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Chapter 9
James twisted on theporch swing, trying to find a comfortable spot.
Sitting around all day while Mabel was around keeping him company was one thing, but she had gotten called out not long after she had texted Lark, and he had ended up spending the last few hours by himself, which was not nearly as pleasant as what it had been when Mabel was there.
Still, it was hard to keep the smile off his face.
After all those years of waiting, wondering if God was ever going to give him a lifetime love, the woman he admired from a distance, doing what his dad wanted, working hard in the business, and deliberately being ethical about it, even when it wasn’t a popular decision, or the most lucrative, his patience had finally paid off.
He spent a lot of the afternoon thanking God for this seismic shift that had happened in his life.
He certainly hadn’t seen it coming. Of course, he had to get shot first, but that was a small price to pay, in his estimation anyway, to have Mabel propose marriage to him.
He shifted once more and thought about going in just to get a glass of water, thinking that surely Mabel wouldn’t be upset with him if he did that much, when he noticed a vehicle coming down the lane.
The front porch faced the lane, and a person sitting on it could see almost the whole way to the state highway, which was just out of sight over the horizon.
It was perfectly private and beautifully serene, and he was so thankful he had bought it and seen the potential all those years ago.
As the truck came closer, he noticed it was a rollback. He had totally forgotten about Silas.
He chuckled a little to himself at trying to figure out what Silas’s reaction was going to be when he told him that his advice had worked pretty well, so well in fact that he would be getting married...
He didn’t even know when. That was something they hadn’t talked about.
But he was actually living in the same house as Mabel, and he would be here when she got back from her call, so they could talk about it then.
Silas pulled around the side of the house, and he heard the door slam.
He thought he saw a second head in the passenger seat and wondered who Silas had brought. Maybe Gladys. She was going to be disappointed that her sister wasn’t there.
But when Silas walked around the corner of the porch, he had a little boy, maybe five or six years old, striding beside him.
“Hey there, what happened?” Silas asked immediately, seeing his foot propped up on the swing with the gauze bandages around it.
“I got shot.”
Silas’s eyes flew from looking at his foot to searching his face. “I think you’re serious.”
“Dead serious,” James said, and he didn’t even crack a smile. He could have been dead. It was only by the grace of God that the bullet had gone to his foot.
“Well, I would be interested in hearing that story.”
“I probably have a couple of stories you might be interested in hearing.”
