God's Gift

It was Saturday and Lace had come over early to drag Rae out of the house for a walk down to the park and back. Rae had groused about being woken up on the one morning she could sleep in, but now followed Lace down the path with the loyalty of a friend reluctantly conceding defeat. By the time she had convinced Lace she really should be allowed to sleep in, she had already been fully awake.

As she brushed her hair before the mirror, pulling it back into a ponytail, she noticed dark circles under her eyes. She heard Lace in the kitchen.

Rae didn’t know what Lace had hoped to find. There was nothing left in the house. She had taken the last of the saltines to work with her to try to settle her stomach, ordered in food there when she got hungry. It had been an eighty-hour work week and it was only Saturday. She needed sleep, not exercise.

She had survived. It was the only good thing she could say about the week. The managed funds had crept up 1.24 percent against an index that had dropped two percent. She had traded her way out of the correction quite admirably.

Lace had insisted they stop for breakfast before they walked to the park. She had also frowned at the sweats Rae wore, but hadn’t pushed it. Lace was saving her energy for another round of negotiations about their vacation.

They had been going on vacation together ever since their college days—Leo, Rae, Lace and Dave, plus whoever else they could tempt to come along. Rae loved the week in the country, fishing, hiking, relaxing. She just didn’t see how it was possible to go this year; it had not been possible last year, and fundamentally, nothing had changed.

“Jack wouldn’t mind coming out of retirement for a week to keep tabs on the accounts.”

“Lace, it’s not that simple.”

The path widened and Lace dropped back beside her.

“Make it that simple. Rae, if you don’t slow down, you’re going to burn out. Do you honestly think Leo would have wanted this?”

Rae stopped walking, blinking away the unexpected tears.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to touch a raw memory,” Lace said, her arm slipping around Rae’s shoulders.

Rae nodded, knowing it was true. There was deep sympathy in her friend’s eyes; Lace would hand over part of her own heart if she thought it would cure the pain. “I’m doing exactly what I have to, Lace. Keeping the business together while I look for a new partner to replace him. And you are right. Leo thrived on the day-to-day trading. For me, it’s nerve racking. But I’m not working any harder than he did.”

“He took breaks, Rae. You don’t. If you don’t stop soon, you’re going to crash. Please, you need to come with us on vacation this year.”

“The bridge games are just not the same without you,” Lace added when Rae hesitated, dragging a smile from her. “Tell me you will at least think about it?”

Rae hugged her friend back and started walking down the trail again. “If I say no, is Dave going to be showing up at my door?”

“Now, would I do that?”

They had been best friends since Rae was nine years old, the year Rae’s parents had died and she had come to live with her grandmother. Lace had lived down the street. They had a lot of history between them. Rae didn’t buy the look of innocence. “Yes, you would.”

They walked together down to the park benches where mothers could watch their children play on the swings and slides and rocking horses. Rae sat down, annoyed to admit to herself she was tired; Lace joined her on the bench. Her friend was fit and active and had the stamina to go for hours. Rae just felt old. She kicked a bottle cap on the rocks in front of the bench and watched it flip over, tilting her head to read the words inside.

“Dave says he’s going to make senior partner next month.”

Rae looked up in surprise. “How? The senior ranks are age sixty plus, he’s thirty-six.”

“He snagged some major client, and the firm is worried about the message it conveys to have a simple ‘partner’ working such a major account.”

Rae laughed and the sound was rusty but felt good. “He got the Hamilton estate.”

“Hamilton Electronics?”

“That’s the one.”

Even Lace looked impressed, and she didn’t impress easily.

“When is he getting back from Dallas?” Rae asked.

“Tonight. I told him I would meet his flight.”

Dave McAllister stepped off the plane from Dallas, and with a thank-you and generous tip accepted the sheaf of faxes and the ticket a courier was waiting to hand him. Then turned his wrist to glance at his watch. He had thirty-eight minutes before his flight to Los Angeles, barely time to find his luggage, get it on the right plane and check his messages, certainly not time for dinner.

