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He should have brought Nora with him. But she’d wanted to take a nap, and he hadn’t insisted, knowing that they had gotten up early in order to make the long drive to his house.
He was almost to the water when he realized he didn’t have anything to say. He was just following the laughter and the fun. Was his life really that sad?
He was considering whether or not he would be able to leave without being spotted, when one of the girls splashed Jubilee, and she laughed, dragging her foot through the shallow water of the last wave and splashing her daughter back, before turning and running and plowing straight into him.
He wasn’t expecting that. He might have been able to keep his feet, but the sand was uneven and he stepped into a depression as he backed up trying to keep his balance.
He ended up falling flat on his back, with Jubilee on top of him.
Not what he had planned.
Her hair was down, and it draped all over his face as her legs tangled with his and her laughter carried on the breeze.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said, trying to untangle herself from him. It was probably made harder because he somehow got his hands wrapped around her, and his brain hadn’t quite gotten the message to his fingers to let her go yet.
“I’m so sorry!” she said, somehow grabbing her hair and slipping all of it back over her shoulder.
That’s when she realized who she was lying on top of. He could see the second that she figured it out, as recognition entered her eyes.
“Matt?” she asked, her brows going up, her eyes widening.
“Mom! You’re not supposed to plow into strange men!”
“It’s okay. It’s not a strange man,” Jubilee said cheerfully.
He huffed out a laugh at that. “Just because I’m not a strange man doesn’t mean it’s okay to plow into me.”
“That’s what I was saying.”
“Mr. Matt?” Penelope came over, wrinkling her nose, like she couldn’t quite figure out what he was doing on the beach, lying down, with her mother on top of him.
“Are you okay?” Jubilee said, and he finally got his hands to let her go. But after pushing up a bit, she looked at him like she wasn’t quite sure whether she might have hurt him.
“I’m fine. Just a little embarrassed. I should have caught you, not fallen with you. The only thing that would have made it worse would have been if I had fallen on top of you.”
“Kind of hard to do considering that I was the one plowing into you,” Jubilee said, and her voice lost none of its cheerful happiness.
He couldn’t believe the difference in her from yesterday to today. He had to comment on it. “Good to see you smiling.”
Her face froze for just an instant, and then she seemed to shrug. “You know, thank you so much for taking me to your mom. She has a way of making me feel like she really cares about me. And... I guess I feel like everything’s going to be okay. Not necessarily because of anything she’s done or said, just because... I guess I was praying last night and told the Lord that so far He’s taken complete and total care of me, and it’s silly for me to get upset. Isn’t it?”
She said that last question a little bit more softly, just as though she had been thinking about it and was asking herself rather than him.
“I think you probably said it better than anyone else could. God is in control, and as long as we work hard and try to watch and do what He wants us to, there really isn’t too much that can bother us.”
Her smile stretched big again.
“Plus, look at this sky,” she said, leaning to her side, looking up at the blue sky with white puffy clouds blowing in off the lake. “And the lake. It’s cold and refreshing and... I just can’t believe that I’m living beside it. That my girls will be here all summer long. We can go swimming whenever we want to. Is this not the most awesome thing ever?” She smiled, her lips pulling up in a huge grin, like God had given her the biggest gift in the world by letting her live beside the lake.
Matt felt a little bit guilty, because he took it for granted that he was there. It was just a part of his life, and while he loved it and enjoyed his ride every morning, he knew it didn’t make him happy the way Jubilee was happy now.
“I was talking to Davis and Kim, and they said we could ride their horses along the lakeshore sometime. That just seems so...amazing.”
“It is amazing. You’ll have to go with me sometime.”
“You ride along the beach still?” Jubilee asked as she finished untangling herself and ungracefully shoved herself to her feet, careful not to step on her skirt. She reached out a hand for him.
He took it, then tried to gather himself so he wasn’t pulling on her too hard as he stood up. “Every morning. Even in winter. Unless it’s dangerously cold for the horses. I just bundle up, and we go. It’s fun to see the different ways the lake looks every day. It’s never the same.”
