Francine Rivers - Her Daughter’s Dream

The doorbell rang. Swiping the perspiration from her palms, Carolyn fixed a smile on her face and opened the door. “Hi, Mitch. Come on in.” Her voice sounded so chipper, so high school. Mitch looked entirely too handsome in a black leather bomber jacket, casual blue henley shirt, black leather belt, Levi’s, and boots. He held a bottle of red wine in one hand and a bouquet of lilies in the other. Swallowing hard, she opened the door wider and waved him in. “Can I take your coat?”

“Better take the wine and flowers first.”

She blushed. “Of course.”

As soon as his hands were free, Mitch stripped off his jacket, tossed it on the sofa, and followed her into the kitchen. “Something smells good.”

“Does it?” She rattled off the menu. “Sorry. Nothing fancy.”

“Got a corkscrew? I’ll open the wine.”

She fingered through her utensil drawer until she found a can opener that included one. “Here you go.” His fingers brushed hers, and she dropped it. “Sorry.” She stooped to pick it up and put it on the counter. Did he have to watch her like that? Her heart kept knocking wildly. She arranged the lilies in a vase and took it back into the dining room. She took a wineglass from the built-in china cabinet and put it on the table.

“Only one glass?”

“I’m a recovering alcoholic. An ex-pothead.”

He grimaced. “Sorry.”

“I’ll try not to drool while you enjoy it.” She tried to make it sound like a joke, but the words came out flat. “Dinner won’t be ready for another forty-five minutes. Why don’t we sit in the living room?” She waved toward the sofa, where he’d tossed his jacket. Mitch sat and watched her. Tense, she picked up his leather jacket and then wondered what to do with it. She should hang it up, but she didn’t have a hall tree. She thought of her bedroom and discarded that idea. Giving up, she folded it over the sofa again.

She sat in one of the wing chairs, back stiff, hands clasped in her lap. “So. What shall we talk about?”

“You want to tell me why you’re so nervous?”

“I’ve never invited a man over for dinner before.” She smoothed her skirt over her knees. “You want to talk about Charlie?”

“Is May Flower Dawn going to join us?”

“Nope. She’s spending the night with my parents.” She felt her face flame up to her hairline as she considered how he might take that news. “It wasn’t my idea.”

His mouth tipped ruefully. “I’m sure it wasn’t. I’ll bet it was you calling my room this afternoon, trying to call the whole evening off.”

So he had been there. “Why didn’t you answer?”

“Why do you think?”

The look in his eyes didn’t give her any room for speculation. Her mind flashed images of other men who had wanted her. Dock popped into her head, first. As she fled thoughts of him, Ash emerged from the pit, beautiful, charismatic, and on a power trip. More pain. More shame. How many others had she slept with who wanted her body, but cared as little about her as they did about the weather? She’d become the wasteland after the hurricane, the refuse washed up onshore, the broken trees, the crushed houses. And now, Mitch Hastings, Charlie’s best friend, sat on a secondhand sofa in her living room, eyes full of a consuming fire, asking her what she thought.

She put her hands on the arms of the chair and pushed herself up. “I’m not much of a hostess. I didn’t even think to offer you something to drink. I have Coke, 7UP, iced tea, lemonade, well water. Or you can start on the wine you brought.”

“Nothing, thanks.”

She sank into the chair again. Now what? She sought desperately for something to say. She dredged down into the darkness and came up empty. Thankfully, Mitch came to her rescue.

“You mentioned Charlie. We wrote letters back and forth after we left high school, kept up the correspondence when he went into the military. He wrote about you.”

“I’ll bet.”

“He loved you, Carolyn. He worried about you.”

She pressed her back against the chair and lifted one shoulder. “His dumb, screwed-up sister gone hippy.” More cause for grief. “Mom and Dad said I made him ashamed.”

“He never told me he was ashamed of you. He said you were trying to stop the war. He said you wanted to be his savior. He worried about your relationship with Rachel Altman. She seemed to have a lot of influence on you.”

She bristled. “Charlie only met her once.”

“Yeah, and it was that one meeting that made him worry. Apparently, she came into his bedroom in the middle of the night.”

She blushed. “I know. She told me after the fact.”

“He beat himself up over what happened. He said she was totally screwed up, and he took advantage.”

Carolyn gave a soft laugh. “I think it was the other way around, Mitch.”

“Whatever the case, Charlie liked her. A lot. He said there was something about her…”

“Chel sang a siren song.” Like Janis Joplin, her idol, who died of a drug overdose less than a year after she did.

“They exchanged letters. He planned to look her up when he came home.”

“Did he?” And now both of them were dead. She wanted Mitch to get things straight. “No one can blame Chel for the things I did, Mitch. Some people are born into a mess. Some people find ways to mess up their own lives. It’s the one thing at which I’ve always excelled.”

“You put your life back together, Carolyn. That takes courage.”

Mitch deftly turned the conversation to other things, managing to make the mundane interesting. She asked about his travels. He talked about riding cross-country on his Harley, interesting people he’d met in diners and campgrounds, sights he’d seen. Carolyn relaxed and enjoyed listening to him. When the timer went off, she put the food on the table. She poured him a glass of wine and set the bottle down before taking her seat across from him. He asked if it would be all right if he said grace. Surprised, she said please, and when he finished, she asked when he’d become a Christian.

“Always have been, just never went to your church.” He’d attended Sunday services all across the country, checking out different denominations. “Thing about knowing the Lord is you have friends and family everywhere. You recognize them when you meet them.”

She didn’t know about church, but she’d found the same rapport in AA meetings. People cared. They didn’t use the Christian jargon, but had their own lingo and simple slogans to get through each day. First things first. Think! Easy does it. Let go and let God. She’d felt Jesus’ presence there. No one looked down at her from the pulpit or told her she wasn’t welcome. She could say, “My name is Carolyn and I’m an alcoholic” and hear “Welcome, Carolyn,” instead of being shown the door and told not to come back until she had proof of repentance. She would have crashed and burned long ago if she hadn’t found a meeting close by.

Mitch ate as though he enjoyed the food. “What was it like in Haight-Ashbury?”

She told him about the pot and alcohol, the constant parties, the confusion and angst. She told him about Woodstock and the long, frightening drive home with Chel still half out of her mind in the backseat. She told him about Ash and his brand of enlightenment, though she left out the drug-induced sexual exploits, the rapes. Some things should be shared only with God and her dead brother.

“Were you in love with him?”

What she’d felt for Ash couldn’t be called love. “No. I saw him for who he really was the day Chel died. In a way, her death freed me.”

“But you’re still not free of all of it, are you?” His eyes filled with compassion. “You’re still carrying a truckload of guilt and shame.”