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“Well, they wouldn’t be very seasonal for a Christmastime wedding, but I think if I could pick anything, I would want a whole fistful of snowdrops and Mount Hood Daffodils.”
A full smile spread on Kenzie’s face, causing her coppery eyes to dance. Helen thought, as she had many times over, that Jackson must have fallen in love with those lovely eyes and the smattering of sweet freckles long before he’d known this girl’s name.
“Flowers of hope and perseverance.” Kenzie dipped an approving nod. “Entirely perfect, I’d say.”
Chapter Ten
(in which old debts demand a high price)
Kevinsavoredthehandin his. For forty years this woman had walked beside him, offered the silent comfort of her presence, lent him the strength and determination to make a better life.
Thank God for Helen Chase Murphy.
As he inhaled the crisp evening air, a breath full of sharp pine, Kevin did exactly that.
This path was not one they took often. Usually when going out for a walk—or rather in this terrain, a miniature hike—they opted to take the hillside trail to the lookout. But that late afternoon, after slipping into coats and donning stocking caps, he and Helen set their direction on an older trail that had become nearly indiscernible over the years.
Because it led to a place Kevin didn’t like to think on often. He didn’t hike that way, and when it was used, it was accessed by the poorly maintained four-wheel-drive road.
That afternoon, however, he felt called to walk that direction. Though she glanced at him with a questioning look when he pulled back a bough that had grown over the trail entrance, Helen didn’t voice her query. Instead, her hand securely in his, she followed his path as it led deeper into a new-growth forest.
They had planted many of the sugar pines and white spruces that now reached above their heads, in an effort to restore the forest that had wilted to beetle damage. Clearing the dead and replanting the new had been grueling work, but it had been important to them—and a means of small income for their sons over the years.
To Kevin, this bit of forest was symbolic of his life. The felling of the old, the diseased, the toxic. Such hard and often painful work. But necessary. And then the planting of the new. Sometimes those seedlings didn’t make it. There was the frustration and loss of money, time, and effort, yet the determination to try again. To keep at it.
By the passage of time, the persistence of effort, and ultimately, the grace of God, they walked through a healthy stand of trees. Hand in hand, now sharing a healthy and beautiful life.
Their trail spilled into a small clearing. On the far side stood the place Kevin didn’t like to visit. The shack that had been his childhood home.
It didn’t look like a shack anymore. Hadn’t for quite some time. They’d used it every now and then. For overflow of guests. Even as a home for Brandon for a few years, before he’d fallen in love with his arranged fiancée and shocked everyone by actually marrying her.
It had also served as five of his sons’ childhood home for a few years. And that was why he was there.
Five feet into the clearing, and with an unhindered view of that tiny house, Kevin stopped and let the emotion of so many memories overtake him. Silently, as if knowing why they were there, Helen released his hand and slipped her arm around his, offering him the strength of her presence.
“I really, really didn’t want us to live there,” Kevin said in a low voice.
She pressed her head into his shoulder. “I know.”
“How long do you intend to have my daughter work herself ragged to pay your debts?”
Jim Chase’s words hit like fiery arrows against Kevin’s heart. It had taken years for Mr. Chase to even speak to Helen again. He’d been so terribly angry that they’d lied to him. Kevin believed his father-in-law hated him for getting his eighteen-year-old daughter pregnant and then covering it up by jumping into a rushed and unapproved marriage. Connor had been a baby before the man chose to acknowledge that he had any grandsons, let alone three.
Now, nearly four, as Helen was expecting. Again.
Alongside that piercing shame his father-in-law had just fired into Kevin’s heart came a familiar thrashing panic. How was he supposed to be a father tofourchildren? He’d been sober for almost two years, and with each passing day he saw his own insufficiencies with more clarity.
Kevin loved his sons. And he loved his wife. He loved having a family. But he had no better idea of how to be the kind of husband and father he wanted to be than when he’d married Helen five years before. All he had was a desperate thirst to do better and a hope that his mornings spent with God in His Word and weekly meetings with George and Dave would aid the transformation he longed for.
And countless prayers that usually went something like,By Your Spirit, Lord, make me the man you would have me to be.
“I don’t want her to work the night shifts at the diner.”
Kevin had never liked that Helen had taken that job, but he couldn’t argue with her when she’d showed him that they needed the money to pay off hospital bills. “But we can’t figure out another way—”
Mr. Chase scowled at him. “Sure seems stupid for a man to keep making babies when he can’t take care of his family.”
Gut clenching hard, Kevin thought he might puke. He couldn’t argue that point. Rolling his fists, he could only stare at his shoes while heat burned his neck and face.
