Sidewalk Flower (53 page)

She had found this place on
accident.
 

She never participated in the group
activities, preferring instead to sit quietly on her own.
 
Everyone at the church seemed understanding
of her need and never pressured her otherwise.
 
It was the reason she kept coming back.
 
A few times a week recently.
 

But one day, she’d been looking for the
restrooms when she happened to pass by this room and saw a little boy, probably
about eight or nine years old, who looked like he was scared of his own
shadow.
 
She couldn’t help but go to
him.
 
She’d asked him why he was standing
in the hallway alone and if he was okay.
 
The scared young boy told her he was supposed to be in the room, but it
was his first time and he knew that if he went inside, then everyone would know
why he was there.
 
Because
only the kids who had been abused went to this classroom.
 

His candidness surprised her and she felt
hopelessly in need of helping him.
 
She’d
knelt down to his level and told him she was supposed to go in the room too,
but she was also a little worried about what the others would think.
 
She asked if he would be her friend and go
with her.
 
He seemed a little leery that
a girl as big and tall as her would be afraid of anything but he eventually
took her hand.
 
They entered together, a
woman and a young boy who shared nice smiles and sad eyes.

Together they had made their way to the
back row.
 
She made sure to be there
every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and she’d always sat with little
Marshall.
 
After one month, the young boy
stopped coming.
 
When she asked the group
leader why, she was told that he had been adopted by a family.
 
They lived in a nearby town where they
attended their own local church.
 
The
news made her happy but sad that she had lost her little companion.
 
After Marshall left, she went back to sitting
by herself.
 
Although now, she would wait
and only come into this room after the classes had let out.
 

She looked down and to her left at the
pair of shoes that belonged to whoever had sat down in her row.
 
Not shoes, but boots, western style ones with
triangular toes.
 

She followed them up, unbelieving.
 

Up past the deep indigo blue jeans and to
the hand that was outstretched in her direction, lying along the wooden
seat.
 
The long, tapered fingers that
could have belonged to a musician, but that she knew were those of a
woodworker.
 
She couldn’t believe Lucky
was there, in her private room.

She didn’t know what to say.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” She echoed back to him.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you.
 
Did you want me to go?
 
I understand if you do.”

“No, please stay.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”
 
She nodded her head as if they had just agreed upon some very important
deal.
 
One where they
were both agreeable that he would not leave her right now.
 
Not until they figured out what else to do.

“You looked like you were in the middle
of something when I first came in.”

“Oh, I was just thinking.
 
You know.”

“Yeah, I could tell.”

“I was thinking about friends” she offered.

In truth, she’d spent the better part of
the last two months praying like she had never done before.
 
She had been at such a loss to explain what
her life was about that it seemed everyone she’d ever cared about, except for
Gramma thankfully, had been taken from her.
 
And she couldn’t figure out on her own why that had happened.
 
She listened to the sermons sometimes and one
day something had caught her ear.
 
It was
about praying and finding clarity.
 

She needed it desperately.
 
So she started praying silently to herself
about almost everything.
 

She even asked that Vangie would get
better somehow.
 
That God would help her
to learn to love the right way.
 
That
Jaxon would learn to accept love if it should ever show up at his doorstep
,
that he would find his
own peace and that the world would be set right so that they could remain
family as they were meant to be.
 
She
wanted Maryella to grow up with two loving parents, whether they were able to
live together or not, she just wanted the best for the little girl who she
loved like her own niece.
 

She wanted so many things for so many
people.
 
And so she sat and prayed for
them all.
 
Sometimes she surprised
herself by asking that peace would come to those she thought might not deserve
it but she told herself that she wasn’t their judge.
 
She wanted her mother and her father to
always rest in peace because they had loved her first.
 
If God existed, she wanted him to bless
Gramma with at least another twenty years so that she would have the time
necessary to love her and give her thanks for being her savior.
 

Lucky, that one was tough.
 
She hoped he would be happy, and be able to
forgive her someday.
 
She loved him and
felt empty that she hadn’t been able to grow the love in the proper way.
 
She knew he had been the one.
 
And she hadn’t been able to hold onto
him.
 
Letting him go had been hard.
 
But she had seen how many times he had been
hurt by her and she knew that wasn’t fair.
 

And now here he was.
 

“Friends,” he said, as he smiled with his
eyebrows.

“Yeah.”
 

They both smiled and Lucky reached his
hand out further to hers until their fingers met up.
 
“I hope my face came up when you were
thinking about those.”

“It did.”
 
She kept her voice
low,
not wanting to assume
her answer would make him happy.

“Good.”
 
His fingers lay gently over hers now.

Nerves almost kept her from asking, but
she got over them and put herself on the line.
 
“Would you like to go for a walk with me?”

