What She Left for Me Read online

  “All lies. Read his letter—it’s right there. He decided to do this while I was gone. At least that’s what he says, but obviously this has been in the works for some time.” Jana could barely hold her anger in check. “So while he was telling you how this was my plan, did he also tell you that he was carrying on an affair with his secretary? That he planned to clean out our bank account and leave me penniless before running off with her?” Jana asked bitterly.

  “No,” Gary admitted. “We didn’t know about the situation with Kerry until last Sunday. Rob and Kerry left us a letter in the office. Jason Broadbent called us first thing to ask if we knew what was going on. Apparently his wife left no more details in her letter than Rob left in his.”

  Jana hadn’t even considered Jason . . . how this might affect him. The man was fifty-something and had been talking of an early retirement so he and Kerry could do more traveling. She shuddered. So many would bear the consequences of two people and their sin.

  “Of course, when Rob gave his resignation, we tried to talk him out of it,” Gary continued, looking most uncomfortable in the silence. “But he told us that . . . well, he said you were determined to end the marriage and that he didn’t feel it Scriptural to head up a church while going through a divorce.”

  “I didn’t even know we were having problems,” Jana said in a clipped tone. “I thought we were very happy. In fact . . .” She let the words fade. She had been about to tell the men of her pregnancy, then thought better of it. She didn’t want them to be the first people with whom she shared her news.

  “I’m truly sorry, Jana,” Gary said.

  “Me too. I’m sorry for a lot of reasons, but I’m really sorry that Rob’s actions had to be such a public affair.”

  “I . . . well . . . I don’t know how to tell you this, but—”

  She couldn’t stand the game any longer. “Just say it.”

  Her interruption seemed to bolster Gary’s strength. “When Rob resigned, we immediately went to work finding another pastor. We have an interim who agreed to move here immediately and take on the church. We signed him on for a six-month trial.”

  “I don’t understand what that has to do with me.”

  “Well, he’s slated to begin next week. That was part of the agreement. Rob said he needed the house until you were back because he couldn’t just throw your stuff out on the lawn, and he didn’t want to put it in storage. Besides, until last week, Rob was still preaching, so it was only right that we let him stay.”

  Jana hadn’t thought the day could get any worse, but this news made it clear she’d underestimated the situation. “I have to move out by next week?”

  “Actually . . . by Saturday.”

  “I have four days, then?”

  Gary and the others nodded in unison. “We will help in any way we can.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, getting to her feet in protest. “I have no money. I have nothing. Rob took it all. How do you expect me to hire movers to load up my possessions—what few Rob actually left me with—and vacate this house by Saturday?”

  Gary’s apologetic tone only served to further her irritation. “Like I said, we’ll help in whatever way we can. We can get the church as a body to come and help pack you up. Most of the men in this room have pickups, so we can probably move you as well.”

  “Sure we can, Jana,” Bill Usher said with a smile. “We’ll see you through this.”

  “I have no place to go,” she declared. “You don’t understand. Rob has cleaned out our bank account. I had nearly six thousand dollars in savings. It was my money, and he took it. There’s no money for deposits on rentals or utilities or anything else. I couldn’t even go out and buy groceries today because there’s no more than ten dollars in my checking account.”

  The men seemed genuinely stunned as Jana continued ranting. She stalked across the room and picked up her purse. “I have only the money left from the trip. I think maybe there’s a total of thirty dollars in here.” She tossed her purse onto the coffee table. “That’s it. Rob has taken the computer and printer, the tools, the TV and DVD player. He’s even taken my jewelry.” This last discovery had been one of the hardest of all. Her only pieces of real value had come from either Rob or her great-aunt Taffy. Her afternoon taking inventory had left Jana depleted of hope and energy.

  “He took everything?” Gary questioned.

  It seemed as though the elders, men who had long worked with her husband, were trying to take in this information and decide if it were true. She hated the looks on their faces—almost as if they were accusing her of lying.

