“I don’t know.” She was feeling hot. And scared as usual.
“You sure about that?”
“About what?” Now he was confusing her. This whole thing was confusing her. She should’ve gone home.
“About how you feel? I think you miss Aaron. A lot.”
“Well, I don’t.” She couldn’t. It would kill her.
Pastor Marks was quiet for a while and Ellen began to think that was the end of it. She’d just about worked up the courage to ask him for a ride home when he said, “Answer one question for me, Ellen.” He’d stopped at the back part of the yard, standing in front of her, trapping her between him and the rose bushes lining the wall behind her.
“What?”
“I want an honest answer, and then, if you wish, I promise I won’t mention the subject again.”
“Okay.” At least she could breathe again. One question and then there’d be no more hard stuff from him.
One question.
Why wasn’t he asking it? She looked up at him.
“If that night had never happened, would you have broken up with Aaron?”
She couldn’t answer that. She couldn’t. Ellen just stared at him. And eventually, when there was no other option, started to cry.
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice soothing. Calm. Reassuring. Like her father used to sound back when he still loved and needed them. She’d believed then that he’d always be there, fighting her demons, keeping her world safe. “It’s okay, Ellen. You’re going to be okay.”
Her father used to tell her that, too.
TUESDAY NIGHT, during their shift at the rental building, Martha asked David about his family. And came dangerously close to falling for the man as he described a life growing up in foster homes. He’d developed a lawn-mowing business in the Phoenix area that eventually earned him a college education.
“What?” he asked when she couldn’t seem to stop looking at him.
“Nothing.” It just felt good. Looking at him. As though she could glean from him some of the determination that turned neglect and cruelty into an incentive for good.
“You’re thinking something,” he said softly. The car, the many hours they’d spent there recently, gave his voice an intimacy that didn’t really exist between them. That shouldn’t exist. “Tell me.”
She needed to look away. Told herself to look away. Started to remind herself why that was so crucial. “I’m thinking about life in general,” she said, her voice not sounding like her own at all. “About how one person takes hardship and uses it as an excuse for everything bad that ever happens to him. Lets it beat him. While another can be faced with horrendous circumstances and somehow find possibilities for good. They discover a way out and end up happy.”
David didn’t say anything. At least not with words. His eyes were talking to her, though. Expressing things she needed to hear—and would never be able to believe.
“It’s kind of like that glass half-empty or half-full cliché,” she murmured, rambling on. “You know, give some people half a glass of milk and they complain that it’s half-empty while others are thankful that it’s half-full.”
“You make your own reality,” David said. It was something he said often.
“To some extent, I guess,” she agreed. “You’re never going to convince me that we choose what happens to us.” She certainly never would’ve chosen to have her husband of two decades leave her to raise their four children alone. “But you certainly create the circumstances that come from those events in the way you choose to handle them. I choose to handle my life from a position of control. I’m not going to be blindsided again.”
“You’ll never get me to agree with that,” he said. “But we won’t debate it tonight,” he continued, his face moving closer. “Just make sure you pay attention on Sunday.”
“Where you’re going to enlighten me,” she said slowly, her gaze shifting from his eyes to his lips and back again.
“Exactly.”
“Hey, Pastor?” she said, although she was having a hard time focusing on what she meant to say.
“Yeah?” His face was so close, his lips fascinating her.
“On Sunday, prepare yourself for a fight, okay?” She couldn’t let the challenge lie, not even to keep him smiling at her. The man had to know that he wasn’t going to convince her to join him in his whimsical outlook. She was a woman who’d only recently gained full control of her own life, her own mind. She wasn’t giving it up. Ever.