“Do you miss that? Not growing up with him around?”
“Sometimes.”
“I miss my mom, too,” she said, “even though I never even knew her.”
It was the first time I’d ever considered that Jamie and I might have something in
common. I let that sink in for a while.
“It must be hard for you,” I said sincerely. “Even though my father’s a stranger to
me, at least he’s still around.”
She looked up at me as we walked, then faced forward again. She tugged gently at
her hair again. I was beginning to notice that she did this whenever she was nervous or
wasn’t sure what to say.
“It is, sometimes. Don’t get me wrong—I love my father with all my heart—but there
are times when I wonder what it would have been like to have a mother around. I think she
and I would have been able to talk about things in a way that my father and I can’t.”
I assumed she was talking about boys. It wasn’t until later that I learned how wrong I
was.
“What’s it like, living with your father? Is he like how he is in church?”
“No. He’s actually got a pretty good sense of humor.”
“Hegbert?” I blurted out. I couldn’t even imagine it.
I think she was shocked to hear me call him by his first name, but she let me off the
hook and didn’t respond to my comment. Instead she said, “Don’t look so surprised.
You’ll like him, once you get to know him.”
“I doubt if I’ll ever get to know him.”
“You never know, Landon,” she said, smiling, “what the Lord’s plan is.”
I hated when she said things like that. With her, you just knew she talked to the Lord
every day, and you never knew what the “Big Guy upstairs” had told her. She might even
have a direct ticket into heaven, if you know what I mean, being as how good a person she
was.
“How would I get to know him?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, but she smiled to herself, as if she knew some secret that she was
keeping from me. Like I said, I hated it when she did that.
The next night we talked about her Bible.
“Why do you always carry it with you?” I asked.
Now, I assumed she carried the Bible around simply because she was the minister’s
daughter. It wasn’t that big of an assumption, given how Hegbert felt about Scripture and
all. But the Bible she carried was old and the cover was kind of ratty looking, and I
figured that she’d be the kind of person who would buy a new one every year or so just to