The Marriage Wish (13 page)

T
here was a good crowd at the Sunday morning services. Jennifer smoothed down her floral dress nervously as she got out of the car.

“You look beautiful, Jennifer.”

She barely heard the compliment she was so nervous. “You said Frank and Heather will be here?”

Scott nodded. “Frank is teaching Sunday school this morning, so only Heather will be in the services.” He caught hold of her hand, carried their Bibles in his other hand. “If you would prefer not to sit with Heather, I can ensure they never even know we are here.”

“No. I would like to sit with someone I know. Scott, I hate these first times. All your friends are going to wonder who I am.”

He smiled. “Let them wonder. We’ll slip in and out before they can come over to be introduced.”

“No. If you do that they will really start to speculate about who you were with.”

He laughed. “Relax, Jen. They are nice people. They will like you. Would it be so bad for them to know we are friends?”

“I guess not.” He opened the front glass door for them. “But I hate this,” she whispered to him.

He hugged her waist. “Do you want to be introduced as Jennifer or Mrs. St. James?” he whispered back.

“Jennifer. Wait—no. Someone might take my wedding ring to be an engagement ring.”

“If they do, we’ll just say it’s true,” he teased.

“Scott.”

“Spoilsport.” It got him the smile he’d been trying to coax out of her.

They had reached the auditorium. Scott guided Jennifer toward the left section. “Good morning, Twig.”

“Hi, Scott. Jennifer, I’m glad you could come.” Heather’s smile was genuine, and Jennifer realized she was also nervous. Scott had called his sister and told her they were coming, that was obvious. Jennifer slid into the pew to sit beside Heather.

“Jennifer, this is for you.” Heather handed her a card. “I was so sorry to hear about Colleen.”

“Heather, thank you,” Jennifer replied, surprised. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I felt so awful about Thursday night. I couldn’t have been more insensitive.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I should have been more observant, I’m so very sorry.”

Jennifer opened the card and read it, had to fight not to cry. She had promised herself she would not cry today. “Heather, it’s a perfect card. Thank you.”

The services started. Jennifer felt herself pulled into the music. It felt good to be standing beside Scott sharing a hymn book with him. Not being in a position where others saw her and felt sad for her. It was one of the reasons she had stopped going to church with Peter and Rachel. It had been the church she and Jerry attended, and after he had died, she had simply not been able to deal with the pity.

Scott had a good voice.

It had been too long since she’d been in church. As the service progressed, Jennifer just tried to absorb it all. The choir was singing softly as the communion was passed.

As open as he was with her, the man seated beside her, deep in prayer, was a mystery to her. Scott had needed this morning she realized as she watched him searching out and finding God. This was where he got the strength to walk through his difficult weeks. Jennifer swallowed hard.

God, I’m sorry I have been fighting you so much. I know with absolute certainty that You did hear that prayer for breath. I don’t understand why You answered it by saying no. Please help me accept what happened and go on, to accept the fact there will be no explanations for me to find. Only You. I still wonder if I prayed something wrong that time, if it was something I did that resulted in that specific prayer not being answered when the hundred prayers before that were answered. I’m still so angry, Lord. I’m trying to let that pain and anger go, but it’s hard to the point of being impossible. When I see You face-to-face, I will understand why it had to be this way. Please, until that day, will You give me the grace to accept what happened and move on? I need you, Lord.

Heather was the one who silently slipped her tissues. Jennifer accepted them gratefully. All she seemed to do this past month was cry.

Scott gripped her hand. Jennifer wanted to lay her head against his shoulder and ask for a hug that would never end. Some things would have to remain a wish.

The sermon was good, but Jennifer remembered little of it.

When the service was over, neither Heather nor Scott questioned her earlier tears. They seemed to have a plan already worked out between them. Heather was the one doing all the introductions as they met friends. Jennifer was aware of the speculation going on. Scott had never dropped her hand. The people she met seemed very nice.

