Showers in Season (14 page)

Brenda and Cathy were already on the porch when Tory launched across the yard. A cool breeze whipped up from the valley, teasing and ruffling her hair, but it did nothing to quell her anger. The life she had known was coming quickly to an end, and she had no power to stop it.

Both women saw the distress on Tory’s face and reached out to hug her.

“How are you doing, honey?” Brenda asked.

“Fine,” Tory lied.

“How’s Barry?” Cathy asked.

Tory shook her head. She couldn’t make herself answer the question.

“Want to talk?” Brenda whispered.

Tory shook her head and swiped at the tears on her face. “Not now. Just read me Sylvia’s e-mail. I think she sent me a copy but I haven’t had time to turn on my computer.”

Reluctantly, Brenda began to read, and Tory welcomed the chance to think about problems other than her own. Sylvia was suffering a trial, and she had given them a way to help.

When they had finished reading, Cathy’s eyes were glowing. “Well, now we know what we can do,” she said, as if they’d all been looking for new endeavors. “We can have a clothing drive. Heck, everybody gives away their old clothes. All we have to do is get people to clean out their closets.”

“How would we get them to Sylvia?” Brenda asked.

“I don’t know,” Cathy said. “But my church would love to help Sylvia, since she went there all her life, and as big as it is, I’d bet
somebody
could donate the use of a plane.”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Brenda said.

Cathy started rolling up her sleeves, as if she was ready to start work here and now. “It’ll be fun, knowing we’re helping Sylvia in some way. But Tory, you don’t have to help if you don’t want to.”

“Why not?” Tory asked with dull eyes. “It’s not like I can do anything to solve my own problems. I might as well be doing something for someone else. I was just thinking that some of Spencer’s old clothes might fit the little girl with Sylvia.”

“Good idea,” Brenda said. “But are you sure you won’t need them for the baby?”

Tory’s face slackened. “No, it’s a girl. I’ll keep Britty’s things for her.”

“A little girl,” Brenda whispered with awe. “I forgot you told us that. How wonderful.”

Tory looked at her feet and nodded. They both stared quietly at her for a moment, neither knowing what to say. “Tory, are you sure you’re all right?” Cathy asked again.

“Yeah,” she said. “As all right as I can be, under the circumstances.” She looked up at Cathy, seeking a way to change the subject. “So when do we get started?”

“Tomorrow,” Cathy said. “I’ll tell Steve tonight and get him involved, and he’ll have flyers printed and distributed by morning. The man’s amazing. And he has a heart as big as Survey Mountain.”

Tory smiled. She loved watching Cathy’s romance develop. “So, how are things with you two?”

“Pretty…fabulous, actually. We would have gone out tonight, but I keep having to go back to the clinic to take care of the million-dollar dog.”

“The what?” Brenda asked.

“This poodle that got hit by a car the other day. He had about a one-percent chance of pulling through, even with all the best technology. If there’s ever been such a thing as a canine ICU, I’ve got one set up at my clinic now. I had to rent all this extra equipment. It’s costing his owner a fortune, but she’s willing to pay whatever it takes to keep him alive. And if he lives, he may never walk again…”

Something inside Tory snapped as Cathy’s words sank in. She couldn’t explain the unmitigated rage that began to rise inside her. A dog was being rescued with every resource available, while Tory’s own husband was lobbying for the quick, easy death of their child? “Unbelievable,” she said.

“What? The cost or the effort?”

“Both.” She got to her feet, trembling. “This much energy can go into saving a dog, but when it’s a human who’s in jeopardy, the doctors are so quick to suggest the easiest options.” She touched her temple with a trembling hand. “You know, I hate that word,” she bit out. “
Options.
It sounds so sterile. Did you use that word with the dog’s owner, Cathy?”

