Showers in Season Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER Twenty-Eight

  The sound of a mother’s anguish ripped across the corridors of the Missionary Children’s Home. Sylvia heard it from the room where she played with some of the smaller children, using cardboard toilet paper rolls as instruments and sticks for percussion. The children were laughing as they made the sounds, but over the voices came the woman’s cries.

  Sylvia picked Carly up and stepped out into the hall. She looked up toward the door, and saw the woman who was wailing. Julie Anderson was trying to calm her.

  “What is it?” Sylvia asked, hurrying toward them.

  “She came here looking for her children,” Julie said. “But they’re not here.”

  Sylvia’s heart burst. “Oh, the poor woman. Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Julie said. “Hers were eight, ten, eleven, and thirteen.”

  “Not even one of them?” Sylvia asked.

  Julie shook her head. The woman’s pain was unquenchable, and Sylvia adjusted Carly on her hip, and touched the woman’s back, trying to comfort her.

  “How did they get separated?” Sylvia asked.

  “They were with their father. She found him dead, but the children weren’t with him. They’re not in the hospitals, so she was told to come here.”

  “Maybe they’re still alive,” Sylvia said. “Let’s take her somewhere and pray with her.”

  Julie looked as if she hadn’t thought of that. “Yes,” she said. She looked down at the woman, and told her in Spanish what they were going to do. “In here,” she said, and led the woman to one of the few empty rooms.

  Carly sat on Sylvia’s lap, sucking her thumb, as the three women began to pray together. The Nicaraguan woman’s crying ceased as they prayed, and though she could not understand their language, the words comforted her. Sylvia knew that the Spirit of God was offering comfort that Sylvia and Julie did not have to give.

  When they had sent the woman on her way, Sylvia went back to working with the children. God had provided several Nicaraguan women to come and help with the children. One of them was a woman who had lost her two children in the flooding. She had spent the first days grieving, but then had turned her despair into hard work for these kids. More came to help each day. It made it possible for Sylvia to do some of the public relations necessary to get the word out about the home, and the fact that parents might be able to find their children here. A steady stream of parents had come since she’d first put the posters out, and some of the children had been reunited with their parents. But in the last few days, the number of children had grown. More were being brought in than were being taken out.

  She didn’t take Carly and return home until after dark that evening, and she rocked her quietly and savored the feel of the little girl relaxing in the comfort of her arms.
She was getting attached to the child, she knew. Too attached. In the last couple of days, she hadn’t tried very hard to locate Carly’s mother. She told herself that she had already done everything she could, but every time a mother came to the school looking for her child, her heart tightened into a fist, until she knew it wasn’t Carly she wanted.

  When Carly was asleep, she laid her down in the basket-bed she had made her, and smiled at the sweet expression on the child’s face, as if she had no idea that she had been left alone in the midst of a disaster, and that she had no family.

  “I’ll be her family, Lord,” Sylvia whispered as tears filled her eyes. “Let me raise her.”

  She knew the prayer was almost a betrayal of the child, for she should be praying for her family to come. She forced herself to utter that prayer, but she knew the Lord knew what she wanted most.

  She heard Harry coming, and got up, afraid to let him see her doting too much over the child. Already he was worried about her. She went into the kitchen and began to make him a tamale, knowing he probably hadn’t eaten all day.

  “Sylvia!” he called from the doorway.

  She went running to tell him that Carly was sleeping, but stopped cold when she saw the young, dark woman with him. She was no more than eighteen or nineteen, and had big, black eyes and a bruise on one side of her jaw. “Hello,” she said, forgetting to use Spanish.

  “Sylvia, this young woman is named Lupe. She’s looking for her baby.”

  Sylvia’s heart crashed. Her instinct was to pray that she wasn’t the mother, that she wasn’t going to take Carly away. But she knew better. Carly needed her real mother, not some American imitation. She swallowed. “Have you taken her to the school?”

  “No,” Harry said. “Honey, she has an eighteen-month-old girl.”

  “I see.” She touched the woman’s arm, inviting her in, and motioned toward the basket on the floor. “Carly’s sleeping. She was exhausted from all the noise at the home, and drifted right off when I got her home…”

  But already the woman was approaching the basket, slowly, as if she feared that the child there might not be her own. Sylvia froze, and Harry put his arm protectively around her.

  The woman knelt over the basket, and leaned over the child. She began to cry, and brought her bandaged hand to her mouth.

  Sylvia wasn’t sure if she was crying for joy, or despair. She approached the woman and knelt down beside her. She picked the sleeping baby up, and turned her so that the young woman could see hen

  But the woman only turned away.

  “She’s not hers,” Sylvia said. She tried to hide the relief flooding over her. “Harry, she’s not hers.” She clutched the baby to her chest, and the child kept sleeping. Harry got the young woman to her feet and walked her outside.

  Sylvia got up and took the baby to the rocking chair, and began to rock her again as tears flowed down her face. She hadn’t lost her, she thought. God had let her keep the baby a little while longer.

  When Harry came back in, he saw Sylvia’s tears and sat down next to her. “Crying for the mother?” he asked softly.

  “Half of me,” she said. “But the other half is crying because I was so afraid she was going to take Carly away.”

  “Don’t you want her to have her mother?”

  “Of course. But Harry, it’s been occurring to me lately that…maybe God gave her to us. Maybe he wants us to raise her.”

  Harry let out a heavy sigh. “Oh, Sylvia. You can’t believe that.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “He knows how I’ve missed being a mother. Why wouldn’t he have given me a second chance to do that?”

