A Mother's Gift (Love Inspired) (3 page)

“Gotta happen sooner or later, sugar lump.”

“Clark.” This from Dixie. “Remember what I told you. Best behavior.”

“Okay, Mommy.” Joel pinpointed the voice. Clark was walking along in front of his mother.

Joel heard people greeting Dixie and her parents. It became clear that Dixie had not been around the church in some time. She’d been part of the youth group when this had last been his regular church home, which meant that they had attended separate services, not that he had been all that faithful. After high school, he’d floundered a bit, halfheartedly attending junior college with no real idea of what he wanted to do with his life before settling on the Marine Corps.

Someone thrust a paper into his hand. A man called Bess by name.

“My son, Joel.” She gave his hand a furtive tap, and he lifted it, felt it grasped, shaken. “Son, this is Emmitt Lively.”

“How do you do?”

“Good to meet you.”

They entered the larger room. Joel felt a moment of uncertainty as he sought to get his bearings. A guitar had joined the piano, but the sound seemed to be coming from different directions. Then he realized that the guitar was miked. Voices, movement and smells swamped him from every side. His mother smoothly steered his progress until they came to a halt. She reached out, making sure that his hand fell upon the end of a pew at the same time hers did. Then she gave him a little nudge on the hip. Another touch showed him the area through which he would need to move. Turning, he edged his way into the pew and kept moving until he sensed another body.

He felt behind him and sat, hearing a little voice say, “Joe?”

“Shh.”

“Joe?”

He leaned forward, bumping shoulders with Sam, who said, “Come here, pal.”

“Make him keep still,” Dixie muttered.

There was a tussle, and a little shoe knocked against Joel’s knee.

“Joe?” Clark said again. Joel smiled in the boy’s direction, against a background of hushing sounds, and then a man’s voice welcomed them to the service. After a few remarks, he asked everyone to stand for the opening hymn. Music swelled, live music from the sound of it, many more instruments than the old organ and piano that he remembered. Joel started to rise and found himself nearly knocked back down by a small body.

“Whoa,” Sam said. Joel chuckled, gathering the boy into his arms once more. Dixie hissed from the other side of her father, but Sam just put his head next to Joel’s and muttered, “Looks like you two are already old buddies.” Joel nodded, smiling, as the congregation began to sing. “What?” Sam said, apparently talking to Dixie. “He’s fine. Kids always go for the new face in the group.”

Clark touched Joel’s mouth then, as if asking why he wasn’t singing. “Not a song I know,” he explained softly.

Next to him, his mother’s smoky alto lifted in praise. It was a beautiful sound to Joel, all those voices and instruments, with his mother’s voice next to him. He pressed a hand between Clark’s delicate shoulder blades and inhaled deeply, every cell aware that he stood in the house of God. A sense of peace, of true homecoming, crept over him, followed by the gentle elation of gratitude.

I am still a man,
he thought, feeling that small body pressed to his,
and God is still God.
No disappointment and no challenge could overcome those two facts.

Dixie maneuvered past her father as the song ended and everyone once more took their seats for announcements. Sam grumbled, but he slid over when she motioned.

Ignoring her, Clark found something interesting about Joel’s ear but then quickly moved on to his jaw, muttering, “Pop-Pop’s jaw picky,” as he patted Joel’s chin.

Joel chuckled, and with a deep breath Dixie fought down a rising sense of irrational indignation. Sam’s jaws were bristly and prickly even when freshly shaved, so it was no wonder that Clark was fascinated by Joel’s smooth face, though given the blue-gray shadow beneath Joel’s skin, Dixie couldn’t imagine that he would stay freshly shaved for long.

Mark’s beard had glistened rusty-brown, she remembered with a shock. How long had it been since she’d even thought of that? She glanced at the altar, a plain, heavy, oblong table of pale wood, and the vacant space before it. She closed her eyes, expecting horrific images of that day. When they did not materialize, guilt and resentment assailed her. She immediately pulled Clark into her lap.

Joel Slade frowned, and Clark looked at her curiously, his slender brows drawn together tightly.

“Be still,” she whispered. He babbled something she couldn’t quite discern. Ignoring it, Dixie fixed her gaze straight ahead, prepared for grief and sadness.

