had been nothing but the means by which God would eventually reach Chelsea. He couldn’t help but marvel at such a thing as being used by God that way.

Just as he had done a thousand times, Tuck thought back to that day when Chelsea came to see him to ask if Lucy could travel to New York with her and John. That day, she all but admitted that she was supposed to come home when she first graduated. Looking back, that moment between them that one Christmas was exactly what he thought it to be at the time, a first glimmer of light directing them toward a future together. When she ran from it, she began a chain reaction that would take her farther than she had ever anticipated.

Piecing together the details as much as he could, Tuck supposed God gave her that final year to change her mind on her own. Then He removed her funding for school with the death of her granddad. God foreknew the time of his passing. That once again gave Chelsea the opportunity to obey Him and go home. She chose her arrangement with John over obedience. The consequence for her, actually for both her and Tuck, was that she gave her heart to a man who had little time. Once again, God foreknew the time of John’s passing. Sadder still, Chelsea had a child with John, one who would lose her father way too soon to ever truly know him. All were consequences.

Just as his disobedience began a snowball effect that devastated many lives, his, Chelsea’s, Lindsey’s, and Lucy’s with the loss of her biological mother, Chelsea’s act of rebellion over what she knew to be God’s will cost them all just as much. Ultimately, though, God seemed to be offering them both an opportunity to try again. This plan B of His was a fractured image of what should have been, marred, but still beautiful, in that they had two little girls to bring with them into a new life together.

Not so long ago, the actual
promise
crossed Tuck’s mind. To view God’s promise with this new understanding, a promise made with God’s full knowledge of where future events would carry them, brought tears to his eyes. That night, standing by Chelsea’s bed, God told him he would take care of her and love her unconditionally. As far as he could recall, He never said she would be his. Tuck had been taking care of her and always would take care of her for as long as she would allow him, but it was the unconditional love part that he was viewing with fresh eyes. Unconditional love requires proof; it requires conditions to be established and overlooked in order to be recognized as unconditional. The condition that he had to endure was that she would never likely love him in return, not as he loved her and certainly never as she loved John. That was his proof of unconditional love for Chelsea. He had loved her in spite of it all – and still did. That was likely the context of God’s promise, or, maybe considering it under these new conditions, it was His warning.

Though there were no guarantees, based on Chelsea’s attitude that day, she was planning on a future together. She would be his in the sense that she would likely marry him. It was the natural progression of things. Because of their love for their girls and their willingness to always be a family for them, they would live the rest of their lives together. If that did happen, however, Tuck would walk into a marriage in which he had no way of knowing if she would ever be his, truly his. He would be hers, but a piece of her would always be withheld from him. All that was based on the notion that she would ever want to marry. For all he knew, they may go back to the way things had been before he pulled away and never go any further than that pretend family. The truth was, if that was all she could ever offer him, he would take that too, another condition under which he would love her and take care of her.

All of this, every single consequence of their new fractured existence, came back to land on his shoulders. That one moment of pleasure with Lindsey forfeited him, not the promise, and not Chelsea necessarily, but it cost him her heart. How could he have ever known as such a young and inexperienced man that choosing his own way could have such a tragic outcome? And how could he consider Lucy a tragic outcome? Sometimes it became this circular means of thinking. Without the sin, he wouldn’t have Lucy and Chelsea would have never wanted John and with him had Sara Beth. His children were literally born out of his sin, proving God’s Word when it says He can take what the enemy intends for harm and make it turn out for good. His children were the best thing that had ever happened to him besides Chelsea, but they never would have been had it not been for that one night.

Such deep places with God felt familiar and comforting. The years had taken him into deeper waters with God in ways that he may have never known apart from all the heartbreak of loving and losing Chelsea. That younger version of himself, the one who chose Lindsey that night, was barely swimming in the shallows with the Lord. Obviously, God knew what was needed to make him His, and Tuck wouldn’t go back and choose any other path. At the end of the long road, he had Chelsea and his girls, and he would never choose anything over them.

Lucy’s words from earlier that day came back to him, making him feel just as uncomfortable as they did when she said them. She said, “Welcome home,” meaning welcome back to their family. He understood her intentions, but when she said it and he looked around, he knew that house could never be his home. Chelsea had loved John there and it still was a shrine dedicated to him, covered in photos and memories of them together. As for his place, he had been there with Lindsey. If they really were to ever marry, they would need a place of their own. Sliding down from the hood, Tuck walked to the bed of his truck, grabbed his shovel, and moved back around to where his headlights shone on the ground where the front porch was supposed to be. With a broad smile, he reared back and dug the shovel deep into the soil. Tossing the first load of dirt aside, he knew he was finally breaking ground on his future with Chelsea. He would build the house they had once dreamed of and hope and pray that someday she would choose to be there with him.