Angel Falling Softly - By Eugene Woodbury Page 0,44
didn’t tell him.”
“And what a way to find out! Congratulations, Elder, it’s a girl! Now, about that lesson on the law of chastity—”
“So is that why they died?” Rachel didn’t think so, but she had to ask.
“They died because a drunk driver ran a red light. It certainly wasn’t because of what they did. Not when you’ve heard what I’ve heard, people doing things—people doing things in this ward—upstanding members of the community and all that. If anybody’s going to hell for their sins, I can promise you it won’t be Doug and LaRita Bromley. Jesus told the woman to go and sin no more, and that’s what they did. Some shotgun marriages do work out for the best. I had faith in theirs.”
“Then why them?”
“I don’t know. For all we know, that drunk driver was going to run somebody down that night, and if not them then some other unlucky couple. I could even believe that at that moment they were as perfect as they were going to get in this life. They’d started over and were headed in the right direction. Not everybody completes the circle like that. People die all the time, for all the wrong reasons. But that’s the whole point of the gospel, isn’t it? Having faith in Christ, believing in the atonement and eternal life. Or deep down, do we cling to mortality and fear death the same as everybody else?”
He stopped talking. They were both silent. It was a rhetorical question.
It struck Rachel that in many ways Carl and David weren’t all that different, Carl relying on theology to explain his good fortune, David relying on theology to explain their bad luck. That’s the way men’s minds worked: they coped with life by explaining it. But the explanations didn’t make life hurt any less. The explanations didn’t solve anything, really. Forget logic. Maybe pitching a fit now and then, having a real temper tantrum, was what it took to get God’s attention. After all, Jacob wrestled with the angel, and Jacob came away with the blessing.
Rachel rested her head on her husband’s chest. “But I still want a miracle.”
Her husband kissed the crown of her head. “So do I.”
Chapter 24
Discretion is the better part of valor
At the front desk, the brilliant smile on Cindy’s face told Milada that the good news had nothing to do with work. “Something came for you this morning,” she said.
Milada answered with a look of practiced insouciance and continued on to the conference room. The something had been placed at the end of the table where she usually sat by the phone, arranged—by Karen, undoubtedly—to catch the muted light from the curtains on the gold foil of the long, slender box.
Karen waited anxiously while Milada put aside her parasol and attaché and took much longer than necessary to get around to opening the box. She untied the ribbon and lifted off the cover to reveal a single long-stem white rose, resting against burgundy velvet. A casket for a relationship, Milada thought.
“How pretty!” Karen leaned forward to examine it. “It smells so nice. What does the card say?”
Milada slit open the envelope. As she suspected, the gift had come courtesy of Troy Ellis. On the card he had written in a careful hand: The symphony deserved a better encore. Lunch at the Garden?
She smiled to herself. She still harbored some guilt about the clumsy manner in which their date had ended and was not averse to concluding it on a more proper footing.
Karen said, “It’s from Mr. Ellis, isn’t it?”
Amazing that Karen remembered who he was. But there was no arguing with a person’s true priorities. “The Garden is a restaurant?” Milada asked.
“It’s in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, the old Hotel Utah. It’s a really nice building, right across the street on South Temple.”
“Oh, yes.” Steven had pointed it out to her in one of their many jaunts past Temple Square. Milada retrieved her phone and dialed the number Troy had included on the card. He picked up on the second ring.
“Milada!” he exclaimed, obviously startled that the gift had been deemed an acceptable recompense.
“The rose is lovely,” she said. “And Karen informs me that the Garden is a respectable establishment.”
It took him a moment to parse her language. “Yes, yes, it is.”
“Would a one o’clock lunch fit your schedule?”
Some rustling through papers. “Not a problem. Why don’t we meet by the statue.”
“The statue?”
“The Joseph Smith statue in the lobby. You can’t miss it.”