Chapter 10
Garnet stared at Mertie.
She wanted to repay him? How did you repay a person for raising your child for you? For loving her like she was his own, for giving everything he had to make her childhood the best he could. All the while, wishing Mertie was there to give him a hand.
How could she think she could repay him for being a friend?
“No repayment.” That was all he could think of to say. There were so many things jumbled around in his head. He didn’t want Mertie’s gratitude. But he didn’t know exactly what he did want. He just...wanted his friend, the friend from childhood, the friend that the years had come between and given them an entirely different perspective on each other and life.
He couldn’t have that back. A person couldn’t go back and get their childhood back again. It just wasn’t done. She had her own life trajectory, and he had his.
“There has to be something. I can pay alimony, only it wouldn’t be called that. Something else.” Her mind seemed to be whirling.
“I don’t want money.” He needed to be firm about that, and he emphasized each word. That was not what he wanted.
There was one thing that she could do, not for him though. For the girl he loved more than anything else in the world beyond Jesus.
“Dabney wants a mother.” There. He threw it out there, knowing that it was the one thing she wouldn’t do. It would destroy everything she had worked for. She wouldn’t want the public to know that she had slept with a man she wasn’t married to, gotten pregnant, and then given the child up while she ran off, abdicating any responsibility at all.
She had asked him to put the baby up for adoption and entrusted him to do it, and he had. Just hadn’t told her that he was the one who adopted her.
“Anything but that,” she said, her eyes wide, her stance frozen, her entire being saying she was affronted and offended and shocked that he would even suggest such a thing.
It figured. The one thing Dabney, and he, wanted more than anything was the one thing she couldn’t give.
“I’m sorry.” Her tone softened, as did the straight line of her body. “It would ruin everything. I mean, not all of my followers would leave. Some people would understand that I made a mistake, years ago, but... I’ve been offered a position, a position that hundreds, if not thousands of women would love to have, and it was offered exclusively to me. It’s huge. Something I absolutely cannot turn down. I would be a fool to do so. It will make my name a household name and elevate my ministry from reaching thousands to reaching millions. Literally. Overnight. The influence that I will have on this country will be almost unheard of. And I can do more for you and Dabney. But I have to be squeaky clean. There can’t be a hint of scandal or trouble in my past. Nothing that would disqualify me from giving advice and teaching the Bible to people. I can’t have the word hypocrite associated with my name at all.”
Garnet watched, meeting her eyes the entire time she spoke. When she finished, he looked down. Those last words, the idea of having “hypocrite” associated with her. Wasn’t that what she was doing right now? By not coming forward, admitting that she had made a mistake, admitting that she had a daughter, admitting that she had given that daughter up for adoption...
Wasn’t trying to hide that, and trying to pretend that none of that had ever happened, wasn’t that the very definition of being a hypocrite?
He pressed his lips closed. Maybe, back when they were teenagers, back when they roamed the beach and the bluffs together, back when he knew her better than he knew himself, he might have pointed that out to her. But now?
“I didn’t have any experience with babies at all,” he started. Not planning on saying anything, but the words just came to him. “She was so tiny. I was scared I was going to break her.”
“I had been shocked at how small she was. I’d never held a newborn before.”
“Oh, did you hold her?” he asked as his eyes slipped back to hers.
She nodded. “She was thirty-six hours old when I appeared on your doorstep. I held her and changed her up until that point.”
“I’d never fed a baby before in my life. That wasn’t too hard. I figured it out. My mom helped me, but there were too many questions here. I had to leave. So I moved out the next day.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head. As far as he knew, she had been holed back up in Pastor Calvin’s home until the end of the summer. He knew she had a job and she was working out of their home. People just didn’t know she was pregnant while she was doing it.
“You left your home,” she said, when he didn’t speak.
“You made it clear that you needed absolute secrecy. I couldn’t stay here. People might put two and two together, although I hadn’t realized you were pregnant until you said it was your baby.”
“I thought about lying about that. But I just couldn’t. I’d like to say that I couldn’t lie, but the truth of the matter is, I couldn’t lie to you.”
That surprised him, but she didn’t see the widening of his eyes, because they were still cast down. He nodded his head slowly instead.
“The first time she got sick, I was in my apartment alone. She coughed, and it felt like she couldn’t get her breath, and it scared me. I thought she was going to die. I ended up in the ER.”
“If I had been with her, it probably would have been just as scary.”
“I was afraid I’d lose her. By then, I loved her more than I love myself, and I would have done anything for her. They just laughed at me, told me to give her some Tylenol, told me where to get a vaporizer, and sent us home. I wanted them to admit her.”
When he looked up, Mertie was staring at him like she’d never seen that side of him. He hadn’t realized he had a side like that or that he could be so scared, so determined to do anything it took in order to save his daughter’s life.
“As she grew, she was quiet, sweet, but she has a stubborn streak, and I knew exactly where she got that.”
“From me.”
He nodded, smiling. Dabney wasn’t like her mother at all other than that stubborn streak that wouldn’t allow her to stop.
“When I was teaching her to ride her bike, she wouldn’t quit. She had fallen, skinning both of her knees. They were bleeding, dripping blood down her leg. But she wouldn’t stop. Absolutely refused to stop picking herself up off the ground, and getting back on that bike, and riding it until she had it mastered. Probably that day, for the first time, I truly saw you.”