Cathy’s face fell, as if she’d been wrongly rebuked. “Well, I don’t know. I think I told her what could be done…”

Tory’s eyes stung with tears, and her lips stretched thin across her lips. “And the poodle’s owner thought it was worth it. Spend the money, utilize the resources, take the little paralyzed animal home and love him no matter what shape he’s in, no matter what he can
contribute
, no matter what his potential may ever be, this…this
poodle
who is so wanted!” Blood pumped furiously through her face, punctuating each word with her own fury.

Cathy and Brenda both stared up at her, stricken and speechless.

“It kills me,” Tory went on. “I’m carrying a
human being
, and my husband thinks she’s not even as valuable as that poodle in your clinic!”

Cathy swallowed. “I shouldn’t have brought it up, Tory. I’m so insensitive.”

“No, you’re not,” Tory wept. She walked down the porch steps and stood in the grass, looking furiously up at the stars. Finally, she turned around. “You’re the one keeping the poodle alive. You’ve assigned value to that life, even if it isn’t human. They fight for whales, and baby seals, and tuna, for heaven’s sake. I just don’t understand how people could assign
less
value to a little baby…”

Brenda looked heartbroken as she got out of her chair and came down the steps. She reached for Tory, and Tory went into her arms. Helplessly, Cathy got up and joined in the hug.

“What are we gonna do without Sylvia?” Tory asked.

Brenda pulled back and wiped her own face. “We’re not going to do without her,” she said. “She’s still one of us.”

“I just want to talk to her,” Tory said in a high-pitched voice. “I want to tell her about the baby. I want to ask her what to do about Barry.”

“Well, I’m no Sylvia,” Brenda said. “But I know where she gets her wisdom. We could go to the same source tonight, Tory.”

“You mean pray?”

Brenda smiled. “Yeah, we could pray. Take all these things to God. He’s the only one who can help, anyway.”

Together, the three neighbors spent the next hour talking to the Lord, pouring out their hearts for Tory’s and Sylvia’s problems.

When Tory finally went home that night, she felt calmer, and thought that she and Barry might be able to navigate their way through these decisions now. But Barry was already in the basement. She went to the steps and creaked down them, crossed the concrete floor to the couch. He was already sound asleep, fully dressed, with a blanket thrown over him.

She thought of waking him up, resuming their conversation, but she didn’t know what more could be said. They would never agree on this. Never.

Defeated, she went back up the stairs and to their bedroom, and slept alone again.

The death of the poodle, Shish-kabob, made Cathy late getting home on Monday, Mark’s first day back at school. The distraught owner had detained her for more than an hour as she wept on Cathy’s shoulder. Cathy didn’t know how to tell her that her pain needed to be cut short, because Cathy needed to be home when her son got off the bus. So she had held the woman and let her cry as the moments ticked by.

The fact that Mark was out sweeping the driveway when she drove up clued her that something was wrong. He looked up at her as she pulled her car into the garage, and she saw the trepidation on his face. She left everything sitting on her seat and braced herself as she got slowly out of the car. “Mark?”

“Hey, Mom,” he said in a dismal voice. “How was your day?”

He never asked her how her day had been, and had never cared. She didn’t think he cared now. “Mark, what’s wrong?”

He looked offended. “Why do you think something’s wrong?”

“Because you’re sweeping. You asked me how my day was.”

“You act like I’m lazy and don’t care about anybody but myself.” He threw the broom against the house, as if giving up. “I just thought somebody needed to sweep.”

“Uh-huh,” she said skeptically. “Thank you. Now what’s wrong? Come on, Mark. You have to tell me sooner or later.”

He sighed and headed into the house, and she followed, dreading whatever was going to be thrown at her next. He grabbed his backpack from the floor and jerked out an envelope.

“From the principal?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s my stupid report card.”

Now it all made sense. She opened the envelope and watched as Mark went to the refrigerator and stood perusing the contents. She had a feeling that he didn’t have an appetite, despite his feigned interest. She probably wouldn’t have one, either, by the time this was all over. She unfolded the card and looked down at the grades lined up on the right side. The blood drained from her face. “F, F, D…” Her voice got louder with each letter…“D, F, C.” She looked up at her son’s back. He seemed very interested in a shriveled orange that should have been thrown away weeks ago. “Mark, what in the world…?”

