A Morning Like This (28 page)

“I like that one,” David said smugly to Edna. “I think it should win.”

“You think so? That one?”

“Yes.”

“All it is, is a bunch of dogs pulling a car. That’s their job. Those dogs run in Alaska in the Iditarod. No effort put forth
to decorate the car or make anything festive.”

“I like them, Edna. They’re impressive.”

But even as he argued halfheartedly with Edna Clements, the sight in the street sent David reeling deeper into his uncertainty.
Perhaps it was the sight of those huskies barking and straining against their fitments. All their combined effort as they
followed a master’s command, and all it got them was another few inches up the road.

Over and over the dogs gathered their strength and struggled forward. Over and over they surged and rested, surged again.

David saw himself in them, the way he’d made such effort to pull himself ahead of what he’d done, to drag himself away from
the wrongfulness that had for years held him back and weighted his soul. The same way that Volkswagen held back those huskies.

Lord
.

Ridiculous. A grown man talking in his head to thin air. Who had he been following all these years? A figment of everybody’s
imagination. Something that Nelson and the men on the presbytery committee and his own parents had said would change his life.

Well, it hadn’t.

How is it that everything everybody else seems to do with You works, Lord, and every time I try to listen to You, something
else falls apart?

This moment, as he sat in a chair with his tie bound like a hangman’s noose around his neck, watching a parade going by, his
faith made him feel like an outsider looking in, wiping the fog from the window, seeing everyone else inside without him.

His final shred of hope and purpose, that Braden might have been able to save Samantha, gone. Gone. With Susan’s latest phone
call, even that remaining shred had been ripped away.

He felt so entirely isolated from God this moment that all his years of belief might have been a game.

I don’t want something in my life that’s empty. I don’t want this, if I’ve only been wasting my time. I don’t know if anybody
really hears You, Lord, even when they say they do
.

Up Broadway rolled one of the old standbys of the parade, gleaming green trucks from the Teton County Volunteer Fire Department,
lights pulsing red and blue. The firemen aimed their giant water hoses skyward, and streams of water arced and rained down
on the hapless people below. Behind that, still in the distance, David heard the beginning strains of the sparse but zealous
Jackson Hole Community Band.

The band float was in sight by now and, behind it, the town street sweepers. The massive round brushes revolved on the pavement,
with a light hiss of water, cleaning up the dropped remnants of horses and mules.

“That’s the one I’m pushing for.” He elbowed Edna. “The street sweepers get my vote every year.”

The Jackson Hole Community Band passed before them, its brassy music making people extend their arms, jump sideways, and cheer
along the curb. On the rear fender, two children held spinning disco balls high, the reflection of the July sun flickering
over the bystanders with light.

I am light, Beloved. In Me, there is no darkness at all.

But, Lord. There is darkness all around me
.

The lone tuba
oom-pahed
while children from the wagon threw fistfuls of candy onto the street.

“Oh, the community band isn’t getting my vote this year,” Edna commented beside him. “I hate this song so much, if they played
it at my funeral I would stand up and walk out.”

David turned away from the float and shot his neighbor a wide grin. “Edna, I doubt seriously that anyone would ever play ‘The
Macarena’ at a funeral.”

“With all the new people who keep moving into this town, you never know.”

David’s attention fell to his knees. He tamped his float ballots there, fingered his pen, and made several notations. It was
high time he made some decision about the parade. “I want those huskies. They’re really good.”

I am good, Beloved. My love endures forever. I am faithful through all generations.

Oh, Lord. Are You? Are You?

If you can bring good from this, Father, what could You have done with me if only I had remained faithful?

David wrote two words before he laid down his pen and looked up. Directly in front of him, an eight-year-old girl with long
brown hair flying over her shoulders shyly tossed a Tootsie Roll to a tiny girl holding her father’s hand on the sidelines.
Because the child on the sidelines was too little and the parade too big and the girl on the float hadn’t thrown the candy
quite far enough, the father dashed out, retrieved it, and handed it over.

The girl on the float grinned with pleasure, revealing a dimple beside the left corner of her mouth and a teasing jut of her
chin.

My, but she looked like
…

David’s heart leapt as high as the knot in his necktie. He felt as if his breath would never come again.

The child on the float—the exact image on a poster that Braden and his friends had tacked on every telephone pole and every
fence in town.

She was the exact likeness of the small school picture that had tormented him ever since Susan had opened her wallet and let
him see it.

David stumbled up from his chair; his parade ballots scattered into Edna’s lap and he didn’t even notice. He tried to get
around the man in the folding chair one step down from him, but it couldn’t be done. He moved sideways, crashing into John
Teasley, who threw an arm sideways to keep himself from being pushed off the side of the reviewing stand.

David didn’t notice. “Sam.” Frantically, he tried the name on for size as she passed directly below him.
“Sam.”
The band crescendoed below him. When the child didn’t respond, he yelled louder. Louder, still.
“Samantha!”

She turned toward the sound of her name. He saw her eyes searching, full on. And, he knew.

Every doubt in David Treasure’s mind fled at that moment.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized to the man in front of him who was right in his way. He fumbled and kicked and pushed, trying to
get around. “I’ve got to get down from here,” he said to John Teasley as he shoved the man’s metal chair aside.

“You’re knocking me off, David. Can’t you wait until the end of the parade?”

“No, I can’t.” He almost shouted it in his frustration. “I’ve got to get down to the band.”

Sideways he went, and a chair clattered to the ground. Three steps forward, between two people where there wasn’t any room.
As a final resort, he climbed over the top of somebody’s head.

