God's Gift (5 page)

God, You know what Psalm 37 says. Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. I feel like that promise got broken.

The prayer was a soft one. Rae settled back against the trunk of a tree and watched the water.

…the desires of your heart…
That’s what she felt had been taken from her with Leo’s death. She’d had a relationship with him, a deep one, a relationship that had been heading somewhere. Leo knew her, inside, where she rarely let many people in.

God, why did You rip away what was the desire of my heart?

She tilted her head back and watched puffy clouds drift across the blue sky. For the first time in over a year, she felt a sense of peace settle inside.

“What’s wrong? You’re frowning.”

A cold soda appeared at her elbow. Rae looked up from her laptop. James had begun to join her most afternoons on the patio, and while she would not admit it to Lace, she had begun to look forward to his company.

“I think I need to rewrite chapter eighteen.”

“Rae, the story is fine.” He’d been up until 2:00 a.m. reading the manuscript. It was more than fine, it was wonderful. She just needed the courage to finish it.

“I think it’s slow.”

He pulled over a chair. “Give me the printout. Let me see.”

She shifted the book holding down the manuscript pages and gave him the last four chapters. She gratefully drank the soda as she watched him read.

It was odd, how far their relationship had come in five days. She’d never expected to be so comfortable around him. She’d relaxed, and he’d turned into a very good friend.

“Read it again without page 314, I bet that’s what you’re sensing is wrong.”

She paged back and forth in the on-line text. “That’s it. It’s too technical.”

He picked up his own drink. “I want an autographed copy when it’s published.”

“James, it may never get finished, let alone find a publisher.”

He smiled. “You’ll finish it. You’ve got, what, another five hundred pages to go?”

She laughed. “Trust me to choose a big story to tell.”

“I
like
the fact you think big.”

She blinked. Smiled. “The kids catching any fish?”

“Emily’s got six and Dave’s only caught two. Emily’s de
cided it is time to start giving him pointers, he’s letting the team down.”

Rae laughed. “How are Lace and Tom doing?”

“Scheming. They disappeared about an hour ago for what Tom called a ‘super-duper’ spot.”

“That sounds like Tom. Got the time? Patricia asked to be woken up at four.”

He glanced at his watch. “She’s got another half hour.”

“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

James grinned. “I sure think so. She was eating pickles for breakfast this morning.”

He leaned back in his chair to pick up the book on the lounge chair that Rae had been reading that morning. Richard Foster’s book on prayer. He liked her reading selection. “Is this one good?”

“Very.”

“Bookstores and hot fudge sundaes were the two things I missed most about the States.”

“I don’t imagine the vanilla ice cream in Africa is the same as a Dairy Queen here.”

“Didn’t even come close. Want to ride to town with me to find some good ice cream?”

His offer caught her off guard.

Interesting…she looked like a doe caught in a car’s headlights. “I promised Tom a banana split for having thrown a perfect spiral,” he said gently. He’d just walked into something that caused her pain and he had no idea what it was.

“I think I’ll pass.”

There was the clatter of feet and the sound of laughter from the front porch. James squeezed her shoulder gently before walking inside to meet the fishing champs.

Several hours later, James carefully set the sack he held down on the kitchen counter. He flexed his wrist which had threatened to drop the package. The rest was helping, but he had such a long way to go before his body recovered. The only thing predictable was the pain. He would be so grateful to be able to do normal tasks like carry in the groceries without having to think about them first. Tom had disappeared down to the pavilion.

“Thank you, James,” his sister said, walking in behind him. “I didn’t mean to leave you with the groceries to carry in.”

“It was three bags, Patricia,” he said ruefully; the pain made it feel like thirty. “How’s Emily’s hand?”

“It’s barely a scratch. A Band-Aid fixed it.” She started putting away the groceries. “Since we’ve got cornmeal, should I deep-fry the fish as well as make hush puppies?”

“Most of the fish are bluegills—they are going to dress as popcorn pieces, so I would plan to deep-fry them. Do we have some newspaper we can use?”

