Beyond The Storm Part 17

Directly in front of her, Bob Ray and Heather were sitting together. Hearing Justin find the tissues, Bob Ray reached down and grabbed several and handed one to Heather and one to Selma. One he kept for himself and proceeded to loudly blow his nose.

Pastor Caldecott turned to Chaz. "Chaz, you and your bride have made it no secret that you and Kaylee have waited to give the gift of your virtue to each other for after the wedding. For this obedience, I believe the Lord will bless you. And for this reason, I'll make every effort to keep what follows short and sweet."

Laughter rippled through the audience as Chaz winked at Kaylee. Bob Ray slid his arm around Heather and pulled her close and kissed her temple.

"And so, Chaz, please repeat after me. I, Chaz Edwards, do take you, Kaylee Johnson, to be my lawfully wedded wife-"

Bob Ray's expression was solemn as he silently mouthed the vows along with Chaz into Heather's ear. "I, Bob Ray Lathrop, do take you, Heather Bancroft, to be my lawfully wedded wife . . ."

Abigail felt her eyes welling up all over again and this time, Justin grinned and handed her the entire box of tissue. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter.

". . . to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this day forward until death do us part."

Kaylee repeated her vows next, her voice as clear and strong as Chaz's had been. "Chaz, I give you this ring as a symbol of my love and faithfulness. As I place it on your finger, I commit the rest of my life to you."

"Do you, Chaz," Pastor Caldecott asked, "agree to wear this ring as a reminder of the vows you have spoken today, your wedding day?"

"I do."

When they had both agreed and the rings were in place, Pastor Caldecott turned to the book of Ruth in his Bible and read from the first chapter: "Wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your G.o.d will be my G.o.d."

Eyes s.h.i.+ning, Heather smiled at the earnest expression in Bob Ray's red-rimmed eyes as she whispered the words along with Chaz and Kaylee. After a beautiful prayer and a song by a soloist, the couple lit the unity candle, and Pastor Caldecott happily proclaimed, "By the powers vested in me by the laws of this great state, I now p.r.o.nounce that you are husband and wife. What G.o.d has joined together, let no one put asunder. Chaz, you may now kiss your wife as often as you like for the rest of your lives." A happy whoop went up as Chaz swept Kaylee into his arms, bent her over backwards, and planted a joyful kiss on her lips.

"It is my honor to present to you for the first time ever, Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Edwards! Please join us across the street at the Rawston Community Center for the reception." Wild applause roared across the room as Chaz set his wife back on her feet and escorted her down the aisle.

The reception was even more fun, if possible, without the benefit of electricity. Held in the Rawston Community Center's enormous community room, Bunsen-burners kept the food piping hot and all of the tables had candles in the centerpieces. Someone had set patio torches up in iron floor stands and decorated them with ribbon and flowers. The string quartet traded in their various instruments for guitars and drums and Chaz pulled a reluctant Kaylee out on the floor for their first dance as man and wife. There was plenty of teasing between the two. Chaz spent considerable time limping, which had Kaylee going after his feet on purpose. Finally, her father cut in on the fun and the two of them danced off while Chaz hobbled over to his laughing mother. As plates were cleared, people filtered to the dance floor to dance in the twinkling candlelight. Standing, Justin extended his hand to Abigail.

"Dance?" Eagerly, she nodded and allowed herself be pulled through the candlelit throng. "Just like starlight, huh?" he murmured.

"Better almost." She nodded. It was absolutely enchanting. Everyone agreed, the power going out had only added to the beauty of the evening. "I can't believe it's only been a week since I danced with you the first time."

"I know. This is gonna sound like a really bad pick-up line, but I feel like I've known you all my life."

"Me, too. Weird, huh? Okay. Since we are old friends now, can I ask you a personal question?" Abigail asked and angled a mischievous smile up at him.

Justin tilted his head toward her. "Shoot."

"I couldn't help but notice when I cut your hair that you clean up rather nicely."

A crooked grin tugged at his lips. "And?"

"Well, the wedding got me to wondering how you managed to avoid getting married and having kids, like your brothers did, for so long."

"What, so long?" He pulled a funny face. "I only just turned thirty."

"In ten short years, you'll be forty."

"Wow! When you put it that way it makes me sound old or something." He laughed. "Seriously?"

"Yeah. Seriously." Abigail shrugged. "I really don't get it. You've got all the Boy Scout virtues, plus you're hard-working and good-looking . . . I mean, I don't want to stick my nose where it doesn't belong, and you can tell me to mind my own business but, like Selma says, time is short, and I figure, if you want to know something you should just ask. So. I want to know. Why haven't you allowed some filly to la.s.so you into the barn?"

