Unlikely Praise (2 page)

More deep breaths.

She rounded the car to collect her things. The church would be dark and quiet, now. It was the best time to arrive.

She pushed her key into the lock at the back entrance. It didn’t turn. Her toes continued to throb inside her shoes as she leaned against the door and tried again. Her overstuffed folders started to slide from her arms. When her heavy purse slipped from her shoulder to her forearm, all the music broke loose and hit the ground. Pages fluttered on the sidewalk and blew away in the evening breeze.

She tossed her purse into the shrubbery.

Her cell phone skittered across the concrete.

And the ridiculously uncomfortable shoes? She kicked those off with wild abandon as she scrambled for flying paper.

“Let me help you.”

The strange male voice from behind her came as such a shock that she screamed like a teenaged girl in a horror movie. It was
not
attractive. She bolted upright. “You scared me!” She placed her bare foot on the stack of folders and met his gaze. Wait a minute...she knew that ponytail.

“Sorry,” he said and handed her a pile of paper. “You’re Candi.” He smiled and extended his hand.

Her stomach flopped completely over. It was the same guy, but there were two less holes in his jeans, and he’d replaced the tee with a plain, white-collared shirt. At least the long sleeves covered his tattoo.

She put her hand in his rough and calloused one. “You should have said something at Jake’s.”

“I wasn’t sure. I’ve only been here a few weeks and you look different than your picture on the church’s website.”

Not that hideous picture!
Her hair was too long in that horrifying faculty photo, and she looked matronly, annoyed, and at least ten years older.

“You can forget you saw that,” she said and smoothed her skirt. “But yes, I am Candi Canaberry. And I assume you’re Samuel Blackledge.”

“Everyone calls me Shade.”

She tugged her purse out of the bushes and repositioned the folders in her arms. “Why would everyone do that?”

He laughed. “Years in the music business.”

She nodded. Kyle had been right. “Ah, yes, you rockers and your nicknames.”

His smile faded as silence grew between them, and she remained distracted by a long piece of hair that had escaped his ponytail and whipped across his face in the wind.

“You bought my CD at Jake’s,” she blurted.

He rested his hands on his hips. “Uh...” He shook off a confused expression. “I bought a lot of CD’s. Which one was yours? Did you write the music?”

“No, I mean Jake was saving it for me and the sticky note fell off and Kyle sold it to you and...” She stopped and raised her arm as though her own hand signal could somehow end her muddled flow of words. “Never mind. Did you bring the CD’s with you? There’s a song I wanted the band to hear tonight.”

“I took them home. But I can go back and get them.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll listen another time.”

He picked up his guitar case and rushed to retrieve her shoes.

“That’s OK,” she said, “I’ll get them.”

“It’s no problem. You need help with the door?”

Right. The door. The keychain dangled from the lock.

“No, it’s just being stubborn.”

She clasped the handle and the key.
Lord, if there was ever a time I needed a door to open...

Click!

She scooped her cell phone off the ground. “C’mon in.”

He trailed behind her as she padded shoeless down the dimly lit aisle to the front of the sanctuary. Evening sun glowed through the jewel toned windows behind the pulpit. Her favorite time of day. She dropped her things by the keyboard on the platform.

In the control booth, she brought up the lights and clicked on the sound system. The familiar gentle hum was the weekly “welcome to God’s house” she’d grown accustomed to.

She headed for the closet behind the platform while Shade sat on the front pew and tugged on his guitar strings.

“Are those new?”

“Yeah. Not quite broken in.”

She put a guitar stand near the keyboard and pulled microphones out of their foam-filled storage boxes. Shade fidgeted in his seat and tapped the toe of his cowboy boot against the floor at lightning speed. He was as nervous as she was.

“You can plug in right here.” She pointed toward the box on the floor. “Use the one labeled
guitar three
. Right now our sound system is not all that sophisticated. Hopefully when we get our new building we’ll get a state-of-the-art set-up.”

He joined her on the platform and set his guitar in the stand.