He swung around. “I’m sorry, Mom, okay? I thought I was doing better than that…”

“You’ve never had an F in your life. None of you have. Even D’s…”

“Don’t overreact, okay? I mean, they’re just grades. Some states don’t even have them anymore, and I think that’s a good idea, because it’s not right to judge people like that. Some kids get messed up for life because their grades make them feel so bad about theirselves. Besides, I did good in PE, and it wasn’t easy because we had to run two miles…”

She gaped back down at the report card. “Your C was in
PE?
”

“Well, I forgot to study for a couple of tests about nutrition and muscles and stuff. If not for that I would have had an A.”

A million reactions filed through her mind as she stared helplessly at the report card. Some were illegal. Others were controversial. All were justifiable.

“Now, Mom, I knew you were gonna blow a fuse, but if you’ll just calm down and think about this…”

She closed her eyes and held up a hand to stem further conversation, and he stopped midsentence. “I think you’d do best,” she whispered, “just to go upstairs…and keep a low profile for, say…a year or two…until I decide what to do with you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He was gone before she opened her eyes.

She was shaking, almost as badly as she’d been when she found out about the marijuana. She sat down and covered her face with both hands.

The door flew open, and Rick stepped in, dropped his backpack on the floor, and headed for the refrigerator. Annie flew in behind him. “Mom, I made honor roll! Check out this report card.”

Cathy took it numbly, wondering what the joke was going to be, and saw the letters lined up down the side of the computer printout. “Great, honey. This is great.”

Annie frowned. “You don’t look like you think it’s great. What’s the matter with you, anyway? You look kinda pale.”

“No, really,” Cathy said. “Great report card. You’ve come a long way.”

“Do I deserve something for that? Like those new shoes I want? Mom, you know how hard I worked for those grades, and those shoes are all I’ll want between now and Christmas, I promise, and you always punish us when we have bad grades, so doesn’t it stand to reason that you should reward us when we have good ones?”

“Yes, maybe,” she said, still thinking about all those F’s. “You do deserve a reward. What about you, Rick?”

Rick turned around, as if he hadn’t noticed his mother was in the room until she called his name. “Oh, yeah. In the backpack.”

“Do I have to dig it out?”

He sighed as if he didn’t have time to be bothered. “Guess not.” He pulled the report card out and thrust it at her. “Now, before you say anything, that one C was in calculus, and it was really hard, and ninety-five percent of the class made a C or below…”

She studied the grades and saw that most of them were As. One B. Not a single D or F. She wanted to fall to her knees and thank God for his mercy. “This is good, Rick,” she said. “Really good.”

“Really?” he asked, shrugging. “Cool.” He saw Mark’s report card folded in her hand. “Boy, Mark’s must be really bad.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, you usually go ballistic over C’s. What did he have?” He grabbed at the report card, and she tried to snatch it back. But he had it open before she could stop him. “F’s? I can’t believe it! Look at this, Annie! F’s, all over the place. The kid is flunking out of seventh grade.”

Before her eves, Rick and Annie became best friends as they shared a laugh over their brother’s plight. It was probably the first time they’d spoken cordially to each other in days. “Man, is he in trouble!”

“What are you gonna do to him, Mom? First pot-smoking, now this? He’s just asking for it, man!”

“
Shut up!
” Mark cried from upstairs.

Annie and Rick let out a howl of laughter, and Cathy jerked the report card back. She wondered if God had been thinking of teenagers when he said that every intent of man’s heart was only evil continually. “Upstairs, everybody,” she said. “To your rooms.”

“Why?” Rick blurted. “What did we do?”

“We’re the good ones, remember?” Annie cried.

“You have Scripture to learn. James 3:6. Tell your brother to memorize it, too.”

