The Weight of Shadows (2 page)

TWO

“Joshua, Seth wants to see you in his office at four. Are you free?”

Joshua’s stomach dropped. “Yeah, I am, Amanda. Thanks.” He set the phone back into the cradle and ground his palms against his eyes. This couldn’t be happening.

Maybe it’s not.
He sat up straighter, took a couple deep breaths.
Don’t jump to conclusions.
The spreadsheet on the monitor in front of him seemed to glow brighter than normal, and a low-level throb began in his temples.
God, please, not my job too.

He still had an hour left before the meeting, and at least three hours’ worth of work waiting to be done. This was not the time for a pity party. He shook his head to clear away the wild thoughts that threatened to steal his concentration.
Show them why they still need you.

He got back to work, diligence and fear driving his pace, and at 3:56 p.m. he set his shoulders back and walked down to Seth’s office.

Amanda sat at her desk, the phone clamped between ear and shoulder. She waved her hand towards the door, mouthing, “Go on in.” With a final fleeting prayer he pushed open the mahogany door and went inside.

Seth was standing at the window, looking out to the parking lot where snow was once again beginning to fall. Joshua closed the door and walked to a chair, but couldn’t bring himself to sit. He wanted to face his fate standing. He braced his hands on the back of the chair across from Seth’s desk and waited.

Seth’s eyes remained on the view. “You know, of course, about the financial struggles we’re having.”

Joshua smiled, though there was no humor in it. This kind of small talk didn’t bode well. “I wouldn’t be a very good accountant if I didn’t.”

“The board wants me to cut ten positions. With three of you down there in accounting—” He shook his head. “It’s killing me to do it, Joshua—I hope you never think for a minute I didn’t feel sick to my stomach over this decision.”

Joshua nodded, though Seth couldn’t see, and felt the last flicker of hope die out. “Last hired, first fired, I know. I understand.”

When Seth faced him, Joshua saw the haggard look of a man haunted by the less-pleasant aspects of his position. His boss and friend closed the distance between them, and spoke quietly. “I’m not blind to how absolutely awful the timing of this is. I talked with the board and begged them for another few months, but…” He shrugged. Joshua knew enough of the organization’s worries to be able to end the sentence himself. “They actually wanted your position cut by the end of last year, but held back until now because of the…circumstances. But the budget—I’m sorry, Joshua. I really am.”

Seth’s compassion made Joshua’s heart ache almost more than the loss of his job. “I appreciate it, Seth.
Really
appreciate it. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d lost the job in December. It was a rough enough month without that to deal with.”

Seth nodded. “We haven’t had the chance to talk in a while. How’s Madeline doing these days?”

Joshua took a deep breath. “She’s doing about as well as expected for a four-year-old. Still dreams about Lara, though; those nights are…hard, to put it mildly. For both of us.” He took another breath as his composure wobbled.
Keep yourself together, man.
“My parents were here for a couple weeks last month and that helped. Hopefully this summer we’ll be able to go out there for a week or two. It gets hard being at the house all the time—all the memories—” His throat closed and he looked away, coughing to cover his emotional slip.

Seth grabbed his shoulder and squeezed. “If there’s anything Beth and I can do…”

Joshua straightened and nodded. “Thanks. Just keep praying.” Seth nodded and closed his eyes, beseeching God aloud for mercy and blessings on behalf of Joshua and his daughter.

On the way home, Joshua considered Seth’s offer for help. He knew he’d get a glowing recommendation from him, and possibly some contacts at other ministries, but other than that there wasn’t much he—or anyone, really—could do. He and Maddie were past the meal phase, though the casseroles they’d stashed from friends and neighbors had lasted them nearly two months. He was also past the shoulder-to-cry-on stage, at least in the eyes of the people around them. Apparently six months was considered long enough for mourning the death of your wife.

Lost in thought, he almost missed the driveway to the day care center. When he entered Maddie’s room she tossed down the doll she was dressing and jumped into his outstretched arms. He held her little frame tightly, reveling in the scent of baby shampoo that still lingered in her hair from last night’s bath, aching for the hole in her life where a mother was supposed to be.
Please, God. Help me.

