“People told my father he should put one of those ‘Runaway Wife’ ads in the paper, that they would even put together a collection for a reward for her safe return, but he declined. He said that if she really wanted to leave, he wasn’t going to try to hold her here against her will. But it deeply embarrassed him. I think he felt like as the spiritual leader of this town, he was supposed to exemplify the ideal family structure, and her leaving ruined that image.”
Cora was a great listener. She didn’t interrupt, nodding in the appropriate places, her brow furrowing as if she were imagining the movie playing in her head as Roy retold the story.
“I think that’s why he was always so hard on me,” Roy continued. “He had to keep a firm hand on me, raise me to be the good son of a pastor, to prove to everyone that he could do it alone, and that our family hadn’t completely fallen apart.”
“That sounds like a lot of pressure to put on a kid,” Cora said, which surprised Roy. That was the first time she had ever said anything that sounded as if she were considering his perspective at the expense of his father.
“It was,” Roy admitted. “But maybe I shouldn’t have left. Because of me, he had to deal twice with the pain of someone he loved walking out on him.”
“He never stopped loving you, though,” Cora said soothingly. “And I think in the end, he understood.”
Roy looked up at Cora, her blue eyes so full of compassion and understanding. He realized that this was the first time he had ever talked about his mother, or the pressure he felt from his father, to any other soul.
The wind blew a strand of hair in front of her eyes, and Roy lifted his hand to brush it away before catching himself. He felt like they had made a connection, a bond, after their heartfelt talk, and reaching for her felt as natural as breathing.
But the truth was, Cora was engaged to be married to someone else, and no matter how either of them felt about that, he had to keep himself in check. He lowered his hand before it made contact with her face, and walked back toward the church to finish his work before he made a mistake that they would both regret.
Chapter Fifteen
After that first afternoon she had lunch with Roy, Cora developed a routine for the rest of the week. She would wake up in the morning and prepare breakfast for her father, already excited for it to be noon. As soon as her father left for work, she would wash up and change into one of her favorite dresses, running a brush through her long hair and pinching her cheeks to add a flush of color. Then she would get to work preparing Roy’s lunch and coffee—making sure to add the egg to the coffee grounds before boiling it, just the way Roy liked it.
Just before noon she would rush to the church, where Roy was always so hard at work that she had to call his name sometimes two or three times to break his attention. Sometimes he was working on the roof, and other times he was kneeling inside the church repairing the floor.
He would break for lunch, and they would share a meal and conversation. Sometimes their talks would be serious and other times they would be lighthearted, and each time they would grow to understand each other better and end the afternoon feeling like the lunch hour went by too quickly.
On Friday of their first week of daily lunches, Roy was standing on a ladder, intently focused on applying a fresh paint of white coat to the exterior of the church. Instead of immediately announcing her presence, she leaned against a nearby tree, her head tilted and resting against the trunk, and watched him work. His eyes were intent and focused on his task in a way that made the long, jagged scar beneath his left eye more visible.
The scar gave his face the appearance of being tough and hardened, but his gentle eyes served as the perfect contrast. With each rise and fall of the paintbrush, Cora noticed the muscles in his strong arms flex, which made her feel warm and tingly inside. She imagined that she would always feel safe in the presence of arms like that to protect her.
Roy noticed Cora watching before she had a chance to call his name like she usually did, and her face flushed with embarrassment that he had seen her staring at him. But Roy didn’t seem to mind; when he saw her, his face broke out into a grin. He wiped the brush once more on the building to remove the excess paint and laid it on the edge of the ladder before climbing down and joining her.
Cora’s knees felt weak as she watched Roy stride toward her, limping just slightly in the way that was his normal gait. His face glistened with the sweat that came from hard work in the sun. He wore dark trousers and a loose-fitting, long-sleeved work shirt that had become more brown than white from the dust and dirt. He had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, and Cora had to fight hard not to imagine what it might be like to be held in those strong arms.
“I’ll need to wash my hands in the creek before I take that from you,” Roy said, holding up his paint-smeared hands.
Cora teased him by taking a step back. “I better keep my distance. I don’t want you to accidentally get paint on one of my good dresses.”
Roy grinned mischievously and pretended to reach for her arm to smear paint on her. Cora squealed and took off running in the direction of the creek that ran just beyond the trees along the backside of the church while Roy playfully chased her.
Once they arrived at the waterbed, Cora sat down on a nearby log, a different one than their usual log nearby the church, while Roy crouched near the waterbed and rinsed his hands. When he finished, he walked over to where Cora was sitting and shook his hands in her direction, spraying her with bits of residual water.
“Hey!” Cora protested, but she was giggling, which made the grin on his face deepen, highlighting again the deep scar beneath his left eye.
“Do you mind if I ask you what happened there?” Cora asked as Roy sat down and opened his linens packed with sandwich rolls. Without thinking, she reached out and ran traced her finger along the raised scar line, which had faded to be nearly the same pink color as his cheeks when they were flushed in the sun. Once she realized what she was doing, she quickly pulled her hand away and folded it in her lap.
Roy didn’t seem to mind. He just chuckled and answered, “Iggy happened.”
Cora gasped. “Not Iggy!” Over the week, she had gotten to know Roy’s gentle horse almost as much as she had gotten to know Roy, sometimes feeding him bites of apple while she waited on Roy to wrap up his current task and be ready for lunch.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Roy said, and he delved into the story of Iggy becoming spooked by distant gunshots, inadvertently bucking him off.
“I landed all wrong on the ground and broke my leg, and then when a second gunshot sounded in the distance, Iggy became spooked all over again and kicked me in the face,” Roy explained, running his finger along the length of his scar just as Cora had.
“Thank God you weren’t killed!” Cora exclaimed. She remembered a few years back when her father dealt with a situation in which an older gentleman of Lakewood got kicked in the head by his horse, and he didn’t survive the head injury.
“Thank God, indeed,” Roy admitted. That was the first time she had ever heard Roy acknowledge God in the same way she did, and it encouraged her that maybe his heart was softening toward Him. “I got this nasty scar, and I’ll walk with a limp for the rest of my life since the bone in my leg never healed correctly, but I survived, and now I get to have these lunches with you.”
Cora’s heart skipped a beat at those words. Surely, he didn’t mean them the way they sounded; he was just expressing gratitude for not having lost his life in that terrible accident. Nevertheless, she already knew she would fall asleep that night with those words repeating in her head and covering her with warmth:I get to have these lunches with you.
