Clearly

Hey Friends! Thanks for continuing the Country Girl Cattle Drive as we herd 111 verses from the pages of our Bibles to our hearts. (Matthew 5-7)

(If you are new, here’s the scoop: I write down a verse and then write a story to help us remember the verse. If you want to begin at the start of the current story, go to the post entitled “Store Up.”)

Matthew 7:4-5 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

Blaze

The printer whispered in the corner as Blaze put the final round of black olives on his bean dip supremo. He looked over at the picture of his mother on the desk. “Nia has a point. I’ve spent thirteen years living in this town, feeling ashamed of this house. Maybe the house is actually okay.”

He felt like his mother was nodding. “Don’t agree with her,” he said, raising his hand to point a finger at his mother. She smiled back innocently. Blaze turned away, continuing his rant. “She’s infuriating. She’s unpredictable.”

He was pretty sure he heard his father say, “But she’s pretty.”

Blaze washed his hands, dried them and looked down between the desk and the wall where his father’s picture would always end up falling when the printer started shaking the desk. He slowly picked it up out of the narrow slot, rubbed it with his shirt sleeve, and set it back on the desk again. It was a picture of his father at the Sedgwick County Zoo. Their family had gone on a boat ride to watch monkeys on small islands and a monkey had actually dropped onto their boat. Blaze was too small to have any memory of the event, but his mother had taken this picture of his father, looking surprised and happy. The gray at his temples and the wrinkles at his eyes said something of his age.

“Did you have to go and get Lyme disease?” Blaze said the words half-jokingly. His dad had died when he was four—too young to have any memories of him, unless the sort-of-memories attached to video clips counted. “It would have been nice to have had some memories of all of us together, of a house full of laughter.”

“Well, son,” his father said. “Maybe it’s time to start your own family, to start filling these walls with laughter.”

Blaze wrapped the plate of bean dip in plastic wrap and then commenced the work of placing the printed sheet into a picture frame.

“Yeah, well, they just grow ‘em psychopathic around here.”

There was a knock at the door.

Blaze eyed the door suspiciously, piled the dip, frame, and a bag of chips on one arm, shut out the lights, and opened the door.

Nia. Marshmallow stocking hat. Deer hide coat with white trim. Eyes looking down.

Blaze grunted.

She looked up. The storm was gone out of her eyes. An apology had taken its place. And then her eyes looked over the contents in his arms. “You were headed out.”

“Yeah.”

Her eyes looked across the darkened room. “Were you talking to someone?”

Blaze shifted his weight to his other leg. “What do you want, Nia?”

She sighed, stepped backwards into the snow-crusted grass, and looked away. “I just came by to say that I’m sorry. If you have a minute to talk sometime, I would like to talk, but–”

“I’m just headed to church. You could come.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You sure?” Her eyes met his again.

Moments later, they were driving to the church in Blaze’s car. Nia pulled a gold ring from her pocket and held it out in the palm of her hand. Blaze swerved toward LMNO Pizza, curb-checking his tires and scaring the snot out of a ten-year-old boy on a mountain bike.

“He asked you to marry him?!?” Blaze yelled, righting the car back into his lane.

“Who?” Nia asked, wide-eyed.

“The pretty boy in Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Nia’s face split into a smile and she covered her face with her hands. “No.” She shook her head back and forth. “Ha. No. Um, wow.” She explained to Blaze how she had ended up volunteering to be the cook for the group of girls on a little mission trip. “At least, I thought I was going to be cooking for the girls. I did cook their breakfast, but the real reason they needed a cook was to cook a meal for the entire congregation to eat after the Sunday morning service. That was a little more than I had bargained for.

“The church was composed of homeless women and, what was the term Pastor Adele used? At-risk. Yeah, at-risk women and children. Pastor Adele talked to the girls when we got there last night. She told them that she meets slaves everyday. and asked them what they were slaves to. I realized that I was a slave to this thing.” Nia picked up the ring with her thumb and index finger. “And I’ve been a jerk to you because if it.

“I mean, not to blame it on a ring. Let me explain.” She pulled off her white hat. Her normally orderly red hair stuck up in funny places. As she continued to talk, she ran her right hand over her hair, trying to tame it down. “When I was fourteen, I fell in love with a boy at church. He was seventeen. He took me to his prom. We hung out at church camp. We would sit in church together and hold hands. Before he left for college, he asked me to marry him. I said yes. He gave me this ring. I was fifteen.”

Blaze felt like a hot frying pan tossed into a sink full of cold water—sizzling, sinking, cooling. His fingers, wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel, relaxed. “What happened?”

Tears filled her eyes. “I’m not really sure. He called for awhile. Wrote to me sometimes. Talked a lot about a little tech business he started. Told me it was taking up a lot of his time. His family moved. I know this will sound weird, but the last time I saw him, I was at a Royals game with my family, looking for our seats, stepping on popcorn and spilled pop, and there he was, with his arm around this amazingly beautiful blonde, talking on his phone, watching the game in one of the nice seats. My dad turned to me just about then and asked me to hold Cal’s hand so he wouldn’t fall down the cement stairs. It was all so weird.”

“And you’ve carried the ring around with you ever since.”

Nia shrugged her shoulders and then nodded.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I was thinking about something involving heavy metal music and a hammer. Do you have a hammer?”

Blaze smiled. “Would you let me buy it from you?”

Nia nodded. “Um, yeah. You can have it. But I owe you a lot of money.”

Blaze cocked his head.

“Red corvette.”

His fingers tightened around the steering wheel again.

“I was thinking,” Nia said, “Could I pay for the damages out of pocket rather than it having to go through insurance?”

Blaze sighed. “Nia, we’re talking about thousands of dollars.”

She winced. “That’s okay. I have some savings.”

“We can figure all of this out later. Maybe we should head on into church.”

“Blaze,” Nia said. She reached over, almost to his hand, but rested her hand on the steering wheel instead. “When you wanted to take over Patterson, I felt like jerk-boy was leaving me to go to college again. I’m sorry that I judged you like that. You’re a completely different person. Will you please forgive me?”

Blaze reached over to the hand holding the ring and took it in his own. “Debt paid.”

That night, after church, Blaze stopped by the Mt. Hope Nursing Center and walked the long, white hall to Aunt Min’s room. The lights were out, but there was enough light pouring in from the hallway that he could make out her dresser. He set the picture frame there. It held a photo of himself, his mother, and Min when he was six years old. He was wearing a red silk shirt. Aunt Min and his mother were wearing matching dresses—black with red roses. The photographer at the church valentines banquet had made them laugh with a stupid joke about a frog leaving his harp at Sam Fran’s Disco and clicked the camera at just the right time.

When Blaze turned to look at Aunt Min, he was glad to see her resting easily. The moonlight was shining on her white hair. He took the ring out of his pocket and slipped it on her pinky finger.

As he got in his car to head home, he looked down toward the window he knew to be Aunt Min’s. He wished he could be there to see her expression when she woke up in the morning and saw the ring, but he would be heaving open the load-out door at Patterson elevator. There was a lot of work to be done.

He had a future to build.