“Logan called me a poopyhead today at snack.”

Joshua bit back a smile as he buckled her into the carseat. “Uh-oh. What did you do?”

“I told him that was mean and that he should apologize—”

“Good for you.”

“—and that he was poopyhead infinity.”

He couldn’t stop the chuckle that time. “Sweetheart, do you even know what infinity is?”

Her brown eyes blinked up at him. “No, but Serena says it all the time.”

He laughed as he shut her door and turned on the car. “It means something that goes on forever.”

“Oh. Poopyhead forever!” She giggled and Joshua rolled his eyes as he backed out of the parking space.

“Anything else exciting happen today?”

“No. I want hamburgers for dinner. Can we get some from Rudy’s?”

He hesitated, knowing that money was going to be much tighter than it had ever been.
But why not one last hurrah?
“Sure. And Rice Dream for dessert?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Her sneakered feet kicked the back of his seat as she began to sing along with the children’s worship music that was their standard driving soundtrack. Joshua smiled at her in the rearview mirror but the gesture was missed—her eyes were fixed out the window, watching the snowy world pass by.

They ate their burgers in their favorite booth at Rudy’s, Maddie peppering their conversation with her preschool knowledge and a barrage of obscure questions. Afterwards, they walked to Sweet-Please, where she chose her usual bag of gummy bears and ate them one color at a time on the way home. These little capsules of normality were becoming more frequent, a phenomenon he’d noticed a couple weeks ago but now feared losing again when the severance pay ran out.

A couple hours later he sat alone in his home office, the baby monitor crackling occasionally with Maddie’s shuffling in her toddler bed. He turned his Rolodex slowly, checking each name and wracking his brain for the connections they might have to help him find new employment. He couldn’t afford to be picky right now. Anyone who might have any kind of connection—or even know someone who might have a connection—to a company or ministry in need of accountants was worth considering.

The one name that was not in the Rolodex was the one he knew would be the most helpful—in theory, anyway. He said another prayer, hoping he wouldn’t become desperate enough to consider asking his father-in-law, George Michalson, for advice. He knew George would be more than willing to help him, but it was the strings Joshua knew would be attached that kept him from making the call.

“God, I need a break here,” he muttered as he set the Rolodex aside. “We’ve been through so much already—Maddie especially. If I didn’t have her it wouldn’t be so bad, but God…”

His eyes caught the picture of his daughter smiling at him from the frame on his desk. She’d been having a great couple days, but then, just before bed, had broken down in tears when Joshua had bungled the order of her bedtime routine. “Mommy never forgot!” she wailed as he cursed his wandering focus. He’d held her and cried with her as they were both overwhelmed once more by the pain of their loss. After finally getting her to sleep with extra lullabies, he’d wandered the house, hungry for a connection with the woman he still loved so deeply, and finding it in all the little objects that resided on bookshelves and end tables: a picture frame from their Maui honeymoon, Maddie’s first year scrapbook, nesting dolls from their Alaskan cruise, and finally, her closet, where her summer clothes still hung. The tears had come once again when he’d buried his nose in a stack of her T-shirts and found her scent was finally gone.

“I’m mentally fried as it is. To add a job search and the stress of the hospital bills on top of it…” He eyed the stack that sat in the tray beside Maddie’s picture. How would he deal with one more crisis?

S
OMETHING HAD TO GIVE.

He’d been sitting at this desk for half an hour while Maddie played in the snow outside with a friend. Saturdays were usually daddy-daughter days, but he’d made some excuses and plied her with the promise of an afternoon filled with Disney princess movies to secure some alone time for himself. First he’d worked on his resume and posted it to a couple websites. Now he needed to lay everything out and see exactly where he stood.

The desk was covered with the bills Joshua had been putting off for weeks, now organized into small, neat stacks by type. If he could figure out how to cut some expenses, maybe they’d be alright. They hadn’t been living hand to mouth; his income had allowed them a little wiggle room. Surely there were some luxuries he could sacrifice. But his severance would only cover two months, and though he hadn’t acknowledged it until now, the medical bills had been eating up far more of his paycheck over the last few months than he could afford to spend. He needed to cut back on the nonessentials or risk losing his house.

