Chelsea recalled the words of a familiar passage of Scripture, her Grandmother Sophia’s favorite. “The house did not fall, because it had its foundations on the rock.” As Chelsea explored the ruins of the Higher Grounds Café and its adjoining homestead, she imagined her grandmother would be smiling. To be sure, few of Chelsea’s earthly belongings remained. Save for the stainless steel ovens, the metal speaker of the old record player, and the charred frame of the Queen Anne sofa upon which Lady Bird Johnson once sipped cappuccino, very little was even recognizable. But the walls, thick and heavy, the handiwork of masons from generations past, stood tall upon the café’s stony foundation.
When the insurance adjuster arrived, he gave a curious whistle. “Special place you got here.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” Chelsea said.
“No, really, you don’t come across these places much anymore.”
“These places?”
“I’m sure you know,” the man said, swinging his clipboard in a wide open semicircle, gesturing to their surroundings. “All this land once belonged to an old mission. It predates the Alamo.”
“That’s what my mother told me. And my grandmother before her.”
“Yeah, but I ’spect it’s more than that,” he said, stomping the ground beneath them. “This structure could have been part of that original mission.”
As the adjuster continued his survey, Chelsea wandered through the wreckage, recovering a few mementos along the way. That some of the items had survived the fire was nothing short of miraculous. A hand-carved rocking horse her parents had bought for her on a rare, happy vacation to Mexico. The needlepoint pillow her mother had stitched so many years ago. Chelsea read the phrase, Living on coffee and a prayer.
“Words to live by!” Bo shouted from the singed doorframe. “Thank God you all made it out alive.”
“Thank God for Sawyer and Manny!” Chelsea added as her neighbor gripped her in a tight hug.
“How is Manny? I managed to see the rest of your family at the hospital, but I didn’t get a chance to shake his hand.”
“Manny is . . . great. He really is an angel,” Chelsea said with a smile. “But I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of him for a while.”
“Oh?”
“He was needed back home,” Chelsea said, averting her eyes from Bo’s. There was no simple explanation for Manny.
“Amazing how help comes just when you need it, huh?”
“It certainly is,” Chelsea said.
“So what’s the plan?”
“A lot of that depends on him,” Chelsea said, gesturing to the adjuster. “I’d like to reopen the café. If I can afford it.”
“I’d love to help any way I can. I know a thing or two about construction,” Bo said with a wink. “Looks like there’s some stuff here we could salvage.”
As the adjuster finished his report, Chelsea and Bo rummaged through the wreckage of Chelsea’s sunroom. Sadly, Bo’s table looked more like half-burned firewood than, well, a table. Yet some items she still recognized. The face of Diana Ross on the cardboard cover of the Supremes’ Cream of the Crop, Paul McCartney’s mop top on A Hard Day’s Night, and most surprising of all, her mother’s favorite album, Put Your Dreams Away, appeared untouched by the brutal flames. As Chelsea plucked the record from the ashes, she noticed something beneath, an inscription on the stone floor, buried by layers of wood and carpet but newly revealed by the devastating fire.
“Would you look at that!” Bo said.
Chelsea kicked away the debris to uncover the entire inscription, a sacred phrase no doubt chiseled into the very foundation of her home by the original inhabitants many centuries ago. Casa de Oración.
Chelsea translated it aloud. “House of Prayer.”
In the weeks that followed, Chelsea was indeed living on coffee and a prayer. Tony and Sara had opened their home to her and the children, making for a very full house. They were serving as foster parents for Marcus Johnson, which brought the household to three adults and five kids, including the twins, who had just begun to crawl. The close quarters strengthened the family bond like never before. And with every memory made, Chelsea could see that her sister was growing more and more rooted to her humble home in Lavaca.
“I used to think the answer was moving my family to a better neighborhood,” Sara told Chelsea as she pulled the For Sale sign from her yard. “Now I want my family to make this neighborhood better.”
Sara was not the only one in the family to have experienced a change of heart. Hancock seemed to have aged several years since the fire. Everyone noticed. But it was Tony who pointed out that he was handling their loss with a maturity that did not come with time, but trust. Chelsea knew without a shadow of doubt that the same light she had seen in her life was residing within her son. When Hancock asked if he could spend a week with his dad in Austin, Chelsea consented, her mind at rest.