Song of the Brokenhearted by Sheila Walsh

Author:Sheila Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

By the end of the week, Ava’s cupboards begged her to fill them, with Jason seconding that request. “I can deal with stupid rumors about Dad’s work and about me and my supposed drug issues,” he told her, “but I can’t survive without food.”

She ventured out to a grocery store across town to avoid seeing anyone she knew. In the checkout line Ava stared at the numbers growing on the cash register. She counted the cash in her wallet, looking at the row of useless credit cards tucked neatly in their compartments. When was the last time she’d worried about those numbers? Their first year of marriage, but more from habit than necessity. Before that, there were the lean college years, and her childhood that was more famine than feast.

But for over twenty-five years, Ava hadn’t feared the checkout line. Sometimes she remembered the anxiety, the counting and recounting of what was in the basket before moving to the checkout, the horror of being short several dollars and having to put things back.

The cashier moved each item over the scanner with Ava’s heart rate rising. She counted the cash in her wallet a fourth time and barely responded to the cheery small talk. Then the total, and Ava exhaled in relief. She had twenty dollars to spare.

When Ava pulled up the cobblestone driveway to their two-story house that suddenly appeared taller to her, as if it were too much for them to keep, Dane was outside the garage waxing Old Dutch—the 1966 VW Vanagon.

Old Dutch had joined the four-car garage after Dane’s father passed away.

Every six months, Dane pulled the old bus out of the garage. He and the kids washed it and checked all the fluids. Then they piled in for a drive or sometimes drove it to church. It was a reminder to all of them that what they had was a gift, and that they’d worked hard to get it.

“This was my dad’s first brand-new car,” Dane reminded the kids, though they’d heard it a hundred times. Their children had grown up with luxury cars. Dane bought Sienna a Volvo for her eighteenth birthday, believing he wasn’t spoiling her because he’d made her drive one of their cars for the two years prior. That was the life Dane had grown up in, and Ava just couldn’t explain the vast difference between hers and all of theirs. Could they ever grasp what it was like to ride a bus to school through high school, to buy clothes at secondhand stores, not because it was vintage, but because it was necessary, or to scrape off mold from a loaf of bread and eat it or eat nothing?

The door to her section of the garage rose and she drove inside. Dane put a hand up as a lame wave, then continued waxing Old Dutch without helping with the load of bags she carried in her arms. She didn’t think he even noticed.

She called him in to lunch. Instead of eating, Dane fussed over his food with a scowl on this face.

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