Chapter 11
Tillman couldn’t believe Phoebe had agreed to come with him. He had expected her to say that she had too much to do and she needed to get moving on it. After all, she had originally floated the idea of doing the rodeo in three months, sometime in July. He expected panic, arguments, even a bit of a temper tantrum, or maybe the silent treatment, or something.
But after her initial surprise, she’d been on board. Over the last four hours, as they’d driven together, she’d actually been very optimistic. She’d thrown herself into getting her things lined up as much as possible and assured him that she would be helping him as much as she could.
To which he responded that she could help him the best by staying out of the ER and, for goodness’ sake, not picking up any hammers.
She had laughed, but he thought maybe his words had hurt her feelings just a little bit. Because she wanted to be involved, and she wanted to be considered as good as any other helper, any other man, maybe.
But she wasn’t a man, and about an hour and a half ago, he’d realized that he hadn’t considered that when he’d asked her along.
With any other man he would ride with, they would have gotten one hotel room, two beds, and split the bill, no problem.
But that wasn’t really going to work for Phoebe and him.
At least he didn’t think so. He was probably okay sharing a hotel room with her, but it didn’t exactly make him comfortable to think about it. And he was almost certain that she would not want to.
He had finally decided to stop wasting time thinking about it, and when they got closer, he’d just ask. That seemed like a smarter thing to do, rather than sit around and wonder what in the world they were going to do and worry about it.
They still had some things they needed to talk about, but both of them were tired, and conversation had dropped off. Not to mention it was hard for Phoebe to juggle all of the notes they had written on notebooks in the dark, which had fallen not long ago.
“Do you think you have much chance of winning tomorrow?” she asked, and it was a total change of subject from everything that they had talked about. Ever talked about actually, since she had been careful not to ask any personal questions, and other than a few comments of his where he mentioned her shape and her hair, he’d been careful about it too.
He certainly hadn’t meant anything by his other comments, he just didn’t really think about it, the same way he’d act if she were a man. But he definitely treated Phoebe differently, and he didn’t see anything wrong with that.
“I know I’m supposed to say yes. Confidence and all that. But I’ve lost everything. It’s hard to think that tomorrow’s going to be any different.”
“Have you done anything differently to make it different?” she asked, and it seemed like a very reasonable question to him. Except he didn’t know how to answer it.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Fired your lawyer? Taken a different angle in your request? I... I guess when something doesn’t work, you can try again, but if it doesn’t work the second time, sometimes it’s better to retreat and regroup, come out and hit it a different way, you know?”
“I guess I can fire my lawyer. He doesn’t seem very competent and is much more interested in how much I’m paying him than he is in winning.”
“Yeah. Definitely sounds like I would want to get someone different. Someone who actually seems like they’re invested in me and believes in me.”
“I guess everyone just thinks the kids belong with their mom. I mean, I think custody arrangements definitely tilt more toward the dad than they used to, but she really painted me like a monster. And there were things I couldn’t argue with.”
“That you’re a monster?” she asked, a little bit of confusion in her voice, like she couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t argue with something like that.
“She said I lost my temper. That I yelled at her. That I scared her, and I never got physical, but she was afraid I would. I couldn’t argue with any of that. I did yell at her.”
He huffed out a breath and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Why was he talking about this? He hadn’t told anyone, other than his lawyer, and his lawyer wasn’t exactly the compassionate, you can cry on my shoulder for a little while kind of person.
“Did you do the other things too?” Phoebe asked, and there was no censure in her voice. Just a calm gentleness that made him want to explain himself to her.
“She just made me so mad. She promised that she would stay with me. She pledged her life to mine. She told me she’d be happy wherever we went, whatever we did, as long as we were together, but it all turned out to be a big lie. And I know, things didn’t turn out the way she wanted them to, and sometimes people change their minds, but you can’t make vows and then just change your mind.”
“I can’t disagree with you. I mean, your actions should be based more upon what is right and wrong and less upon what you feel. But I guess that’s not really something we’re taught anymore.”
“No. We’re taught to do what feels good. And for her, it didn’t feel good to stay married to me anymore. She accused me of a lot of things, most of them are true. I wasn’t very patient with her at times. I worked a lot. I got upset when she spent more money than what we had, because we couldn’t pay the bills we already owed, and she went and ran up more debt. I tried to talk to her about those things, but she would just cry and tell me that I didn’t understand, and then run to the bedroom and slam the door in my face. I...eventually got to the point where I was so frustrated I would just yell at her, even though it didn’t do any good. I am not proud of that.”
“No.” She sighed, taking a deep breath and blowing it out in a long, drawn-out sound that made him feel like maybe she had things that she wasn’t always very proud of either.