There were days he hated being this good a lawyer.

“You eat, I’ll read.”

“Lace.” He felt the relief at seeing a friend’s face. She fell in step beside him, took the briefcase and papers, and handed him a chili dog. He didn’t even protest the onions and eating a chili dog in a suit. She was a lifesaver. You didn’t protest a lifesaver. Not at ten o’clock on a Saturday night.

“Jan told me about your abrupt arrive and depart schedule.”

There was amusement in her voice. Any time now she would be telling him to get a real life. He liked her too much to care. It was business. Sometimes it demanded a little sacrifice.

“Read me the important stuff,” he asked her, finishing the chili dog and wishing she had bought him two.

She was flipping pages as they walked. “Oh, here’s a good one.” She skimmed the legal document with the ease of someone who wrote a lot of them. “Your client Mr. York is going to lose his shirt.” She summarized the brief for him as they took the tunnel from terminal C to baggage claim.

“It’s smoke. They are going to ask to settle out of court.”

Lace grinned. “No, they won’t.”

“If they do settle, you owe me for that parking ticket you managed to pick up on my car.”

He found his luggage and wished he had thought to pack for a longer trip. He hadn’t been planning this trip to Los Angeles.

“Is Rae going to come?” It was the reason Lace had met him, the reason they had been playing phone tag across the country for the last several weeks.

“I got nowhere. You would think after twenty years, I would know how to convince her to budge, but the only thing I managed to do was make her cry.”

Dave frowned. “Lace, you were supposed to be helping, not making matters worse.” He saw the look on Lace’s face and lightened up, fast. He was going to have Lace crying, and one lady in his life in tears was enough. “She’s having a down week, Lace, the markets turned, I bet it was nothing you said. She cried on me one time because I wore a tie like the one she had given Leo.”

Lace blinked and put her lawyer face back on. “Good save, not great, but good. You’re her silent partner, you’ve got to do something.”

“Give me a clue what to do, and I’ll do it. Anything,” Dave replied, frustrated at the situation, frustrated at not being able to help one of the two most important friends he had left. “But I’m just as much at a loss as you are.”

Lace nodded. “She’s got to come on this vacation. That I do know.”

Dave sighed. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do when I get back to town Tuesday.” He checked the monitors to find the gate for his next flight. “What are your plans for the rest of the week?”

“Sports stadium zoning and salary cap contract language.”

“Sounds like a whale of a good time.”

She elbowed him in the ribs. “Beats playing divorce attorney. I thought you were going to get on the happy side of marriage for a change.”

“I’m working on it, Lace,” Dave replied, tweaking a lock of her hair. “Want to have dinner Thursday before Rae’s game?” They were Rae’s acting cheerleader section on nights she bowled with the league. It gave them an excuse to try to make her laugh again.

“Not Thai again, or Indian. I don’t mind spicy, but I draw the line at curry.”

“Need some help?”

The church nursery was busy with activity as one service finished and another prepared to begin. There were name tags to match with diaper bags and parents for children being picked up; new infants and diaper bags and instructions to write down for children being dropped off. Short-handed because two of the helpers were out with the flu, Rae was finally sitting down again. She looked up at the question and smiled.

James.

He looked good.

The unexpected thought made her blush, which really confused her and changed her smile to a momentary frown.

She looked down at the active infants she held. She had to grin. They were twins and she had her hands full. “Which one do you want?”

She watched him step into the nursery, careful to avoid letting any of the toddlers get past him and out the door. His movements were stiff and she wished their prayers on his behalf would be answered. She hated to see someone in pain. His week back in the States had faded his tan slightly. He sat down in the rocker beside her. “Give me—” he paused to read the name tags on their sleepers “—Kyle.”

Rae carefully handed him the infant, watched him accept the six-month-old with the ease of someone comfortable around kids. The infant was fascinated with a man to look at.

“Patricia said I would find you here.”