A half-smile crossed his lips as he ruminated over her question. "A bunch of reasons, really, but they all boil down to one thing."

"What one thing?"

"The thing on the list."

"The list? What kind of list?"

"The list of things I am looking for in a wife."

"And you haven't found someone who is everything you're looking for yet?"

His shadowed gaze found hers. "Maybe. I'm not exactly sure."

Abigail swallowed at the suddenly serious look in his eyes. "What is on the list?"

"Well, she has to be at least 5'6"."

Abigail grinned. "What else?"

"I like crazy, curly hair. And green eyes. I insist on a great sense of humor and someone who will be willing to cut loose and just have fun. But at the same time, she needs to be enterprising and a hard worker. I am also looking for a loving spirit, a soft heart, a tough cookie, a helpmate, a best friend, and one other, extremely important thing. In fact, to be honest? It is the only thing."

Breathlessly, Abigail looked at him. "What?"

"The woman I marry will just know." A new song began and Selma tapped Justin on the shoulder to cut in, leaving Abigail to ponder his mysterious words.

20.

The weeks that followed Chaz and Kaylee's wedding pa.s.sed in a flurry of activities for Selma's household, interspersed with time spent together in the evenings working on the quilt . . . and healing. By day, Bob Ray, Justin, Abigail, and Heather volunteered for various clean up and recycling task forces. By Monday, it was clear that everyone who could be rescued had been, and when at last all rescue efforts had been called off, it became a gut-wrenching search for bodies. The list of deceased continued to grow and the cost of the damage mounted, but there was progress, too. An army of heavy equipment and their operators descended upon Rawston and slowly cleared the debris away. Temporary housing arrived in the form of trailers. Government a.s.sistance trickled in and insurance adjusters were overworked and overwhelmed.

It was also clear that Rawston would be digging out from under for years to come.

Even so, the beleaguered community was enjoying a spirit of camaraderie and brotherly love that most American cities would never know. The storm brought out the very best in people, and more than one Rawstonian was heard to say they'd had no idea just how rich they were in love, until they lost everything they owned.

In as little as two weeks after the storm, Danny's quilt top had been pieced and sewn together, and Selma asked Justin and Bob Ray to carry the old quilting frame that Clyde had built up from the bas.e.m.e.nt. After the dinner dishes were done that evening, everyone helped to drag the heavy oak kitchen table up against the far wall. Then, they pulled Clyde's frame into place and Selma loaded the quilt top together with a thin layer of batting and the quilt's back onto the roller arms. The atmosphere was party-like as everyone dragged chairs around the frame for Selma's most popular lessons on "Hand Quilting" and "Tying Your Quilt."

Abigail settled in next to Justin as they listened to Selma teach and watched her work with rapt attention. It was just as if she'd stepped backwards into another century, she thought, reveling in the simple pleasures that her new life offered. She wasn't the only person who was eager to thread their needles and start quilting the beautiful piece. They were all fairly giddy with antic.i.p.ation.

"I'm going to ask the girls to do the needlework, and you boys to do the tying," Selma explained. "Tying takes strong hands. Watch, while I demonstrate the double-twist square knot." Once she'd guided them through several knots, Selma hovered behind Bob Ray as he and Justin loaded large quilting needles with heavy thread and plunged them into the dots she'd drawn. The elderly woman's small hand rested lightly on Bob Ray's broad shoulder as both he and Justin grunted and fought to get their needles through the heavy layers. But the needle was slippery and unwieldy in their large, unskilled fingers.

"If that's too hard for you, Selma could probably help you, Bob Ray," Heather goaded and bit her lip to keep from laughing.

Eyeing her crossly, Bob Ray snorted. Justin did, too.

"You still struggle with arthritis in your fingers, huh Aunt Selma?" Abigail asked innocently, after Selma had successfully demonstrated another tie.

At that, Justin got up and left. No one said anything at first, and then Abigail ventured in a hushed tone, "Do you think he's mad?"

"Gracious, that would be odd now, wouldn't it?" Selma said, clearly befuddled. "I've never had a student just up and leave without a word like that."

"I hope he comes back," Bob Ray said, still grappling with the slick needle. His tongue peeked out from between his teeth and his muscles bulged. "I could use the help."

Heather giggled. "You don't need the gym anymore, honey. Just look at how you're getting a good workout yanking on that needle and getting all sweaty like that."

"Shut up," he snapped, but he was laughing as he said it. Everyone giggled.

Justin returned a second later holding up two pairs of pliers. "A man's tools are needed for a man's job," he announced with a grin and tossed a pair to Bob Ray who pulled them out of the air like the star football player he was. For the men, the quilt tying job suddenly became less of a battle.