“When my siblings were little, after my parents died, it was mostly me raising them, and sometimes I would get so frustrated. Any time I did, I always regretted it because Mom had always been so patient with me and with the other older siblings. It wasn’t fair that we got Mom and they had to have me. I wasn’t as good as Mom was, I wasn’t as patient, I wasn’t as considerate or kind, and I definitely wasn’t as good of a teacher.” She sighed. “I yelled at the kids a few times. Rufus especially just seemed to dance on my last nerve. He had a special talent for that. And he would do it and laugh, and it would just drive me over the edge.”
“Yeah. Nicole definitely danced on my last nerve. That seemed to be her nightly ritual.”
“But I eventually learned that it was up to me to control my reaction. I couldn’t allow what they did to make me angry or to make me lose my temper, because that was allowing them to control me. I never did get to be as good as Mom, but I stopped yelling.”
“Well, when she walked out, I didn’t really have anyone to yell at anymore. Then she used it all against me in court. So yeah. I wish I would have had more self-control, but it ended up that she won anyway.”
“Part of what I had to do was to let go of my anger and bitterness at the Lord for taking my parents.” Her voice was soft in the darkness, with just the dash lights glowing in the interior, as mile after mile of flat pavement flew by.
It hit him where it hurt when she said anger and bitterness. He had plenty of that.
“I had to get that out of my heart before God could fill it with something else. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be angry. It wasn’t fair. I looked around at all of my friends who still had their parents. When their parents hadn’t even decided to live for the Lord the way my parents had. You know?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice soft and barely audible. He wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying as much as he was thinking about how it applied to him. He had so much anger and bitterness filling him that it would be hard for God to take what happened and work it for good because there was no room for any good. He was all filled up with the sour nastiness of what his wife had done and the anger and hurt that he had from it. How could God work with that? He had to let it go.
And he had never even thought about that before until Phoebe had just admitted that she had to do it in order to move on.
“So I had to take a hard look at myself. I had to look at my heart and face the fact that I was angry. The fact that I was bitter, and all of those feelings were directed at God. And maybe a little bit at the drunk driver who had run into them.”
“Did he get jail time?”
“Some. Not because of our family. We didn’t want to prosecute. All we wanted was for him to get into some kind of rehab so he would quit drinking and not hurt anyone else. It didn’t seem responsible to let him back out on the road, but it also didn’t seem very Christlike to throw the book at him. So we did the best we could at the time.”
“That takes a big person. I would have wanted him to spend the rest of his life in jail for manslaughter, murder, because that’s basically what it was.”
“Except he didn’t mean to. He just was a young kid who made a foolish mistake. Some foolish mistakes you recover from, and some foolish mistakes affect people you don’t even know for the rest of their lives.”
“Yeah.” And he thought again of Nicole and what she considered her foolish mistake—marrying him. She had rectified that, but in the process, she had wrecked his life. And he had been full of anger and bitterness. Still was. Still resented the fact that she was off living the life that she wanted, while he was struggling to even be able to see his kids. Struggling to rebuild, and he would never have what he had and what she had taken from him.
The thought made his hands tight on the steering wheel and his jaw clench. He deliberately loosened it, moving it up and down before he made his hands relax as well.
Just thinking about Nicole made him mad.
“So you really think that taking a look at yourself, realizing you had the anger and bitterness, and getting rid of that changed things for you?”
“Yeah. Absolutely. It’s kind of like you’re a vessel, and you can only hold so much. If everything that’s inside of you is anger and bitterness and hurt feelings and feeling like life isn’t fair, and there’s no room for the good that God wants to give you. I mean, God can always work a miracle, but He usually works within the laws of the universe. And those laws state that if something is already full, you can’t pour more in.”
That made a lot of sense to him, and it made him see that he had a lot of work to do.
He wasn’t sure about how to go about it. Probably, what Phoebe said, taking a good hard look at himself and seeing the places where he’d harbored the anger, where he justified it, where he told himself that it was absolutely okay for him to be upset because she had been so terrible.
He wanted to think on that a little more, but they passed a sign that said they only had thirty miles to their destination.
“I didn’t think about this when I asked you to come, but I assume we’ll want separate hotel rooms.”
“Oh. Yeah. Definitely. I’ll pay for mine.”
“I was the one who invited you.” He really should be the one to pay, but both of them knew that he didn’t have much money. Of course, they both knew she didn’t either. “If it were nicer out, I’d suggest we sleep outside. That would negate the need for paying for two rooms.”
“Then we’d get run off somebody’s property for trespassing. It’s probably better to pay to stay at a hotel. And I’m sorry, I should have thought about it and just said that to begin with. But I appreciate you thinking about it and bringing it up.”
She made him feel like he was thoughtful and considerate. Two things that Nicole had always said he wasn’t. But she thanked him for taking care of her when she hooked her head with a hammer, and even though they laughed about it, the gratefulness that she had shown toward him was still there.
Phoebe just always seemed to see the best in him, make him want to be better, to live up to what she thought about him. And when she found out things that weren’t the most flattering, as she had tonight, she didn’t seem to hold that against him or make him feel like there was something wrong with him.
He liked that about her. Actually, he liked her. A lot.