“I’ve known Grant all my life,” Emily said with a hug. “The unhappy, guarded, perpetually lonely boy who buried his thoughts and his feeling so deep inside himself that they were eating him alive has become this amazing guy who has given his whole heart away and trusted you to hold on to it forever.”
“He was always just a diamond in the rough waiting for someone to polish him up,” Hailey joked.
“He’s gonna be okay,” Emily said, squeezing Hailey’s hand.
“I will hold on to his heart forever,” Hailey said confidently. She lowered her head, “but I’d really like to be able to hold his hand too. You know?”
Randy stood by Grant’s bed watching his son’s bare chest rise and fall. Nora, asleep on a small cot by the window, awoke to watch her husband bow his head and softly whisper a prayer for their sleeping child.
She waited until he was done and sat up, pulling her blanket over her shoulders. The room was perpetually chilly, but, though her limbs were cold, her heart was warm. She stood and walked to join her husband, easily situating herself where she fit like a puzzle piece tucked under his arm.
They stood for a long moment, watching Grant sleep. Then they walked over to the window where night was slowly becoming day.
“Sit down,” Nora told Randy. “There is something I’ve been meaning to say to you, yet we always seem to be interrupted by nurses or test results or phone calls or a host of other things that I am grateful for.”
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you too,” Randy agreed.
Then, as if on cue, a nurse walked in. She smiled at Randy and Nora, quickly attended to Grant’s IV and was gone in a flash.
“You first,” Randy smiled.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the journey that brought me back here,” Nora said. “Though the circumstances that sent me running back here were certainly something I would erase if I had the power to rewrite history, I think this trip was important for me in a number of ways. For a long time, I questioned why I ran back here at all. But, I think it was all part of God’s plan for my life…for our lives. I had to come back here, to start over, to get back to my roots…to remember my true love.”
The tips of Randy’s ears went fire red, but Nora quickly took his hands and gave him a reassuring shake of her head. “Randy,” she said almost scoldingly. “I have never been in love with Jack. It’s always been you. I wasn’t talking about him. Coming back here reminded me of the most simple truth there is…what happened in our marriage wasn’t that we stopped loving each other…it was that we lost our foundation. Randy, the day I married you, we were a couple who promised before God and our families and friends to make Him the center of our marriage and our family. Being here reminded me of that. At some point during our marriage it became all about us and our problems!”
Randy stared into the tired eyes of his wife, eyes suddenly filled with a renewed purpose. “Randy, real love matures over time…but without a solid foundation, problems and tragedies and daily hardships start to weight too heavily.” Nora glanced over at Grant asleep in his bed and then back at her husband. “You are the only man I want, the only man I have ever wanted, but you, nor my children or my grandchildren, can come first in my life anymore…it’s not fair to any of you.”
Randy kissed the side of Nora’s head. “Remember when we used to pray together?”
Nora nodded.
“Why did we ever stop?” Randy asked.
“The same reason that a lot of people do,” Nora gulped. “Our society runs at a breakneck pace. There just isn’t time for everything! Between your job and raising kids and dealing with every uncertainty that both of those things constantly presented, it was one of the things that just seemed easy to ignore…”
Randy nodded his head; his conversation with Hailey several weeks before replayed in his mind. “You know, in a lot of ways, Hailey reminds me of you when we first met.”
Nora walked over to stand next to Grant’s bed. She glanced over her shoulder at Randy, who had followed her. “One day I hope that you and I get to sit them down and show them, by our example, what a marriage should be.”
Randy put his arms around his wife. “I think I have said more prayers in the last couple months than I have in years, and I know that’s not a good thing…but you have to start somewhere, right? Like, when you fall off the horse, you’ve got to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back on.”
Nora smiled as she kissed her husband’s cheek. She held up her left hand to reveal her wedding ring. “It’s a circle with no end. You and I are forever. But God’s got to be the center because we’re not strong enough to make it work without Him.”
Randy looked at Grant, his breaths labored. “We’ve experienced more than our share of hard times over the years, but God sure has blessed us. Our kids turned out pretty well, huh?” Tears formed in Randy’s eyes. “Is this…do you think this is…”
“I don’t know,” Nora shook her head. “I don’t know if Grant getting sick is God’s way of getting our attention, but He’s used it to do just that.”
“Do you think if we tell Him the kick in the pants has our attention that we can take our boy home?” Randy gulped.
Nora smiled empathetically as she rested her cheek against Randy’s chest. “I don’t know God’s plan or His timeline for any of this, but I do know that He will take care of my baby…one way or another.”
“He’s taking care of Ike,” Randy nodded confidently.
“He blessed us with Eisenhower for eighteen years,” Nora agreed. “What a precious, precious gift that was…and what an even more precious gift to know that the day He took our sweet boy back home with Him, He took him to a place so much more wonderful than the home we could give him here.”
“And here we are again,” Randy sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, Nora; I find incredible solace in knowing that when I couldn’t get to my son amidst those flames, when I couldn’t be the earthly father he deserved that his Heavenly Father was there to cradle him in his arms and carry him away to his eternal resting place. But, Nora, I just don’t want to believe that a father is supposed to have to bury his children. That is totally opposite of the way it is supposed to be. When I die, my kids are all supposed to be at my funeral saying nice things about what a devoted father and grandfather I was. I gave a eulogy for one of my sons…” Randy stopped, tears flooding his eyes, “I want this kid to give mine.”
Grant and Hailey sat side-by-side on the floor, their books propped on the coffee table, Hailey jotting answers down in her vocabulary workbook, and Grant filling out answers to his second, make-up, calculus test of the evening. He tossed it aside and reached for the next sheet of paper.
“Are you kidding me?” Hailey laughed, looking up from her workbook.
“Only one more assignment to go, and I am all caught up. You can turn this folder in to Principal Jordan in the morning,” Grant shrugged.
Hailey frowned. “I wish you could come to school with me.”
Grant shook his head as he skimmed the words on the page in front of him. “I wish I could too, Baby, but it has been confirmed that the good people of Hope Hull High, as I suspected all along…have cooties.”
Hailey laughed as she kissed Grant’s cheek.
He turned to face her. “One kiss on the lips?” he asked.
“That’s against the rules,” Hailey grinned.
“Fine then,” Grant turned his head. “I have a paper to write anyway.”