“Under the sink, there’s a stash just for cleaning fish.”

James found them. “Thanks.”

He glanced around as he left the cabin, then walked down to join Dave and Lace and the kids where they were preparing to clean the fish they had caught that afternoon. Rae was nowhere in sight.

It bothered him that he’d upset her with his earlier invitation to get ice cream. He had unintentionally touched a raw memory, and he needed to know that she was okay.

She’d been disappearing occasionally, taking some long walks. Hopefully, that was where she had headed this time.

She was getting her endurance back; she had made it to the top of the trail without being so out of breath she felt
ready to collapse. Rae settled on the big rock that made a comfortable perch from which she could see most of the sandy stretch of beach. She had forty minutes before dinner, and had decided to take advantage of the time. She thought best when she hiked.

James’s invitation had touched a raw nerve. There was no way he could have known Leo had taken her to that Dairy Queen the last summer they’d spent here. It bothered her that a simple question could throw her so badly.

She knew one reason the pain was lingering.

They would have had a child by now.

She wanted children. Deep inside, being a mother was part of who she wanted to be. She and Leo had talked at some length about having children, how they would restructure the business to let her work from home. She had been looking forward to having children almost as much as she had been looking forward to being married. She liked being single, but for a season in her life, not forever. She had been looking forward to his proposal. Learning he had been carrying the ring with him the night he had died had nearly broken her heart. It had simply been another indication of how unfairly life had treated her. She had been so close to the life she wanted, longed to have. It wasn’t fair that it had been wrenched away from her.

The dream of having children was growing more distant.

She had lost so much of her life when Leo died.

It was so hard to keep letting go of pieces of her life. She propped her chin on her hand, rubbed her eyes. She liked to think, to plan, to look at the future. At times like this, she wanted to curse that part of her nature.

She had her work left, her book. Dave and Lace. An indefinite time of still being single.

The passion to earn money for her clients had disappeared during the last year. Two years ago the business had been something she had been willing to pour her life into, she had valued its success. Since Leo’s death, the work had lost its compelling fascination. She was still good at it. She was even learning how to do Leo’s job with reasonable skill. But it worried her that her heart wasn’t in it, that her drive was gone. She had thought the vacation would help her be prepared to go back to work strong and focused and full of energy. Instead, the vacation was only contrasting how strongly she really didn’t want to go back.

She was going to have to make some changes. She knew that. There were no margins left in her life, no time left in her schedule. It had been good and necessary in the past year to be so overwhelmingly busy, but she knew she could not continue in that mode another year.

There had to be a partner she would be comfortable working with, someone who could take Leo’s place. She had been looking for a year to find someone who was a good trader, who had a track record to match Leo’s. She wasn’t having much luck. It was time to find someone who could replace her function, be the primary analyst, so she could consider moving permanently to Leo’s trading position. It made her slightly sick to think about it, but the reality was, she couldn’t carry both jobs indefinitely.

She tugged the notebook out of her pocket, looked again at the list she had been writing. So many components of the job had fallen behind due to lack of time. They weren’t visible yet, but in another six months they would be. She had to hire a trader soon to free up her time to do the analysis.
Every time she looked at the list of work to be done, Rae knew the decision had to be made.

The decision would have been made in the past over a cup of coffee and a stolen few minutes in Leo’s office. It would have been decided and acted upon in a day. She hated running the business alone. The risks had been shared in the past, the decisions balanced by two opinions and two points of view.

She needed to accept and go on, build a life she would enjoy living.

It was a difficult proposition.

She didn’t want the life she had.

She wanted the life she had lost.

“What’s wrong?” Lace dropped down beside James on the steps. He gestured toward the campfire they had built down by the pavilion.

“Rae. She’s restless tonight.”

She had also been avoiding him all evening. He watched her get up from where she had been sitting, studying the fire, and pace down to the lake again. He hadn’t meant to stir up her pain, and it was obvious that he had. She had looked strained when she came back from her walk, tired, and the sadness had been back in her eyes. He hated seeing it.

