High Plains Hearts (36 page)

Lily leaned forward. “Please, Victoria, don’t do this to yourself. I don’t know what happened in the past, and I probably wouldn’t care anyway. What’s done is done. I know people say that all the time, but I really mean it. I don’t hold the past against the present.”

“You really don’t know?” Victoria seemed unable to keep the astonishment from her voice.

“No, I don’t. Does it have anything to do with your son and his need for day care?”

Victoria shook her head. “No.”

“Then I don’t care.”

The other woman paused, as if weighing Lily’s response. “I think I should tell you anyway. It’s all tied together.”

“You need to tell me only if you want to, and only if it’s applicable to getting your son in day care,” Lily reminded her.

“Okay.”

Victoria put her head in her hands for a moment and then began. “I grew up very poor. And I do mean ‘poor.’ I lived with eight brothers in a house that was made of bits and pieces of other houses basically nailed together. I was the only girl.”

She stopped, and Lily waited as the blond woman took a breath. “Sorry,” Victoria said. “I have such bitterness over it all. I keep trying to ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen, but it did, and to be honest, that’s what really hurts.”

“Do you want to stop?” Lily asked gently. “You don’t have to continue.”

“No. I want to tell it all. Maybe bringing it out into the open will make it cleaner, make it go away.”

Lily’s heart swelled with worry. She not only had more than enough on her own plate, but now she was about to hear something that had obviously prevented this woman from living fully.

Lord, help me as she needs me
. It was the only prayer she had time for.

“I suppose lots of kids wear hand-me-downs,” Victoria went on, “but I had to wear them from my brothers. Mom tried to make them a little more feminine, but let’s face it—overalls are overalls. And patches are patches. It’s not chic when it’s from necessity.”

Lily nodded. “I understand.”

“So as soon as I could, I got out of there and didn’t look back. I got married and got out of that, too, with a nice big settlement and Edgar. I feel the same way about him that you do about Todd.”

“Of course,” Lily murmured.

“I started Wedding Belles before I got divorced, though, and it took off. I was making money hand over fist, and I loved it. I wore nice clothes. I lived in a big house. I drove a big car. Life was good, really good, I thought. And then my husband and I split up.”

Victoria stood up and walked around the room, her hands busy on Lily’s display of photographs. “Sorry, I’m a bit nervous,” she apologized as she sat down again. “Anyway, I liked having all this money. And I especially liked having people know that I had money. So when the time came to expand the church, I volunteered to pay for it. All of it. Crazy, huh? Pastor Mike tried to talk me out of it, but I wanted to be the great woman, the current-day saint who saved Resurrection.”

Lily felt as if she were being held back in her chair by centrifugal force. This was an amazing story.

“And it was about that time that the money from the divorce settlement came to an end, and there I was, left with only what I had from the store. I thought there wouldn’t be a problem—it had always done well—but sales dropped off. Business slowed to a crawl.”

Victoria lifted a now tear-streaked face to Lily. “I’m broke. Totally broke.”

“And the addition to the church?” Lily prompted gently, fearing the answer.

“I couldn’t pay. But the worst part is that I couldn’t say why. My stupid pride wouldn’t let me. The same way it wouldn’t let me fill out those papers. Lily, if you saw how much I made now, you’d be horrified.”

“So the people in church don’t know
why
you wouldn’t pay for the addition?”

“No. They think I wouldn’t do it because it wasn’t done to my satisfaction or because it wasn’t named after me, depending on who you talk to, but the upshot of it all is that I never told anybody the real reason. I couldn’t bear to.”

Her pain washed across the room like a wave, so strong it was nearly tangible. Lily got up and crossed the room. She sat beside Victoria on the couch and put her arm around her. “That little girl in the hand-me-downs still hurts, doesn’t she?”

Victoria nodded, the tears returning again.

“Let’s pray for her,” Lily said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Dearest Lord, we need Your help. Take the pain of the past away from Victoria and hold her in Your hands and open her eyes to a future that is bright because it is made by You. Guard her, Lord, from self-doubt, from fear, and from uncertainty. We know You can do it, and we trust in Your power. We ask it in the name of Your Son, the ultimate gift of Love. Amen.”

And, as she prayed for Victoria, Lily knew she prayed for herself.

“I feel better already,” Victoria said at last. “It’s like a weight has been lifted from my chest. I can breathe.”

Lily patted her hand. “That’s good. You shouldn’t carry this burden around with you. It’s not good for your heart and your soul, and above all, it’s not good for Edgar.”

Victoria looked at her watch and gasped. “I’d better get home. He’s with a sitter, and I know he’s already asleep, but I’ve got to kiss him good night anyway. Thanks again, Lily. You are so kind and forgiving. How can I ever thank you?”

“I didn’t have anything to forgive,” Lily demurred. “But I do think you’ll feel better if you clear the situation with the church.”

“They’ll hate me!” Victoria said, and Lily could hear the panic in her voice.

“It’s got to be an improvement over the way it is now,” Lily pointed out. “How do you want to do it? Do you want to talk to Ric, or do you want me to?”

“It’d be easier if you did it,” Victoria answered. “But I think I should do it. I’ll come in tomorrow morning and get this whole thing straightened out.”

“And we’ll see about getting Edgar settled in, too,” Lily promised.

Victoria looked at her in amazement. “I thought it was full!”

“Well,” Lily said, “we can get him in for at least two weeks. He can take Todd’s place. Todd’s visiting his grandmother and won’t be back for a couple of weeks, so Edgar can use his slot.”

“Two weeks?” Victoria wondered. “How are you going to bear it?”

