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Sandra couldn’t wait to tell her husband about her supernatural parking lot encounter, but when the time came, she was scared to bring it up. She wasn’t sure if he would believe her. To her knowledge, he’d never doubted anything she’d told him before, but this? This would require a whole new level of faith in his wife.
So, when they finally crawled into bed late that evening, Nate said, “You’ve been awfully quiet. Everything okay?”
She sat up and scooted back to lean against the headboard. “Actually, I wanted to tell you something, but I’m kind of scared to.”
He laughed. “Scared? You shouldn’t be scared. You can tell me anything. You know that.”
She took a deep breath and then let it all spill out: “So what Peter didn’t tell you is that the referee ended up dying, and he said something to me before he did, but it wasn’t any big deal. But people saw him say something, and they thought it was a big deal. The other ref asked me what he said. And then I was approached in the grocery store parking lot by a man named Bob, only he wasn’t a man ...” She took another big breath. “And this is the part I’m scared to tell you. He was an angel, Nate, an honest-to-God angel. As soon as he told me, I just knew it was true—”
She stopped. She didn’t like the look on Nate’s face. Amused. Condescending. Entertained.
“Fine.” She lay back down and rolled away from him. “I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.”
He gently shook her shoulder. “Hey, don’t do that. I do believe you.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “No, you don’t.”
“Well, I’m not sure he was really an angel, but I believe that you thought he was.”
“Never mind. I’m sorry that I told you.”
“Hey, Sandra, don’t do that. Don’t pick a fight. I do believe you, but come on, the guy wasn’t really an angel. Angels don’t hang out at the Piggly Wiggly.”
They didn’t even have Piggly Wiggly stores in Maine, but Nate thought the name was hilarious and called all grocery stores Piggly Wiggly. When they’d first started dating, she’d found that adorable.
She squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she could rewind time about twenty minutes.
“Would you please finish your story?”
“That was it. That’s the end of the story.”
“An angel approached you and then didn’t say anything?”
“He asked me what the ref had said, and I told him.”
“And what did the ref say?”
“He said we had to stop the white team.”
“Why would he say that?” He sounded critical, as if she was making up a story that didn’t make sense.
“I don’t know,” Sandra said in a tone bordering on cranky. “I think he was delirious. The game was really physical, lots of elbows. Maybe he thought white was being too rough. The man was dying. His brain might not have been in tip-top shape.”
“Did he have a heart attack?”
“I don’t know. He was a hundred and five years old. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m tired.” She closed her eyes again.
He took the hint, lay down himself, and turned off the light. “Good night,” he said. She didn’t answer. A few minutes later, he said, “We’ve got to get up early tomorrow. It’s my turn to teach Sunday school.”
She groaned. Not because she didn’t want to get up early, although she didn’t. Not because she didn’t enjoy Sunday school, because she did, but because she was frequently annoyed with how involved Nate was with everything and everyone other than his own family. He didn’t neglect them or anything; he showed up to the major events. But he seemed to find the day-to-day grind beneath him. But if the church, or his school, or the multiple nonprofits he volunteered for needed him, he was Mr. Service. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, trying to rein in her thoughts. She didn’t want to mentally complain about her husband. She loved him. He was a good man, a good husband, a good father. And while mentally cataloging all his attributes, she drifted off to sleep.