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“How do you know I did something?”
“Just a hunch,” he said, humor in his voice.
“Well, it’s a good one.”
She’d done something terrible, and she was about to do something even worse.
She looked up, over the back of the fence, at the pasture that ran behind her house.
There were horses grazing in it, and the way the wind blew their manes and tails back soothed her soul almost as much as having Mark beside her.
He was quiet, knowing her well enough that he could probably read the signs that said she was trying to figure out where to start. Sometimes, it just took her a little bit to sort through the information in her brain and decide how to spit it all out.
“I quit my job.”
“No.” Disbelief forced the word out and wrapped his tones in shock.
“Yeah.” She laughed a little, humorlessly, and lifted her gaze to meet his. “I told you it was bad.”
“I knew there was a lot of stress there. But... I hadn’t realized how much.”
It was terrible to work somewhere where a person couldn’t use their basic core beliefs to help any of the children. Things that she knew would help kids weren’t allowed to be uttered in the classroom.
The previous principal at the school allowed them to talk about their faith and didn’t get too concerned about it. But the new administration that had slowly been replacing the older folks as they retired had cracked down in a major way last year and this year. Being in the classroom was stressful enough, but she wasn’t allowed to pray with the children, wasn’t allowed to tell them that Jesus loved them, wasn’t allowed to mention God at all. How did a person talk about science without mentioning God?
She always skipped over most of the parts of evolution in her science textbook. When she did mention it, she made sure to emphasize that it was a theory. In a small school like Blueberry Beach, where the school was located and where the kids from Strawberry Sands attended, folks would agree with stuff like that.
But her freedom to speak the Truth had been slowly taken away, and the stress had been getting to her. The workplace environment had gotten worse, even though there were many teachers who still got together in the mornings and had prayer for the students and Bible study together before the workday began.
Still, working in such an anti-Christian environment had taken its toll on her, along with the fact that her children were gone, and her life was...almost over. More than half over. It had been that way for a while, but the thoughts had been settling in all at once.
“I know. It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she said.
“I don’t blame you. I don’t think I could’ve worked as long as you did. When you’re not allowed to talk about what you believe, and you’re not allowed to share what you know will help the children who are having issues, it’s really difficult.”
She almost felt targeted and discriminated against. After all, pretty much anything else was perfectly okay to talk about.
Regardless, she tried to shove those thoughts aside.
“What did it drive you to do?” he asked again.
“I bought the inn.”
“You didn’t.” His words were negative, but his tone held excitement. She could hear the pride in it. “I didn’t think you would. But you did. That’s awesome. Why are you so upset about it?”
“Because I quit my job.”
“And you don’t have enough money to live on and fix up the inn?”
“Yeah. What was I thinking? It’s one thing to quit my job. It’s another thing to buy the inn. But to do the two of them together? I am crazy.”
Originally, when she talked about buying the inn, her thought had been to use her teacher salary to fix it up. After all, with both kids out of school and only one of her in the house, it didn’t take nearly the money to run her household as it used to. Her grocery bill was down, light bill was also. The heating was cut in half, and she probably would never need to buy another item of clothing again.
But when she thought about buying the inn, she hadn’t considered that she might quit her job too. That changed things.