“I hide out here most Sundays,” Rae replied, tempting Kyle’s sister Kim with a set of infant car keys. She had been keeping up with infants and toddlers for the last hour and a half with her teenage helpers. She couldn’t believe he’d shown up here of all places. She pushed her hair back as Kim reached for it again.

“Like kids?”

“Babies,” Rae replied matter-of-factly.

“They grow up fast. Emily was barely walking when I saw her last. Now she’s reading,” James commented.

“Six years is a long time.”

Rae snagged an infant who was in danger of falling backward and scooted him over to lean against her knee. James nudged a ball over to him with his foot.

“Thanks.”

“It is always this lively?”

Rae smiled. “No one is crying so this is calm. But I normally do have two more adults to help keep order. They’re both out with the flu. Thanks for the offer to help.”

“My pleasure. I wanted to thank you for the Chicago Bulls tapes.”

She was surprised and pleased that he had sought her out for something so simple. “Kevin said you were a fan.”

“Your packages would make my week and that of my entire crew.”

She looked down at the infant she held, embarrassed. “I’m glad you liked them.”

“I’m afraid I’ve been thinking about you for two years by your nickname,” James added.

His remark made her look up. “Really?”

He smiled. “We named you Rachel the Angel.”

Now she really blushed. “They were just game tapes.”

“They meant a lot to us. I promised the guys I would convey their thanks.” James set the rocker in motion.

Rae had no idea what to say. “Should I apologize for not liking hockey?”

Her question brought a burst of laughter.

Rae left work Monday night after nine, stopped at the grocery store for a deli pizza and a six-pack of soda, and on impulse picked up a carrot cake. She needed to grocery shop to actually stock her cabinets but didn’t have the energy.

She had decided she really, desperately, wanted a break. She was going to read a good book tonight, set her alarm to let her sleep an extra half hour and try to rebuild her energy. It was bad when she started the week exhausted.

She put the pizza in the oven, forgot and then came back to set the timer, walked down to the den as she poured the soda over ice. She wrinkled her nose and chuckled softly as she tried to drink around the fizz. She was parched.

Work would not be so bad if it were simply not so long. She had given up trying to record her hours in February; tracking her time had been one of her New Year’s resolutions. Knowing she was averaging 64.9 hours per week did not make coping with them any easier.

The library shelves were packed with books she considered worth keeping—thrillers and suspense and mysteries intermixed in the fiction, medical texts, financial texts and law references taking the rest of the space. She had a hard time choosing, there were so many books she would like to reread. She finally pulled down a hardcover by Mary Clark.

She settled into the recliner, kicking the footstand up. This was the way she liked to spend an evening.

She opened the book.

A small piece of red colored paper fluttered down between the arm and the cushion of the seat.

Rae shifted in the seat, balancing her drink and the book in one hand to reach the item.

A Valentine’s Day card.

Leo’s bold signature signed beneath his “I Love You.”

The sob caught her off guard, emotion rushing to the surface before she could stop it.

No. No, she was done crying!

She wiped at the tears with the back of her sleeve, caught a couple deep breaths and forced them back. No. No more. She was done crying.

She got up.

It was hard, and her hand wavered, but she resolutely tucked the beautiful card in the box on the bookshelf where she kept the pictures she had yet to file in her scrapbook.

She wasn’t going to let a card do this to her. It was beautiful, and there was no one to send her I Love You cards anymore, but she wasn’t going to let the card affect her this way. No. She couldn’t.

The desire to read was gone.

She left the book resting on the armrest of the recliner and returned to the kitchen. The pizza had barely begun to cook.

Was it possible to simply decide to stop grieving?

She leaned against the counter and watched the pizza cook.

Was it possible to simply decide not to grieve anymore?

Rae rubbed her burning eyes and reached to the medicine cabinet for the aspirin bottle. Her head hurt.