Not thirty seconds later, Clark attempted to crawl over into Joel’s lap again. Caging him with her arms, she kept him with her, but then the congregation was called to the opening prayer. Standing with Clark in her arms, Dixie bowed her head and tried to concentrate on the poetic words of the pastor, but Clark squirmed and soon became heavy. She dipped slightly, intending to stand him on the pew, but the scamp wiggled away, and when she looked up, he was once more in Joel Slade’s arms. This time he played with the Windsor knot in Joel’s blue silk tie.

The combination of sky-blue silk against a slightly paler shirt was stunning with Joel’s blue-black hair and black suit. Dixie wondered if Bess had chosen them for him, and just the fact that she wondered about something so personal irritated and perturbed her.

When they sat down again after the prayer, she pulled Clark back onto her lap and tried to occupy him by taking out an envelope and letting him draw on it with a pen. He kept leaning over to show it to Joel, who had no idea what was going on. Embarrassed, she tried to pass Clark to Sam, but Clark put up a noisy fight, which she had to curtail by giving up and placing a hand lightly over his mouth. That was when Joel Slade reached over and literally commandeered her son.

Dixie’s mouth fell open at his high-handedness, and because he couldn’t see her glower, she closed it with an audible snap. She spent the rest of the entire first half of the service fulminating, especially as Clark sat quietly on Joel’s lap, his back to Joel’s chest. Anytime he became restless, Joel whispered something into his ear, and Clark instantly quieted. Dixie could not control her resentment, telling herself that it wasn’t fair.

That should be Mark,
she thought.
That should be Mark.

When the preaching started, Clark became restive again. She produced the paper and pen as inducement, but once Clark had them, he moved right back onto Joel’s lap. Not content to simply scribble by himself, at one point, Clark offered the pen to Joel, poking him in the chin.

Mortified, Dixie hauled him onto her lap, cupped a hand over his ear and whispered, “Stop it, Clark. Joel can’t see what you’re doing. He can’t see at all.” In an effort to help him understand, she placed her hand over his eyes. “Joel can’t see.”

Joel frowned at Dixie, and none of it meant a thing to Clark, anyway. He shrugged off her hands and slid to the floor, banging up against Joel’s knees. By that time, Joel had produced a small metal object about the size of a credit card. Taking a hardback hymnal from the pew pocket, he placed it on his lap. Then he found the open envelope on the pew next to him and flattened it atop the book, running his fingertips over it until he somehow located a clean spot. He placed the metal card on the paper, and Dixie saw that a small rectangle had been cut out of the center of the card, with tiny notches marking the long edges, top and bottom. A whisper in Clark’s ear got Joel the pen. He then very carefully, using both hands, wrote Clark’s name inside the rectangle.

Clark reclaimed the pen and spent the next twenty minutes leaning against Joel’s knees while he scribbled inside the tiny rectangle, moving it every time he’d filled the spot. The paper was practically black by the time they rose for the closing hymn.

Dixie plucked the pen from Clark’s grasp, but before she could pull him into her arms, Joel had set aside the book and paper and taken him up. Fascinated by the fact that Joel actually sang this time, the hymn apparently being familiar to him, Clark stared into the man’s face. After a moment he reached up and touched Joel’s eye with his finger. Joel flinched, but then he smiled and actually bowed his head for Clark’s exploration.

“They’re there,” Dixie heard him whisper to the boy. “They just don’t work anymore.”

Dixie gulped, pity and embarrassment mingling with her feelings of resentment. She hated that Joel was blind, but she also very much disliked the fact that he had so entranced her son, against her wishes, and that she couldn’t even call him on it! How, after all, did she challenge a blind man? The most she could do was take back her son as soon as the service ended.

“Come on, Clark. We don’t want to burden Mr. Slade. Time to go to Nana’s birthday dinner.”

Joel Slade’s mouth tightened as he released the boy, but he smiled and said, “Yeah, I’m looking forward to that myself.” Even as his mother laid a hand on his forearm, though, he bent his head and spoke softly to Dixie, his breath stirring the hair over her ear. “And you don’t have to worry about burdening me. I’m blind, not weak. Or stupid.”

