Vanessa’s heart stopped and then skidded into a fast beat. “Are you willing to lay it all out there between us, Rory?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m willing to tell you things I’ve never told anyone. Not even the friends I’d trust with my life. But those friends know everything now. And they encouraged me to talk to you. To be honest with you.”
“And why me?” She had to know that this was real and that he wouldn’t panic again. And she needed to know what was holding him back. “Do you think you can trust me?”
“Yes,” he said again, his usually animated eyes turning solemn and somber. “I’ve needed someone like you in my life for a long time now. But like you, I was afraid to let go or to give in to God’s plan for my life.”
Surprised at this candid conversation and touched that he felt this way about her, Vanessa smiled for the first time since she’d had her meltdown earlier. “How do you know if I’m in that plan? What if I mess things up for you the way my mother accused me of messing up things for her?”
“Didn’t your mother, with all her flaws and problems, finally find a man who could love her and change her and make her see that she’d damaged you?”
Vanessa’s mind reeled from the implications of that statement. “Marrying Richard did make it better for me, yes, but she never saw that her actions had damaged me, Rory. She might have found happiness and a husband who brought her the security she always craved, but she never once told me she was sorry for what she did to me. For what that man—the other husband—did to me. I can’t forget that, and I sure don’t have to forgive it.”
“Forgiveness is the hardest part of following Christ,” Rory said. “It never comes easy but you need to understand something about forgiveness, Vanessa. It’s more about helping you to heal and grow through grace than it is about soothing the other person’s feelings. Don’t get me wrong. When you forgive someone it releases them from any guilt or debt. But it also releases you from bitterness and heartache and that yoke of despair.”
Despair.
She’d felt a sense of desperation and despair for as long as she could remember. She’d become so cynical and jaded that she’d stopped making the effort to understand what being a Christian could mean. And she’d given up on one of the most important things in life.
Love.
She’d given up on love.
“Maybe it’s time to make that next move,” she said, getting up to reach for the journal she’d been avoiding for days.
Rory waited for her to sit back down. “Are you sure you want to do this with me here? I can take a walk along the bay, give you some time alone.”
“No. If I’m supposed to forgive her, I’ll need you with me to remind me of that.”
“You know that, in your heart.”
“But my head is a tad too stubborn to follow that notion.”
“That’s the thing about humans. We think we have all the answers.”
She swallowed the rising fear tearing through her throat. “Okay, I need to get this over and done so I can get on with my life.”
Rory gave her a quick kiss. “You can do this, Vanessa. You’re strong and you’re a fighter.”
Vanessa opened the worn journal and took a deep breath.
Soon, she was immersed in baby pictures of herself and several pictures of her mother with various men. Some that Vanessa remembered and others that she’d just as soon forget.
Each picture was dated and marked with captions.
Vanessa’s first birthday! We survived even after her daddy walked away. He offered to help me make ends meet, but I told him to never come back if he couldn’t come back to stay.
“I don’t remember him,” Vanessa said, shock jarring her memories into action. “I don’t remember having a daddy.”
Rory studied the photo. “You were young, a baby still. How could you remember?”
Vanessa went back to searching through the journal.
Vanessa’s first day of kindergarten. I hope she’ll be okay.
And then, two months later:
We had to move again. Got evicted from that cute little apartment on the beach. I have to find another job. I’m no good at cleaning condos.
“Do you remember any of that?” Rory asked after she’d read the captions out loud.
“Some of it,” Vanessa admitted. “This is bringing it all back. I remember a man with dark hair coming to see us right after I started first grade in...what was that little town?” She stopped and stared at her smiling, snaggle-toothed image. “Somewhere in Alabama. I can’t remember.”
Rory encouraged her. “What happened? Do you remember anything the man did or said?”
“No. Not really.” She closed her eyes, the image of her mother sitting out on a porch crying drifting through her memories. “She cried after he left.”
Now Vanessa needed to see every page in the little scrapbook. She pored over each and every caption and touched her hand to some of the faded photographs. A few of her mother marrying again, always smiling that hopeful, determined smile. Always looking for love. Searching. Always searching.
In between husbands and a history of Vanessa’s childhood, her mother talked about her artwork and how she needed to make a living at it. She wrote about art shows and selling her work to all kinds of customers, from rich, eccentric donors to poor but interested individuals.
Vanessa began to see a pattern here. Her mother had met three of her four husbands at these events. Vanessa couldn’t remember how Cora had met Richard.
“A lot of this is about you,” Rory said, drawing her back to the journal. “In spite of everything, she treasured these memories of you.”
Vanessa pushed at her hair and took a calming breath. “I never knew she kept all of these photos and other things.”
Her school pictures. New shoes. A good report card. Walking on the beach and finding seashells. Lying on the floor, on her stomach, reading a book. Her first teenaged dance. Wearing vintage clothes.
“I remember being bored at the art shows. I’d go shopping on my own. No wonder I love vintage things so much. I was raised in flea markets and art colonies.”
Rory grinned and punched her on the arm. “Well, you always look pretty to me, and you have a good thing going with Vanessa’s Vintage, so that’s something.”
“Yes, that’s something.”
And then:
I got married again today. He’s a preacher! Can you imagine that? But he’s so sweet and so kind to me and he buys me pretty things.
Vanessa stared at the photo of her mother with Gregory Pardue. Cora wore a cream-colored suit, and he wore a dark jacket and light-colored pants.
She put the journal down, her stomach churning. “I remember the wedding. I cried because I knew he wasn’t a good man. I was afraid of him from the beginning.”
“Your instincts were right,” Rory said. “But you were too afraid to say anything to anyone.”
