a woman could ever have, and then he sent us you.”
Cole wants to know what Jesus looked like. Tracy laughs and pinches his cheek. “Like himself, silly puppy. Who else?”
Later, when he is alone, Cole ponders Tracy’s story. To him it is not a comforting story. It is a splinter in his heart. I was raised to believe in God, and I always went to church and said my prayers. Tracy had already accepted Jesus Christ. Her name was already written in the book of life. So why did Jesus choose to appear to her, and not just once but twice? Cole’s parents had not been raised to believe in God. His parents were not redeemed. Hadn’t they needed to see Jesus a thousand times more than Tracy did?
And if Jesus could cure Tracy of cancer and the flu, why couldn’t he cure Cole’s mother and father of just the flu? Why couldn’t he cure even one of them?
Which one? A voice so silky and sly it had to be the devil’s, and Cole was afraid. He knew he should have called on Jesus then, he should have started praying. But he could not. He was too angry, and Jesus was too far away.
Instead, he did something he had not done in a while. He went to the upstairs bathroom and took from a shelf the jar of cream that PW used on his hands. He felt sneaky and not a little disgusted with himself, noiselessly unscrewing the cap and taking deep whiffs, like some kind of junkie. Not for the first time, he wondered how many secrets a person could have and still be a good person.
But the magic worked. The familiar vanilla balm spread through him. The splinter was still in his heart, but for a moment, at least, he felt comforted.
Besides the group classes, there are other activities, like softball and swimming, that bring homeschooled children together each week. There are field trips: the Creation Museum, Old Settlers’ Village, the House of Rocks and Minerals, the snake farm. In good weather they go hiking or spelunking, and now that the baseball and racetrack museums in Louisville are open again (they’d been closed during the flu), there are plans to visit them soon.
Cole doesn’t usually enjoy these outings. (In the past he’d always tried to get out of class trips, and these days he’d rather stay home and draw.) But better to be with the others than alone with Tracy (herself only too glad not to be teaching on her own).
Cole gets along with the children he meets in Salvation City, though he has yet to make best friends with any of them. He has never been the kind of person who makes friends right away or has more than one or two close friends at a time. Once he’d started middle school his parents had worried that he was too shy. One day his father said, “You know, they have some great medications for shy people now, especially shy kids.” The very suggestion had brought on revulsion and paranoia (pharma mind control? no thanks), and Cole was relieved that his mother had not been on his father’s side in this. But it had always bothered him. He had always thought it was his father’s way of saying he wished Cole was more popular.
There had been an even worse period of time, before Cole got to middle school, when it seemed that almost everything he did got on his father’s nerves. It was during this time that Cole began to suspect that when his father was a kid, he might have been a bully. His mother tried to explain. “Dad’s one of those people who’s never quite sure how to be around children, maybe partly because he was an only child himself.” The good news was that as Cole grew older, things would be different. “You’ll see. You and Dad are just going to get closer and closer.” And Cole had believed her. He knew what she was saying, and that lots of men couldn’t connect with their sons until the sons were almost men themselves. And now he felt bitterly cheated.
But—in his own eyes anyway—he had never actually been the pathetically shy loner his parents were worried about. If he hadn’t been exactly popular, or even part of any crowd, that didn’t mean he was a total reject, either. The hardest part had been knowing how disappointed his father was that Cole wasn’t the kind of kid