Everything’s Coming Up Josey (2 page)

“Of course,” I say and glare at him. Slacker. We have a fort to build.

But now, nearly fifteen years later, I realize he's returned to ask me to dance. To twirl me around the floor in front of my sister and her husband, saying, Thank you, Bozo, for not realizing what you had and saving her for
me.
Then he'll sweep me in his arms and kiss me and…time to cash in the promises.

Wait! This is Chase. My last resort. Didn't I use those very words two days before graduation under a starlit sky? My friend. My tormentor. My neighbor. The guy who bailed me out of the clink the night I got arrested for skinny-dipping and didn't laugh.

The last line of defense before I'm a lone gal out in the world of singleness.

Kissing Chase would be like kissing the cousin you always had a crush on—daring but just way too creepy. He knows too much. Besides, ever since I got serious with God, there's been a gulf between Chase and me. The more I try and share God's grace with him, and the richness of life with a Savior watching my back and setting my course, Chase pulls away and turns me off.

It makes me ache, and pushes me to prayer. Most of all, it puts a stop sign between us. Not only emotionally but spiritually. I groan to think of Chase not with me in heaven. The thought burns a hole in the center of my chest, and if I could have one thing, it wouldn't be Chase's embrace around me. It would be his embrace around Christ.

I smile anyway, touched that Chase is still “Chase-Me,” my next-door-neighbor hero.

Then, as I'm grinning at our past, our friendship, his smile fades and he glances away at…a girl. She's glaring at us with a possessive look that comes straight from the Isle of Amazon. And, in her strapless dress and buff arms, well, she just might be able to take me.

Especially with me stuffed inside the poppy affair, barely able to take a full breath. I sit back in my chair, and something inside my heart has snapped. Of course, Chase and Buffy the Amazon Queen, the perfect match. Why would I ever think that Mr. Anthropology, I-Travel-The-World, might return home for me?

Shyster. We had a deal.

Then he opens his mouth, and if this day could get worse, he shatters every last Cinderella dream in the ashes of my dustbin existence.

“C'mere, Josey. I have a surprise for you. I'd like you to meet my fiancée, Elizabeth.”

Did anyone else hear that howl?

 

I blame my sneaking out halfway through the reception, right after the maid of honor speech, completely on my renegade high-school pal H. She is on hand to share the weddings joys because she's in town helping her now-widowed mother downsize the family home. I fall back into blaming H without blinking. After all, I spent three years of my high-school life perfecting that move.

H epitomizes the wild thread in me that just couldn't rip free from the conservative churchgoer I was raised to be. She dropped her full name, Hyacinth, which her former hippie mother shortened to Heidi, then Cinthia, then Cindy, before H took control in ninth grade. She took a letter for her name—like Prince—and became her own icon. She was my alternative mind, the part of me that delved into the deeper meanings of life that only high-schoolers and art students have the ability to do, at least while sober.

After high school, H hitchhiked off on the road less traveled. While I attended the University of Minnesota and earned a perfectly respectable English degree, she went into art—as in body art. She has multiple piercings and a tattoo—a cross with barbed wire around it. I asked her what it meant once, and she said she didn't know. But we conjured up some interesting scenarios, and I was hoping that it might lead to one of those evangelism moments our pastor keeps nudging us toward. It's not that I don't want to share my faith with her. It's just…well, you know how people get when you mention Jesus in your life. They stare at you and something turns dry and sluggish in the conversation and you're wondering who turned on the carbon monoxide. I wonder, sometimes, if I have the courage it takes to share what I believe without flinching.

Still, my faith, and especially an excursion through the Bible, has been the only thing keeping me sane lately, let alone a smile on my face. I really dug the “heaping burning coals on their head” verses. Especially when Jasmine showed me a sample of the maid of honor dress she'd purchased. Burning coals. Burning coals. Smile. Smile. But, I have to admit, all this time on my knees, begging for Jasmine and Milton to elope has done wonders for my relationship with God.

I've needed Him more than ever.

In fact, I've wondered, without letting the concept tunnel too deep lest it carve me out from the inside, if it was supposed to happen this way.

Ouch. See?

Nevertheless, losing the love of my life led me to a relationship that feels somehow cleaner. Richer.