How ironic.
Lara had often talked about simplifying, paring down on their “stuff,” reducing their carbon footprint. He’d always loved that hippie side of her. And now it was happening, and not only would she not be here to see it, but it was her fatal illness that was causing it.

He picked up the one bill that sat alone and opened it. The total, in bold print at the bottom, made him groan aloud.

Lara’s breast cancer looked beatable at the beginning. The doctors threw everything they had at it, and were successful at first. Two months later it resurfaced, but this time in her liver. Again the doctors attacked it with a vengeance, and again they seemed successful. When it showed up in her lymph nodes four months after that, they stopped looking so confident. Their choice of words became more cautious—more
ifs
than
whens
, a lot of
maybes
and way too many
we don’t knows
. His insurance through the ministry was far from comprehensive, but neither he nor Lara had a family history of major illness so they’d never cared.

What little savings they’d had was gone almost instantly. What was left of the bill rivaled the cost of an Ivy League education.

He wiped a hand over his face and drew a deep breath. “Okay. You can do this, Miller. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Where can you cut back?”

He opened bill after bill, scrutinized each account, categorized each ATM withdrawal and credit card charge. His fingers danced over the calculator’s buttons, and as the next hour ticked away, Joshua came to realize there was not much he could do. In fact, there was only one thing that would make the kind of difference he needed to make.

He set down the calculator and stared out the window. Maddie and her playmate Julie were knocking down the snowman they’d constructed earlier, running full-tilt and slamming into it, collapsing on their backs in the snow and laughing.
Would it be too soon? Would it be too much change?
He sat back and stared at the ceiling, letting out a slow breath. “It’s the only way I see, God. Please show me something else—if there
is
something else. But if there isn’t…help her to adapt.”
Don’t make it be the reason she needs therapy at thirty
. He sat quietly, waiting to see if God offered anything up. All he could hear was the girls’ laughter. He closed his checkbook, put the calculator back in the drawer, and went to the kitchen to make the girls a snack and figure out how to tell Maddie they were moving.

J
OSHUA AND
M
ADDIE SAT ALONE
at the kitchen table. Julie had gone home, much to Maddie’s consternation, and now Joshua was looking for the right time to break the news.

“I love the snow.” Maddie sat up on her knees and sipped her hot chocolate almond milk. Her nose and cheeks still glowed from the cold, and wet tendrils of her brown hair curled around her ears.

“I could tell. That was quite a snowman you and Julie built.”

“Did you see us knock it down?” Her eyes sparkled with mirth. “We ran into it and bam! We fell back. It was
hilarious
.”
Hilarious
was her new favorite word. She’d been using it indiscriminately for days.

“I did see that. Pretty cool.” Joshua took a sip from his mug, then shot a quick prayer to God for Maddie’s response. “So I was thinking about something today, Mads. You know how we sometimes get sad because something here in the house will remind us of Mom?”

The light died in her eyes and she sat back on her heels. “Yeah. Like the rocking chair.”

“Right. The curtains always make me think of her, because she spent so much time making them.”

“Or the burn spot on the carpet in the living room.”

That made Joshua smile. It had been the result of a candle toppled from the end table while she’d been dancing the polka to amuse a sick, couch-ridden Lara. That memory made Maddie smile as well. “I was thinking today that maybe you and I should find a place to live that doesn’t have so many memories. It might make it easier, not having so many things to remind us, you know?”

He watched her, ready to backpedal if he saw panic in her features. Her eyes stayed glued to the napkin in her hand that she’d balled and twisted and then begun to shred. “So we wouldn’t bring our stuff with us?”

“Oh! No, no—we’d bring our furniture, and pictures, and clothes. We wouldn’t be leaving all our Mommy memories behind. We’d just be going somewhere new, where we can make new memories and decorate things differently. We could make you a princess bedroom, for example.”