“I suppose there are benefits to being stubborn,” she said, sounding subdued.
“Oh, definitely. She doesn’t quit things. She learned to read when she was in preschool, because she wouldn’t stop asking me to tell her what each letter said and then teach her how to put them together into words. Once she realized there was such a thing, night and day she was after me to help her with words, to sound them out, to figure that reading thing out.”
“I guess she gets her intelligence from her father, whoever he is.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said, wondering why Mertie didn’t think she was smart. It was true that he had always gotten better grades in school than she had, but she had common sense and people smarts that he lacked. He would have no idea how to climb up the cliffs, maybe that was part of the reason why he quit. He knew he didn’t have what it took, but she had the intelligence to figure it out. Had the stubbornness to keep going.
“Do you have more stories?” Her words were soft, but there was a pleading in her eyes that Garnet couldn’t resist.
It wasn’t exactly his intention to tell her about Dabney and make her want to meet her, long to be a mother to her, but on the other hand, he loved Dabney and wanted the best for her. And he knew that she wanted to know who her mother was, wanted to know why her mother didn’t love her enough to keep her. No matter how many times Garnet told her that her mother had reasons and would have kept her if she could, he knew it didn’t satisfy her. There was a part of her that felt like there was something wrong with her, or else her mother would have wanted her.
He thought back over the years. He had a million stories. And he loved to talk about his daughter. It was his favorite subject after the Lord. He had a feeling that little snippets of her life would make its way into every sermon he preached. It certainly seemed like it, if this first sermon he was writing was any indication. But what would Mertie like to hear?
“She wants siblings.”
That wasn’t the top of his list of things Mertie would want to know.
“I bet she does. My sisters were what I clung to when we moved to Chicago and I lost you. I don’t know what I would have done without them,” she said. “Part of the reason that I came back to help get my parents’ house in order was because I wanted to have a better relationship with them.”
“She’s lonely, I suppose. I have to work. I wish I didn’t, but I do, and I can’t spend every waking hour with her. She... She’d like to have someone to play with. She’ll be fifteen in August, and she’s been asking me to get married so I can have children with my new wife, and she’ll have babies to watch. She loves kids, loves animals, even reptiles, which... I had to talk her out of the snake that one of her friends wanted to give her.”
“A snake? She definitely doesn’t get that from me.”
“If it breathes, she loves it. Even fish, and in fact, that was one of the earliest things that she ever asked me to do. She wanted to go see the Titanic.”
“The Titanic?”
Mertie wrinkled her nose up, and Garnet pointed. “She does that expression all the time.”
“What?” Mertie said, wrinkling her nose up again.
“That. That expression right there. You look just like her.”
A smile spread across Mertie’s face, and she was quiet for a moment before she said, “Why did she want to see the Titanic?”
“She didn’t see any fish in the pictures she saw in a magazine. She wanted to go down and see where the fish were. She thought they were shy.”
“Really?” Mertie said, looking like she was charmed.
It had been charming. Especially considering that Dabney had only been maybe five years old.
“She was never interested in big crowds and the popular things all the other kids wanted to see. She wanted to go to Alaska so she could see a polar bear.”
“Did you explain to her that polar bears are dangerous and that humans aren’t supposed to be interacting with them?”
“I gave her an article to read. She figured that out for herself. But she did have a thing for bears for a really long time. Probably from about seven to eleven years old. In fact, her bedroom was decorated with bears. And not cute ones like koala bears or panda bears. She actually found a grizzly bear rug at an old estate auction we went to. Talked me into buying it. It was filthy and sold for a dollar. How could I say no when that was all they wanted for it?”
He laughed. “It cost five hundred bucks to get the rug cleaned. And that wasn’t even a professional cleaning, that was just cleaning it up enough to bring into the house. She hung it on her wall.”
“On her wall?” Mertie was totally impressed and aghast at the same time. That was the reaction of everyone who heard about that.
Then he realized maybe Mertie didn’t know. “I homeschooled her from the beginning.”
“Oh.” Mertie’s mouth closed, and she looked smug. “That explains why she’s so odd.”
He didn’t think that she meant that as an insult, but honestly, one never really knew.
Homeschoolers were odd. In a good way, to his way of thinking, but the rest of the world often thought that they didn’t fit in. And it’s true, they didn’t. But Christians weren’t supposed to fit in with the rest of the world, so homeschooling was actually perfect. It produced children that didn’t worship at the world’s altar. The problem was, homeschooled children were still human, and some rebelled, because they didn’t like the feeling of not fitting in. They forgot that this world was not their home, that they were just passing through, that to feel at home in the world, to love it, was to not love God, according to the Bible.
“I’m seeing second-generation homeschoolers in a lot of my meetings. People who were homeschooled and are homeschooling their children. It’s...a movement. And while I don’t think that you can generalize any group, if there is one group that really understands that the things society loves, the things of the world, the bright and shiny toys that are everywhere around us, are not the things we should be focusing our eyes, attention, or money on, it’s that group.”
He nodded, knowing that generalizations were dangerous, and he could think of a hundred examples that were not true, but also knowing that if a person wanted to not be in the world and wanted to raise their children to not love the world, homeschooling was probably their best option.