Chapter Fourteen
Delilah
“Well, someone was up late!”
I look up from my lunch in horror, my face draining of color. But my mother is just smiling at me in her usual way, and I take a shaky breath. I force a smile to my own face, and shrug.
“Oh, yeah, kinda went down the rabbit hole with Melanie about charitable outreach to third world counties, and if converting them to Christ is something that needs to be part of that, or if just helping how you can is the more Christian thing to do, without worrying about who they’ll pray to after.”
I almost stumble over my own words, and I’m, immediately a little started by just how easily the lie rolled off my tongue. Because discussing missionary work with Melanie Krupa is not what I was doing last night. No, last night, I was letting myself go, with Gabriel.
I was… sinning, I suppose, but in the most incredible way I’ve ever imagined sin to feel. I lost myself with him, and yet, I feel found.
I blush. I also feel a little sore, but in a deliciously heated way that’s still sending little fluttering feelings through my core.
My father, sitting across from me at the table on the back porch, puts down the political thriller he’s re-reading for the fortieth time, and he grins. “Well, shoot, Christina,” he chuckles, glancing at my mother. “She’s your daughter all right with those smarts.”
I roll my eyes and look back at my sandwich to avoid the shame of lies on my face. To be clear, I don’t feel bad about last night. I don’t feel like I’m going to Hell, or lost, or damned. But I do feel bad about lying to my own parents.
“I think I woke up to you coming upstairs,” mama chuckles. “And I believe it was close to midnight!”
“It was twelve thirty,” Paul mutters as he steps out of the backdoor with his laptop and stack of files in his hands. He eyes me, but he doesn’t say anything else before he slumps into a chair in front of a sandwich my mother has made for him. My father glances at him over the top of his book and scowls a little before looking back to the pages.
Papa and Paul are “at it again,” as my mother informed me when I finally stumbled downstairs this morning. Apparently, there was a blowout fight late last night after I left for “bible study,” and apparently, it was a bad one.
It’s not the first time my parents—particularly my father—and Paul have argued about, well, several things. Him leaving home for a little bit before he even finished high school was a big one, but they forgave him and took him back in. Then there was the DUI he got after finally graduating, and again, they put it aside. When Paul “left” the school my parents had scraped together money to send him to, it was pretty clear even to me that it was less of a voluntary “leaving” and more of a “being asked to leave situation.”
But they still took him back. Forgiveness runs strong in our family, I guess.
But his upcoming marriage to Lizzie Purcell has been a pretty hot topic for months now. For one, because he been completely wishy-washy on when they might actually be getting married, and for two, because Lizzie has never once even spoken to my parents since they got engaged. Which is… weird, to say the least.
She and Paul have never come over for dinner, she’s never even called my mother—her future mother-in-law—to even say hi. On top of that, it’s not even like they’re a couple who like their privacy or anything, or like they’re one of those “they’re so opposite it’s cute” situations. It’s like they’re not a couple at all. Plus, Lizzie is just… I wrinkle my nose. She’s not exactly a nice, warm person. None of the Purcells are, actually. They’re one of the oldest families in Canaan, but Thomas Purcell, her father who owns and presides over the Purcell Savings and Loans Bank in downtown, mostly walks around town as if he’s a king and we’re all his lowly subjects.
Bottom line, Lizzie is a cold, snobby, rich girl, which makes it extra strange that she’s marrying a middle-class college drop out who’s trying to build a church and be a small-town minister.
The last time this all came to a head, I actually had to find out the details through the gossip chain a week later. Paul and my father got into blow-out fight in the living room, and Paul left roaring that it was “none of my father’s damn business.” He was gone for a week that time, but eventually came home to his pseudo-apartment above the garage. Eventually, I got it through Melanie Krupa that a friend of my father had sworn with his hand on a bible that he’d seen Paul’s new fiancée out on the town in Athens when he was there on business, making out with some other guy outside a fancy hotel before going inside with him.
That’s what that last fight was about—my father asking Paul if he was really sure about his plans for marriage, and Paul yelling back that it wasn’t his business. Last night was again about his marriage to Lizzie and how my parents just want to sit down with them both and talk about it. Mama says it got pretty heated, too.
“Pass the lemonade, Delilah,” Paul grumbles.
I reach for it, but my father growls lowly.
“Please.”
Paul frowns and looks at him. “What?”
“Please,” my father grunts. “We raised you in a good, Christian home, Paul, and we use manners in this house.”
“I’m twenty-seven years old, dad,” Paul grunts. “I don’t need to be lectured.”
“Twenty-seven years old, living in the apartment above your parents’ garage—”
“Jeb,” mama says quietly, putting a hand on his arm. He grinds his teeth and lowers his book, looking at Paul.
“And marrying a girl we don’t get to meet, who doesn’t seem to want to even acknowledge you have a family. That sum it up, Mr. Grown-up?”
“You’ll meet her, okay? I’ve been busy, dad,” Paul hisses.