I glanced at Liz, sorry he was coming back sooner than planned but glad at least that I still had another week here before he did.
“And hey,” he added. “If I get home early, we can actually spend a little time together before you have to go back.”
“I’d like that,” I said, and once again I realized I’d been thinking about myself rather than others. God had already told me that part of my time here was about restoring my relationship with my father. Of course he was coming back early. This had to be a part of God’s greater plan, one I had to stop trying to orchestrate myself.
“All right. I probably should hit the sack. We’re on the road at six a.m. tomorrow. You sure she’s okay?”
Liz smiled wearily at me.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll stay in touch. Take it easy, Ty.”
“You too, Dad.”
I clicked off the phone and returned it to its base.
“He already worries too much when I travel on these trips.” Liz winced as she sat up and swung her legs around to the floor. “Now he’ll never want me to go on another one again. Drives me crazy.”
I hadn’t ever thought of my dad as much of a worrier, and I said so as I walked back to the family room and perched on the far end of the couch. She turned to me, a half grin on her face. She thought I had been joking. “Seriously?”
“Ya. I mean, yes.”
“He’s always been this way with me.”
“Really?”
“He pretends he doesn’t worry until the tiniest little thing happens, and then he’s like Eeyore, always thinking the worst will happen. Or has already happened.”
I shook my head. “How odd. He’s never done that with me at all. It’s hard to imagine that’s even in his nature.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s not so much in his nature as it is something he picked up once your mother died.” Liz looked toward the family portraits scattered on the shelves of the entertainment unit. “I know he loves me and that I’ve been married to him twice as long as she was, but sometimes I think she’s still right there in his heart, hovering like a ghost. It’s as though he never got over losing her, so he’s that much more afraid he’ll lose me.”
She turned abruptly back to me. “I’m so sorry, Tyler. I took a painkiller earlier. I’m really sorry I said that.”
“It’s okay,” I told her, even though I was taken aback. I had never heard Liz talk that way. Ever. In fact, I doubted that she and I had ever had a conversation between just the two of us and no one else, not in all the years I had known her.
We both seemed to realize this at the same time, and we looked at each other for a long moment.
“Your dad doesn’t talk about your mother around you, does he?”
“No. Not really.”
“Does anyone?”
“My grandparents and aunts and uncles will tell me things when I ask. But it’s hard for them too.”
Liz thought on this for a moment. “I knew your mother. Were you aware of that?”
Surprise rendered me wordless. I just gaped at her.
“In between your dad’s two tours in Germany, they lived in Texas for a while. I was stationed at the same base. Our base housing units were near each other. You were just a toddler.”
I cleared my throat and tried to speak. “I thought you met my dad while you were both stationed in Spain.”
She shrugged. “Spain is where we got to know each other beyond a casual hello as neighbors who hardly ever saw each other.”
“Were…were you and my mother friends? When they were still in Texas?”
“Not intimately. We’d talk sometimes in the front yard while you played. Your dad was gone a lot. I think your mom was lonely, even though she had you.”
“What did you talk about?”
Liz pondered my question for a moment, and then she seemed to shake off the answer she had been composing in her head. It was as if it suddenly occurred to her that we had strayed into off-limits territory.
“That was twenty years ago.”
I didn’t want the conversation to end, but I could tell she was trying to wind it down. Before she did, I had to ask her the one question she might know the answer to.
“Was my mother happy?”
Liz regarded me, studying my face. “What makes you ask that?”
“My grandparents don’t know, and I’ve never known how to ask Dad a question like that. But I need to know.”
“Need to?”
Though Liz had opened up to me more than ever before, I wasn’t ready to lay my soul bare and tell her everything about my own current issues, about the crossroads I was facing in my life. In a way, I hardly knew her. She had always kept me at a distance.
Instead, I just said, “If your mother had died when you were young, wouldn’t you wonder that? She gave up a lot when she left her Amish roots. I’d like to know if she was happy.”
Liz held my gaze, contemplating my words. “She loved you and she loved your dad. Very much. I know that.”