Surprised, Valerie asked, “My mama?”
“Oh, yes. Your mama and I met through Buddy and Phillip and became such good friends. She had just found out she was pregnant with you about the time the doctor sent me to bed. She came over every day and kept me company. We made baby clothes, worked on scrapbooks, and talked about these babies of ours. She loved you so much, honey.”
Valerie felt the pang of knowing she should miss something she’d never known. “I don’t remember a thing about her.”
“I know.” She set her cup and saucer on the table. “I wish you could remember. She was an incredible woman who loved the people in this world with such grace that it practically shone out of her. I look at pictures, sometimes surprised I don’t see the aura glowing around her like a halo.”
Valerie pulled her legs up onto the couch and leaned against the arm. “It feels unfair at times. I know so much in my life would be different if she’d lived. However, the things that would change like growing up here, with you and Uncle Phil, the boys…” her voice trailed off. “But I wouldn’t have made the same decisions I made if I’d grown up with my parents, with brothers or sisters.” She looked at the picture again. “Maybe.”
“Child, if ‘ifs and buts’ were fruits and nuts we’d all have a merry Christmas. You can’t live like that. ‘What if’ is a dangerous game to play. Think of King David. The result of his sin with Bathsheba was a child. A son. God took that son as a punishment. The whole time the baby was sick, David fasted and prayed and cried out to God. After the baby died, David cleaned himself up and ate. Why?”
Rosaline paused and waited. Valerie might have felt annoyed at the Biblical analogy, but she knew better than to just shrug it off and refuse to answer. Instead, she pulled her education from the back of her mind and said, “Because he couldn’t change what God had done.”
Rosaline raised an eyebrow, clearly reading Valerie’s tone. “Because he couldn’t change what had happened. There was no sense continuing to fast and mourn. What was done was done.” She stood and crossed over to Valerie, sitting on the table in front of her and taking her hand. “You can’t change the mistakes you made, the decisions you made, the things you’re not proud of in your past. You don’t have that power. You do have the power to get up, clean yourself off, and resume life. You’ve done a really good job of that. I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Auntie Rose,” she whispered, using the name she’d called her all her childhood.
A noise at the door made Rosaline look over her shoulder. Brad stood there, leaning against the door frame, his hands in his pockets. He had untucked his shirt and taken off his tie. Valerie noticed he also wore no shoes. “Am I intruding?”
“We were just walking down memory lane,” Rosaline said, squeezing Valerie’s hand before she stood. “I have to get dinner going.”
Valerie slowly stood up from the couch and raised her hands above her head, stretching her body from side to side, loosening muscles that had tightened while she sat. “Your mom found the neatest picture,” she said, grabbing the photo and the bag off the table. “Look. Remember this?”
She walked toward him and held out the photo frame. He had a quiet, contemplative look on his face and his gray eyes had darkened and looked like a stormy sky. When he blinked and smiled, his features softened. He took the photo from her and after a second, laughed. “I remember this.” Still smiling, he handed it back to her. “You looked so beautiful in that dress.”
“I felt very grown up in that dress.” She put the photo back into the pink bag. “Looking at it now, though, I was so very young. What made me think I was in any way mature?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think we were all on the cusp of a new maturity. What were we? Thirteen?”
“Yeah. Full-blown puberty times four in that picture,” she laughed. “Lord, how did your mama do it?”
“It was certainly a gift.” He straightened and gestured with his head. “Want to walk?”
“No. Actually, I brought my suit. I thought I might swim a few laps. I think that would feel really great on my hip.”
With a raised eyebrow, he asked, “Mind if I join you?”
“I kind of assumed you’d want to. Never could keep you out of the pool.” She picked up the bag she’d set by the door. “I’ll go change in the pool house. Meet you there in ten minutes?”
“Sounds good.”
Brad slipped a short-sleeved shirton but did not button it up. On his way out of his room, he put his watch on the charger on his dresser and slid his feet into a pair of slide sandals. In the hall, he ran into Jon coming up the stairs.
They’d made up as soon as Brad had come home from church. Never one to hold a grudge against his brothers, Brad had gladly accepted Jon’s apology and offered his own.
“Valerie and I are going for a swim. Want to join?”
Jon glanced at his watch. “Sure. Yeah. I have about an hour.” He paused with his hand on his bedroom door handle. “It’s nice enough out you could probably open the roof.”
“I was thinking that, too. See you down there.”
He didn’t encounter anyone else as he walked through the house and down the path to the pool room. When he went inside, he saw Valerie swimming laps. Instead of announcing himself, he went to the control panel and activated the motors that would retract the part of the roof above the swimming pool. Knowing that next week, the temperatures would cool off slightly, he didn’t want to go through the effort of retracting the entire roof and pushing the walls back. This would give them some sun and make it easier to put everything back in place when they finished swimming.
He went to the little bar area against the side wall and pulled two bottles of water out of the mini fridge, then grabbed a towel and walked over to the table where Valerie had set her things.
He remembered the day his father finished building the pool house around the pool and installed the pool heater. Suddenly, swimming became a year-round activity for them instead of just something they enjoyed in the summer months. The four of them would barely finish homework before the race to the pool house began. Phillip had experimented with his own home to help launch a special section of Dixon Brothers Contracting and Design that specialized in pools, pool houses, glass walls, and mechanical roofs.
Once he’d kicked his shoes off and slipped the shirt off his shoulders, he walked over to the deep end and executed a smooth dive into the tepid water. Already he looked forward to the days when the sun warmed the water instead of the heater. Smoothly cutting across the surface, he swam to the end and rolled and turned in the water, using the wall to kick off and start stroking back to the other side.