"Thank you, Justin. For a minute there, we thought you'd given up."

"And miss the fun?" He seemed truly surprised that Selma would even suggest such a thing as he took his place and winked at Abigail. "Never."

The women all exchanged broad smiles. No one doubted that the men were enjoying the quilting bee as much as the women were.

Over the evenings that followed, the chairs around the quilting frame became the household gathering place to sew and tie, to talk and to drink coffee and to share the day's activities with each other. As one day blended into another, the quilt, as well as their lives, began to take shape. Pieces had been picked up and put together, and the beauty began to emerge.

Once the rebuilding efforts began, Justin had more work than he could handle most days, which was good because it served to distract him from his losses-most especially, Danny. Justin's J.G. Construction Company not only had to hire Bob Ray on as an a.s.sistant, but a half-dozen carpenters as well, because Justin had contracted so many rebuilding projects. Justin and Bob Ray's first team effort was a run up to Souths.h.i.+re to buy a company truck. For both men the work was rewarding, but Bob Ray felt a special sense of purpose.

"I think perhaps the Lord blesses those who make an effort to live according to His will," Selma told Bob Ray one night as he sat alone in the kitchen with her, eating a sandwich as she quilted his and Heather's quilt blocks.

"Totally." Bob Ray bobbed his head into his napkin as he wiped his mouth. "You know, Aunt Selma, I never was much of a pray-er, until I found myself crammed into a refrigerator under a bar in the middle of a tornado. But something huge happened to me then. I can't explain it. It was like suddenly, kablam-o. I could see! Life was like . . . a twinkling. Just like Danny always said. And here I was, about ready to take that big ride into the great beyond without knowing . . ." his voice cracked with the emotion that was so ever present in all of them these days, ". . . without knowing . . . where I was going. My mama used to talk about h.e.l.l and how it was a real place and everything, and I always just sort of blew that off as a myth until I looked it in the eye, you know? And," Bob Ray hung his head, "I didn't want to go there."

Selma placed her hand on his wrist. "Amen," she whispered.

Abigail set up a mini hair salon in Selma's laundry room and set back to work servicing her old clients and adding a steady stream of new. Hair, it seemed, didn't stop growing simply because a storm had come to town. Business, if not exactly booming, was at least steady. One afternoon Abigail was between clients and wandered into the kitchen to scare up some lunch and found Selma quilting. "Beautiful, Auntie Sel," she murmured, as she watched Selma draw the thread into perfect rows of perfectly s.p.a.ced st.i.tches. "Jen is going to love this."

"I hope it helps her heal." Selma's smile was wistful. "It certainly helped me."

"Really? How has it helped you this time?"

"I love to see the ways the Lord finds to use us. Each of us, like Danny here," she pointed out the bright center patch, "is the center of our own quilt. Our lives are made up of bits and pieces, some good, some bad. And isn't it amazing how G.o.d, in all His infinite wisdom, can use even our mistakes and what we might consider chaos, to His glory? Take the storm, for example." Selma ran out of thread and tied a knot as she ruminated. "Consider how it revealed things to each of us that would have otherwise remained hidden and left us in our ignorance if the winds had not blown them into view."

Abigail watched her aunt's hands shake with the benign tremor of age as she snipped off a new length of thread and began another arduous row of st.i.tches. The fabric, each piece so different than the next, all pointed to Danny's willingness to share his life and love of Jesus so unselfishly with others.

"Yes," Abigail finally said at length and sighed. "I see."

These days, the house was also ringing with the shouts of small children as Elsa and Heather landed a plumb babysitting job for some working moms who'd lost their day care in the storm. The money they made not only filled the cookie jar; it helped to fill the pantry. When they weren't caring for small children, they could be found working together with Guadalupe and Selma doing housework and planting a big garden. But in between these efforts, the teenaged Elsa had time to carefully work st.i.tches into the fabric of her own square, as Rawston High School had closed for the year.

"I almost went outside, on prom night," she confided in Justin one evening, when it was just the two of them sitting in the quiet kitchen after everyone else had quit st.i.tching and gone off to watch a movie in the next room.

"Really?" Justin reclined, shoulder blades to chair back and rubbed his sore fingers. "What stopped you?"

"Tyler, you know, Brooke's brother?"

"The skater?"

"Yeah. He was looking for his sister, Brooke. I told him that I saw her go outside . . . with . . ." Elsa stopped sewing for a moment and turned her limpid eyes on Justin, "you know, Nick. Tyler was going to follow her out there . . . but, I knew that Brooke wanted to talk to Nick. Alone. Because she wanted to tell him . . ." Tears spiked her long, heavy, dark lashes, ". . . she wanted to tell him that she loved him, you know? So, I asked Tyler to dance so that he wouldn't bug her. But, if I hadn't done that, maybe she wouldn't have been hurt. Ah . . . ah . . . and Nick . . . you know?" Elsa dipped her head and the sounds that came from behind the quilt were those of grief.

