Love's Labors Tossed Read online

  “Leonard!” I yelled at the mountain, the rain making me almost mute.

  There was no response, just some heavy wiggling from his feet. I wasn’t sure about what to do, but I figured that getting Leonard out of the hole was probably a good place to start. I crouched and grabbed his ankles. He seemed to resist a bit and then went limp. I pulled as hard as I could, my efforts getting him about four more inches out into the open. Before I could yank again, my feet slipped in the mud and I fell face first into dirt and ankles. Leonard kicked like mad. I stood back up and pulled.

  He was loosening.

  Two more tugs, and he seemed to flop out like the mountain giving birth to a clod. The rain began to taper off. Leonard spit and shook for a good three minutes before saying anything.

  “Face . . . hurts,” he finally moaned.

  Since it was too dark to see his face clearly, I was forced to ask for an explanation.

  “What happened to it?” I hollered louder than necessary. “And why were you in that hole?”

  “I was trying to get away from the ward,” he said as if we were some ravenous bear with an appetite for destruction. “I didn’t know those tires would take off like that. My side started hurting from running, so I tried to find someplace to escape to. I thought maybe I could crawl through this hole and out to the other side of this hill.” Leonard breathed deep and then spit again. “I saw on the Discovery Channel that ants often dig tunnels with holes at each end so they can escape if a predator comes down one of them.”

  “That’s not an ant hole,” I laughed.

  “I know that,” Leonard defended. “I just thought that maybe it was something all digging animals did.”

  “Ants aren’t actually an animal.”

  “That Discovery Channel sure leaves out a lot of important stuff.”

  Lightning struck, and I got my first good glimpse of Leonard’s face. I jumped at least a good two feet backwards.

  “Holy . . .”

  His head and face were completely covered in blood. Long scratches marked every inch of his mug. His hair was missing in places, and his bushy eyebrows looked as if big bites had been taken out of them. His right eye was wide open, and his left eye looked bruised closed.

  “What happened?” I asked in amazement.

  “Let’s just say I wasn’t alone in that hole,” Leonard blew out.

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “The funny thing about badgers . . .”

  I suppose Leonard would have gone on if we had not been interrupted by the sound of voices hollering out our names. We hollered back, and moments later a cluster of flashlights swarmed our way. It was Bishop Leen, Brothers Barns and O’Shawn, and two of the ward’s young men, Norm Chavez and Benjamin Johnson. Benjamin was the first person to catch Leonard’s face in his beam.

  “Ahhh!”

  “Good night!” Bishop Leen exclaimed. “What the heck happened to you?”

  “He got stuck in a hole,” I explained.

  “That must have been one ugly pit,” Hyrum Barns whispered.

  “Are you all right?” the bishop asked.

  “If it’s an emergency, you’re welcome to use my cell phone,” Brother O’Shawn said with excitement, unclipping it from his belt and happy for the possible chance to dial anyone up.

  “I’m fine,” Leonard said, looking anything but.

  Lightning struck, and the rain that had begun to die down picked up again. As a group we hiked back to the campsite together.

  “You didn’t need to run,” Bishop Leen said apologetically to Leonard.

  “Old habits die hard.”

  Back at camp Leonard accidentally stuck his head into a tent full of young women. He’d thought it was his. His timing could not have been worse, seeing how one of the older Laurels had just finished telling a particularly haunting ghost story. The tent was literally ripped in half as young women frantically tried to make an escape. The badger Leonard had met earlier had nothing on these girls.

  After everything had settled down, Grace and I retired to our separate tents that we had pitched side by side. We lay down in our sleeping bags and whispered through the thin walls. The rain had stopped, and the night smelled like something a soap manufacturer would kill to be able to duplicate.

  “Quite a night,” I whispered out to Grace.

  “Umm,” she softly sounded back.

  “August isn’t that far away,” I said, referring to our wedding date of August eleventh.

  “Trust?” Grace asked, obviously wishing to whisper about something else.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we go home?”

  “Now?” I asked, thinking that she was talking about leaving the campgrounds and going back to Southdale.

  “Not now, but soon.”

  “The campout ends tomorrow,” I explained. “Is that soon enough?”

  Grace laughed. “Not Southdale,” she whispered. “Thelma’s Way.”

  “You want to go back home?”

  “Can we?”

  It was a pointless question. For the last five months I had been begging Grace to let us go back to Thelma’s Way for a while. I missed her hometown immensely, but more than that, I felt as if it was where we should be. Grace, on the other hand, had been reluctant to return. In fact, she had enjoyed her time in Southdale so much that I worried about her ever wanting to go home again. Now here she was speaking to me from beyond the nylon and admonishing me to take her back. I shifted onto my left elbow and faced her tent. Through the small gap at the bottom of the zipper I could see the outside of her tent. The clouds above crumbled, and thick moonlight pressed through the dark and lit up the landscape. Grace’s tent seemed to glow as nature x-rayed the insides. I suppose if this had been some risqué movie I would have now been faced with the seductive outline of Grace as she lay within. But seeing how this was a ward campout and all, the most the skies could do was silhouette her bulky sleeping bag.