A wave of loneliness washed over Lily. She knew it was just the first of many. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I really don’t know.”

As she closed the door behind Victoria, Lily glanced at the church. A light glimmered from a window. Ric was at work.

Ric. Along with so much else, she put him at the back of her mind, too.

There was no time for love when you were fighting for your life.

T
he initial chords of the processional were beginning, but Ric was on his knees, not in front of the altar but in front of a sink, a wrench in his hands.

The faucet in the men’s bathroom had been dripping, and his fumbling attempt to fix it had resulted in a cascade that had soaked the floor—and him. Luckily he’d been able to crawl under the sink, and after wrestling with a recalcitrant valve, he’d managed to get the water turned off.

He backed out from under the sink and wiped his forehead, then he groaned as he stood up and surveyed the damage. Not only was there water all over the floor, but there was water all over him.

The water on the floor was easily remedied—there was a mop in the janitor’s closet just outside the door—but how was he going to deal with the soggy trousers?

He mopped up the floor and swabbed his pants as dry as possible with handfuls of brown paper towels that seemed to do nothing except add a thin layer of tan lint to the wet cloth. He glanced down at his trousers and shook his head. Now he not only was waterlogged—he also looked as if he were covered in dust.

In other words, he was a mess.

If only he had time to put his clothes in the dryer that was part of the day care! He chuckled as he thought of what the members of the congregation would think to see their youth minister running through the hall pantsless.

Too bad he didn’t have a pastoral robe like some ministers did. It would cover this quite nicely.

There was nothing to do but go into the church, wet trousers and all. He was lucky it was August, when the heat would dry the material quickly.

The service was well underway. The congregation was standing for a hymn, and no one noticed the condition of his slacks.

He saw Lily at the end of a pew on the side, and he tapped her on the shoulder. She moved down to let him in beside her.

She looked at him inquiringly. “Everything okay?” she asked under the cover of the anthem.

“Plumbing problem,” he whispered. “It’s all fixed now.”

“Good,” she mouthed back to him.

The song ended, and they sat, so close that her perfume drifted over to him. She was wearing a dress the color of red roses, and the sun through the stained glass made dancing designs on the fabric.

This was God’s hour, though, not Lily’s, and he needed to focus on worshiping the Lord. He spread his hands over the wettest parts of his attire and turned his wandering attention to the front of the church where Pastor Mike was beginning his sermon.

“Why do bad things happen to good people? We often ask ourselves this question, and I wish I had an answer to give a grieving mother or to share with patients who have just heard the word ‘malignant,’ but I often find myself stammering and trying vainly to find the words of comfort.

“It often seems as if it’s personal, as if God has some kind of vendetta. It often seems as if that’s the only possible answer. And that’s why I’ve called today’s sermon, ‘Why Me, God?’ ”

Ric sneaked a look at Lily, but her gaze was steadfastly on the minister.

He had told Pastor Mike what was going on with the day care and Lily. Although his own family problems had called him away during the week, he was still the head of this church and had the right to know what was going on.

Of course, the sermon could be about the senior minister’s own situation, having to deal with a flooded community and the life-threatening illness of his elderly mother in a town five hours away.

The topic could be about any of them, Ric realized, looking around the sanctuary. The man in the third row was battling depression. The couple behind him was struggling through a rocky patch in their marriage. The teenagers clustered together on the side had talked to him about their own difficulties with peer pressure. The older woman in the back of the room had near-constant headaches, and the young man across from her had confided in Ric that his brother had been charged with theft in Arizona.

Truly, the sermon’s topic touched them all.

He turned his attention back to the words Pastor Mike was delivering.

“—and so we ask for His understanding as we question whether we have been forsaken, and we find comfort and heart’s ease as we realize that we are never alone. We are always with the One who watched His Son die, and we know that He, truly, is the One who understands. Amen.”

Well, that was swell. He had managed to miss the entire sermon, but he had heard enough to give him something to think about through the day.

At least his pants were dry. That was one thing to be thankful for as he and Lily stood at the benediction.

“Lily—,” he began, but a touch on his arm interrupted him.

“Sorry to break in to your conversation here,” Marnie said, “but apparently there’s no water in the men’s room. Do you think you could take a look?”

He laughed ruefully. “I already did. That’s why there’s no water there now.”

“It sounds like you’re needed elsewhere,” Lily said with a smile.

“That’s the life of the youth minister,” he said. “Always being called to the restroom!”

Lily went to the narthex where the coffee line was set up. It was her turn to serve.

Pastor Mike approached her in the line, and she began in a voice barely above a whisper, “I think you and I should visit. I need to tell you—”

The gentle minister held up his hand. “Is it about your problem with the organization in Chicago?”

Fear washed over her. “Yes.”

“Ric has already filled me in. He tells me that he believes you and so does Marnie. So, until I learn otherwise, so do I.”

“But you barely know me!” she protested.

“I know Ric, and I know Marnie. And”—he lowered his voice—“I have also talked to someone this morning who has told me that you provided her with some very wise counsel last night, and to my way of thinking, anyone who resolved that long-standing issue is blessed by the Lord indeed. Thank you.”

Before she had the chance to recover from her astonishment, he left. She saw him greet a few other congregants and then slip into his coat and leave.

What a burden he must be bearing
, she thought. The pressures of his own family illnesses combined with the needs of a disaster-stricken church would be overwhelming for most people, but he seemed to be bearing up well under the strain. That must have been the source of his sermon.

A movement to her side caught her attention, and she saw Marnie hug Victoria. Over her shoulder, Victoria caught Lily’s eye and gave her the thumbs-up signal.