Page 11 of Echoes of Eternity
“We’ll figure it out together, Bro. By the way, you should keep Mom in your prayers when you think of her. She had a bruise on her head the other day when I saw her, and I’m not sure what from. I worry about her living alone.”
“What happened to her head? And I will pray for her.”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“That explains the conversation I had the other day with her.”
“What?”
Shaking his head, Ryan sighed. “She told me I was free to move myself and my family up to live with her. Told me she wouldn’t mind having her oldest living back at home.”
“I think she’s lonely.”
“I can’t imagine what she’s going through with all this . . .”
“Right.”
A silence lingered as the conversation came towards a conclusion. “Well, let me know what that guy says about the account.”
“Will do.”
Ryan progressed through the rest of his morning as usual, working on website stuff until lunch, then took a break to eat. Sitting down in his dining room with a sandwich, the front door of the house opened unexpectedly.
“Emily?” he called out.
Appearing in the living room, visible from the dining room, she tossed her purse onto the couch and headed down the hall as she answered him. “I’m going to the bathroom and then heading over to meet with Tina.”
Searching his mind for the name, he couldn’t place the name with a person he knew named Tina in their circles. He took a bite of his sandwich. As she came back out into the living room, he rushed over to meet her face to face.
“Who’s Tina, and why aren’t you at work?”
Lifting her eyebrows, she shook her head. “You don’t remember? Randy’s mom. She texted me about needing to talk and asked if I took a lunch break.”
Hearing the almost twenty-year-old’s name that his daughter had been involved with in the past come from her lips caused Ryan’s heart to edge toward a mixture of fear and anger. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know.” She looked him in the eyes, a yearning in them. “If she’s been?—”
Ryan raised a hand. “There’s no way. We told her last year to stop seeing him.”
“She’s fifteen, Ryan.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose as he thought about the revelation, he shook his head. “I can’t right now.”
“You’re a parent. It doesn’t matter whether you can’t right now.”
“I know, I just . . . It’s not a good time.”
Emily held something back and then came in close and planted a kiss on his cheek. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”
As she exited the house to leave, Ryan was about to sit back down to eat when he felt the urge to act. He ran out the front door, catching Emily before she drove down the street. He got into the car and looked at her.
“We’re going to do this together.”
A genuine smile lifted her lips. “Okay.”
Sitting down across from Tina at a coffee shop fifteen minutes later, Ryan let out a sigh as he noticed the mother fighting back tears.
“Thanks for meeting with me.” Her words were shaky. “I hate that I couldn’t fix this on my own, but I can’t.”