  “Go look for yourselves,” she said, her voice rising an octave. She felt her throat tighten and tears well in her eyes. Running from the room, she locked herself in the bathroom and remained there until she regained control of her emotions. She despised Rob for what he’d done. But she also questioned God for allowing such a nightmare to be her life, especially when she’d given up so much to be a pastor’s wife and missions liaison.

  “Couldn’t you at least have left me what was mine?” she muttered, not knowing whether she said the words with God or Rob in mind.

  Finally she emerged and rejoined the elders. On the coffee table beside her purse Jana noted a check. She looked to Gary for an explanation.

  “We had no idea, Jana. Rob made it sound like all of this was your idea. Then when we found out about him and Kerry . . . well, we were still confused as to how it had all come to be. Now it’s kind of easy to see that you knew nothing about this—that you’re the wronged party here.”

  Jana eased into the closest chair. “I’m sorry for getting so upset. I simply don’t know how to deal with any of this. I thought God was supposed to look after His own. I thought He was supposed to keep evil from overtaking His children.” She looked to each man as though to force him to contradict or support this, but no one said a thing.

  “I don’t think I understand God at all.” She crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair. “Maybe I never have.”

  “God didn’t do this, Jana,” Bill said. “God doesn’t want this for you, any more than we do.”

  “Bill’s right,” another man chimed in. “God is just as saddened by this as we are—as you are. It wasn’t His desire that something like this happen.”

  “Guess He wasn’t on top of it then, is that it?” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “What sweet Christian platitude will you throw at me to make this one all right? My mother used to say, ‘Jana, there are worse things than death.’ Guess I know now exactly what she meant.”

  Two

  On Tuesday morning, Jana made stacks of breakable dishes and coffee mugs on the kitchen table. She needed to figure out what to take with her and what to sell. She’d already decided to have a huge yard sale and get rid of almost everything. There was very little she’d need to take with her. Just clothes . . . and soon, even those weren’t going to fit.

  “I don’t even know where I’m going,” she said aloud. But deep inside she knew the time had come to make the most dreaded phone call of her life. She knew there was only one place she could turn, and while it wasn’t ideal, it would put a roof over her head. Her head and the head of her baby.

  Jana reached for the phone and punched in the number. She waited for the ring and held her breath. Am I doing the right thing? Is there another answer?

  “Hello?” The clipped tone of the woman on the other end of the line sent a chill through Jana.

  “Hello, Mom.” Jana hated calling her that. Eleanor Templeton had never desired to be a mother. She had borne Jana in the hopes of having a son and made no attempt to hide the fact.

  “Jana? Why are you calling?”

  It was a typical response from her mother. Jana seldom telephoned, usually only making the expected call on Christmas, Mother’s Day, and birthdays. “I’m afraid something has happened and . . . well . . . I need a place to live.” She blurted the words, feeling like a twelve-year-old about to confess some horrible wr
ongdoing.

  “To live? What about that husband of yours? Does he need a place to live as well?”

  Jana bit her lip. How much should she tell her mother? It was obvious that she needed the woman’s sympathy—not that she’d ever had it before. Jana sighed. She wasn’t going to play these games anymore. She didn’t have the energy for it.

  “Rob left me,” she finally managed to say. “He ran off with his secretary and took all of our savings.” There. She’d said it all. Well, almost.

  “What? Your goody-goody preacher husband . . . committing sin?” Eleanor’s voice was edged with contempt.

  “Mom, I need a place to stay. Can I come live with you and Taffy?”

  “Of course you can!” the enthusiastic voice of her great-aunt sounded on another extension. “We’d love to have you, wouldn’t we, Eleanor. Oh my, but it will be great fun with you here.”

  Thomasina Anderson, or Taffy, as everyone called her, bubbled with energy. Jana hadn’t even known Taffy existed until her mother dropped a note several years earlier to say that she was moving to Lomara, Montana, to care for an aging aunt.

