Head turned slightly to the side, Martha was obviously attempting to hear both conversations at once—the one in which she was engaged and the one going on behind her. Shelley’s voice had grown even softer than Ellen’s. Mostly she appeared to be listening without saying much at all.
“Not usual duties for a preacher,” Martha remarked, although rather than sounding impressed by his efforts she seemed annoyed.
Or maybe it was just her daughter’s conversation that was having that effect on her.
“I’m also fairly adept at just listening without offering advice, if that’s what’s needed.”
Behind her, Rebecca flopped over to the middle couch seat to take the phone from her sister. “Hi, Daddy, how are you?”
The start Martha gave was almost indiscernible.
So it was her ex-husband, just as Tim had predicted.
“I have lots of friends,” Martha told him now. “But if there’s ever a time when I can’t reach one of them when I need help, I’ll be sure to keep your offer in mind.”
She was wearing a smile that looked painfully forced.
Rebecca had grown silent behind her. The ponytail that was almost constantly bobbing was oddly still now.
“I’d love to see Tim play ball sometime,” David said, before the boy’s mother could order him out of her house—which, he suspected, was coming next. He didn’t want to leave while the family was so obviously upset. There must be something he could do. Some counsel he could offer. “I used to be a little leaguer myself.”
Pushing buttons on his video device and biting his lower lip, the boy didn’t seem to hear.
“Half the town comes to see the games,” Martha said. “There are usually teams playing every night of the week during the season. There’s only one lighted field in town so you can’t miss it, and the games always start at seven.” She barely took a breath. David had the impression that she was trying to prevent a moment’s silence during which he’d be able to hear Rebecca’s conversation with her father.
Not that she was having much of one. Like her two older sisters, the girl had grown very quiet. But while Ellen and Shelley were staring at their laps, Rebecca kept glancing nervously at the back of her mother’s head.
“I haven’t seen you at Bible study once since I’ve been here,” he said then, realizing the inanity of the comment as he spoke the words. He was really grasping.
And more determined than ever not to leave until he knew that this single-parent family was going to be okay.
“I quit going almost a year ago.”
About the time she’d found her former pastor in the arms of a married parishioner?
David knew why Martha Moore was one of his hardest souls to reach. She and her boss, Keith Nielson, were the two who’d walked into Pastor Edwards’s office and seen his hands fondling the naked breasts of the mother of teenage sons. The wife of a prominent Shelter Valley businessman.
Martha and Keith had taken the pastor at face value when he’d said it would never happen again. When he’d told them he’d confess to his wife, begged them to let him salvage a marriage that he valued.
They were the two hardest hit when Edwards was discovered with the same woman a second time—in an even more compromising situation—and forced out of a job he’d held for decades.
Edwards had lied to her. To the whole town.
And, in his own way, David Cole Marks was guilty of the same thing.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DISTURBING near silence that had permeated Martha’s living room as her children, one by one, heard what their father had called to tell them grew even more intense when Timothy took his turn on the phone.
Martha had known that would happen.
She desperately wanted the do-gooding man who was currently filling the job of preacher to have left her home before then.
She needed to be alone with her children, to be able to tend to the shock and hurt on her daughters’ faces.
But Preacher Marks was still standing in the room, mentioning something about a new choral production for the next Christmas season, when Tim took the phone. Her son didn’t say much more than his sisters had while his father was on the line.
There were some things that didn’t change, and Tim’s fearful respect for his father’s authority was one of them.
It lasted, as Martha had known it would, right up until Tim slammed down the phone.
“That’s disgusting!”
She would’ve liked to remind him to take better care of their things.
“Tim.” Martha turned to him, to all four of them, needing to help them with something that couldn’t be helped, but determined to try, anyway.
And needing to be alone with them. And with herself.
“It’s gross!” Tim blurted at her, his brown eyes glaring. The girls were all staring up at her, as though expecting her to make some incisive comment that would put everything into place.
She wished she could have accommodated them.
Everyone except her seemed to have forgotten the preacher standing behind her.
“Calm down for a second,” she said evenly, scrambling for a way to hold life together long enough to get rid of Marks. This was Moore business. Shelter Valley business. Not Marks business. “Why don’t you go start the car, Ellen, and we’ll go into town for some ice cream.”
It had worked when they were little.
And they’d all been glad when she’d brought home sundaes the week before.
“He’s a big fat jerk,” Tim said, standing there with his arms folded across a chest that was just beginning to take on masculine form. His glance, traveling among his sisters, landed on Ellen. “Having a baby at his age, with a girl who’s practically your age, is just plain sick!”
The words cut Martha to the quick.
Her daughters, with moist eyes and unsmiling mouths, looked lost. Broken.
Four years ago, Todd had left them high and dry—except for the checks he sent—for a girl just a couple of years older than Ellen. One of his students. At Martha’s request, he’d gone with her to see Pastor Edwards. They hadn’t even had one full visit before Todd had stated that he had no interest in patching things up with his wife. He wanted out.
Away from her.
From their kids.
Looking up, Martha caught the empathy aimed at her from the eyes of the stranger who’d come, grudgingly invited, into their midst.
For one brief second, she wanted to die.
“YOU’LL HAVE TO FORGIVE my mom,” Ellen Moore said, walking the preacher out to his car shortly after Tim’s outburst on Sunday afternoon. “She’s not usually so…unfriendly.”
Ellen couldn’t bring herself to call her mother rude. She loved her too much. And she understood.
As much as a twenty-year-old kid could understand a mother’s heartache.
“Don’t worry about it,” David Marks said. “I can see she’s an impressive woman. She’s carrying around a ton of emotional responsibility and doesn’t seem to be dropping any of it.”
The look in his eyes gave Ellen an odd sensation. One she barely recognized. It made her feel safe. Protected.
She hadn’t felt that way since