Larkspur Cove
Larkspur Cove
LISA WINGATE
© 2011 by Wingate Media, LLC
Published by Bethany House Publishers
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287.
E-book edition created 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1418-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION.
®
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
For Sydney and Ansley
And their awesome grandparents,
The Blues
Contents
If you’re lucky enough to be at the lake,
you’re lucky enough.
– Welcome sign, Moses Lake
Andrea Henderson
If you’re lucky enough to be at the lake, you’re lucky enough.
That motto is boldly emblazoned on signs at either end of the sleepy little shoreside burg of Moses Lake, Texas. The letters, carefully tinted with gold paint, shine in the sunlight like a heavenly promise.
Or a divine farce, depending on who you are.
If you’re on your way to an appointment you can’t afford to miss, and you find yourself lost on some back road, listening to the hiss of a tire going undeniably flat . . . well, then . . . proximity to water does not in any way alter your sense of misfortune. The only overriding feeling at a time like that, other than sheer terror, is an unhappy kinship with the road. A sense of being just like it – rutted, pitted, cracked, and scarred, wandering through the wilderness, headed in completely the wrong direction.
I’d always imagined, as I counted down the latter half of my thirties, that I’d be rolling through life like a family sedan on a superhighway – not in Moses Lake, certainly, but somewhere. It was a comfortable expectation. The problem is, however, that building a life is a little like planning a road trip. You travel mile by mile, each depending on the last. It’s hard to end up where you planned to be when there are flaws in the map, and the more you look, the more you realize there have been gaps all along, and at this point you’re hopelessly off course.
Now what?
would be a logical question at such a time, but the problem with asking such questions – of God, or the universe, or whoever you believe might be listening – is that you already know the logical reply, and you’re just voicing the query because you don’t like your own answer. You want someone to tell you differently.
I pictured how I must have looked standing there on that middle-of-nowhere dirt road – an average brown-haired, brown-eyed woman in a new pantsuit and sensible shoes, shouting into the air, “Could this day possibly get any worse! Could this week, this year, this . . .
anything
possibly get any worse?”
Of course there
were
worse things than being stuck in the woods, thereby flubbing my first afternoon of field appointments. But considering my woeful lack of experience, I was fortunate to have gotten a counseling position at all, even if my duties did include driving the back roads to work with families who lived out in the sticks. It was a starting point, at least, and I couldn’t afford to lose this job. One way or another, I had to get myself back on the road.
My cell phone let out a wobbly, in-and-out ring, and somehow I knew it wasn’t one of the tow-truck drivers for whom I’d left messages with directions that included things like,
Turn by the forked
tree, and go past the stinky hog farm with the fence made of contraband road
signs, and keep going, keep going, keep going until you ford what looks like
a bottomless mudhole, and at the top of the next hill, you’ll see a blue car
in the ditch on the right.
. . .
No telling whether those directions would lead anyone to me, but I had no choice but to leave them and to leave a message at my office, where no one had answered either. My cell phone was slowly losing battery strength atop a pile of CPS case files and maps, while tow-truck drivers everywhere took coffee breaks away from their phones. Thanks to my son, who at fourteen should have had no use for a cell phone car charger, I had no means of recharging my phone at the moment.
I could see the plan for the day rapidly disintegrating from
Attack
first day of field work with passion, vigor, and determination,
to the old tried-and-true motto of the past year,
Get by somehow,
along with
Figure out how to change tire
(I’d seen this done on TV a time or two) or possibly
Hike to safety
.
Taking a hopeful breath, I tried to sound calm as I answered the phone, so as not to scare away whoever was on the other end.
My mother’s static-laced voice sent a strange mixture of relief and queasy dread through me. Mom and Dad hadn’t wanted me to take the counseling position, and this snafu in the woods would only help to prove their point. On the other hand, I was as good as rescued, and even having a parent lecture you at thirty-eight is better than being stranded in the middle of nowhere. “Mom? Mom, can you hear me? I need help.”
She didn’t answer. For a moment, I had the disheartening vision of my voice being lost between cell phone towers somewhere. Maybe I could hear my mother, but she couldn’t hear me. Which also meant that all those calls to tow-truck drivers were a waste of what was left of the cell phone batteries. “Mom? I need help.”
Mother was probably tired of those words, after a year in which so many of our interactions centered on my need for help. I couldn’t blame her.
I
was tired of it. I was tired of myself, tired of not being self-sufficient, tired of this weird dynamic in which, after sixteen years of marriage, I was suddenly on my own again – destitute and back under my parents’ thumb, living in their lake house. Hence, the job with Tazinski and Associates, which was at the low-paying end of the counseling spectrum but still a realistic means of rebuilding my life and supporting myself and my son. It was time to stop hanging on everyone else’s apron strings, use the counseling degree I’d earned while my ex-husband was the vice-chancellor of a lovely Christian college in Houston, and make a life of my own.
“Andrea. Andrea?” Mother’s voice crackled amid the static of a choppy connection. “Where . . . you? I . . . barely hear.”
“Mom, you’re not going to believe this, but I’ve got a flat. I need a wrecker. I’m out in the middle of no . . .”
“Andrea? I can’t . . . ake out
one thing
you’re saying. Pull to the top of a . . . and stop driving. . . . told you you’d have terrible reception out on the other side of the lake. What if your car breaks down, or you get . . . tuck in the mud? What then? It isn’t safe . . . all kinds of riffraff live up there in the timber, and who knows . . . sort of people might be hanging around the public beaches. Honestly . . . drea! Most of those roads are so deserted, you could sit . . .”
“Wrrr-eck-er. I. Need. A . Wrrr-eck-er. Mom? Hello?” The line went dead, and when I tried to dial back, the phone just clicked, and clicked, and clicked, pinging towers in vain.
Thus, I had the answer to the hasty question I’d spit into the air moments before. What could be worse than having a flat tire in the middle of nowhere when you’re supposed to be at an appointment?
Finding out that your cell calls aren’t going through, and no wrecker is coming, and you really are all alone . . . and perhaps hearing the rumble of thunder somewhere in the distance on what had seemed to be a perfectly clear July afternoon.
“No, no,
no
,” I whispered, or perhaps by then I was begging. If a storm hit, the dirt road I was standing on would rapidly become a quagmire of chalky limestone-colored goo.
Shading my eyes, I looked up, but the narrow strip of sky visible above the thick canopy of live oaks seemed harmless enough. Just the gentle blue of central Texas summer. Not a cloud in sight.
The rumble grew, then waned, then grew again. A puff of breeze blew through, whipping a silty, white dust devil along the road. I turned my shoulder and squeezed my eyes shut, the force of the wind pushing dust through my clothing and into the pores of my skin. When the breeze died, the scent of dirt road and imminent storm remained, along with a faint noise I couldn’t quite identify. Grit fell from my lashes as I blinked, straining toward the sound. A rumbling, but not the rise and fall of thunder.
