High Plains Hearts (28 page)

“It’s a paper you need to build houses,” she explained. “And since you don’t have one, you’ll just have to stay with me until school starts this fall. I’m sorry, son, but working is out.”

He shook his head as if to say “Grown-ups!” and bent over his pizza again.

It seemed so natural, the three of them sitting there together. It was as if they’d always been together.

Lily thought more about it on the ride back to Wildwood in the evening twilight.

She’d occasionally worried about whether Todd missed having a father around. He’d never mentioned it, and it was true that with people she knew through work and church, he’d known many men who’d treasured him and treated him well.

But none of them, she reasoned, had the commitment that being a father would bring to the relationship. Did Todd miss it?

She wondered if there was a way to explore his mind a bit more and see if he was happy without a father. Although, she had to admit, there wasn’t a lot she could do about it.

It wasn’t like daddies—and husbands—grew on trees.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Ric said as he pulled his car into the parking lot behind the church. Summer evenings stayed light long, and sunlight still washed across the trees.

She didn’t dare tell him. Instead she said, “A penny? That’s all?”

He chuckled. “Well, it is the going rate.”

“I’ll take the penny,” Todd chimed in from the backseat, and they laughed.

“I’d better get this guy into a tub,” Lily said. “Thanks, Ric. We had a great time.”

Half an hour later, his bath taken, his pajamas on, they went into his new bedroom.

“Wow! Look at this!” Lily pulled down the cover on Todd’s bed. “Race-car sheets!”

“Cool!” Todd jumped onto the bed and bounced experimentally. “I like this bed. I wonder who picked out the sheets. Ric, probably.”

“Probably,” she agreed. “Do you want me to listen to your prayers?”

“Nah,” Todd answered. “I’m into saying them in my head now.”

She ducked her head to hide her smile. “That’s fine. Now go to sleep and have sweet dreams about all your new friends here in Wildwood.”

She’d just turned off the light when he spoke again. “Mom?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Do you like Ric?”

She stopped, her hand frozen on the light switch. “Yes, Todd. I think he’s very nice.”

“Nice enough to kiss him?”

Her hand jerked, and the light came back on. “What on earth—?”

He grinned at her. “Just checking. I know you wouldn’t kiss him. And he wouldn’t kiss you either. No matter what.”

Her heart flipped. “Why do you say that, Todd?”

His answer was short and to the point: “Cooties.”

S
he managed a brief laugh and said something meaningless that apparently satisfied her son because he settled into a quick sleep.

Kissing Ric? What on earth would he come up with next?

She couldn’t make herself settle down. Too much had happened in such a short time, and through it all ran the image of Ric kissing her.

It was silly. She barely knew him.

But you were willing to totally change your life because of him
, a little part of her mind pointed out, and she had to acknowledge that it was true. There was something about him that made her trust him—but that wasn’t the same as wanting to kiss him.

The mobile home was comfortable, but the days at Shiloh had spoiled her. She hadn’t realized before how much she missed the feel of fresh air on her skin. Now she was almost addicted to it.

Marnie had left a pair of canvas-backed chairs and a small table on the patch of dirt and scrubby grass by the door to the mobile home, and Lily transferred herself out there.

A breeze whispered through the deep green leaves of the elms that arched overhead. Lily had never heard anything as beautiful as that soughing sound. It was a balm on her heart, a heart that was beginning to come back to life once again.

This was the cool of the evening. The early summer warmth of the afternoon had given way to the soft comfort of a gentle zephyr that lifted her hair from her neck and invited her to relax. It was her favorite time of day.

“Mind if I join you?” Ric materialized from the gathering darkness.

“No, not at all. I’d welcome the company.” She motioned toward the twin of the chair she occupied. “Working late tonight?”

He ran his hand through his hair. “Tonight and every night, to be honest. I don’t know how being gone for one week to Shiloh can put me back three weeks here. That just doesn’t fit into the time-space continuum I’ve always known and trusted.”

The trees cast moving shadows across Ric’s face, drawing her attention to the dark hollows under his eyes. He was clearly exhausted.

“It is one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, I agree,” she said lightly.

Ric smiled. “I may be stepping into dangerous waters here, but how do you like Wildwood so far? At least as much as you’ve seen of it?”

“I haven’t seen much,” she acknowledged. “Just basically the church, my new home here, and Pizza Wonderama, but I’m enjoying all three of them.” A thought occurred to her that made her chuckle, and she shared it with Ric. “Of course, for Todd that pretty well covers his basic needs. Church, home, and pizza.”

“He’s a neat kid,” Ric said.

They settled into a companionable silence, listening to the leaves rustle overhead, the far-off sound of children’s voices raised in late play, the faint sounds of someone’s radio.

“I like Wildwood,” Ric said at last. “It’s the kind of place a guy can settle into, buy a house, raise a family. There’s not much crime here either.”

“I wonder why there seems to be so much crime in big cities and not much in small towns,” she mused. “Do you suppose it’s just a matter of population? That per capita, it’s the same?”

“I don’t know. Could be. People are people wherever you go, that’s for sure. I suppose your chance of meeting a bad apple is just greater in a bigger barrel.”

Well
, Lily thought,
if there’s a bad apple in
this
barrel, I’ll manage to come across him
. Although her logical side reminded her that simply because she’d had the miserable luck to become involved with an apple that was rotten to the core in Chicago didn’t mean she was a bad-apple magnet. It was an unfortunate set of circumstances, that was all.

But she summed it all up in a single noncommittal word: “Maybe.”