“Mom, you’re kidding!” Annie said. “I don’t have time for this. I have a date tonight.”

“Not unless you’ve memorized that Scripture.” She handed them her Bible.

Rick took it, and angrily turned to James. “This is ridiculous, Mom. We got good grades for this?”

“What’s it say?” Annie asked. “Is it the one about provoking your children to anger?”

Rick shot his mother a look and began to read. “’The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.’ Oh, great, Mom. This is real uplifting.”

“Upstairs!” she yelled.

“What about the shoes?” Annie ventured before she went.

Cathy shot her a seething look. “Bad timing, Annie.”

“Well, can we talk about it after I memorize about my evil tongue?”

But the phone rang before she could respond, and the children scattered to answer it. Cathy pulled her feet up on the couch and covered her head with both hands. She wasn’t strong enough for this, she thought. This was the kind of thing for which she needed help. She wished she could have walked in and yelled, “Wait until your father gets home.” It took two parents to raise teenagers. One just didn’t cut it.

But their father wouldn’t give Mark’s grades any thought at all.

No, she was going to have to act on her own. She just wasn’t sure what to do. All she knew for sure was that her son was in the wrong crowd, that they were leading him down the wrong path, that he wasn’t learning and he wasn’t behaving while he was at school.

Her instinct was to jerk him out and homeschool him, like Brenda used to do. But she had to make a living, and besides, her kids never listened to her. What made her think that Mark would learn anything at all from her?

Private school, she thought. That was his only hope. She would take him out of his school, remove him from the friends who were changing his life for the worse, and put him into a new school.

Then she could
pay
to see him flunk out.

She crumpled into tears.

She went into the dining room which she used as a computer room, and turned on the computer with tears rolling down her face. She pulled up her e-mail program, and with rapid-fire keystrokes, began composing a letter to Sylvia. She wished she could get her sound Christian wisdom now.

She wrote out the letter, explaining her dilemma to her friend who had much worse problems. Then she closed it by saying, “Advice welcome, and prayers needed, if you have any extra time. Love, Cathy.”

She pressed her thumbs to her tear ducts and cried like a baby as the e-mail program sent the letter flying across cyberspace.

Later that evening, Brenda was pushing the “send” button on her own e-mail program, which she’d accessed on her office computer during her break. She’d been battling depression all day after the medical bills that had come in. Fortunately, she had managed to pay most of them, thanks to her income from this job. But each night in this huge, noisy room had become worse than the one before it.

Her boss was hostile, to say the least. He verbally attacked anyone who fell short of their quota, monitored calls as if he was guarding national security, and had pet names for the employees, like “Bozo” and “Airhead.” He called Brenda “Grandma” because, at thirty-six, she was one of the oldest employees. The name was designed to rankle her, but Brenda had made it her business to smile right through any abuse he threw at her.

The people she called with her sales pitch ran the gamut from being rude to downright vile. She burst into tears several times a night, longing for the days when she could put her kids to bed and spend time unwinding with David. She was tired all the time, and had started to become irritable with Joseph, so much that she knew that homeschooling her other three children would be a bad
idea right now. It seemed that she never caught up on her sleep, and the cycle of sleep deprivation night after night added up to her being as close to depression as she’d ever been in her life. She didn’t want her kids to be trapped at home with a cranky mother, when they could be at school with a teacher who slept at night and had time to think.

But her kids’ report cards had indicated that they were bored with school. Their grades were less than stellar, despite the fact that they’d already covered most of this material two years earlier. Every single day, they begged her to resume their homeschooling.

For one of the first times in her life, she didn’t quite know what to do.

She wished cyberspace was as immediate as the phone, but it wasn’t. She would have to wait for an answer, she thought. She felt like Tory felt last night, missing Sylvia and wishing with all her heart that she was here. She hadn’t realized how valuable her prayer partner was until she was gone.

Quickly, she choked down the sandwich she had brought from home, then got back to work, praying that Sylvia would have time to e-mail her back before she got off tonight.