  “You’re serious about Thelma’s Way?” I whispered with excitement.

  “We could just go stay until we get married.”

  “When should we leave?”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Two days later we were standing in the Dallas airport waiting for our connecting flight into Tennessee. I was very happy and excited to finally be going back. Yep, life looked just about as smooth as it could be.

  I needed to get my eyes checked.

  2

  The Homely One

  He caught his breath and stared out at the small home through the dense trees. The burlap sack at his feet wiggled and squealed. He kicked it and yanked on the rope that was cinching it closed. His dark eyes looked once again towards the house. A big man with a hairy chin stepped out and glanced around.

  It was time to leave.

  He had played it too close this time. Normally he had taken care of things during the night. Lately, however, his circumstances had made him much more bold and careless. Everything that he had known was gone, and in his mind Thelma’s Way was partly to blame. So he took a pig here, a pie there. He shopped for clothes off strangers’ lines and collected blankets from open windows and unlocked doors. He had to live, didn’t he?

  He wasn’t completely unaware that his presence was causing the residents of Thelma’s Way to grow worried. But he was even more aware of how much he needed to survive. He threw the small pig over his shoulder and slipped deep into the woods.

  3

  Another Log on the Fire

  To say that Cindy Finders was a piece of work was like labeling a forty-car pileup, with casualties, a simple fender bender. Cindy was the trickiest piece of work that the heavens had thrown down in quite some time. She was five foot seven with brown eyes, long dark hair, and nice hands. She was absolutely out of this world, unbelievably drop-dead gorgeous. She made perfect sunsets and priceless masterpieces look shoddy and worn. Her smile was a weapon; her walk, a doomsday device.

  Yes, physically Cindy was really somethi
ng. Unfortunately, emotionally Cindy was something else. Once you got past her outer shell, Cindy wasn’t so easily defined or pleasant to look at. You could never say that with her it was the insides that count, because if you did, you would be running at a constant deficit. She was blunt, tacky, conceited, opinionated, and bossy, alternating with obtuse, stubborn, and malicious, depending on the day, mood, and slant of the moon. She administered criticism like some sort of poisoned Pez dispenser, dropping her jaw down, her full lips pushing out sour negatives. She was constantly finding fault in nearly all she saw.

  She alienated herself from most folks by acting better-than-thou and distanced herself from all the rest by being harsher-than-all. She didn’t even care for her family. Her father had tried to be what she wanted, but what she wanted was for him to exhaust himself into an early retirement, from which point he could then spend all his time doing exactly as she demanded. Her younger brother Floyd confessed to love her like a sister but not like the sister she presently was. And her poor mother had worn out her knees praying that she would someday find a man, marry, and move far away, or at least two states over. She loved her daughter, but Cindy truly was the kind of child that even a mother could shove.

  The genesis of Cindy’s behavior was said to stem from a bad summer camp experience that she had been through many years ago as a youth. It had been her first and last summer camp. She and her friend Brittany Wence made all sorts of extraordinary best-friend-before-camp plans. There would be days filled with crafts and games and nights filled with pranks and sharing secrets. Well, the plans fell by the wayside due to Brittany’s falling in love with a camp hand named Coop. Coop was a son of one of the older instructors and in charge of such charm- inducing tasks as spraying for ants and cleaning the stables. So, where once Cindy had been Brittany’s best friend, now she was love’s third wheel. Thanks to her, Coop and Brittany couldn’t seem to find a moment alone. They tried to lose her by playing complicated games of tag, but Cindy was too quick. They attempted to ditch her with hide-and-seek, but Cindy’s keen sense of smell and Coop’s cheap cologne made it impossible. So, frustration being the mother of dementia, on the last day of camp, Brittany and Coop took matters into their own hands and locked Cindy in one of the far bathrooms out by the old drained pool and adjacent to the craft shack.

  Well, two things happened as a result of that. One, Coop and Brittany discovered that they didn’t really care for each other when they were alone. And two, Cindy was forgotten about until camp was over and Brittany was back home. The bathrooms that Cindy had been locked up in were far enough away from everything to prevent her banging and screaming from being heard. And since it had been the last day of camp, nobody had returned to that area until Brittany went home and Cindy’s parents had become curious about why their daughter had not returned too. It took Brittany all of an hour to tell the truth, and after unsuccessfully trying to get ahold of someone up at the now-deserted camp, Cindy’s parents drove five hours to rescue their child. When they finally located her and opened up the door, what walked out of that bathroom was a completely different person from what had been pushed in.

  Cindy had seen the dark.

  She now knew that she could not and would not trust another human being for as long as she lived. If her best friend could turn on her, then how could she ever believe or tolerate another human being?

  As a result of that conviction, Cindy was now all of twenty-five, all of rotten, and all of unmarried. She had served a mission in Spain because her parents had promised her a car if she did. They had hoped that she would return a new and nicer woman.

  Nope.

  The only difference was that she could now pick them apart in Spanish as well as English. Cindy simply couldn’t find her place in this world. In fact, she had been unsuccessful at locating a single spot that she could tolerate for longer than ten minutes. Everything seemed to be against her.

