Davis’s great-grandchildren—four girls and a boy who is awfully good-natured for being so outnumbered—are racing around my chair as I guard my teacup. Their parents are out on the lawn playing a game of bocce ball while Davis’s adult daughters—my cousins!—keep me company in the living room.
I can’t get over how closely they resemble me.
I can’t get over how Davis’s wife has taken to mothering me just as much as she mothers them, never mind that we’re all so close to our seventh decade.
I can’t get over this family. My family.
After George died, I asked God to send me a person. Just one person to care for. He sent me Mara. And he sent me this.
“Kids,” Davis says as he and his cane thumpety-thump into the room. “Time to stop making Eleanor dizzy. Great-Grandma has snacks for you in the kitchen.”
Eleanor. The poor man has tried so hard to call me Lenora. But sixty-odd years of thinking of me as Eleanor are hard to undo. Over and over I tell him I don’t mind.
He settles into the recliner next to me, his daughters caught up in their own conversation over on the sofa. “You miss her,” he says simply.
And that’s another thing I can’t get over. How an uncle I didn’t even know months ago can now hear my unspoken thoughts. But he spent all those weeks praying at my hospital bedside. Maybe, even when I was unconscious, God was knitting us together. Grafting me into this family.
But not so long ago, He grafted Mara into my life too. And Davis is right. I miss her.
Yet I’m happy for the decision she’s made. It’ll be official soon. All the paperwork completed and signed. She’s found her open door. She’s taking her next step.
Most of all, she’s discovered the One who’s present in the hallway every bit as much as the other side of all of life’s doorways. I hear it in her voice when she calls. In her newfound confidence and her gentle strength.
“I miss her,” I confirm to Davis now, setting down my teacup. “But she’s right where she’s supposed to be. And I’m right where I belong. And—”
A high-pitched tone blasts from the pocket of my cardigan. Of course, that phone Mara insisted I buy and Davis keeps trying to teach me to use. Never mind that I had the annoying thing figured out the day it came in the mail. Just because I don’t like technology doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use it.
But it makes him happy to teach me and so I let him.
“The green button, Eleanor,” he says. “The one with the little image of a phone.”
It’s not ladylike to roll my eyes, so I don’t. I lift the phone. “Hello?”
It’s not the voice I expected. It is, however, another answered prayer. I hang up a few minutes later and turn to Davis. “I hope you don’t mind company.”