She took a nervous step away from him.

“Is everything OK?”

She placed her hand across her heart as she caught her breath. “Everything’s fine, really. I’m sorry I’m not doing a better job of making you feel welcome. I’m a little in shock after just seeing you at Jake’s and now you’re here, and I didn’t know you were coming until I got an e-mail this morning from Pastor Charles. He’d mentioned some changes, but I didn’t know when or what was going to happen.”

“Yeah, it’s been kinda weird. I’d only been here a couple weeks, and he started talking to me about joining the worship team.”

Candi’s blood bubbled in her veins and sent a warm rush to her cheeks. Pastor Charles had bypassed her completely. Was there any point in trying to find out what Shade’s skill level was? Where had he trained in music? Where did he get his worship experience? Did he even
understand
the importance of worship?

She remembered what Grandpa Nick used to say.
All things work together for good to them that love God.

She
did
love God and the church and even Pastor Charles, though he was temporarily insane, but most of all she loved to worship. Didn’t this all have to work out somehow?

“You’ll be fine, Shade. Everyone should be here shortly. You can tell us a little about yourself and then we’ll make some music.”

“Sure thing.” He grabbed a mic stand and clipped the cord at the side. “Have you lived in Spring all your life?”

“Uh, no. I moved around a bit, but I’ve been in this area for several years. I went to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. Why?”

“Your name is very familiar.” He moved to another mic stand and handled the messy cord like an experienced professional. “I swear I know someone else named Canaberry. I think it was in Austin.”

Shade’s words hit her like an oncoming truck. Was it not enough in one day that he was even here? Was he now going to take a sledge hammer and break into the only secrets she had left?

She turned away and busied herself with some music. If he couldn’t see her face, he couldn’t see her fear. She tried to sound calm. “You spend a lot of time in Austin?”

“Fair amount. Had a pretty successful band there.”

She rushed to the closet and pulled the three-hole-punch off the top of the filing cabinet where she stored music. No. Way. This was
not
happening. Samuel or Shade or whoever he was did
not
know her family in Austin. He was mistaken. He had to be.

She stuffed a stack of papers into the punch and clamped down.

Could Pastor Charles have said anything? Never. Only he knew the whole story of her life in Austin, her mother’s death, and her sour relationship with her criminal father—and he would never tell.

She wrestled with the punch. The top two cutters released cleanly. The third was hopelessly stuck. She should have never come to the Houston area when she fled Austin. It wasn’t far enough away. She should have gone to Montana. Or Canada. Or Siberia. Anywhere, but here.

Suddenly Shade was in the closet with her, smelling like spicy soap and blocking her way out of the crowded space.

“Let me try.” He took the punch from her hands. “Sometimes you have to turn it over and knock it loose.”

She swiped her sweaty palms across her skirt. “I put too many pages in it.”

There was a click and he handed her the music.

“Thank you.” She squeezed past him. “What brings you to Spring?”

“Needed a change.” He followed her out of the closet. “And I have some family around here.”

She nodded and added the pages to her binder.

“I was mistaken, by the way.”

She closed the notebook and met his steady gaze. “How’s that?”

“It was Winterberry. The guy I worked with once in a while in Austin is a horn player named Winterberry. Not Canaberry.” The corners of his mouth curled. “Wings Winterberry.”

“Wings?”

“Yeah, you know us rockers and our nicknames.”

She noted his sly grin and the knowing glint in his eyes. Had he really remembered Wings Winterberry? Or had he crossed paths with her father and now chose to be a gentleman and let her off the sharp hook?

Either way she was flopping around on the dock.

****

Shade took a step back.

Wow.

He’d framed a lot of houses with his father on job sites all over Texas, and he’d never seen walls go up as fast as Candi Canaberry could construct them. Even now as she flitted around the platform like a small tornado, the worried lines across her forehead deepened.

Wow, again.

She’d not only built walls, she was mentally hanging sheetrock to make sure he stayed out. But why?