  “Because we have other work to do here. You’re needed in the school, Sylvia. You’re needed for my patients. If we do all the things God has given us to do, we won’t have time to raise another child.”

  “But I can do all those things with Carly,” she whispered. “I can, Harry. Haven’t I been doing them?”

  “Yes, but Sylvia, she’s not yours. Even if her mother is dead, she probably has a father, a grandmother, aunts and uncles. They’ll come for her eventually.”

  “What if they don’t?” Sylvia asked. “Are we going to put her in the home when she’s old enough?”

  “Well, I don’t know. We’ll just have to pray about that and see what God leads us to do. You know, some of these families who’ve lost children might want to adopt her.”

  Sylvia closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t stand the thought of such a thing. “We’ll see,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against the baby’s crown. “We’ll just pray about it and see.”

  Later that night, when Harry and the baby were asleep, Sylvia read her e-mails from home. She sent the same response to Tory, Brenda, and Cathy, asking them all to pray that she would do the right thing for Carly. She confessed to them how she wanted to raise this baby, and how she believed in her heart that God had sent her directly to Sylvia for a reason.

  Then, when she had finished pouring out her heart, she addressed their own problems one by one. It was clear that they were keeping too many things from each other. Cathy didn’t want the others to know the trouble she was having with Mark. The only reason she told Sylvia, she suspected, was that she was so far away, and it was safe. Brenda didn’t want anyone to know that her job was pure torture, but how necessary it was for her to keep it to pay their bills. Tory had finally started sharing, but she didn’t know either of her two neighbors’ problems. So Sylvia chided them all, hoping they would listen.

  Brenda, I’ve been praying for you and the kids and for Joseph, and I never forget to pray that David will come to a saving knowledge of Christ. I’m also remembering your finances. I thought hard before writing that out so clearly, because I’m writing this to all three of you, and don’t want to betray confidences. But girls, I have to tell you, this is not the time for keeping things to yourselves. You need each other. And I have an idea.

  Cathy, I’ve been praying for you and your kids, too, especially Mark, who’s turning corners in his life that will take him to dangerous places. And I was thinking about your problem with Mark in school, the kids with whom he’s yoking himself, the lack of interest in his grades. And Brenda desperately wants to homeschool again, but here she is working at a place she hates at night, not getting enough rest, and still barely making ends meet.

  You girls aren’t sharing, and you hold each other’s solutions in your hands. Why don’t you two put these problems together, and solve one for each other? Brenda, think about quitting that job, go back to homeschooling your kids, but also start homeschooling Mark. Cathy could pay you what she was considering paying a private school. Then Mark would get the personal attention he needs, and he removed from the influence of the kids he’s following. And Brenda, we know you can do it.

  It’s just an idea, and if I were there in person, I probably wouldn’t say it straight out like this. I’d take you aside one at a time. But I don’t have a lot of time to be tactful right now. Forgive me if I’ve stuck my nose in where it doesn’t belong.

  And dear Tory, don’t be afraid. I know there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. I know you worry about this less-than-perfect child you’re carrying. What will she look like, how disruptive will she be, will you be up to the challenge? I can only tell you that you are. And when you hold her for the first time, I believe all your fears will vanish. That child is a gift from God, exactly as he made her. Sometimes we have to look at the events in our lives that look like crises, and realize that God doesn’t always send sunshine. He sends showers, too, hurricanes sometimes, mud slides and floods. And out of those, sometimes, come little rewards like Carly, beautiful blessings like children’s homes committed to raising godly children, salvation for thousands who would never have heard if they had not come to the point of desperation.

  Your showers are going to yield blessings, too, Tory. Hang in there, honey. You’re not alone. But Barry might be right now. Go easy on him, and show him mercy. Don’t tell the kid
s about the pregnancy just to force him into accepting the baby. Give him time and space, and when you tell them, tell them together, with great joy. Trust me, it will come. I wish I could be there to share it with you.

  When she hit “send,” she was weeping, and wishing she could hug each one of her neighbors now. Oh, how she missed them.

  But then she went back to Carly in the little basket-bed, and stroked her back, and realized that God took things and people away, but he also brought new ones into our lives. His compassions never failed. They were new every morning.

  Even during the stormy season.

  CHAPTER Twenty-Nine

  When the kids had left for school the next morning, Cathy saw Brenda out watering her garden. She got up her nerve and bounced across the street. “Did you read Sylvia’s e-mail?” she asked bluntly.

  “I sure did.” Brenda turned off the water. “Cathy, why didn’t you tell me about Mark?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me how much you hated your job, and that you were having more money problems?”

  “Because you’ve all done so much to raise money to pay our bills. I don’t mind working. It’s not your problem.”

  “But I’m your friend. I could have at least listened.”

  “And so could I. What’s going on with Mark, Cathy? Daniel told me he’d gotten in trouble at school, but that’s about all I could get out of him.”

  “He probably didn’t want to tell you for fear that you’d never let him cross that street again.” She looked down at her feet. “Mark got suspended for smoking marijuana in the bathroom.”

  Brenda caught her breath, and Cathy knew this was probably one of the worst things Brenda could imagine. A surge of unexpected resentment shot through her. Brenda’s kids would never do anything that rebellious, because Brenda was the perfect mother. Quickly, she shook that bitter feeling away, and told herself it could happen to anyone’s kids. “Then he went back to school, and got his report card. He’s failing most of his classes.”