They walked out to the parking lot together. Scott was so proud of her. It had felt so right having her beside him. He longed for the day that would be permanent. He wished they could spend the day together again, but he didn’t want to pressure her.

“That wasn’t too bad was it?” Scott asked as they drove to her home.

“No. I liked your church.”

“I hoped you would.”

He walked her to her door a few minutes later. He gently dropped his arms around her shoulders and pulled her into a hug. “Thank you,” he said softly, brushing back the hair from her face. “It meant a lot to me that you came.”

She hugged him back. “It helped.”

“I’m glad.” He hesitated before letting her go. “I’ll call you,” he said, stepping away, smiling.

She smiled back. “Okay.”

Jennifer wandered around her house for almost an hour, cleaning things that were already clean, straightening things that looked fine.
“Have you ever thought about writing about Colleen?”
The words Scott had said Friday were haunting her. She picked up a pad of paper and went to stretch out
on her bed. “If I were to write about Colleen, what would I want to say?” She wrote the question down on the top of the page. The tears began to come. “That I loved my daughter.”

It was a soul-cleansing four hours. When she got up from the bed, her neck and shoulders were stiff, her eyes were sore, her hand tense from writing. But the raw pain was gone from her heart. It was on paper now. It was something that could be touched and shared and thought about. She set the pad of paper down on the nightstand and pulled down the comforter. Her feet were cold, there was a mountain of tissues tossed over the side of the bed, her eyes burned, and she desperately needed to sleep. But she felt better inside than she had in the past three years.

God, I can feel your peace inside for the first time in years. A safeness that feels like your arms wrapped tightly around me. Thank you for today. For all of it, the trepidation of going to services with Scott, the music, the sermon and the chance to begin healing by writing about Colleen. Please don’t let this flicker of faith die. I know I’ve got such a long recovery still ahead of me.

She drifted to sleep with the light still on.

The phone was ringing, shrill and nearby and not stopping. It roused her groggily back to consciousness. “Hello?”

“Jennifer, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

She yawned and her jaw cracked. “It’s okay, Scott.” She rubbed her eyes and blinked hard trying to bring her clock into focus. “What time is it?”

“Seven-fifteen.”

Did he mean evening or morning? She had no idea. “I was taking a nap. I didn’t plan to sleep away the day.”

“Andrew and I were just talking. I’m going to have to be
out of town for most of this week. I need to visit two clients in Denver.”

Jennifer forced herself not to feel the disappointment that churned inside. She wanted to discuss with him what she had been thinking about. “I’ll miss you,” she finally said, willing to admit the obvious.

“It’s mutual,” Scott replied, and she smiled at the frustration she heard in his voice. “I would give anything to get out of this trip. I don’t want to be miles away from you. Would you like to go out to dinner Saturday night when I get back?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you.” She heard the relief in his voice. “I am sorry I woke you up. I know you need the rest. I’ll give you a call from Denver.”

“I would like that.”

“Probably every night.”

She grinned. Was this good or bad? She wasn’t sure. But it felt good. “I’ll be waiting for your calls,” she replied with a smile.

They said goodbye, and Jennifer hung up the phone and looked at the ceiling and smiled as she groaned. “God, it was bad enough to be going on a date again. Why did You send a guy who wants to get serious? Are You sure I’m ready for this?”

“You went to church with him Sunday,” Rachel said, sliding into the seat across from Jennifer at the kitchen table. Jennifer nodded as she took another bite of the bacon, lettuce and peanut butter sandwich. She had passed on the tomatoes. They had talked about church repeatedly since Jennifer had made the decision to stop attending with Peter and Rachel. Rachel understood her reasons—having attended the church with Jerry, having had a baby shower for
Colleen there, having buried both Jerry and Colleen in that church—Jennifer simply found it too painful a place to be. She hated the pity in people’s faces and constantly feeling like a widow. Rachel had offered to go with her to check out other churches in the area, but Jennifer had kept saying not yet, not willing to admit she was too angry at God to feel like going to church. Time had drifted by.

“I’m glad you went,” Rachel said.