God, I’ve decided I’m not going to cry anymore. My head hurts, my eyes hurt, and crying over the fact I flipped open a book and had a Valentine’s Day card he sent me fall out has got to stop. My life is full of reminders of him. He was in my life for ten years. He’s there, in scrapbooks, in snapshots, in little knickknacks around the house. He fixed my car, and helped build my bookshelves, he even tried to teach me how to make pizza. Work is filled with reminders of him, he is there in every decision and in every stock position we hold. God, I’m not going to grieve anymore. You’ve got to take away the pain. But I’m through crying. He’s gone.

She felt like she had been sideswiped by the same semi that had killed Leo.

When the pizza came out, she ate one piece and put the rest into the refrigerator, not hungry, not caring that she really needed to eat more than she had been in the last few months.

She took a hot shower and let the water fill the room with steam, cried her very last tears until she felt hollow inside, and quietly said goodbye.

She was going on with life. She only hoped it held something worth going on for.

“What do you think?” Kevin asked, leaning against the side of the construction trailer.

James looked out over the eighty acres of land Kevin was turning into a new subdivision of affordable homes and felt slightly stunned. “Kevin, you have done wonders with the business in six years.”

His friend laughed. “Believe me, it has more to do with you than you realize. The early days of the business established such a high-quality standard that almost overnight the business opportunities began to come to us faster than we could meet them.

“It was that house we built for Ben Paulson that turned the corner. He considered the construction so top-notch, that when he began to put together this community, he approached us with the business.”

“How’s the business mix—new construction versus additions, reconstruction?”

“It’s tipped sixty-forty toward new construction now. You want to take a look?” Kevin asked, motioning to the current homes being built.

“Please.”

They walked across the site to one of the framed-in homes. “We have five basic models going up in this subdivision. Most are selling before we even pour the foundation. This is the most popular model. Three bedrooms, two baths, with an open great room.”

“You’ve got a good architect.”

Kevin stepped into the studded kitchen. “Not as good as you,” he replied with a grin, “but Paul has an eye for both space and cost. He’s been a good addition to the team.”

Kevin stepped through what would someday be a patio door. “Of course, partner, when you get tired of Africa, we’ve got a lot of work to do here.”

James laughed. “I think you’ve got things well under control.” He looked around the staked-out lots and thought about what this place would look like in five years, full of homes and families and kids, a place for dreams to be born. It felt good knowing the business here had thrived while the work in Africa had thrived as well. There were times when he could see God’s hand at work and this was one of them. Instead of building only here, they were building both here and overseas.

The doorbell rang.

Rae was sprawled on the couch with the book that had come in the mail that day. It was Tuesday and it had been a long day. She had decided on the drive home that it was time to pick up the final part of life she had left idle since Leo’s death, the book she had been working on. When she had found the package with the medical text waiting for her on her doorstep, it had solidified her decision.

She glanced at her watch. She wasn’t expecting anyone.

With some reluctance, she put down the book and went to get the door.

“Dave.” She was both surprised and pleased to see him.

“Dinner?” He was carrying a pizza box from the place down the street and his smile made her grin in reply.

“You angel. Sure. It’s what? Only ten o’clock?” she teased.

“I just got off work, and it’s time for congratulations.”

“Oh? You won your case?”

He rolled his eyes. “You, my little friend. When were you going to call me?”

Her…oh, the stock that went public…Her smile widened. It had been such a long day she had actually forgotten. “It was only a little killing,” she demurred.

“Sixty-four percent in one day. And you had an even hundred thousand on the line. I would have brought ice cream as well, but they were out of pralines and cream. You look good,” he said, seriously.

She wasn’t in the mood for serious tonight. “Thanks a lot, friend. Go get silverware, the game’s on.”

He moved around her town house with the ease of an old friend, finding plates and napkins, the pizza cutter he had put in her stocking last Christmas.

The living room coffee table had served as a table for many such late-night dinners. Dave discarded his suit jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves, kicked off his shoes. He settled on the floor, using the couch as a backrest. “Who’s winning?” The Chicago Bulls game was muted on the TV.