“I’m sorry, sir.” A policeman on horseback cut him off. “The street sweepers are coming. No one is allowed in the road during
the parade.”

“But that’s my… that’s my…” David couldn’t get it out; he was breathless from fighting his way through people and chairs.
“That little girl is
lost
,” he gasped. “She’s my daughter.”

The officer followed David’s desperate gesture. He brought his horse around, and stared, peering from below his hat brim.
“She’s that one, isn’t she?” he asked. “The one that’s all over town in all the pictures.”

“Yes.”

The officer reined in his mount. “Don’t let me hold you up. I’ll help if you’d like. Me and this horse, we can stop that float.
You’d better not let that young lady out of your sight.”

David ran, catching up, falling back, catching up again, until he reached with his hand and seized the lip of the wagon. By
that time, the officer had drawn to the front and the horses were slowing. David passed the pounding bass drum. He passed
the trio of uplifted trumpets and the lady who tooted her piccolo.

“Sam?” he cried, gasping out her name before he’d quite gotten to her. His sweat-stained shirt had come untucked. The shoulders
of his sport coat had worked their way down to his forearms as he ran. His necktie flew to one side like a sail.

She looked at him.

“Samantha?”

She’d been doling out candies to the littlest kids along the route, who looked like they weren’t big enough to get much, and
wanted it most. The candy scattered to the ground when she heard him calling her name. Tootsie Rolls and Jolly Ranchers and
Atomic Fireballs bounced on the pavement like pearls, crunching to pieces beneath the wagon wheels.

“Is it you?” she whispered. “David Treasure?” He could read her lips even though the music played too loud for either of them
to hear.

“Are you Samantha Roche?”

She nodded.

With no hesitation, he lifted his arms up for her. “With all due respect,” he said with a good amount of reverence in his
voice, “I think you’re somebody I know.”

O
h, what it felt like for David to embrace his newfound daughter. He’d wanted to hold her like this, he knew it now, from the
very first minute he’d known she was alive. It was a moment of wonder for him, more poignant to David because it was something
he might never have known.

He felt himself when he held her.

He felt his own mother in her, and his grandmother, and the women his grandmother had known when she had been a girl, gone
before. She smelled like chocolate and Atomic Fireballs and dust when she leaned close to his ear. “I was afraid,” she told
him. “Do you think I should be?”

He held her out a bit, his heart aching, thinking of all she had to be afraid of in her future. “Afraid about what?” he asked.

“Afraid of having you know me. Because you might not think I’m the way you wanted me to be.” He examined her face.
They just don’t make them much cuter than this
, he thought. She
did
look like Braden.

One beat passed, two, three, before David could answer her question. He’d lost everything that was solid and stable in his
life, for this. Miraculously, being with his daughter now, it seemed worth that much. “So far, you’re exactly the way I thought
you’d be.”

“Yeah?”

She cocked her head sideways at him like a puppy, and he spoke with an amazing feeling of possessiveness in his chest. “When
someone is your father,” he said, “he doesn’t love you because he’s gotten to know you. He loves you because he’s your father—because
you belong to him, no matter who you are.”

For a long time she didn’t move. She only looked at him with quiet reverence. “You really think so?”

He nodded. “I know so. Because of you.” Then, “You’re heavy, you know that? Bigger than I had imagined.”

“I used to be even bigger. I’ve lost five pounds, because of leukemia.” If she felt his arms tighten around her at that, she
pretended it made no difference.

“Let’s take care of you now,” he said. “Get you something to eat.”

That’s how they found themselves at the end of the parade route. As if, for the time being, this might be nothing more than
a normal day. Samantha wanted a hot dog. David sidled down the barbecue line with her, carrying her backpack and helping her
load her plate. She wanted ketchup, a wiener without any black on it, and two spoonfuls of chili.

He watched while she consumed the entire thing in less than four minutes.

When she dribbled chili down her chin, he found a napkin for her and wiped it off. When she guzzled red Kool-aid from the
paper cup it made a mustache that wouldn’t wipe off no matter how hard either one of them scrubbed.

“Marked for life,” he teased her.

“Nah.” She laughed. “In one day, it always goes away.”

“Well,” he said, slapping his hands on his knees.

“Well,” she said, slapping her hands on her knees, too.

And that seemed to be the end of the conversation for a while.

Around them, horses were being unhitched and the jangle of bridles and buckles rang out like bells. The entire roster of huskies
had been fastened to a truck with individual ropes. Each dog chowed down from its individual bowl, its name inscribed like
royalty on the side: Smoke-Fur Luke, Maggie, Tucker, Annie, Buckie, Heidi, Red Lady, and Tom. Above them the sky shone blue
and clear, a color so deep it made David’s head throb.

“I like Tom for a dog,” he said, slapping his knees again, fighting for something else to talk about. “That’s a good name.”

Silence hung between them for longer than it had before. Samantha suddenly seemed shy to him. “So, what do we do now?”

She stared at a butterfly that had landed on the grass beside his knee. He steepled his fingers in front of his lips and looked
at her. “Let’s see. We ought to think about that. We really should.”

And, as he laid the list out for her, David laid it out for himself as well.

“First, we need to get to the house and phone your mother to let her know you’re here. She’s been worried sick about you.
After that, we’ll call the police and tell them we’ve found you and they can stop looking, too.”

“The police were looking for me? Where?”

“People were looking for you everywhere.” He’d said enough. He knew by the way she glanced at the ground beside the cuff of
her khaki shorts. He switched the subject. “You’re going to meet—” He tried to figure how best to say it. “—my wife. And your
brother. Did know you have a brother?”