“How close were they, Lace?”

“Rae and Leo?”

James nodded.

“That last year, you would swear they were able to read each other’s thoughts.”

Lace pushed her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “Leo lived life with intensity. That’s what drew people to him. He had the energy and boldness and courage to switch directions on a dime, take big risks. Rae was the perfect fit
for him. She has the focus and depth and thirst for details necessary to break apart the problems, quantify them and see a way to make his vision happen.”

James, watching Lace, saw deep concern etched in her face. “She hasn’t been the same since Leo died. The sparkle that used to be inside when she talked about work is gone. They fed off each other, and she’s lost without him. I think she’s found the business was Leo’s dream, one she had borrowed, and now that Leo’s gone, she’s trying to learn to do what he did naturally—take risks—and she’s scared to death. She’s not designed to take risks, it’s not in her personality. To compensate, she’s working hours that will put her into an early grave. About the only time I see glimpses of the old Rae is when she’s working on her book.”

For the first time, James was starting to understand some of the complexity in the lady he had met. “She’s using work to cope with the grief. That’s not unusual, Lace.”

“She’s at the office at 5:00 a.m., doesn’t leave until 7:00 sometimes 8:00 p.m. She makes Dave and me look like loafers. We haven’t been able to shake her out of that routine.”

“How much money is she managing?”

“About twenty-five million for thirty clients,” Lace replied. “It could be seventy million if she said yes to even half the offers she gets.”

Rae was driven by her own internal standards of excellence. Watching her with her book had shown James that. Add that kind of money to the equation, it was no wonder she was responding in the way she was. “She’s good at what she does.”

“Rae and Leo were the only money managers in the Midwest to have beaten the S&P 500 every year for the last seven years. Rae did it again on her own last year. She’s on
track to do it again this year. She’s good. But her heart’s not in it, James, not like it used to be.”

“It would be a big risk to sell the business, walk away, Lace. You said yourself she’s not going to easily take that kind of risk.”

Their serious conversation was broken up by a shout of laughter from the pier.

“Dave just threw Rae into the lake,” Emily told them, racing past. “She really needs my towel.”

Lace got to her feet. “Excuse me, James. On behalf of my out-of-commission, best friend, Rae, I’m going to go help Dave join her.”

“He’s crazy to take both of you on.”

“That’s why we love him,” Lace replied with a grin. “Keep what I said to yourself, okay? Rae’s opinion about her work is different than mine.”

“I will. The background helps, Lace.”

She nodded, looked down at the group by the pier. “Mind if I borrow your flashlight?”

He handed it to her. “Just don’t hit him with it.”

She grinned. “I’m more refined than that. I think I’ll suggest a late-night boat ride and let him swim back to shore.”

The cabin was quiet, except for the sounds of the night drifting in—the soft sounds of rustling leaves, the distant call of an owl.

James had long since given up on trying to sleep. He lay in bed listening to the night, thinking, working out construction plans for the clinics he was going to build in Zaire.

He had loved the past weeks in the States with his family, his friends, but his heart was in Africa with the work that needed to be done. It was comforting to be able to focus on
that and lay his plans. He would be able to hit the ground running when he got back in late August. They should have the first of the four clinics built and equipped by early November, the next one by the end of the year.

He needed to see about getting the equipment for the clinic expedited while he was in the States. A face-to-face meeting would ensure the urgency was understood.

He moved to shift the quilt and felt a familiar hot pain course through his elbow. He frowned, annoyed.

He had stopped asking God to heal him. He understood his Scripture, he understood the power of persistent prayer. He also understood the reality that nothing was going to stop God’s plans from moving forward, not lack of money, not lack of building materials, not lack of government signatures, not lack of physical health for him. God knew what he needed and by when. James had stopped worrying about it. He had seen too many miracles in the last six years as God brought all the right pieces together for him to even worry about this need.