Free Rhythms of Grace by Marilynn Griffith Page B

looking through your mail. He put down the postcard, but kept what mattered most—the envelope with my old notebook inside.
    I sat down, my drink on the bar between us. “I thought I was done with it too, but evidently God isn’t done. He’s not done with a lot of things.”
    My bare feet had left footprints, I noticed. Only the toes showed up, like a young girl on tiptoe. Perhaps that’s just what it was. I grabbed the envelope and pulled. My boyfriend’s shocked look made me smile. “I’m not who you think I am, Mal. Nobody is. You know me as Grace, but in this envelope is Diana, a part of me that I have silenced for a very long time. The part of me that’s missing.”
    It must have been his turn to surprise me, because he sat down, right there in my dirty footprints on my kitchen floor. He was wearing his favorite pants. Mine too. He didn’t seem to care as he motioned for me to join him on the floor.
    I did, but not before offering him some tea. He declined.
    “Tell me then. About Diana, I mean.”
    And so I did that too. Between sips of mango tea, I told him about how my ballet teacher and my mother had plotted to starve me (he laughed), the leaves and the bus stop (he cried). I even went a little further, to my time in the psych ward (he looked concerned). It seemed best to stop there.
    Thank God I didn’t tell him everything.
    He hugged me, but it was more polite than passionate. “I’m so sorry, Gracie. Or should I call you—”
    “Grace is fine.” I’d long since gotten over the confusion of my fractured identities. One day there would be someone who could see me for all I was, Diana Grace Dixon Okoye. Until then, there was Jesus. “And I’m sorry that I stood you up. Maybe this was supposed to happen. We can still do our planning though. Let me get my binder.”
    He hung his head. “Maybe we should just pray on it some more? We’re getting married. I love you. It’s just . . .”
    His declaration of love sounded like he was trying to convince himself too. It took me a minute, but I caught on. Mal had been looking for a running mate as well as a wife. Someone to grace his arm in the next few years when he got his own congregation. Yesterday, I’d fit the bill, before the mailman came.
    We got up at the same time. I waved away his explanations. I didn’t want to hear them. I grabbed a travel cup from the cupboard and made him some mango tea, knowing it would likely be the last I’d give him. He took his time with it as though he knew it too.
    Outside, we held hands as I walked him to his car. He didn’t talk. There was nothing to say. He’d fallen in love with who he’d thought I was. The real me, however, scared him to death. What he didn’t know was that she scared me too.
    I smiled and waved goodbye before plunging into a patch of Indian Blankets with both hands. Transplanted from where I’d gently picked them on the shoulder of Interstate 75 one day when my car went dead, the flowers had never quite taken to their new surroundings. I watched as the man who had been my future pulled away, probably calling a new woman from his B list on speakerphone as he went.
    That made me laugh as the petals slipped through my fingers, bright and fragile, like all the lies I’d told myself. Another part of my life was over, and after five years of mourning one man and two years of playing games with another, I resented all of it. The meanings would come clear eventually, but right now I needed answers, and preferably not the obvious ones. The only comfort came in my heart. A verse that I memorized after losing Peter.
    Return to me, for I have redeemed you. Your husband is your maker, whose name is the Lord of Hosts.
    I grabbed a pot and started to pull up the bulbs, careful not to disturb the root system. If I worked quickly, maybe they’d make the move intact. I wasn’t getting another man. I’d had men enough. This time, God was giving me a mission: to change the lives of children the way Joyce