  She knew of only one relief.

  Yes, early in life she had discovered the magic of romance novels and their ability to take her away. She consumed them. If a book had a woman and a man on the front, she read it. If the man was shirtless, she read it even faster. The books were her world. Within their pages was an existence far less painful and disappointing than the elements around her. The men were men, and the women were women.

  Cindy was a woman.

  And Cindy felt that her bitter life could be made better if she could just find that fictional Mr. Right. A man with the ability to recognize the world as she did. And not to mention, a washboard stomach.

  Was that too much to ask?

  Cindy thought not.

  Well, her prospects in Georgia had dwindled. All the single men her age had either moved away or were currently looking for job transfers that would help them do so. No, her hometown of Homerville, Georgia, and the small communities surrounding it were obviously not going to be able to fill her needs. She had tried ads in the paper and on the Internet, but even in type Cindy was offensive.

  SWF What’s it to you? Looking for someone nonpathetic enough to not need to be looking here.

  She had even considered becoming a nun. The idea had merit, seeing how she could then spend her days complaining about the great sacrifice she was making. But the local nunnery smelled funny, and they refused to let her wear her hair loose and full.

  Well, just like in her books, it took complete darkness to usher in hope. So, while clinging to the end of her romantic rope, she discovered an unopened letter that had fallen back behind the desk in her room. It was quite by accident, seeing how Cindy never did any cleaning herself. But she had accidentally dropped her favorite crushed rose petal bookmark, and while retrieving it, happened upon the letter.

  The letter was from her aunt, Daisy Cravitz, who lived many states over in the town of Southdale. According to the postmark, it was more than five months old. Cindy could only figure that her mother had done an incomplete job of making her aware of it when it had originally arrived. Cindy considered throwing it away. She had no time for outdated news. But Aunt Cravitz was one of the few people that Cindy almost respected. She was blunt and levelheaded to the point that anything sensible rolled right off her. She was widowed and wise to the world and its often lacking participants. And, like Cindy, she was blessed with the gift of not giving a hoot about what others thought of her.

  So Cindy opened the letter and read.

  “Interesting.” Cindy smiled.

  It seemed that Aunt Cravitz had found a man for her niece. Cindy pulled out the picture that had accompanied the letter.

  “Very interesting,” she shuddered.

  Cindy looked at the picture again. He wasn’t half bad. He was standing in front of a chalkboard looking away, but his hair and shoulders made up for his not being attentive to the camera. According to Aunt Cravitz, he was dating a girl that was all wrong for him.

  “How unsurprising,” Cindy sniffed. “Looks like he needs a little direction in his life.” Cindy touched the photograph affectionately. “Well, Trust, set your dial for Cindy.”

  She set the picture down and smiled. Well, to her it was a smile. To anybody else, it was more of a cold, wicked wince.

  4

  One Eternal Now

  From Dallas we flew directly to Knoxville, Tennessee. Somewhere over Mississippi we hit an extremely rough patch of air. Grace and I worried for a moment, but we kept a brave face. The turbulence, however, caused the older gentleman sitting next to us to react a little more strongly. He panicked and screamed, “We’re all going to die!”

  He buried his face in a couple of tiny airplane pillows and sobbed. A few minutes later, when the air smoothed out, he looked as if he might have been more comfortable if he had plummeted to earth in a fiery ball of flame instead of having to face all of us who had witnessed his behavior. He removed himself to one of the plane’s bathrooms for the remainder of the flight.

  With him gone I pointed out the window at landmarks I didn’t know anything about an
d made up stories for Grace.

  “That’s the valley where Abraham Lincoln and Pocahontas built their summer home.”

  I thought I was being clever and charming but when I turned to spot the admiration in Grace’s face, I realized that she was too busy reading the instructions on the sick bag to listen to me.

  I knew where I ranked.

  We landed in Knoxville and wandered around until we found the car rental booth. They were out of anything small and economical, so we got a car that must have been a boat in its previous life. It was huge. When we set our suitcases in the trunk they seemed to disappear into the vast unknown—there were houses in Thelma’s Way with less square footage. The front leather bench was so long that Grace, while sitting on the passenger’s side, was more than two arm’s lengths away. She tried to scoot closer, but the bulky seat belt heads stuck up like metal fists, making the in-between very uncomfortable.

  “Maybe it’s better this way.” She smiled from across the leathery meadow.

  People view things differently. I could see no advantage to her being so far away from me. But she sat by her door and I sat by mine while we drove through Tennessee in a car that even my grandparents would have been embarrassed to be seen in.

  One advantage of a huge car is that you get to stop and gas up a lot. We could actually watch the gas gauge drop each mile we drove. We stopped in Collin’s Blight to fill up again and then made it to Virgil’s Find with nothing but fumes keeping us moving. We turned the car in and walked with our bags to the edge of town where the trail to Thelma’s Way began.

  “This is it,” I said to Grace as if she didn’t already know that.

  Grace set her small bag down and looked at the weathered wood sign that said “Thelma’s Way” with an arrow beneath it.