With that, he yielded to his mother’s silent entreaty and followed her out of the pew, leaving Dixie with her face burning while her son followed him with hungry, worshipful, heartbreaking eyes. She was halfway up the aisle before she realized that she had hardly thought of Mark’s funeral at all.

“L
ook at this,” Sam said, handing a long-stemmed pink rose to each of the women. “In honor of Mother’s Day. Now, this is a classy restaurant.”

Dixie made herself accept the flower. Sam was a man’s man, a little rough and rugged, who wouldn’t know class if it smacked him in the face with those roses, but he loved her mother, her and Clark with every fiber of his being. He could never understand why she’d like to dash that rose to the floor and stomp it, especially as she adored everything about being a mother. Still, she could not forget that, were it not for her, Mark would be here now enjoying this time in their son’s life.

“No, no, Clark.” The sound of her son’s name spoken in Joel Slade’s voice jarred Dixie. She whirled around to find Clark standing with his hands pressed flat against a large fish tank set into the rock wall of the restaurant’s waiting area. Joel crouched beside him, speaking softly. “Tapping on a fish tank isn’t good for the fish.”

“He was just patting it,” Dixie defended, rushing over to take her son by the hand.

Joel pushed up to his full height. Somehow, he seemed more imposing sightless than he might have otherwise. “If I could hear it from across the way,” he said, nodding to the bench where their mothers now sat chatting, “then it must have been deafening to the fish on the other side of that glass.”

Dixie lifted her chin. “I imagine your hearing is more acute than normal. At least, that’s what I understand happens with—” She bit her lip, her flimsy outrage waning in the heat of her embarrassment.

“Blind people,” he finished for her. “You can say it, you know.”

Uncomfortable, Dixie cast a glance at her father’s back. He rocked on his heels in front of Vonnie and Bess in the increasingly crowded waiting area. She edged closer to Joel, Clark’s hand in hers to prevent him from tapping on the fish tank again. She knew that she had overreacted. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“You’re right, by the way,” he interrupted cheerfully. “The loss of one sense does sharpen others. You begin to figure it out as soon as the initial panic is over. You start to realize how much sensory information you blocked out before.”

Dixie smiled, realizing that he had intentionally derailed her apology. “It must have been terribly confusing at first.”

“Yes, disorienting. Right after the explosion, I couldn’t tell where I was, who was with me, what was happening. It was almost sensory overload, but all that seemed to matter was that I couldn’t see. I had to get past that, accept it, before I could learn to decipher what my ears, nose and skin cells were telling me.”

“It was an explosion, then?” Dixie prodded gently.

Joel nodded as casually as if they were discussing the weather. “IED on the side of the road in Iraq. The driver lost his leg, and the others took some shrapnel, but we were blessed not to lose lives.”

“Blessed,” Dixie parroted. “How can you say that?”

Joel shrugged. With his hands clasped behind his back and his legs spread, he looked every inch the Marine. “Soldiers deployed into war are putting their lives on the line every day. You learn to approach each moment as if that is the moment you’ll be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. I could have lost my life that day, as have so many others. Instead, all that was required of me was my eyesight. Doesn’t seem such a terrible thing by comparison.”

Dixie cleared her throat, suddenly moved, and asked in a soft voice, “Didn’t you ever ask, ‘Why me?’” She had. From time to time over the past fourteen months, in one way or another, she had railed at God, demanding to know why her husband had to die. “It’s just so unfair,” she whispered.

“Why not me?” Joel asked. “Might as well be me as anyone else. I look at it this way. If Christ, Who was unfairly crucified, could go to the cross without complaint, how can I stay angry about this?”

“But if Christ had not gone willingly to the cross, He wouldn’t have been the perfect, redemptive sacrifice,” Dixie pointed out.

“If I hadn’t gone willingly into the military, I wouldn’t have been on that road in Iraq. Jesus didn’t regret His sacrifice in the service of humanity. I can’t regret my sacrifice in the service of my country. Not that the two equate in value,” he quickly qualified, “or that I’m happy about losing my sight or that I didn’t have some selfish reasons for joining up.”

“Such as?”

“Pride. Career. College tuition.”

“You have every reason to be proud,” she said. “I’m sorry about your career.”

Joel grinned and lifted a hand to the small of her back just as the hostess appeared. “There’s still that college tuition.”