“Yes.
 
I would like that.”

They stood and she led Lucky down the
hallway and the center aisle of the church, then to the side door.
 
Before they left, dear Mr. Francis caught
Lucky’s eye and smiled.

Chapter
Thirty-Five

“I feel like we’ve been here before,” she
said as she tried to find a way to re-break the ice with her humor.
 
She was rusty, but it slowly rolled off her
tongue and did the job of making Lucky smile.

“Don’t even try to tell me you’ve
forgotten the last time we were out here.”

Could it be that he still had the means
to flirt with her, after all the mess they had made of their sweet, romantic
beginnings here?

“No, that’s what I mean, this feels
eerily the same.”

Lucky sat with her on Gramma’s back
porch, sipping lemonade.
 
The sun had set
and the last few birds chirped along their routes to getting settled down for
the night in their trees.

“By my recollection, Miss, that’s a good
thing.”
 
Lucky smiled.

“I don’t know.
 
Since then, you’ve left me, I’ve left
you.
 
Maybe the universe is trying to
tell us something.”

“But here we are.
 
I think I know what it’s telling me.”

“If you listen closely enough, you’ll
probably hear it saying ‘
Run Lucky, run
far, far away from this crazy woman.
’”

Lucky grinned but became serious as he
rubbed the pad of his pointer finger over his bottom lip.
 
“I tried that.
 
It didn’t work.”
 

“Lucky, I’d really like to try
again.
 
But how do I know, or you for
that matter, that one of us isn’t going to freak out and leave the other
again?”

“I don’t know.
 
I guess you just have to have faith in me, in
us.
 
Hell, I’d ask you to marry me right
here, right now if I didn’t think it’d scare you to death and send you running,
screaming into those woods.”

Silence.
 
She was still sitting there but her
vocabulary had apparently high-tailed it.

She tried to feign a look of shock with
wide, deer-like eyes but it wasn’t an act.
 
“Did you just say you’d ask me to marry you?”
 
Did he
just ask me that
?

“Would you say yes, if I had?”

Silence again.

She thought about it and realized she’d
completely underestimated and misunderstood Lucky’s down-home charm and simplicity.
 
She’d worried so much that he wasn’t tough
enough to weather the chaos of her life as it had been in California and on the
road.
 
That it would have chewed him up
and spit him out.
 
When in fact it had
done exactly that, but to her.
 
The truth
was that neither of them belonged in that world and everything she’d seen as
simple and humble about him was exactly where he drew his strength from.
 
Exactly the place she wanted to draw hers
from as well.
 

She crossed her arms, grabbed hold of her
bent elbows and answered honestly.
 
“I
think so.”

“Is that kind of like how you told me
once you thought you might love me?” he asked as he buried her with a look so
straight on and intense she thought she needed something to hold onto.

“I’m sorry, Lucky.
 
You see, listen to the little voice.
 
You might still have a chance to escape if
you go now.”

She thought he had reached out for her
hand but instead he let his fingers fall over the soft blonde hairs of her
forearm, stroking her up and down.
 
He
hadn’t changed, hadn’t lost that innate sensuality of his when it came to
petting her.
 
She was afraid she might
have simmered down too much in their separation and lost hers but no, it was
here.
 
Her arm heated under his fingers,
pushing her to remember what it had felt like to play in his dusting of chest
hair.
 
Did he have any idea of what his
touch did to her?
 
Even after all this
time?
 
His natural rhythmic motion left
her achy and throbbing with a crazy yearning to finally be buried under him,
hips to hips, chest to chest.
 
To be that
girl who welcomed him inside her so deeply he’d have nowhere else to go.
 
There’d be no escaping because those
unforgiving long legs of his would be tangled with hers.
 
She swallowed, trying to moisten her dry
throat.
 

“Trista, do you think you might ever love
me one day?
 
Because, let me tell you,
I’m there.
 
And I’m obviously that guy
who’s gonna wait for you.
 
I might get a
little stir crazy once in a while but my feelings haven’t changed since the
first minute I saw you.”
 

The song
of
 
male
cardinals calling after their
mates sounded in the nearby trees as she told Lucky the absolute truth she’d
learned the past few months.
 
“I think I
love you in ways I didn’t even know existed.
 
But my love doesn’t seem to be good for people.
 
I’ve been trying to figure out why.
 
I don’t want to hurt you, ever again.”

“Darlin’, your love is exactly good for
me.
 
You make me think, not take anything
for granted.
 
Most of the things you say
make me hysterically happy.
 
As a man,
you make me want to take you home and keep you safe and protected.
 
I want to always, always be your friend and I
want to be your lover, too.”
 

His fingers slid down her forearm in
search of her hand.
 
Once he found it, he
laced his fingers tightly with hers.