Tender Grace (19 page)

“So, you like my buffalo?”

“I do. They look peaceful, any rancor they’ve ever experienced a thing of the past. Like Andrew and me.”

“I’m going to name them after you two, A and A.”

I rested my head on the back of my seat and yawned. “That’s a root beer,” I said, blinking, trying to keep my eyes open.

“A and
W
is a root beer!”

We had a great day in Prescott.

I had told Ed and Willa good-night and was reading in the casita when I heard a knock and opened the door to see Andrew standing there.

“Are you still leaving tomorrow?” he asked.

I put my Bible on the bed, walked outside with him, closed the door behind me, and leaned against it. “Yes, I’m packed, my map is in the passenger seat, and I’m ready to head to Yuma in the morning after breakfast.”

“You want company? I could get away for a few days.”

“I’ve got company. Remember?”

When we’d talked by Willa’s pool on Sunday, I had told him about my collage of Scriptures, the sheep I count.

He smiled. “I mean flesh-and-blood company.”

“Spirit company is what I need now. Not only is the Spirit good company, but he’s quite generous. He’s brought good experiences and cool people into my life all along the way. But thanks for the offer.”

He leaned his shoulder on the door and stood so close I could smell his cologne.

“If I e-mail you will you answer me?”

“Unless you make me mad,” I said, smiling.

“I don’t plan on that.”

“Seriously, I’ll answer you as long as it seems right. As much as I’ve enjoyed being with you, as happy as I am to be friends again, I think you should work at getting back together with Marlene.”

I looked at the pewter key chain in his hand. “If you decide to try, you might give that
A
back to me since it stands for Audrey.”

“Sorry, babe. I’m too attached.”

I frowned.

“But maybe I can convince myself that
A
is for Ackerman,” he said. “Would that satisfy you?”

I smiled.

He traced the bridge of my nose with his finger.

“So, how do I get Marlene back?” he asked. “How do I quit being ambivalent about whether I even want that? You know what I want.”

“I know what you
think
you want. It seems to me you need a good dose of clarity. And the best way to get that might also help you get your wife back—pray.”

He laughed.

I laughed too. “Well, I’m sorry, but I really can’t think of anything that would help more.”

I took his hand and led him to his car door. He looked at me so tenderly that I went into his arms without hesitation, and we held each other for a long time, fully experiencing every sweet thing we had felt, and still feel, for each other. And then I opened the car door for him and watched while he drove away.

I went inside and put my Bible in my suitcase and pulled back the covers, quite ready for bed. “Believe the miracles,” Jesus said in my reading tonight. (It appears reading Tom’s Bible, specifically John, has become a habit.) I believe in miracles, but I also believe the change God brings to the human heart is the greatest miracle of all. Tonight, as I wait for the gift of sleep to come, I’ll save the rocks the trouble and praise God for what he is doing in my heart.

September 13

The cereal boxes stayed in the cabinet this morning. We had a late breakfast and a big one, what Willa and I affectionately call an Oklahoma breakfast: bacon, eggs, biscuits and gravy, and juice. The upside to all those calories is the fact I didn’t have to stop for lunch. I arrived in Yuma by four and reacquainted myself with dragging bags from the car to my room by myself. I can’t say, however, that I’m not glad to get back to the rhythm of my trip. I have the sense that I’m where I’m supposed to be, at least for tonight.

I dreamed about Tom again last night and wonder if the anticipation of resuming my trip triggered the dream. In it I was taking a walk by myself in Willa’s neighborhood, which became a street in Prescott. As I stopped to look in a shop window, I heard a beep and turned around to see Tom parallel parking his golf cart at the curb, which, because it was a dream, didn’t make me laugh; in fact, it didn’t seem the least bit extraordinary. That’s the charm of dreams, I guess. Of good ones anyway.

“Audrey,” he said, coming over to me. “I’ve been looking for you. I bought you a statue.”

