Leaves of Hope (15 page)

Jan tried to get through her front door without Jim following, but no such luck. He was right on her heels, asking if she still had any of that blueberry cobbler she’d served him the other day. She did, and she considered fibbing. But lately, ever since Beth went away and the old Bible came out from its cardboard box, Jan had been feeling the prick of conscience. You could hardly tell a lie when you’d just read about God giving Moses the Ten Commandments.

“Mmm-mmm, fresh blueberries,” Jim mused aloud, shaking his head as he toddled after her toward the kitchen. “Frozen blueberries. I can take ’em or leave ’em. But those fresh ones just can’t be beat.”

Jan had no choice but to feed the man. How could she refuse? Earlier that evening, he had picked her up in his nice clean car and driven them down countless curving, dark roads to the home of a member of their Sunday school class. She would never have found her way to the fellowship dinner if Jim hadn’t offered to take her.

“I’ll give you the recipe,” she told him. Kicking off her shoes, she stepped to the refrigerator in her stocking feet. “It’s not hard to make at all. You start with biscuit mix.”

“Not me.” He held up a beefy hand. “I can barely boil an egg. I am getting better at cooking as time passes, I’ll grant you that. But cobbler? No, I’d prefer just to drop in here and mooch a slice of yours every now and then.”

“We did have dessert at the social, Jim,” she reminded him. “I think you ate three of those peanut-butter cookies and a piece of pie.”

“Chocolate silk pie. Now, that was good.” He cocked his head at her. “Say, were you watching me? Trying to keep me honest?”

“Well, you’ve got diabetes, Jim, and you need to take off a few pounds. Those aren’t my words, they’re yours. So, I’m just telling you what you already know.”

“All right, all right.”

“But here. Take this cobbler and don’t tell the doctor who gave it to you.”

He laughed as he settled onto a chair at her kitchen dinette. Jan cut herself a small square of the dessert and sat down across from him. As much as Jim Blevins could annoy her, she had to admit this evening had been fun. She’d been trying to read the directions with a flashlight while they negotiated the narrow, winding lanes and tried not to hit another car, a deer, a possum, an armadillo, or anything else that might think it had a right to the road. By the time they finally arrived at their host’s house, they were both giggling.

People probably suspected something was going on between them, Jan surmised, but they were wrong. It just felt good to be silly occasionally. To have companionship. To share an enjoyable event with another person.

“You know, you’re a killer at that trivia game,” Jim observed. “I never met anyone who knew where Borneo was.”

“Oh, it’s just useless information. I remember some things, and other facts go straight out of my head. A few weeks ago, my daughter called me from Nairobi, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where she was.”

“Well, where was she?”

“In Africa. Nairobi is the capital of Kenya. It’s over on the east coast.”

“Why would anybody ever want to go to Africa, is what I’d like to know.”

“That’s exactly what I thought. But Beth was helping an American family to move there. She’d found them a house and a school and all that. Beth said she loved Botswana so much, she’d move there herself in a heartbeat.”

“Botswana?”

“It’s another country in Africa. Farther south and toward the middle.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough money to live in Africa. And it’s not what you might think. I don’t care whether people are black, white, yellow or purple polka dots. But all those wild animals? Snakes? Do you know they’ve got the fastest snake in the world in Africa? I saw a TV show about it. The mamba—mean, aggressive thing. No, just give me good ol’ Texas. I’d take on a rattler before a mamba any day. At least with a rattler, you’ve got some warning before it strikes.”

Jan carved a bite of cobbler with her spoon. She had always said she would never leave Texas, and that still made sense. But she wasn’t so sure a rattlesnake was any kinder than a mamba. If Beth liked Botswana so well, maybe Jan would, too. Not that she would ever consider leaving the United States. Not in this day and age. But still. It was something to think about.

“Have you ever heard of Darjeeling?” she asked Jim suddenly.

