Beneath a Southern Sky - By Deborah Raney Page 0,71
affects you. You are Natalie’s father. And you’re a wonderful father. But—” She hesitated, not wanting to start another argument.
“Say it,” he urged.
“Well, it wasn’t fair for you to just make the decision yourself. You should have talked to me about it before you came down with your verdict.”
“I’ll give you that,” he said with a meek, sideways grin. “But can we agree right now that we will start being more consistent with her? She’s a little toughie—I have a feeling we have one of those textbook strong-willed children on our hands—and she’s going to play us against each other every chance she gets if she sees that we’re divided on this.”
“I’ll try, Cole. It won’t be easy, but I’ll try. And I’m so sorry this turned into such a huge fight. I said some horrible things—and thought some even more horrible things. Things I didn’t even mean. I need to ask your forgiveness too.”
“You know you have it.” He took her hand, and they both sat in silence for several minutes. Finally he turned to her. “So what horrible things were you thinking?”
She shook her head firmly. “You don’t want to know.”
“Then don’t tell me,” he said, leaning over to kiss her gently. He drew away and then laughed softly. “Man,” he said, shaking his head in feigned bewilderment, “I thought we were going to see steam coming from Vera’s ears.”
Daria giggled at the vision of the prim and proper Vera literally letting off steam, and for now their shared laughter drew her into the circle of her husband’s arms.
Twenty
Early in October, autumn finally made a reluctant appearance in Kansas. Daria bent to retrieve another damp pair of Cole’s work jeans from her laundry basket. She snapped them briskly and pinned them to the clothesline. A hint of crispness was in the evening air, and though it was a welcome respite from the heat, she thought with regret that it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to go back to using the dryer. She clipped the rest of the clothes to the line in a neat row and straightened to flex her aching muscles. Doing a veterinarian’s laundry was no small feat. She sometimes had to run Cole’s grimy coveralls through the washing machine three times to get them clean. For him she would have made lye soap and scrubbed his jeans on a washboard. She smiled to herself, realizing that she had never expected she would gain such deep satisfaction from a tidy row of clean laundry flapping in the wind.
But it was the view beyond the clothesline—the stretch of backyard that ambled to the creek—that took her breath away. The trees on their land were beginning to turn, a glorious kaleidoscope of gold and scarlet against the rolling green pastureland. When she’d first returned to the States, especially that first winter, she had sometimes longed for the predictable, balmy tropics of Timoné, but after a year of living on this sweep of Kansas prairie, she realized how much she cherished the beauty of the changing seasons, and especially how much she loved the winter snows.
She heard voices and knew that Cole and Natalie were coming up the lane from their nightly stroll to retrieve the mail. She went to the corner of the house where she could watch them without being noticed. Nattie was chattering away about some little object she held in her hand, and Cole was listening intently, as though what she was telling him was the most important thing in the world. Daria couldn’t make out their words, but Nattie’s voice was like the song of a little bird, her twittering peppered with an inflection of adoration wrapped around two repeated syllables: “Dad-dy, Dad-dy, Dad-dy.”
Natalie said something Daria didn’t catch, and Cole laughed uproariously and scooped the little girl up and threw her over one broad shoulder like an unwieldy sack of potatoes. She squealed with delight until he finally swung her back to the ground with a tender pat on the head.
Watching them together, hearing their dear voices, Daria was overcome with gratitude for the life she’d been given. Like the tears that pooled behind her eyelids, a prayer of gratitude welled up in her, and she poured out the words without thinking. “O Lord, I’m so blessed. Thank you, Father,” she whispered. Her words wafted away on the evening breeze, and she was suddenly overcome with the realization of how rare communion with her heavenly Father had become lately. She felt so