The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Read online

  The woman in front of her noted Willow’s insider status. Ciara wore no nametag. Willow sensed the envy, a new edge added to that odor of tension.

  “I’m simply grand, as usual,” Ciara said, her marble-hard tone telling even a stranger that she was all but “grand.”

  Willow didn’t say anything, but hooked her eyes into Ciara’s. The barista did not blink or look away. She knew Willow was praying for her, sending her good energy. That’s how she thought about what Willow did.

  The woman with the blonde hair, who stood waiting for her latte ahead of Willow, looked at her phone and returned it to her purse. Willow scooted closer to her to allow the next person in line to order. She noted the scones available that morning and decided to add one to her usual purchase. She was regaining her normal body weight again and could afford the extra calories.

  When the blonde woman looked up from her purse, Willow had rested her eyes on her. She found a surprising connection waiting. Though Willow hadn’t said anything, the tense woman instinctively said, “What?” as if she hadn’t heard properly.

  “God is trying to get a message to you,” Willow said simply, her voice low and confiding.

  “A message for me?” she said.

  “What do you have in your pockets?” Willow said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a message from God for you in your right-hand pocket,” Willow said to her, just as the low-fat caramel latte the woman ordered arrived on the smooth maple counter.

  The woman ignored her coffee. She reached into the right pocket in her navy blue skirt. She kept her eyes on Willow. The woman knew now that there was something in her pocket. She had just remembered that she had slipped a little note in there before she left home, a note from her daughter.

  As the line for coffee advanced, Willow ordered her blueberry scone, and the blonde woman stepped back. She held a bright pink square of paper in her hand. She stared at it, unbelieving. It said, “Get message from G.” She had written that note to herself at the office and later had laid it on the black onyx countertop in her kitchen. It was a reminder to check her messages from work, where a message from Greta, her boss, waited. On the other side of the paper her daughter had written a little note: “I love you very much,” it said.

  As she pocketed her change, not bothering to place the bills and coins in her purse as she normally would, Willow stepped closer to the bewildered woman. Their noses less than a foot from each other, Willow hitched her purse up to her shoulder and then reached out to the other woman, a gentle hand landing on her shoulder.

  “You’re Karen?” she said simply.

  Karen nodded. She looked back at the note, reading first one side and then the other. She made no move to physically withdraw from Willow, but her usual exoskeleton protected her from the woman standing too close, touching her. She was fighting to contain a flood of tears. Just behind the bursting urge to bawl like a wounded child, waited an angry shout, an indignant accusation she had reserved for whoever it was who would receive her at the end of her life.

  All she could think to say was, “I’ve always wondered if he was real,” as if the hard shells of the wounded outburst and the angry accusation she had stored up, had cracked open to reveal a kernel of discovery.

  “God is real, and God truly loves you very much,” Willow said, though she hadn’t gotten a good look at either side of that note. Karen knew that, just as she suddenly knew that God was sending her messages.

  Though both women were headed to work and would likely be late if they paused to assess what had just happened, Karen agreed to Willow’s offer to sit down for a minute. There, in the bentwood chairs accompanying a tiny round table, they exchanged names and numbers and Willow prayed a brief prayer to seal the envelope on that message, to seal the impact of it deep in Karen’s heart. And Karen managed to keep her sniffles shielded from most of the room, her tears sparing her waterproof makeup, but not her love-proof heart.

  Quiet as a Library

  Annetta Baker had worked for the Palos Heights library system as long as Willow, and longer. She was a substantial woman in her late sixties now, with very short-cropped gray to white hair that framed her face like the feathers outlining the face of an owl. She commanded respect by her low narrator-quality voice and by the intelligent gleam from her espresso brown eyes.

  During most of their time at the library, Willow and Annetta had not been friends, even though they were friendly. For the first eight or ten years, Willow was still carrying a shell around with her, in which she could hide whenever threatened. In the early days, a person looking at her constituted a threat, especially if it was someone as intimidating as Annetta.

  For her part, Annetta first thought the inward-focused white girl with the spooky air about her was a fine employee and coworker, but not friend material. She had internalized a feeling from her mother, summed up in the words, “I don’t brook no nonsense.” Though Annetta, a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Iowa library sciences program, would not have expressed it in those words, she had breathed it in as a child and the odor had stuck in her nose ever since. And, as far as she could tell, there was some crazy nonsense about Willow Pierce. If it wasn’t in the way she nearly winced when someone approached her the first time, then it was the way she would drift off, as if travelling in another dimension, having left her body behind on terra firma. At least Willow did her work and always showed up on time, even in those early days.

  People have an extraordinary capacity to get used to strange things and strange people. Almost as fast as Willow transformed from her early box turtle days—at least fast in terms of total human transformations—Annetta grew accustomed to her weirdness. It helped that Willow never woke from one of her extended stays in la la land with instructions to kill her fellow employees. It also helped that she began to let Annetta get close enough to look into her eyes without flinching or even averting her gaze.