“I’ve got a box of it up in my kitchen cupboard with the Earl Grey and the chamomile. Never drink the stuff, but my wife used to love it, and I haven’t gotten around to throwing it out. She told me Darjeeling was flowery tasting, and I said, who wants to drink flower-flavored tea anyhow?”

“I’m not talking about the tea, Jim. Darjeeling is a place. It’s in India.”

“Is Beth going to India now? Pretty soon they’ll have her flying off to Timbuktu.”

“Timbuktu is a real city, you know. It’s in Mali, which is in West Africa.”

“No kidding? Timbuktu is real?” Jim wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Did your daughter tell you that, too?”

“It’s just one of those things I know. Like Borneo.”

“Well, Timbuktu, Borneo and Darjeeling can carry on without me. My wife and I went to Canada one time. That was foreign enough for me, and we weren’t even in the French part. We drove to Saskatchewan. It’s all a big prairie up there, as far as you can see. You’d think it wouldn’t be so different from Texas, them speaking English and all. But it was. They have strange customs, and food and things like that. You’re supposed to take your shoes off when you go into a house. The people eat an odd kind of dumplings. But at night…that’s when you can see the Northern Lights. Strangest, most beautiful thing in the world. Colored lights just coming and going, streaking across the sky in waves, flashing in and out like nothing you ever saw. You ought to go up there sometime. You’d like it.”

Jan set down her spoon and studied the man across the table from her. They were just alike, weren’t they? Beth had noticed it first, and now even Jan could see it. Each had lost a spouse. Each had children they loved who rarely came to visit. Each had chosen Lake Palestine for retirement at the end of their lives. Only Jan wasn’t anywhere close to the end of her life. At least, she didn’t think so.

“If you liked things about Canada,” she said, “what makes you think you wouldn’t like Botswana?”

“I told you. Mambas.”

“Isn’t there anything dangerous in Canada? Grizzly bears, maybe?”

“I reckon there’s something dangerous no matter where you go.”

“Then maybe you’d like Botswana.”

He focused on her, his eyes narrowing. “Are you thinking of going to Africa?”

For a moment, Jan hesitated. And that slight pause scared her silly. Of course she wasn’t thinking about going to Africa. But why couldn’t she just up and say it? Why did the denial hang on her tongue like one of those old-fashioned stamps when you licked it too long?

“I’m not thinking of going anywhere,” she told him. “But I am thinking.”

He leaned back in his chair. “What about?”

“My daughter says Christians are supposed to keep busy—like we’re in a race. Heading for the finish line.”

“Well, I can set your mind at ease, honey—the finish line is not in Botswana.”

Honey.
He had called her honey. Jan stiffened. Did she want to be Jim Blevins’s honey? Did she want
any
man to address her with endearments ever again? Surely not. And yet, the comfort and ease with which he had said the word made her feel strangely peaceful. It was almost as though she and John were sitting together in their little kitchen in Tyler.

“The Apostle Paul talked about running the race,” Jim was saying. He had his eye on the refrigerator, and Jan knew he was wondering whether it would be rude to ask for more cobbler. “The Christian life is a race, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave Lake Palestine to run it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. Jesus commanded His followers to make disciples in Jerusalem, and Judea and the uttermost parts of the earth. He didn’t mean we
all
have to go to the ends of the earth. That’s what missionaries are for. Some of us need to stay here and proclaim the Gospel at home.”

“Do you do that?”

“Me?” He glanced up with a sheepish look on his face. “Sometimes. I used to leave Christian pamphlets in gas station bathrooms.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“I was a seed salesman, and I traveled all over Texas for the better part of my adult life. That’s a lot of gas station restrooms, let me tell you.”

“I never even did that much.”

“I bet you did. Didn’t you teach Sunday school or Vacation Bible School?”

“Sure.”

“There you go. See, we’re missionaries here in America. Nothing wrong with that.”

Jan let out a breath. “Oh, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Jim. The more I think about my daughter, the worse I feel. Not about her. About me. She’s so driven, and I’ve always been content to be a homebody.”