  “Aunt Taffy, are you sure it will be all right?” Jana asked, completely sidestepping her mother’s input on the matter.

  “Of course. We have tons of unused space. Why, I’d considered taking up boarders, but your mother wouldn’t hear of it. She worries about strangers, you know.”

  “Taffy, Jana couldn’t care less about what I think,” Eleanor stated curtly.

  Jana smarted at the comment. She and her mother had never been close, never even attempted a real relationship. From Jana’s earliest memory, her mother had put her in someone else’s care. To hear her mother tell it, the entire purpose had been to broaden Jana’s horizons and make her less dependent upon people. But to the lonely little girl who waited anxiously to see her mother at the end of the day, only to be rebuffed, Jana didn’t think the plan had worked out so well.

  “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks,” Taffy said firmly. “Jana, you come. Come today.”

  “I can’t come today,” Jana told her. “I have some things to take care of. I’m selling off most of my stuff in a yard sale.”

  “Good. You won’t need a thing here,” Taffy assured. “Why, I have furniture stuck upstairs in the third floor. It’s all just storage up there, and what we can’t find we can surely buy.”

  “Taffy, you don’t need to throw your money away on this,” Eleanor interjected. “Jana will see to herself. Isn’t that right, Jana?”

  “Haven’t I always taken care of myself?” Jana questioned, almost hoping her mother would contradict her. She didn’t.

  “Wonderful. Then it’s settled,” Taffy declared. “Why, I’m so excited, I can hardly stand it. We’ll have wonderful tea parties and talk about the old days. We can even plant flowers.” With a loud click, the receiver fell into place.

  Jana smiled in spite of her misery. Taffy was like an eternal light of hope. As far as Taffy was concerned, the world was a beautiful place, with beautiful people in it. Too bad Taffy was a bit eccentric and, as Eleanor put it, “touched in the head.” Her mother had commented in the past that Taffy wasn’t in charge of her faculties, which was one of the reasons Eleanor had felt it necessary to go live with the old woman when Taffy had asked her to come.

  “I should be there on Saturday,” Jana concluded.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the rush?”

  Jana cringed at the accusation in her mother’s tone. “Well, if you must know, Rob apparently arranged to leave three weeks ago when I went to Africa.”

  “Why in the world would you go to Africa?”

  Again, her mother’s tone made Jana want to slam down the phone and find another way to make her way in the world. “I went to Africa on a missions trip. We have a group of missionaries over there, and some of us went over to help. But that’s really immaterial right now. When I left, Rob resigned his position with the church.”

  “What does that have to do with you?”

  Jana clenched her teeth and drew a deep breath. Exhaling slowly, trying desperately to keep her temper under control, she replied, “We live in the parsonage. The place is provided for the acting pastor. Rob is no longer that person, so I have to move out.”

  “But why now? Why so quickly?”

  “Because,” Jana’s voice took on a harsh tone as she snapped, “the new pastor wants to move in on Saturday.”

  “That hardly seems Christian. If those people care so much—are so holy—then why would they throw you out on the street like that?”

  Jana knew her mother couldn’t possibly hope to understand. “They aren’t throwing me out. They thought I’d known about this for three weeks.”

  “I would still think they could wait.”

  Her mother, with her logical and well-ordered mind, had always run things the way she saw fit. No doubt she would even be able to teach Roberta Winsome a thing or two about organization. Unfortunately, the move had nothing to do with order or organization. Jana wished they could delay her departure as well, but she wasn’t about to agree with her mother on something.

  “Like I said, I should see you on Saturday.”

  “Well, if that’s the way it has to be, I suppose we’ll make do.”

  Jana knew she shouldn’t take her mother’s indifference personally. Eleanor treated everyone the same way; her lack of sympathy wasn’t reserved for Jana alone. It just seemed Jana got the lion’s share.

