Nearly by Raney Deborah

Author:Raney, Deborah [Raney, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Raney Day Press
Published: 2016-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

As soon as Michael had convinced himself he could afford to take the time away from work, he'd known he would go to Springfield. To his family—to the parents who loved him, the sisters who could console him as no one else could. For a wistful moment, he longed for the sage advice his grandparents might have offered.

He had not told anyone he was coming. He didn’t trust his voice on the phone. The hurt was still too raw, the wound too tender.

He wasn’t yet sure what he would tell them when he got there. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to say anything. Perhaps he just needed to be with them, to bask in an atmosphere of unconditional love, and then the answer would come. God would reveal what his next step should be.

He drove on, deliberately recalling everything Claire had told him about himself. . . everything about the part of his past that inexorably connected him to her. Strange that such a profound bond was ripping them apart instead of knitting them together.

This forced remembrance of his childhood dredged up other painful memories. Murky recollections of a dark-haired woman lying on a dirty couch. He tried to wake her. He needed her for something— he couldn’t remember what—but she wouldn’t wake up. She rolled over and turned her back to him, and when he persisted in trying to shake her awake, she shoved him roughly to the floor muttering foul, slurred words under her breath.

He remembered a parade of first days in new schools. It was always the same. An overly cheerful teacher bringing him to the front of the classroom and introducing him while he stood there, his cheeks hot with embarrassment. Evasive explanations to the other children about where he lived and why he'd moved to this school. And always, always, just when he'd begun to make friends, when he'd begun to settle into a family, being wrenched from everything familiar to start the agonizing process all over again.

He tried in vain to think of some happy memory from those days. But it was too painful. Every happiness, he realized, was painted over with loss, negated by good-byes that had separated him from the source of that brief happiness.

He had dealt with all of this before—even the ultimate rejection he'd suffered in St. Louis at the hands of the Andersons—when he'd gone through the drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs in his teens. And he thought he'd put it behind him. No one could take away the assurance he had of the love the Merediths had offered. Or the love God had shown him. He knew with certainty that he was a different person, a new creation. Yet here he was, nearing the beginning of his thirtieth year, and it seemed his childhood was still condemning him.

All these thoughts roiled in his mind, threatening to pull him under in a maelstrom of doubt as his truck ate up the miles between Hanover Falls and Springfield. By the time he drove into the city limits of Springfield, he was emotionally spent.

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