  The most persuasive invitation to deeper trust between them, however, came about twelve years ago, when Annetta was losing her grip on her marriage. Her husband, Raymond, had met someone at work, someone younger and slimmer than Annetta. In the process, he had forgotten at least one “I do” or another, even if he had spoken it in the Baptist church where his grandfather had once been the preacher. As catastrophic as those days felt, Annetta kept her pain all bundled up inside, though her shell wasn’t nearly as opaque as Willow’s had once been.

  Willow, by this time, had turned from spooky to intriguing in Annetta’s mind, because of the way she seemed to know things that no one could possibly have known without divine assistance. On a Monday, when Annetta had come to work against every desire and longing in her soul, Willow had looked at her across the cart full of returned DVD’s and VHS tapes, and said, “I think God has something to say to you Annetta.”

  A part of Annetta had been dreading this day, the day when Willow would finally confront her boss with something that they had both been shy to address. Willow, extending herself past her remaining fear of the outside world, met Annetta, afraid of what lurked in Willow’s inside world.

  It was Annetta’s turn to avert her eyes. “Umhmm,” was all she said in response.

  “I think God wants you to know that it’s not your fault that someone very close has hurt you really deeply. And he wants you to know that he has all the Kleenex you’re gonna need to make it through.”

  Now Annetta’s eyes turned fried-egg wide and rested on the skinny media librarian who stood boldly looking at her, with a DVD copy of Dances with Wolves in her hand. All she could say in response, however, was, “Kleenex?”

  Willow grinned with the right side of her mouth, the way she did when apologizing about a cataloging mistake, or spilled water in the break room. “It’s not your fault,” she said again.

  Even if Annetta couldn’t fully catalog all of what Willow had said, how she knew it, and why God was promising Kleenex, she knew her heart had been laid open like a catfish
caught in her uncle’s farm pond, skinned and filleted. She burst into the most frightening shower of tears and sobs Willow had ever heard. Fortunately, Willow had been laid open herself a few dozen times, and recognized the hopeless infant wail coming from a full-grown body, even a body about twice her girth.

  Willow rested a hand on Annetta, reaching across the media cart to where her boss leaned on it to keep from collapsing to the floor. “He has a really good home for you, Annetta, and not just one waiting in Heaven. He has one he’s getting ready for you here on Earth. And he plans on living with you there.”

  When she heard that part, the cart was no longer enough to keep Annetta off the floor. She collapsed onto her backside, one leg sliding under the cart and a foot sticking out where Willow could see it. It was all she could see of Annetta for a moment. Though unknown to Willow, she had addressed Annetta’s greatest fear, living alone. As she began to recover, Annetta also began to wonder why she had been afraid of finding out what sort of spiritual well Willow was sheltering in her long silences and unexplained smiles. She couldn’t think of a good answer after that day.

  That was the noisiest day in the short and distinguished history of the North Branch of the city library. But Annetta and Willow never spoke of it these days. Their friendship had hiked a long winding trail since, and that mutual journey contained enough items of interest to make that early opening a mere historic event, and no longer an issue between them. Annetta had left her husband, had moved into a cozy townhouse that blossomed with her colors and her sweet aroma, to the point that none of the neighbors could remember who had lived there before, and Annetta knew it as home.

  Arriving at work at seven forty-five, as usual, Annetta reached the bottom of the main staircase in front of the red brick library in time to see Willow unlocking the door. This was a bit late for Willow, though simply as a matter of notable divergence, not a disciplinary breach. Anyway, Annetta long since stopped thinking in the traditional boss-subordinate roles when it came to Willow. As different as the two women appeared, and indeed were, they had each handed over all the trust they possessed to the other, and, with that trust, found complete understanding.

  “A late church meeting last night?” Annetta said, her voice squeezed by her contracting diaphragm as she scaled the stairs. At nearly seventy, gravity had surrounded her and now threatened a final rush to break down the old walls and vanquish the inhabitants.

  Willow stood holding the door for Annetta. “No, it was my mother, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. I plumb forgot about that,” she slowed at the door and looked into Willow’s bright blue eyes. “Well, how did it go?”

  Willow followed Annetta around the glass door, allowing it to swing silently closed behind them. “It was as good as anyone could have hoped or imagined,” Willow said.

  Annetta looked across at her as they stepped slowly up the freshly varnished maple stairs toward the front desk. Though Willow’s description seemed unbelievable when applied to having dinner with her estranged mother, Annetta knew that Willow had become the most tolerant person she knew and could forgive anyone for anything. For all Annetta knew, Willow’s time with her mother might have looked more like a blizzard than the sunny picture Willow offered, if Annetta had been the one assessing the evening.

  “Really? That good?” Annetta knew this was enough to get a close up into what really happened.

  Willow looked her full in the face, recognizing the sound of Annetta’s skeptical voice. “It really was quite peaceful and agreeable. She even apologized to me in a way that I could tell she had been wanting to do for a long time. It was wonderful.”

  Annetta knew the reason for the apology, though she had never probed into the details of Willow’s abusive upbringing. She knew enough from her own experience, and what she had heard from other friends, to guess what needed apologizing for. Because Willow had long since stuck a dagger in the bitterest memories and moved on without the burden of that corpse, Annetta didn’t hear any of the specifics that made Willow’s childhood hell unique.