He’d known her all of five minutes, and it was strictly business. He was there because Pastor Charles asked him to be, and he’d only said yes to this uncomfortable situation because he thought God might be leading him into something. But what did he know? He was a new Christian with more questions and problems than answers and solutions.

God could be standing at the end of his driveway with a neon arrow and he’d miss it.

He retreated to the spot she’d assigned and picked up his guitar. The metallic scent of the new strings soothed him. He glanced at the door. He could still leave, but Pastor Charles’s words of advice had stuck in his mind since Sunday
.

“You can’t drive a parked car, son. You gotta get in and try to go somewhere. If you head the wrong way, trust me, God will put you back on course. Just make sure you depend on Him for directions.”

Even if he had veered off course, at least he was in church with his guitar and not at home alone dwelling on past mistakes. He never doubted the key to his recovery was his relationship with God and his determination to not revisit the ugly habits that cost him so much. But he would always need music. This worship team might be a way to fill that need.

Which brought him back to Candi Canaberry.

First, she pulled a stack of chord charts from her giant purse, and then ducked back into the closet for more microphones. Every movement seemed filled with urgency. Was she always wound this tight, or was it just his unexpected and unwanted appearance that had her all in knots?

Eventually she stopped at the keyboard, like a busy butterfly that discovered the perfect blossom. With a pencil clamped in her teeth, she opened a piece of music and started to play.

It took just a few measures for the creases in her forehead to disappear, and only a matter of seconds for him to realize what a true beauty she was. It’s not that he hadn’t noticed how well put together she was when she blew through Jake’s earlier, but this was the first time she’d actually stood still without a frenzied scowl on her face.

She removed the pencil from her mouth and slid it behind her ear. It disappeared into the short waves of light brown hair. Everything about her was rhythm, notes, and melody as she pulsed with the natural metronome in her head and tapped her bare toes on the floor.

She caught him looking. “Do you know this song?”

He twisted the tuning peg on the D string a little too far. “Yeah,” he said, and met her sparkling green gaze, but the name of it had evaporated from his memory.

The slam of a door jarred them both.

Shade set down his guitar and wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans. A persistent jab of anxiety poked his insides again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been nervous about band practice. Why was he so nervous, now?

Candi left the platform to greet a woman in pink and purple scrubs who looked to be somewhere in her fifties. The older woman tossed her keys onto a pew and swiped her finger under each eye as though wiping away tears.

Candi enveloped her in a hug and then ushered her toward the front. “Long day?”

“The usual,” she replied and pushed a fluff of gray-tinted brown hair away from her face. She greeted Shade with a polite smile and did a quick top-to-bottom survey.

He tried to return the smile as the jabs of anxiety kept coming. It was as if he’d just joined a band with his mother, and she was about to check behind his ears.

Candi handed her a folder and put an arm around her shoulders. “Shade, I’d like you to meet Carol Ann. Carol Ann can sing anything in any key and can find a harmony part when others say it can’t be done.”

Carol Ann laughed and held out her hand. “Good to meet you, Shade. And she flatters me. Truth is I’m the only one she can get to show up.”

“Not true,” Candi shot back. “And Shade will tell us more about himself when everyone gets here.”

As the women prattled on, Shade dropped to a chair. So far so good. He hadn’t had to say a word.

Two more people entered from the back with acoustic guitar cases. They argued and wagged fingers in each other’s faces all the way down the main aisle.

Candi planted her hands on her hips. “You two still sharing a car?”

“Yes!” they snapped back in unison.

The girl put down her case and re-worked her strawberry blonde hair. “He forgot to pick me up,” she seethed through the ponytail holder she held in her teeth.

“Well, she didn’t tell me she’d still be on campus. I thought she was at home.”

“Do you think you can leave this fight ‘til later?” Candi asked.

“Yes.” Once again they replied in unison.

“Shade, meet Kevin and Kelly. They are college freshmen and, if you can’t tell already, are forced to share a car.”

Shade rushed forward to shake hands.

“That also means they’re brother and sister, which I’m sure you can tell from the bickering.”