“Wallace, party of six.”

Dixie bowed her head and clutched her son’s hand, feeling small and selfish for her own lingering anger at Mark’s death. Obviously, God was showing her that she was not the only one to have suffered loss, and that her attitude about it still needed some adjustment.

After following her parents and Bess through the busy restaurant, Dixie took a seat across the table from Joel, with Clark in his booster seat at the end, more or less between them. While Dixie kept Clark busy and glanced over her own menu, Bess quietly read from hers to Joel. Eventually, drinks were brought and choices were made. In the conversation that followed, they touched upon several topics. Then Vonnie asked Joel about his future plans.

Dixie was surprised to learn that he intended to practice law, and that he was far closer to attending law school than she could have imagined. He had been taking classes by computer for eighteen months and was, in fact, still doing so. During the upcoming summer semester at the local university, he would take the LSAT, but thanks to his military service and the efforts of an influential former commanding officer, he was already guaranteed a spot at the law school of his choice, provided his LSAT scores weren’t an embarrassment and he kept his final grades up.

They talked about that until the meal came. They all bowed their heads while Sam spoke a blessing over the food. Dixie added her own quick, silent prayer.

Okay, Lord. I get it. Thank You. I understand now, and it will be different. I’ve been wallowing around in self-pity here for more than a year while others were facing their losses with courage and faith. I guess it took Joel Slade to show me that.

Surely that was the reason for her dreams and their encounters in the park and today. That and only that.

She lifted her head and looked straight into Joel’s sightless eyes. The eerie feeling that he knew what she was thinking crept over her. She shook her head at her own foolishness at the same time as she shook out her napkin.

Clark dined off her plate and the table bread, but he routinely engaged Joel throughout the meal and vice versa. The two made a game of shifting around the saltshaker, and Dixie was amazed by how accurately Joel could track it. Sam had arranged for birthday cake to be served, much to Clark’s delight, and Joel even seemed to relish Clark’s enjoyment of his dessert.

“Man, he really loves chocolate, doesn’t he?”

“Does he ever!” Sam confirmed, using his finger to swipe up the last vestige of chocolate frosting from his own plate. “Can’t imagine where he got that.” Everyone laughed when Sam popped his finger into his mouth.

The waiter soon returned with the check, and Joel instantly began digging out his wallet.

“I insist on paying for Mom’s lunch,” he announced. “My Mother’s Day gift for her. And Dixie’s,” he went on, turning his face in her direction, “because Clark isn’t old enough yet to honor her in that way.”

A hot thrill shot through Dixie, a mixture of longing fulfilled and longing forever denied. The very fact that it had visited both shocked and alarmed her.

“No!” she blurted, bringing every eye at the table to her. How ironic that the sightless eyes were the ones to slice her composure to shreds. “I—I mean…this is Mom’s day.”

“It is,” Joel agreed quietly, leaning forward slightly, “but there are two other mothers at this table.”

To her horror, Dixie felt the burn of tears. Suddenly angry, she pushed back her chair, muttering, “I don’t want to celebrate this day for myself.”

“Dixie,” Vonnie pleaded.

“I can’t!” Dixie exclaimed. “Not when Mark will never celebrate another Father’s Day.” She shot to her feet. “I believe I’ll visit the ladies’ room. Excuse me, please.”

She never noticed the rose that fell from her lap to the floor. Why would she, when she didn’t want it? Then again, she didn’t want to like Joel Slade, either, and she didn’t.

She wouldn’t.

“Joe!”

Joel smiled, shifting on the slatted bench. Finally, his persistence had paid off.

He’d sat in the warm sunshine, enjoying the mild spring weather and listening to a lecture on tape, for what felt like hours. The lecture, in fact, had long since ended, but Joel hadn’t been able to make himself leave. He didn’t know why, really. He had no reason to think that Dixie would welcome another encounter with him.

Dinner had ended awkwardly on Sunday, to say the least. After he’d offered to buy her meal, Dixie had avoided him like the plague, and he had no expectation of things being different now just because a couple days had passed. Yet, he’d come to the park on Monday and Tuesday and again today, lingering longer each time.