  Jana hung up the phone and sat in the stillness of her kitchen for several minutes. She’d always liked the cozy little room. There was hardly space to turn around—the parsonage wasn’t that big—but it suited Jana just right.

  She looked at the pictures and knickknacks she’d used to decorate the room. It had a country-French feel with its porcelain rooster and hen, butter yellow walls, and antiqued wainscoting. She’d picked this look because it fit the older home and sparse furnishings.

  A feeling of resentment rose up inside her. “Why should this be someone else’s kitchen? I worked hard on this.” She knew realistically, even when she and Rob had painted the walls, that it wasn’t hers to keep, but at the time it felt like it would be theirs forever.

  Forever.

  What a silly word. She and Rob had promised to love each other “forever.” Forever meant nothing to Rob and everything to Jana. Forever was the curse of time Jana would bear—raising a child without a father, sleeping alone each night. Forever was how long she’d waited for her mother’s love.

  Having grown up without a father, Jana felt immediate sympathy and heartache for her unborn child. Eleanor had often told Jana that fathers were unpredictable and incapable of endurance and consistency. Yet Jana had known friends whose fathers were quite constant. And oh, how she’d envied them.

  Her childhood friend Danielle had known a father’s love in such a vivid way. Every other Saturday, rain or shine, Danielle and her father spent the day together. They did all sorts of things, and Danielle would always come back excitedly chattering about the trips they’d taken, things they’d seen, food they’d tried. Even after Danielle’s twin brothers had been born, the father and daughter still made their Saturday pilgrimage.

  It sounded heavenly to the fatherless Jana. Saturdays in her life had not been much different from any other day. Especially when she was living at the boarding school. There was no one to talk to about dreams and fears. No one with whom Jana could discuss school or boys or life.

  During the week, Jana’s mother was up by six and off to work in the bookstore she owned. On weekends, Eleanor slept in until eight, then took herself off to chores and appointments. The bookstore, which specialized in used and rare books, was her mother’s life, and Jana had even accused her mother of loving the shop more than her daughter. It was an accusation Eleanor never bothered to deny.

  Then later, when Jana was old enough to be helpful, her mother had bemoaned the difficulty of finding trustworthy staff for the book
store. Jana had volunteered to work there, feeling that this would be a way she could connect with her mother. But Eleanor’s answer had been an emphatic no.

  “That is my respite and domain,” Eleanor had told Jana. “I won’t have you there stealing away that bit of solace.”

  Jana sighed, looking at the stack of dishes. She didn’t have a lot to show for two years of marriage. Frankly, she didn’t have a lot to show for a lifetime of living. There remained very few mementos from high school or college, and nothing, she believed, from her childhood. Eleanor had repeatedly told her that such trinkets were nothing more than baggage from the past to be carried around and dusted or stored. But Jana’s sense was that her mother had systematically erased her daughter’s existence. Jana was much like a blank slate, just waiting for someone to write on her—to tell her who she was, who she should be.

  Rob had insisted that he knew who she should be. He constantly told her that he had seen the untapped potential in her, potential that he alone could utilize and bring to life. He’d shared the plan of salvation with her as if presenting an investment portfolio.

  “This is what you need to make your life worth living,” he’d said as they sipped coffee together one night after church.

  Jana hadn’t wanted to attend the college church gathering, but she’d allowed Rob to talk her into going. He’d met her on the college campus while scouting around for souls to save. Jana had thought him the most handsome man she’d ever seen. He was tall and lean with a mischievous smile that gave his face a boyish quality. His eyes captivated her the most. They were a lovely chocolate brown with thick black lashes. She’d teased him about having lashes that any woman would kill for. He’d laughed it off as being the only way he could keep the dust out of his eyes.

  Rob was the first man Jana felt she could really talk to. He was also ten years her senior and, in ways, almost fatherly in his advice. Jana had shared her lonely childhood and miserable trek into adult life. She’d shared her mother’s indifference and critical nature.