“Nothing wrong with that in my book.”

“But what about God’s book? I stopped being a daily Bible reader a long time ago. Now that I’ve started up again, it feels like I’m seeing the words with new eyes. Did you know that on one of Saint Paul’s journeys, he was bitten by a snake? The ship he’d been sailing in had wrecked, and he swam to shore with the other survivors. He was building a fire on the beach when a snake slithered out of the woodpile and sank its fangs into him. What I’m saying is…Saint Paul wasn’t afraid of mambas.”

“Well, I’m no saint, and I never said I was. I’m just a man doing the best he can. I had a family to feed and provide for, and I did that. I raised my kids up right, took them to church, stayed faithful to my wife—”

“And put pamphlets in gas station restrooms.”

Jim heaved a deep sigh. “A man’s got to make a living, Jan. We can’t all be missionaries and head off to Timbuktu to preach to the natives. Some of us have to stay home and take care of our families right here in Texas.”

She hung her head. “I know. It’s just been bothering me…how I’ve spent my life…how I was so focused on myself and my own family’s needs…how I never even bothered to try to find out what God wanted from me.”

“God wanted a good mother, a loving wife, a hardworking schoolteacher and a baker of the best blueberry cobbler in the world.” Jim reached over and laid a hand on her arm. “And that’s exactly what He got.”

Jan lifted her head and smiled. “Thanks. That’s so sweet of you.”

He swallowed. “Listen, Jan, I—”

“Oh, my goodness!” she cut in, glancing at the kitchen clock and slipping her arm out from under his hand as she got to her feet. “Look how late it is. It’s nearly midnight! You’d better go, Jim. I hate to be so blunt, but it’s really not a good idea for you to come over here at night. I don’t want the neighbors to get the wrong idea about us when we’re just good friends.”

Without waiting to see the reaction on Jim’s face, Jan hurried into the living room. She pulled the front door open and was reaching for the porch light switch when she spotted the flashing red dot on her answering machine. Without thinking, she reached over and pressed the button.

Beth’s voice filled the living room. She sounded strangely childlike and frightened. Alarm coursed down Jan’s spine as her daughter spoke. “…I don’t know where you could be at this hour. I hope you’re okay. I had planned to talk to you, but anyway, I’ll just leave this message to let you know I’m in London.”

“London!” Jan exclaimed.

“…I decided to look up Miles, after all,” Beth went on. “And I also need to tell you that…well, he and I are going to India.”

“Oh, no!” Jan gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. “Not India!”

But Beth went on speaking, delivering the awful message. “…I wanted to tell you that I will be meeting him…my birth father…Thomas Wood…and I hope you’re not upset about that, because I definitely don’t want to hurt—”

The beep silenced Beth’s voice, but Jan continued staring at the machine as if she could make her daughter keep talking and somehow deny the words just spoken. It couldn’t be true. This must be some kind of prank. Hadn’t she and Beth discussed this very thing? Hadn’t Jan explained in detail the importance of stability and reason and choosing wisely? They had chatted right outside in the rose garden, and Beth had nodded at every sage word that came from her mother’s mouth. Then she ran off and did this!

“Are you all right?” Jim asked hesitantly. “Maybe you should sit down.”

“Go away,” Jan sobbed out, fighting tears. “Please, Jim, just go home.”

He knew. Jim Blevins now knew about Thomas Wood and everything! He knew Jan’s most intimate secret, and she could never look him in the face again. He would probably tell the whole neighborhood.

“Sounds like your daughter is hatching some more of her far-flung schemes.” Jim spoke gently as he took Jan’s shoulders, turned her around and pressed her down onto the sofa. “Listen here, honey. I don’t know anything about London or India or Darjeeling or any of that. But I think I understand what’s got you upset. Beth isn’t John’s daughter?”

Jan shook her head. “He knew, though. He wanted her.”

“I’m sure he did. We’ve all done things. Wrong things. Stupid things. And good things, too. To me, you’re one of the best. You always will be.”