“Are you planning to go back to Chicago eventually?” Ric asked.

“No!” The word shot out with more vehemence than she intended. “I mean, I doubt it. For a while, anyway. Todd and I are enjoying not living in the rat race.”

He seemed to accept her unresponsive answer. She decided to snoop a bit into his life. “So tell me, are you from Wildwood? I get the feeling this isn’t your original home.”

“It isn’t. I came to Wildwood about a year and a half ago.”

“Really? Where were you before that?” Maybe she was a snoop at heart, but Lily loved to hear people’s life stories. And her instincts told her this would be a very interesting story.

“Central America,” he said. “And—”

The cellular phone attached to his belt buzzed into action, and after a short conversation with the caller, Ric clipped it back into place and turned to her apologetically. “That was a call from the hospital. Since Pastor Mike’s not here, I’d better go.”

“Not bad news, I hope.” She slid to the edge of her chair.

“No, not at all.” He smiled. “Joy and Linus Alfson have just given birth to two healthy baby boys. I call that very good news indeed.”

He stood up and stretched. “It’s a beautiful evening. Look! A firefly!”

It was all she could do not to clap her hands in wonder. She hadn’t seen a firefly since she was a child.

Ric paused and watched it flit around in the advancing darkness under the shelter of the trees, its light blinking off and on. “You know,” he said at last, “when I was a child, I believed that fireflies were angels.”

Lily laughed. “I can understand that. They’re so incredible that having them be angels is the only good explanation.”

“I’d also wonder what they were doing. After all, an angel is supposed to have a message, I thought, and it occurred to me one evening that if I could just discover what they were up to, I’d have it all figured out. Break their code and all that.”

“Did it work?” She couldn’t resist asking him the question.

“Only partially.”

“Really? Partially? What did you learn?”

“That fireflies talk to fireflies and not to Ric Jensen. It was a massive letdown at the time, but I lived through it.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t become a scientist,” Lily commented.

“I did in a way, I guess. Only now I look at the universe and marvel at it openly.” He flashed a grin at her. “Don’t get me started on snowflakes, or I’ll talk your ears clean off your body.”

“I’ll remember that when winter comes.”

“Speaking of snow, Wildwood in winter is beautiful. I hope you’ll still be here then,” he said, sounding almost bashful.

“We’ll see when winter comes,” she said, but she had to admit that if there were a place for her to put down roots and build a future for Todd, this was probably as close to the perfect spot as anything she’d ever find. She’d only been in Wildwood a day and already it was home.

“Come winter, you’ll have plenty of snow,” he said. “But I’d better not say any more for fear of scaring you away.”

“I’m from North Dakota, you know,” she answered. “I grew up in Mandan, and my mother still lives there.”

“Mandan, huh? Right next to Bismarck.”

“They’re both wonderful places. And both quite snowy in the winter.”

“That’s true. Well, I need to visit the Alfson twins. There’s nothing like holding a baby to make a day end well. Two babies, actually. The only bad part is, I have to give them back.”

“You don’t have children, I gather.” She pulled a blade of grass from the ground at her feet and twisted it into a knot.

“No, I don’t. No wife, no children. Not even a goldfish. Someday the Lord will lead me to them, but I suspect He might start with the goldfish.”

He left, but Lily made no motion to go inside. It was so pleasant to sit out here and let the breeze play across her face.

She shut her eyes and thought about what lay ahead of her. What she’d seen in the files was enough to galvanize her into action.

Day care seemed to be at the basis of so many lives, especially now. People couldn’t work if they couldn’t leave their children in reliable hands, and without work there was no income.

Where would she start? Where
could
she start?

Lord, I need Your help again. Please guide me through these uncharted waters
.

She didn’t want to let these wounded people down. They were relying on her, and she had to see it through to the end.

Her prayer came to an end. She couldn’t put words around the idea. But He would know, wouldn’t He, what was in her heart?

She opened her eyes, and as she stood to go into the mobile home and try to get some sleep, she looked down.

There, on her dress over her heart, was a firefly twinkling out a message.

Maybe she wasn’t a scientist, but she knew what the message was.

Prayer heard
.

Lily watched the firefly as it paused a moment longer before taking flight. As it flew higher and higher into the trees, she smiled.

God was probably glad that she was trying to help His friends. Todd was right about that.

Her soul felt much lighter as she got ready for bed, and in those moments before sleep overtakes wakefulness entirely, one last thought floated through, uncensored.

What would it take to convince Ric that she didn’t have cooties?

Ric leaned against the elevator as it took him from the maternity floor to the lobby. He was tired beyond belief—but the babies were beautiful, and the parents were glowing with happiness.

There was something about babies that sang of possibility and hope. It was the promise of the future, the golden cord that pulled them through each day into the next.

One day he’d be guiding these two children through confirmation classes, taking them on mission trips, and praying them through the first tentative steps of adolescence.

His heart spoke to him, delivering a message he’d been suppressing for months—no, for years. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but in this moment of exhaustion, the unspoken words poured through, undeniable, unstoppable.

He wanted a child. He wanted to be a father.

But first things came first. That was the way it was. The first thing was to find a woman, fall in love, and get married. Or was that three things? His mind was so blurred that he couldn’t make sense of it.

It had begun with the last mission trip he’d taken before coming to Wildwood. A Central American orphanage, where poverty, hunger, and need were reflected in the luminous eyes of the children, had etched itself firmly into his heart.

He’d committed himself to not letting those faces leave his soul.

One day, he’d promised himself, he would give one of those children a home where
want
wasn’t on the menu every day. One day … one day.