“I wanted this one to work,” she replied. “I so wanted to have a good father, someone who’d take care of us so we could live in a decent house and so I wouldn’t have to buy secondhand clothes all the time. By the time they got married, she’d already bought this house, but it needed a lot of work. Later...when she married Richard, he had the whole house redone, and he paid off her mortgage.”
“So Richard was the kind of father figure you always wanted.”
“Yes.” Vanessa held the journal close, her gaze stuck on her mother holding Gregory Pardue’s hand. She couldn’t stop the shivers moving down her backbone. “I don’t remember why she and Gregory broke up. I saw her crying and him packing a suitcase and storming out the door.”
“Is that his name? Gregory Pardue?”
“Yes. You don’t know him, do you?”
“No. I needed to put a name with the face. In case I do ever run into him.”
“I don’t think you will. He left the state of Florida, last I heard.”
She put the journal down. “I can’t read any more right now. But I think I can finish it now. I’ve moved past the worst part.”
“Does it help, knowing your mother did love you? Most of this journal revolves around you, Vanessa. That has to mean something to you.”
“It does,” she said. “It helps.” She got up and moved around the room, that nervous feeling hitting her in the stomach. “I should go and get back to setting up for the estate sale.”
Rory started gathering their dishes and the half-eaten food. “I need to get back, too.” Drying his hands on a towel, he turned to her. “Are you okay? I mean, do you need me to stay with you at your house for the rest of the day?”
“No. I’m much better now. I don’t know what I was so afraid of. I should have read this journal when I first found it.”
“It could help you finish what you started,” Rory said.
She helped him clean up, relief washing over her. “Remembering things wasn’t so bad. Good in places. Sad in others.”
But she had a feeling the end would be the worst. Her mother being all alone for the first time in her life. She’d have to deal with that later.
They were headed out the door when she turned to Rory. “Hey, you aren’t getting off so easily. You promised you’d share with me, Rory. Or are you stalling out on me again?”
He locked the door and turned to stare over at her. The morning had changed into afternoon. The sun glistened off the water in shades of aqua and sky blue. Birds were chirping in the nearby pines and oaks. Out in the shallows, a brown pelican perched on an old stump with an unmoving calm.
“I was married once,” Rory said on a low, calm note.
She turned so quickly to stare over at him the pelican lifted its vast wings and took flight. “What?”
“It’s true.” He studied the water, his expression etched with sadness. “I knew early on that I wanted to be involved in the church in some sort of capacity. So I went to seminary and while I was there, I met a girl. And we fell in love and got married.”
Shock rocketed through Vanessa, burning her with curiosity. “But...what happened?”
Did he get a divorce? Or worse? “Rory?”
“We’d been married for about six months when she got sick,” he said. “It was sudden. An aneurysm in her brain. She woke up with a headache one morning and she died that night, in the hospital. She was twenty-four.”
Vanessa took in a breath and held both hands to her face so she could keep from sobbing again. “Rory...”
“I know. It’s awful. It was awful. We lived in Texas, near the college campus. She was studying to be a nurse, and I was preparing to move us back here so I could begin my ministry. She was six weeks pregnant with our child.”
Vanessa sank into the nearest chair. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t imagine what he’d been through. She reached out a hand to him, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was there, back in the past, remembering, reliving.
“I buried her...them...and then I graduated and took on my first assignment, a small country church about fifty miles east of here. I had nowhere to go, but I wasn’t really ready to be a minister. I couldn’t preach. I wanted to be buried there with them safe in my arms.”
Vanessa started crying again, but this time her tears were silent. She got up and went to him and took him in her arms.
Rory didn’t say anything. He held her there for a long time, his arms tight around her, his breath moving over her hair and her skin.
“What can I say?” she asked, her fingers stroking his jawline. “What can I do?”
“There is nothing to say or do,” he finally managed to say, his words husky and low. “I’ve heard it all. They’re in a better place. It was their time to go. God needed some new angels in Heaven. God has a plan for you, Rory. There’s a reason for everything.” His eyes burned a deep blue. “I never could figure out the reason for their deaths, however.”
Vanessa stood back, her hand stilling on his face, her eyes holding his. “How did you ever come back from that to become the man you are today?”
His eyes, so bright with memories and grief, held her. “I told you. I went to war.”
She could understand him so much better now. He’d been angry, and with good reason. “You didn’t go over there to fight, did you?”
He nodded his head. “Yes, I thought I’d fight or that maybe I’d get killed. But I was drifting. I’d been assigned to a small church here in Florida, but my heart wasn’t in it. I talked to a counselor, a retired minister, and she actually suggested I consider serving as an army chaplain. She’d been through it.” He gave Vanessa a weak smile. “So I read up on what it would take, and I did something very impulsive. I joined up and told the recruiters I wanted to go through the Chaplain Candidate Program.”
“You became a soldier?”
“Yes, a soldier of sorts. I didn’t carry a weapon, but I had a protection detail with me at all times. I went into it hoping to find my soul again. Instead, I found death and heartache and wounded, suffering people. The anger left me when I started talking to the men and women who were serving over there and when I truly started praying for guidance. I guess you could say I had an epiphany. Their pain gave me a reason to live, to help others who were suffering worse than I ever had.”
His eyes met hers, holding the trace of darkness she’d sensed when they’d first met. “I realized I wanted to live. And I wanted to help others to live. Men and women who’d seen the worst and suffered the worst. I counseled them and prayed for them and found my calling again. One dark night after a horrible battle, after I’d held the hands of too many dying men, I promised God that if He’d give me the strength to help and serve others, I’d try to lead a happy, content life serving Him.”
Vanessa lifted on her toes and kissed Rory, her heart opening and lifting in a way that reminded her of that pelican taking flight. And she finally accepted that she might be falling in love with a man of God.