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“Well, hi there. I was wondering when you’d call.” Justin’s entire demeanor is so confident. I feel stronger every time I talk to him.
I tell him a little bit about my day, about church (minus the Grandma Lucy drama or the anxiety flashback in the bathroom), and about going to visit Reginald’s store.
“I’m still bummed I never got the chance to meet him,” Justin says, and we leave it at that. We both know I can’t talk about Reginald more than a few sentences at a time. Not if I want to be upright and functioning the following day.
“So what great plans do you have for yourself now?” he asks.
I fumble through some sort of reply that makes it sound like I’m busier than I am. That makes it sound like I’ve got any plans at all. A week and a half before Christmas, and my social calendar is about as full as Ebenezer Scrooge’s.
I know what’s coming next. I’m not even surprised when Justin says, “You know it’d be great to have you spend the holidays out here.”
Great? Maybe. You never know until you try. But trying takes courage. Trying means opening yourself up to the risk of disappointment. It’s safer to go through life like Mr. Skinflint himself. Safer to keep everybody at a distance.
Even the man who’s raising your child.
The child you love more than anything else on earth.
“Well, I’m not trying to force you into anything until you’re comfortable,” Justin tells me, “but I’d sure love to have you come out.”
It’s not the first time a man I’ve cared about tried to convince me to trust him, to give him a chance. After I moved back in with Chris, he spent every minute at home proving how much he’d changed. How deeply he’d grieved over his past mistakes. How he was learning to love and accept Gracie as his own.
And maybe you’d like me to end the story there. With Chris and me in our nice little home, with a baby on the way. A baby we’d both learned by God’s grace how to love, a baby God used to heal the divisions between us, a baby who was destined to draw my husband and me so much closer together.
If this were some fluffy Christian novel, that’s probably how most authors would end it. A nice little morality tale. A warning to pro-choice readers who think that getting rid of a child conceived by rape is an acceptable decision.
Wouldn’t it be nice to tie it all up with a little bow like that? And they all lived happily ever after. Do you know how many Christian novels end that way? But then look at the Bible. I mean seriously, how many people can you say lived out their happily ever after? There’s Ruth and Boaz, but they’re the only two people I can think of who had a nice, steady, stable life once they got past the rising action of their storyline.
Everyone else? David died with his house in shambles, his kids fighting and bickering and raping each other. Paul and all those early apostles got crucified or sawed in two or burned in oil or beheaded. Job ended up with more kids and more riches, but who’s really going to read his story and think that he got the better end of the deal?
I think that’s why if I ever write fiction, I’d make sure to give my ending enough satisfaction and hope — maybe a hint of a happily ever after — without being so cliché or trite I made my readers want to barf.
Do you know how long our little domestic harmony lasted once I went back to Chris? Seven days. Seven stinking days.
And not seven days in heaven, either.
It was more like purgatory. Except that, at least from what I remember Reginald telling me about it, most people who believe in purgatory say it’s something like the waiting room to heaven.
As for me, I was headed for a direct descent into hell.