big tough guy on skates, waved happily in return through the rear windshield, glad to be going anywhere, even if only to the doctor’s office.
Craig Philem greeted them like royalty, and Kaylie couldn’t help noticing that most of his approbation was aimed at Stephen this time. Considering that he was now listed among the consulting physicians for the Blades hockey team and busily expanding his office suite to accommodate the honor, she couldn’t blame him. He did a most thorough job of x-raying Stephen’s broken bones, even those he had not set himself. Pleased, he replaced the initial post-surgery leg cast with a shorter, sturdier version that would allow walking with crutches. To facilitate that, he also shortened the cast on Stephen’s upper arm, promising to remove it in another couple of weeks.
They walked out, more or less, side by side, with Stephen swinging lightly on his crutches. Stephen astonished both Kaylie and Chester by insisting upon going shopping.
He bought everything that he could find to fit him at the local men’s store, including a suit, though he couldn’t even get both arms in the jacket due to the cast. While they waited for the pants to be hemmed, he ambled around the downtown square to pick out gifts for everyone in the house, settling on sunglasses, of all things.
For Odelia he chose gaudy frames ringed in rhinestones, for Hypatia smart pearl-white. Mags wound up with military-green. Chester came away wearing an aviator style, while Hilda and Carol got classic tortoiseshell of different shapes. At Stephen’s insistence, Kaylie tried on a dozen pairs or more. In the end, he insisted on a cat-eyed copper frame that cost more than every other pair of sunglasses she’d ever owned. Stephen himself went for a wraparound style in silver with the blackest of lenses.
As a last act of exuberant self-indulgence, he insisted on visiting the local drive-through for milk shakes, ordering one of just about every variety. Later, they all sat around the patio back at Chatam House in their fashionable shades slurping decadently and ruining their lunches, staff included. He was so happy that it hurt Kaylie to think she might actually break his heart. And her own.
She knew what she wanted, but she waited for some sign from God to tell her what she should do.
Stephen felt very proud of himself, at least on one score. He did not attempt to press or seduce or even charm Kaylie. Instead he learned simply to be, with and without her, no artifice or attitude or even thought, taking each moment as it came, living in hope and, oddly enough, praying. The last was harder than he’d thought it would be.
He’d begun simply because she’d asked it of him, but he didn’t understand what he was supposed to say to a God whom he did not quite know. In the past, he had made demands or desperate, maddened pleas, but that had not worked out too well, so he did his best just to get acquainted. Telling God about himself, essentially explaining his actions, choices and feelings, seemed foolish. Wasn’t God omniscient, all-knowing, all-wise?
Yet, Kaylie had said that prayer must be grounded in a personal relationship with God, so Stephen set about first explaining and then, often, excusing. Or trying to. Funny, but the more he argued his excuses, the less he was able to, and in the process he somehow came to understand himself better. He didn’t like everything he found, especially the cowardice and the shame. In fact, some of what he saw in himself brought him to tears and, strangely enough, apology, though he did not quite get why he felt that need. In the end, however, he found a sort of peace with himself. How that could happen, he didn’t know, but wanted to. He wanted to understand.
An idea gradually took root, one he’d have scoffed at earlier, and he was trying to find a way to address it when Hypatia did it for him. She made the invitation at dinner on Saturday evening. He had come down for the meal, even though it meant not seeing Kaylie that night. Her father, she had said, required her at home. Stephen didn’t like the sound of that, but he couldn’t honestly plead a greater need when he was now capable of seeing to himself.
Odelia gushed about how happy they were to see him up and about on his own, and Mags, as he’d taken to calling her, offered to show him