Even as he told himself that it was useless to remain, he heard the scruff of gravel and an agitated whisper that made his breath seize. Dixie. He knew it. Would she ignore him? She wouldn’t have dared if he was sighted, but some people considered his blindness permission to simply pretend that he didn’t exist. The sound of running feet had him sitting forward in anticipation.

“Clark?”

“Joe!”

He almost didn’t get his arms out in time to catch the boy, as Clark seemed to launch himself from a dead run. Joel laughed in sheer delight, feeling those little arms slide about his neck.

“Hey, little buddy! How are you?” Shifting the boy to a sitting position on his lap, Joel rubbed Clark’s head, loving the feel of all those springy curls.

“Joe,” Clark burbled, “the tree still on my swing.”

“It is? How did that happen?”

“The storm did it so it come down, and it’s on my swing. Pop-Pop has to fix it.”

“Is that right? Well, I’m sure your Pop-Pop can take care of it.”

“Yeah,” Clark said confidently. “Want to swing?”

Joel grinned. “I’d love to, but I’m not sure these swings are big enough for me.”

Dixie spoke up then. “He can’t swing, Joel, because he can’t see. Remember? You go on and play now. I’ll be over in a minute. Just stay in sight.”

Joel helped Clark get down off his lap. “Later, pal.”

“’Kay, Joe.”

He listened to the boy run off toward the playground, which was quite close by, as Joel had chosen a bench on its perimeter. Tamping down his anger, he raised his face and asked calmly, “How’ve you been?”

She answered him with an abrupt question of her own. “Should you be out here by yourself?”

Joel set his back teeth. So that was how it was going to be. First, he couldn’t swing because he couldn’t see. Now this. “I don’t need a keeper, thank you very much.”

“How did you get here, anyway? Surely your mother didn’t just drop you off.”

“My mother is at her part-time job. I get around on my own, just as you do.”

“But it’s not like you can drive a car.”

“I don’t have to drive. There are excellent aids to help me navigate. I walked here from Mom’s today with nothing more than a folding cane.” He pulled it from his pocket to show it to her. “Which I didn’t have to use, by the way.”

“Why do you come here?” she asked, ignoring his explanation. “Can’t you sit in the sun at home?”

Joel struck a nonchalant pose, one elbow balanced on the edge of the bench back. “I come here several times a week to run,” he told her, “and, yes, sometimes just to sit in the sun and listen to my lectures. Do you have a problem with that, Dixie?”

“To run?” she echoed uncertainly, ignoring everything else.

“Yeah, you know, like those two people on that jogging trail over there.”

A pause followed, during which he suspected she was checking out the jogging trail.

“How do you know there are two runners?”

“I heard two distinct strides when they ran by here a few minutes ago.”

“Hmph. How do I know someone didn’t tell you there were two?”

His jaw dropped. Why, he wondered, was she being so insulting? Maybe she thought it would offend him so badly that he would start avoiding her. Or maybe she just needed to convince herself that he wasn’t a whole man. That smarted. More than it should have.

“Maybe you think I wear this gear by accident?” he snapped sarcastically, waving a hand to indicate his tracksuit and running shoes. “You probably think I can’t even dress myself.”

“Well, if you’re going to be disagreeable…”

“If
I’m
going to be disagreeable?” But he already knew that he was talking to air. He could hear her footsteps carrying her away.

He sat where he was, wounded and angry, for several minutes. Then he got up and left the park. He felt the pavement of the sidewalk beneath his feet before he remembered to count his steps. Fortunately, he was familiar enough with the area by now that it was just a matter of locating the curb with his cane and turning in the right direction for home. Dealing with Dixie after this was going to take a good deal more thought, but deal he would. And so would she.

For the second time in Dixie’s memory, prayer did not diminish her guilt. Sadly, nothing could change the fact that she was responsible for her husband’s death, but she had expected to feel a little better, at least, about how she’d dealt with Joel Slade in the park. Unfortunately, such was not the case. Prayer only seemed to deepen her regret.

Driving toward her parents’ place that Friday, Dixie admitted to herself that she still didn’t know why she’d treated Joel as if he were a delusional invalid that day. She was not by nature a cruel person; yet, she had intentionally attacked Joel’s pride. She’d seen him sitting there, looking whole and handsome and entirely capable, and she’d panicked. That was the only way she could describe what she’d felt: panic.