  “So you two are good now?” Annetta said. Again her words came in puffs as she removed her coat behind the main desk, on her way into the back room and the coat rack.

  “We are reconciled,” Willow said. “I don’t know yet what it means for the future, but I know things have changed between us.”

  “Makes you wonder if it would have been the same if you had gone to see her, instead, like you were considering.”

  “This was good,” Willow said. “This way she could feel that she chose to confront the past and wasn’t forced to do it by me showing up at her place.”

  “Instead, she shows up at your place without warning.”

  “I think she was afraid I would reject her if I had time to think about it. But it worked for us.”

  “She gonna stay with you while she visits?”

  Willow nodded. She was seated now, looking at the computer on her desk, checking her task list and calendar as she answered. “I invited her, and she said she didn’t want to impose. But I could tell she was touched to have me open my house to her.”

  “Hmmm. That’s ‘cause she doesn’t know you’ve opened your house up to a whole lot of nutty and dangerous people already,” Annetta said, never one to neglect a chance to editorialize on past choices her friend had made against her advice. Not that Willow really ever asked Annetta for advice. But she didn’t avoid presenting Annetta with information which she knew would spawn unsolicited opinions and attempted persuasions. Though Annetta still seemed the immovable rock, physically, Willow had become the more unshakable of the two. Annetta’s opinions often crashed against her friend like giant tsunami waves against a mangrove forest. A lot of water spilled into places it didn’t normally go, but the trees stood steady.

  Willow, distracted by her perusal of her plan for the day, delayed her response. When she did turn toward Annetta, it was with a smile. “Well, I’m still here to listen to you remind me about every one of those unusual guests.” This was the sort of effortless flaunting of its fearlessness that the mangrove forest always offered to the departing waves.

  Annetta put one hand on a hip and squared up against Willow. “Well, I’m still here to say ‘I told you so’ when some crazy person tries to kill you in your sleep someday.”

  Willow just laughed at her friend’s unflagging taunts, which left Annetta to shake her head as she shuffled toward her desk. She was wondering who would keep Willow in line after she retired at the end of the year.

  Willow knew that was what she was thinking. But she wasn’t worried.

  Write this Down

  Most of us don’t write down everything that we hear our best friends say. But we would, of course, write down profound life instructions from a famous wise man or all-powerful ruler. What, then, would we do if the most famous and most wise of all counsellors were our best friend, who spoke to us every day?

  Willow was not in the habit of writing everything down that she heard from her eternal companion. She was, however, readily obedient when the spirit instructed her to write something down. Whether because she might not remember all the details, or might forget the instructions entirely, or whether as a sort of exercise in trust, she wasn’t sure, but a conversation would occasionally begin with, “Write this down, my dear.”

  Willow kept a pad and pen at the ready in seven different locations in her home. One lay next to the brass lamp beside her bed, on the antique nightstand she had found at a nearby garage sale. Another sat next to the stove in the kitchen, where she could reach it either while eating at the little round oak breakfast table or while cooking. The one she used the most was usually covered by a coaster and a book next to her favorite fireside recliner. Every room except the guest bedroom was ready for recording a revelation worth keeping on paper.

  Her tall and straight townhome, in the same neighborhood where Annetta had found her new place, was a refuge and a spiritual retreat center for Willow. Most of her time there was
spent in conversation, silent or spoken aloud, with her invisible and ever-present fellowship. Willow had created her own meeting place, and she often followed the prompting to take notes on one of their meetings.

  Though no number of people visiting or living there would stop her from listening—and indeed from hearing—the prospect of her mother staying in the house wrinkled Willow’s generally smooth demeanor. She had to check to discern whether this reticence reflected hidden unforgiveness. Having cleared that hurdle, she prepared to repent of hoarding her place of refuge for herself and begrudging sharing her space and her peace. Unlike love, however, neither space nor peace-and-quiet would multiply by giving them away. During this inquiry, Willow heard one of those prompts to find a pen and paper.

  “Remember Mary and Martha,” said that deep inner voice. “It was Mary who desired the greater thing when she sat at my feet, even enduring the rebukes of her beloved sister to keep that intimate contact with me. Don’t allow the rebukes you imagine in your mother’s heart, or hear from her lips, to hinder your determination to keep the greater thing.”

  Willow looked at the words in black ink on the white 6” x 4” note pad. With this sort of input she could make a confident decision; in this case it was a decision to ignore her mother’s lofted hints, and not invite her to live in the house beyond her visit. The words on the page, however, told Willow more than how to make this one decision about her mother. Their presence in black and white told her that she would need to hear this message again and again. This revelation forewarned her of her mother’s next surprise.

  “I’m thinkin’ about movin’ out here to be closer to you,” Claudia said, standing at the bay window in Willow’s living room, her back to her daughter.

  Willow had grown beyond the twinge of guilt she used to suffer at having stolen the surprise from someone close to her, guilt at having been prepared in advance so that her response could be measured and carefully weighted.