“You’re kidding. What kind of statue?” I asked. “Where is it?”

“It’s in here,” he said, leading me to the restaurant where Willa and I had eaten lunch.

He led me through quaint dining rooms until we reached the back one and exited French doors onto a stone patio that encircled an Olympic-size infinity pool.

“Whoa,” I said, thinking for just a moment we were at Andrew’s house.

“It’s down here,” he said, taking me by the hand.

We hurried around the pool, across an expanse of patio, down steps, along a gravel pathway, and into an enormous garden. We crossed a beautiful lawn and stopped before a pedestal holding a large bronze statue.

“Do you like it?”

I gasped and tears brimmed in my eyes. “It’s my brave.”

He slipped his arm around my waist. “I know! I looked everywhere for it.”

I woke up saying Tom’s name and half expecting to see my Indian sculpture on the table across the room. Tom really had searched for a reproduction of that statue. I’d hear him ask about Humphriss’s
Appeal to the Great Spirit
whenever we went somewhere that displayed or sold western art. If he had located it, I doubt we could have afforded even a copy, but his persistent asking was a gift.

Perhaps the day is coming when gratitude will surpass grief.

Willa and I walked a lot while I was in Phoenix, and I’ve decided if my days don’t naturally include substantial walking I will do thirty minutes on the treadmill at the hotel where I’m staying. It surprised me no end, my resolve notwithstanding, that I actually put my bags down, unpacked my tennis shoes and a T-shirt, and found the exercise room fifteen minutes after I arrived. I was the only person in the place and turned the television to HGTV, determined to walk the full thirty minutes. Determination was necessary, as treadmills are short on scenery and quite easy to abandon.

I hardly broke a sweat when I walked. Tom always said sweating was necessary for effective exercise, so I suppose I’ll up the speed tomorrow. After I returned to my room, I rewarded myself by calling in a pizza and eating it while watching a movie. I found myself saying, as I picked up a piece of pizza, “This is kind of fun.”

I haven’t watched television much since I left the Grand Canyon. I’ve missed it. I hope it can be entertainment and information now rather than my anesthetizer of choice.

After the movie I wrote an e-mail to Willa and told her I was safe in Yuma and thanked her for everything she did to make my stay in her casita such a pleasure. I wrote the kids about my new walking regimen, knowing they would be glad to hear discipline was now a blip on my screen, but I warned them that any celebration would be premature.

When I logged on, I was surprised to see a message from Rita, who had just sailed into Venice. She and John had enjoyed a gondola ride, had paid ten dollars each for the privilege of sitting at an outdoor table in St. Mark’s Square and drinking a Coke, and had resisted buying an outlandishly priced mask at one of the hundreds of mask shops in the city. She mainly wrote to say, “No wonder you loved this place.”

I did indeed. Standing on deck, leaning against the railing, I knew I’d never forget the view of the city as our ship sailed into port that summer afternoon. I told Tom I hated to be so predictable, but Venice couldn’t help but be a contender for my favorite city. We must have taken a hundred pictures there. I’m sure we took one of every bridge in the city. We framed a picture of one of Tom’s favorites. We’re sitting in a gondola with our arms around each other and the Bridge of Sighs in the background.

The picture sits on a chest in our bedroom, and each time it caught my eye after Tom died, I thought how innocent we had been on that glorious sunny day in Venice when we posed in the gondola near a bridge with a name that turned out to be so appropriate. I wrote Rita a quick note telling her she shouldn’t miss the Bridge of Sighs.

I was also surprised today to see an e-mail address I didn’t recognize with the subject line
Opportunity
. Paul Keeter, the principal of the high school where I had taught, wrote a short but impassioned plea for me to take over the classroom of a teacher who was having a baby the first of March. He wanted me to finish the semester for her.

My reply was succinct: “How long do I have to think about it?”

That I would consider it astounds me.