Rae handed him one of the sodas she had snagged from the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, helped herself to a slice of the thick-crust supreme pizza. “The Bulls are up by eight in the third quarter, the Sonics are having a bad night.”

He nudged the book on the edge of the table around so he could see the title. “Cell Microbiology?”

“Research for my book,” Rae commented easily, sinking back against the pillows she had pulled from off the couch. “This pizza is great. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“What were you doing at the office till ten o’clock?”

“Some pro bono work. Yet another father not fulfilling his child support obligations.”

“Will he come through?”

Dave shrugged. “I can force it here as long as he doesn’t go underground with a cash job or change states.”

“You’ll let me know what the family is short?”

Dave nodded. “The fund got enough cash?”

“Eight thousand. It will last about another ten weeks.”

“Let me know when it runs dry. I’ll match you again.”

“Thanks.”

Dave nodded.

Rae smiled quietly at her friend as he snagged the remote and turned the sound back on. They frequently supported families they knew were in financial need. He was as generous as she was, he just didn’t like people to know it.

They watched the game and ate pizza, the silence between them that of old friends. “So, have you thought about coming with us?” Dave asked finally.

Rae laughed. “Lace sent you, didn’t she?”

“Rae, you did not come last year. We understood. But you need a vacation. I’m not accepting any excuses this year. If I can get a week off, you can, too.”

“Dave, I’ve got new clients to deal with, a load of new stock issues to evaluate, and a market that’s so high it makes me cringe. I can’t afford to be gone a week.”

“That is exactly why you have to come. There is never going to be a good time to take a break. When the markets are good, you’re worried about them dropping, and when the markets correct, you’re worried about losing other people’s money. You’re coming.”

She tipped her soda can toward him. “When did you get so pushy?”

He chuckled. “Rae, I’ve always been pushy, you just like me too much to care.”

Rae sighed. She had thought about the problem at length. She did want to go…. “I’ll call Jack tomorrow and see if he’s free.” Jack had been her and Leo’s first backer in the business, and as an experienced stockbroker, she trusted him to keep the accounts stable while she was away from the office.

“He is. I already called him.”

Rae chuckled. “I should have never given you that power of attorney.” It had made sense at Leo’s death to have another partner officially on the books in case something happened to her. Dave had been the natural choice.

“I’m your biggest backer, not to mention one of your more wealthy clients. You have to listen to me,” Dave replied with a grin.

She thumped him with a pillow. “I think it’s time I get some new friends,” she remarked and had to duck when a pillow came back at her.

“The doctor said fresh air and rest?”

“That’s taking a little liberty with his prescription, but yes, that’s essentially it. That, and some medication that is making the pharmacist rich.” James was sitting at the dining room table at his sister’s house, his chair turned and his legs stretched out before him, watching her finish clipping pictures for the Sunday school class she taught. He had managed to sleep until ten and for once had awoke with some energy and only moderate pain. Either the medicine or the downtime were helping. He had eaten lunch with Mom, then come over to see Patricia and the kids.

“Then camping fits the bill. Come with us.”

“Patricia, it hardly seems right to invite myself along on your vacation.”

“Nonsense. The cabin can easily sleep ten, and we had planned the food assuming Paul was going to be able to come. Since he can’t, you might as well take his place.” His sister nodded toward the window. “The kids would relish having you around for an entire week.”

James motioned his coffee cup toward the kids. “Last night you were worried about them wearing me out,” he replied with a twinkle in his eyes.

Patricia grinned. “That was before I knew Paul was flying to Dallas. You’re new, male and a relative. They will listen to you. I’m just Mom.”

He laughed. “Ahh. Kid patrol. I get it.”

“Seriously, you wouldn’t have to do anything but sleep in, eat wonderful food and watch a bobber. It would do you good.”

“What are the odds there are bugs that bite?” he asked, smiling. He had already made the decision to go, he just liked making his sister work for it.

“I will personally tell even the mosquitoes to leave you alone,” she promised.

He set down his coffee cup and absently rubbed his aching wrist. “What do I need to pack?”