"Or," Justin said softly and patted her back, "maybe Nick wouldn't ever have known she loved him, and maybe Tyler would have died, too." Elsa's sob came on a quick intake of air and her unsteady smile was appreciative. "You-sweet girl- may have saved Tyler's life with your bad dancing self."

She giggled and sniffed. "Danny tried to teach me to waltz. But it was so lame."

"Danny was lame sometimes. That's why we loved him, huh?"

"It's why I did. Yeah."

As one day melted into the next, Selma claimed she couldn't remember ever feeling so vitalized. And happy. And needed. And . . . blessed. A full house was her bliss, but Abigail knew that her aunt was not the only one benefiting from the communal living arrangement. For now and into the foreseeable future they all were not only grateful for a roof over their heads, but for the new beginning that the arrangement afforded them all. And for the comfort they offered each other as they began the difficult healing process.

The work on the quilt redoubled.

Especially now that Jen had called Abigail and let her know that she'd set the date for Danny's memorial. She'd decided it should be held in a week and a half, at the Rawston Christian Church on the first Sat.u.r.day afternoon in June. Jen told her that she'd organized some music and a number of speakers, but she got the impression that Abigail and Heather had something up their sleeves and left a slot in the program for them. Would they be ready in only eleven days? Would fifteen minutes be enough? Fifteen minutes. Long after she hung up, Abigail pondered. Fifteen minutes to pay tribute to a man like Danny? It would take a lifetime to do him justice. On the other hand, fifteen minutes in front of an audience? Seemed like a lifetime to simply point at squares in a quilt.

After dinner had been eaten and the kitchen cleaned the night that Jen had called, Abigail joined Justin on Selma's sprawling wrap-around porch. Years ago Clyde had hung two wooden swings by chains from the porch ceiling, at opposite ends of the house. With Rawhide snoozing at their feet, Abigail and Justin sat drinking iced-tea in one swing while Heather and Bob Ray giggled and snuggled in the other.

The pink-orange twilight grew purple and closed in on them, surrounding Rawston and shutting out the rest of the world in a velvety blanket of crickets' song. It was rumored that the rate the insects chirped could tell the temperature. Abigail didn't know about that, but it was very warm and the steady music was peaceful. Through one screened window, the strains of Elsa and Robbie watching a movie in the living room filtered out, while the low conversation of Selma and Guadalupe working on the quilt wafted out another "Jen called me today. About the memorial service," Abigail said. The sweat on her gla.s.s began to drip so she touched it to her knee where it left a perfectly round watermark on the denim. Even her gla.s.s seemed to be sorrowing. In her peripheral vision she could see Justin's head dip under the heavy news.

His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed and nodded. The grief over losing his best friend was a daily struggle. "Today must have been her day for taking care of some business. She called me, too."

"What about?"

He trailed a drop of condensation on his gla.s.s of iced-tea with a fingertip as he spoke. "She wants to talk to me about buying the lumberyard from her."

"Are you thinking about doing that?" Could he be considering staying here in Rawston? She pressed her damp gla.s.s to her throbbing heart.

"I don't know." Brows lifted, he shrugged. "With the rebuilding needs of this town, it would be a lot of work. I'd need help. Could be prosperous. I'm praying."

Praying? What did that mean? What if G.o.d said no? What then? There was so much he wasn't saying. So much that was connected to his feelings for Danny. She didn't feel comfortable pressing him, so she instead s.h.i.+fted her gaze to the spooled rail that surrounded Selma's porch. The floorboards creaked as Bob Ray and Heather slipped un.o.btrusively into the house, leaving them alone.

After a long moment Justin's eyes slid closed and he said, "I miss him. Danny should be there, running the lumberyard. Doesn't feel right, Jen and me . . . talking about me taking over something that he'd worked so hard to build."

"Yeah. I know. But I can't think of anyone he'd rather have had take over."

"I still can't believe he's gone." Chin to chest, Justin looked sideways at her. "Did you know," he paused and wet his lips, "that the last conversation Danny and I had was about you?"

"Why?" Abigail squirmed around to better see him.

He attempted to curtail his grin. "I wondered what you looked like. I didn't know that I had just danced with you, the night before."

Abigail rolled her eyes. "What'd he say?"

He took a sip of his tea, then chuckled. "Something about a tall Tinker Bell."