I began John 11 tonight. In the first section, Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that their brother Lazarus was sick. What struck me tonight was that they didn’t say, “Lazarus is sick,” but “
the one you love
is sick.” There’s something about their referring to him that way that sort of gets me. John referred to himself that way too. They were very sure of Jesus’ love, a love more important to them than their own names. Maybe I should join their ranks: “Lord, the one you love is sad. Lord, the one you love is frightened. Lord, the one you love is confused. Lord, the one you love misses Tom so much.”

“Let us go to him,” Jesus said when he heard about Lazarus.

He has come to me too. And I thank him for that. I am finally able to do something besides sigh.

nineteen

September 14

Ah, San Diego.

Willa really wanted to come here with me. I told her we’d do it next year when Ed is off somewhere playing golf with his friends.

This place I had to do alone.

Tom and I had meant to come here. It was high on the list of must-do’s he kept in the back of his mind. During a time when I couldn’t get away from school, he had attended a conference on Coronado Island at a Victorian hotel, sprawling and gorgeous with its distinctive red roof, a
Somewhere in
Time
kind of place. He said his trip would have been perfect if I had been there to walk the beach with him, our custom morning and evening when we vacationed on any beach.

One summer night on a warm, secluded stretch of beach in Florida, we did more than walk. I should have been suspicious when he brought along our biggest and thickest beach towel. Rounding a bend on that moonless night and having seen no one for quite some time, he laid out the towel in front of a dune and said, “We’re about to make a memory.” He was not wrong. I seldom hear waves crashing that I don’t think of it.

I heard them crash this evening. I’m a landlocked Missourian; no treadmill today. The minute I got situated in my room and looked out at the ocean, I decided I’d take my thirty-minute walk along the seashore. The experience was bittersweet, as I knew it would be, for this was the first time I’d walked a beach without my husband. But the sand was refreshing beneath my feet, and the ocean waves breaking on the shore, though a depressing image in some of the finest poems I know, had a calming effect on me. The return of the tide does not bring to me, as it did Matthew Arnold, an “eternal note of sadness” or the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” I do hear eternity in it, but it is the sound of hope. I’ve become a student of John’s gospel, which is brimming with hope, and I am increasingly grateful for “the tender grace of a day,” finding it enough to live for.

I did have one bad moment this evening. I was walking, one minute on the wet sand, the next in water up to my ankles (Tom believed walking a straight line was impossible for me), and I noticed a man about Mark’s age, walking in front of me at some distance. Just as I was feeling a kinship with the solitary figure, I heard feet slapping the packed sand behind me and a girl’s voice calling out, “I’m here, babe! I’m here! Wait for me!” The man turned around, and a young woman ran past me, ponytail bobbing, and caught up with him. Until I watched them walk on together hand in hand, I didn’t know that coveting words was possible: “I’m here, babe. I’m here.”

I didn’t feel like walking farther after that, and as though it were a prop brought in for this scene, I found a log, where I sat for some time and watched waves lapping the shore, hermit crabs skittering across the sand, and the sun disappearing beyond the horizon. As dusk turned into darkness, I thought of what Tom had said about his time in San Diego and agreed with him—it would be perfect if he were here. But mercifully that thought was overlaid with the thought that had kept me from succumbing completely to “death in life,” the thought that sustains me still: “I am with you always.”

I was okay then, sitting in the dark, hearing in the repetition of waves breaking and spreading on the sand before me,
“I’m here. I’m here.”

September 15

The San Diego trolley line is fabulous. I have a good mind to sit through the whole route again tomorrow, because the scenery along the way and places it stops are wonderful.

But my heart rate rose when the trolley crossed the bridge onto Coronado Island and I caught sight of the hotel Tom had told me about. I spent last night at a hotel on the oceanfront in San Diego, delaying gratification for this moment. I got off as close as possible to the Hotel del Coronado and walked around the grounds and finally made my way into the beautiful lobby. The mass of woodwork, dark and warm, set the mood for an ambiance that struck me as both extravagant and peaceful.