The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,58

my time with him, and when I wasn’t with him, I was thinking about him. He had a way of filling my life, always present. I could almost talk to him in my head.

I was lovesick, in other words, and he felt the same way about me.

My friends thought I was crazy. His thought the same about him. They told themselves it wouldn’t last, that if it went on much longer they would have to intervene. So we dropped them, which left more time for each other. Time we put to use the way young couples obsessed with one another do.

The reality check arrived in the form of a plus sign on the pregnancy test. That’s how I told him, by showing him the stick. He didn’t take it the way I expected.

“I think this is a sign,” he said. “It confirms what I’ve felt all along.”

The sign said we should be together. The sign also said we should elope.

I graduated with honors, with a wedding ring (which I wore on a chain around my neck, since we hadn’t told my parents yet) and with an eight-week-old Jed growing inside me, concealed under the flowing cap and gown.

For a long time after that, we were happy. I never felt like I’d given up my life in favor of Rick’s. I never felt like the ministry thing was his career; I felt like we were doing it together, side by side. When we had Eli, we were thrilled. The first years at The Community were wonderful too. It was later that things started to change. After the church grew so large that most of the people there became strangers. After Rick accepted the job title that started to alienate him from himself.

He didn’t understand any better than I did what a Men’s Pastor was meant to do, but he was determined to be a great one. He had to take up golf, learn racquetball and handball. He had to follow sports in general much more than he’d ever done in the past. All the theology books from school went into boxes, replaced by the leadership handbooks, the best-selling self-help books, the guides to masculinity written by men who could only access the concept via cliché.

Ten years ago, even five years ago, Jim Shaw’s instinct about Rick would have been right. He did have a voice that mattered. He did have something important to say. But the last few years have changed him, hollowed him out. Is it any wonder he feels less present to me, when he’s hardly present to himself?

I’m not sure how much of this Rick could admit to. In the old days, I’d form a judgment on something only to find, when I shared it, that Rick saw things the same way. Now, not so much. He’s trying so hard to live up to expectations that he can’t admit to himself those expectations aren’t worth living up to.

Of course, it’s always possible I’m the one who’s wrong. Not everyone sees him the way I do. Clearly, Deedee has a different take.

These offerings of hers really puzzle me.

For a woman who’s lived her life alone, who has devoted herself to painting rather than a man, Rick’s actions must look so different. What looks to me like a deadbeat, she interpreted right from the start as some kind of hermit saint. Why was she so quick to idolize him?

Does she see something of herself in him?

Or perhaps it’s just the opposite. She sees something in him that is completely different, something utterly inaccessible to her imagination. A challenge.

You don’t leave flowers for yourself, after all.

You don’t appoint yourself to be your muse.

“You know what it is, Ricky boy. She admires you. Whatever she thinks you’re doing, it’s something she wishes she could do herself. But what that is, I don’t have a clue.”

I gaze at the shed, waiting for a reply. Nothing comes.

The last time I was outside enjoying the night, Gregory was walking with me. It’s hard to remember the details of that walk—all the intervening drama has blurred them—but there was one thing he said that seemed important. How did he put it? “Maybe this isn’t Rick’s time”—it was something like that. Maybe this wasn’t Rick’s time, it was mine.

What would my time even look like? A bus ride to our nation’s capital with a bunch of fruit loops and an infatuated son? A road trip down to Florida, maybe in a rented convertible, the wind whipping in