“So was I,” Jennifer replied. “It helped, no one knowing about Jerry and Colleen. Has Karen forgiven me yet?”

Rachel smiled. “I think so. She makes a point of asking about you every week.”

Karen had been a good friend at church, but her daughter had been born two weeks after Colleen, and Jennifer felt it necessary to keep her at a distance now. “I wish she understood it’s nothing personal.”

“She understands, Jen,” Rachel said, passing her the bowl of fruit salad. “You’ll go out with him again next week?”

Jennifer nodded.

It was tough to plot a story when it came from real life. Jennifer tossed the pad of paper back on the round table and got to her feet. Ann had the final draft of the last Thomas Bradford book. Jennifer was trying her best to figure out what she would write next. Abandoning her office, Jennifer picked up a novel she was reading and walked out to the backyard.

She settled into the hammock and stared up at the blue sky and white puffy clouds. She and Jerry had both loved this hammock as a place to think.

Scott’s suggestion that she write about Colleen was creating a real dilemma. Part of her wanted to accept the challenge. She wanted to share her love for Colleen with her
readers. She just couldn’t come up with a story line that would intrigue them. Her own story—a couple in love decides to start a family, gets pregnant, the husband dies; the baby, born early, also dies—wasn’t an interesting story. It was emotional, but it missed a plot line.

She should abandon this idea and get to work on a mystery. She knew how to write mysteries.

Could she take her story and make it a mystery? The thought made her begin to toss the book she held up in the air and catch it, toss it up again.

The mysteries she liked to write had a detective. Maybe the husband was a detective? She rejected that idea. The man would die halfway through the book—hard to write a story around him. Maybe the husband didn’t die of natural causes. Maybe the detective was trying to solve the case—the wife and the baby were an interesting complication to a straightforward mystery.

No. The detective thinks the wife is a suspect, he’s pressing her for information, and she goes into early labor. When the baby dies, the detective is going to feel personally responsible. Jennifer missed catching the book, and it fell to the ground.

He couldn’t be directly responsible. Maybe he’s a cop and his partner wants to push for information, she’s the prime suspect, and he’s holding his partner back as long as he can from directly questioning her, but they reach the point they have to bring her in and she then goes into early labor. The detective falls in love with this premature little girl.

To even out the reader’s sympathies, it’s going to turn out the lady had actually, unwittingly, played a part in her husband’s murder. When the baby dies, she confesses what had really happened. The final scene is the detective at the graveside of the baby.

Jennifer tumbled out of the hammock and headed for her office.

Jennifer wasn’t going to answer. Scott held the phone and listened to it ring. It was after ten o’clock. Where was she? It was too early for her to have turned in for the night. He’d been calling her at ten o’clock every night and normally she was there on the first ring. He was about ready to hang up after six rings when the phone was suddenly answered. “Hello?”

“Jen, hi,” he couldn’t keep the relief from his voice.

“Scott.” He could hear her smile. “How are you? How’s Denver today?” She was certainly not getting ready for bed. He’d never heard her this alive before. She sounded like she had been very busy.

“Denver is fine. We’ve about concluded the negotiations for a new contract with one of our key customers. What about you?”

She laughed. “I’ve just about got the entire plot line for my next book sketched out.”

“Really? That’s great. What’s it about?”

“It’s another mystery. In fact, I think I’ve got another series. The key person is a cop. He’s a detective in homicide. He’s got a partner who is proving to be a great secondary character—sarcastic and cynical, great with one-liners. I’m going to have each book in the series focus on a specific case they are trying to solve.” Jennifer settled back in the recliner. She was in her office, had been working on a pad of paper filling in the plot sequence for the book when Scott had called. She intentionally did not go into the details of the first case she was going to have the detectives solve. “Could you help me with a name? I haven’t found one I like.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He’s thirty-nine. Five foot ten. Divorced. Plays basketball. A good character. Solid ethics. Honest. Tough, but can be compassionate. Slightly jaded by what he has seen people do to one another.”