Did I say love of my life? Maybe that was overstated.

The Calgon feeling stirred up by time in the Word vanished at the altar, however, watching the bride and groom coo into each other's eyes.

I resorted to plan B. Escape with H.

She says this while leaning back in her jeep, her boots on the dash, my bare feet hanging out the window. We're parked on the Bloomquist overlook just up county road 58. She's smoking and I'm trying not to inhale. Usually cigarette smoke makes my head spin, a reaction that probably saved my lungs during my impressionable high school years. But if I got upset every time she pulled out a pack, what kind of Jesus example would I be? Certainly Jesus experienced a few unsavory moments while He hung around all those tax collectors and prostitutes, right? Besides, the top is off the jeep and all I smell is pine, larkspur and a fresh breeze off the lake. Thank You, God, for small favors.

Well, okay, and I
should
get some credit for doing the right thing. Doesn't the fact that I have saved myself for twenty-four years, waiting for the right man, kept my body pure of drugs and haven't done anything more wild than skinny-dip in Gull Lake on the Fourth of July count for anything in God's tally book? I'm thinking yes.

Is there an echo in the air?

H shakes her head and of course I know who. Honey-toned Buffy. The Amazon.

Okay, I flinch. Inside, I don't really want a world without Chase. Perhaps that's the problem. Perhaps I set myself up for disaster, somehow, unconsciously knowing that Milton and Jasmine would find true love, thus leaving me free for Chase. Good try, Josey.

She quirks an eyebrow and all three hoops jump.

She looks at me, and for some reason her black-rimmed eyes hold a hint of anger.

Okay, it freaks me out more than slightly that a woman I haven't seen for nearly six years can peg me in less than thirty minutes.

That was way too vulnerable. I know, because H looks at me, suddenly silent, blinking. I shrug, feeling painfully close to tears.

I attempt a smile intended to disguise the fact that I feel like I'm sitting here in my underwear.

But my words fall into the breeze and I realize how much she knows me, knows my greatest fears. Maybe there is more of my mother in me than I want to concede. Maybe, deep inside, I returned to Gull Lake toting Milton like a souvenir because I was actually terrified of reaching for something brighter and falling flat on my derriere. Maybe I didn't want Milton after all, but wanted failure even less.

I do want the gold ring. The happily ever after. The eternal purpose. I want to be that girl who takes her faith and her Christian calling seriously. And, while I might have zippo idea as to how a gal might do this, I do know that it isn't within my reach from Gull Lake, Minnesota.

I glance at H. Her blond hair is in spikes, dyed black at the tips. The moonlight glints off her nose ring. It seems as if H has always been searching for something, trying to find it in her appearance choices. But then, a gal can be dressed in Lands' End and crunchy-granola Birks and still wonder at the meaning of life. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on H, especially since I'm sitting here in poppy flounce, pretty sure I have “pathetically lost” written all over me. I might have found the eternal answer, but I still have earthly questions.

I say this while little voices explode in my head like cluster bombs. What if I follow my gut and discover that on the other side of sanity isn't freedom or purpose but even more chaos? What if breaking loose simply…breaks me?

Yes, that was another phase. But no, I'm not going to run off to Vail. Hopefully I've matured since then. Although, her words stir old longings…hot tubs, muscles, après-ski mochas…

 

I make it home well after midnight, creep into the house/ office and up to my bedroom. Which, until tonight, I shared with Jasmine.

That feels weird. Aside from the fact that she married my former boyfriend, we capped off each night with low murmured gossip and verbal spars. She alone knows that I have a half-done tattoo just above my right hip, a product of my wild, pre-Christian college days, waning courage and not enough vodka. Tonight, I would have enjoyed Jas's company if only to squeal on Chase. Jas is good, real good, at indignation.

And, no, I didn't burn the dress. Which gives credence to H's accusation that I'm afraid to live outside the lines. Or maybe it was due to the shiver conjured up by the thought of driving home in her jeep, top down (in more ways than one) and sneaking past a houseful of relatives. My wild move is sneaking up the stairs without saying hello, leaving the dress in a heap and crawling into bed in my underwear. I still feel slightly rebellious. As the night sounds fill the room, and the moonlight reaches out to me, H's words ping in my heart.