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Restorations

By Susan Elizabeth Ball

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Chapter 1
From her lounge chair strategically placed under the shade of a large oak tree, Karen looked up from the book she was reading and took stock of her family. Her husband Jeff frolicked in the lake with their youngest son, Kyle. Their middle son, Austin, had tired of the water and was playing frisbee with a red-headed boy he had befriended. Trevor, the oldest, was trying to make small talk with a blonde in a tiny pink bikini. At twelve years of age, he had recently discovered girls and was wasting no time in getting to know the opposite sex better.
As Karen surveyed the scene, she felt a deep sense of contentment. “It really doesn’t get much better than this,” she thought. A lovely spring day at the lake surrounded by those she loved best. Karen picked up the romance novel and continued her reading.
After a few minutes, Jeff brought Kyle to Karen and said that he was going to swim to the small island in the middle of the lake. Jeff was an excellent swimmer, and the short swim out to the island and back posed no serious challenge. Karen occupied herself with toweling Kyle off and changing him into shorts and a tee shirt. She began gathering up the wet towels and sunscreen. It was almost time to head for home. When she cast her gaze back to the lake, Jeff was about 30 feet from shore and struggling to keep his head above the water.
“Jeff! Hang on, Jeff! I’m coming.” Karen’s heart pounded in her chest as she raced to the dock and grabbed the life ring. She tossed it in Jeff’s direction, but it fell short of his reach. She pulled on the rope until she could reach out and grab the ring and toss it again. Karen threw it over and over, as far as she could, but each time it landed a little bit short. Jeff was able to get his fingertips on the ring once before it slipped from his grasp.
“Help us! We need help. Someone, please help us!” Karen yelled at the top of her lungs as she continued to throw out the life preserver.
A man and woman had been walking around the lake and heard Karen’s screams. The woman called 911; the man joined Karen on the dock, offering his assistance. By this time, Jeff’s head had disappeared in the murky water. The man dove in, but he didn’t find Jeff.
The man and woman stayed with Karen and the children, as the rescue divers searched for Jeff’s body. There was no hope now. Karen pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “You did everything you could,” the woman told her.
“It wasn’t enough.” Karen sobbed and repeated over and over, “It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.”


“It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.” Karen Harper’s plaintive cries awakened her from her sleep. Her heart thundered in her chest. Her curly auburn hair was drenched with sweat. What’s happening?
Bolting upright, she opened her eyes and tried to focus. The room was dark. She reached out until her hand found the nightstand. She felt around for the lamp and turned it on.
“A dream. I was only dreaming.” Karen breathed deeply, trying to slow her racing heart. She closed her eyes again and shuddered. It seemed so very real. She could feel the warmth of the sun and the sand beneath her feet. She saw the panic on Jeff’s face as he realized he was going under and the scared faces of her children. Enough. Her heart was racing again. She shook herself and tried to clear her mind of the horrible dream.
If asked, Karen would say that she never dreamed. She knew, of course, that everyone dreams, so certainly she must. But, she could never recall having dreamed. Nightmares, however, were a different story. She could recall nightmares in vivid detail.
As she sat in her bed, trying to make sense of this nightmare, Karen recalled one from several years earlier. In that nightmare, Karen’s extended family had gathered for a reunion. The children were playing ball and running around, while the adults sat in lawn chairs eating hamburgers and catching up on each others’ lives. Suddenly, her father grabbed his chest and collapsed on the ground in front of her. She had crouched on the ground beside him and sobbed into his chest as he died.
Her sobs had awakened Jeff, who gently took her in his arms and stroked her head, whispering, “It was only a dream.” It had seemed so real, that it took several minutes before Jeff could convince Karen that her father had not suffered a heart attack. “Your family has never even had a reunion,” Jeff had reminded her.
Even after all these years, she could visualize her father as he lay on the ground gasping for breath. Despite the fact that her father was still alive and well, Karen’s pulse quickened anytime she thought of that nightmare.
This morning Jeff was not there to comfort and console. This nightmare, while not based on reality, was accurate in its conclusion. Jeff was dead. He had been for nearly two years. Karen had tried to rescue him and had failed miserably. For the first few months after his death, she had been haunted day and night by the horrible series of events surrounding Jeff’s death. She had frequently woken with a start, as she had this morning, frantic to save him.
Over and over, she had been plagued by questions for which she had no answers. “Could I have saved Jeff if I had tried harder? Is it my fault that Jeff is dead?” “If I had been a better wife, would Jeff still be alive?” As time passed, she had to set aside her constant thoughts of Jeff. There was nothing she could do for him now, except raise his sons to be the men he wanted them to be. As a single mother to three young boys, Karen had no time for guilt or self-pity. She had to provide for her family.
The nightmares had eventually ceased. She hadn’t dreamed of Jeff in--oh how long was it now--maybe a year, perhaps a bit more. I thought the nightmares were gone for good. I wonder why they came back now. She pondered this as she lay in the bed she had shared with Jeff for sixteen years. Maybe it was because she was trying to move on and put the past behind her. She was making a new life for herself, one without Jeff in it. Perhaps subconsciously she did not want to let him go.
Karen glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand. It was almost five o’clock. No wonder it was so dark. Her body needed more rest, but she knew it was useless to try. She would not be going back to sleep this morning. Still shaken and sweaty from the nightmare, she needed a shower.
Karen climbed from the queen-sized bed and headed for the bathroom. She paced around the small room as she waited for the water to warm up. When steam began to form on the mirror, she climbed in and allowed the water to gently massage her tensed muscles. The warm water felt so good. She stood under the spray until her fingers and toes shriveled. After toweling off and drying her hair, she pulled on a pair of plaid sleep pants—they had been Jeff’s—and an oversized sweatshirt. She slipped her feet into the fuzzy blue slippers she kept beside the bed before heading downstairs.
Karen loved the 1960’s Colonial-style house she had rented last summer. She would have preferred to purchase a home but that was beyond her reach just now. When she sold the home she had shared with Jeff and moved to Fredericksburg, she had hoped that the equity would be sufficient for her to put a down payment on a home here. After discovering, however, that the housing market was much tighter here than in Chester, she felt fortunate to have found a rental she could afford.
Karen’s only complaint was that the house was drafty and chilly on cold wintry mornings. It seemed particularly so this January morning, with the wind howling outside. Karen peeked out the kitchen window onto the deck. The large outdoor thermometer indicated that the temperature was 26 degrees.
“No snow,” Karen said with a sigh, “but the windshield is sure to need defrosting.” Karen was as bad as the kids when it came to wishing for snow. This was due, in part, to the fact that her compassionate boss allowed her the day off when school was canceled. A widower himself, he understood only too well the challenges Karen faced as a single parent.
Karen filled the teakettle with fresh, cold water and set it on the back burner of the stove. She selected her favorite mug from the cupboard and pulled a bag of English breakfast tea from the box in the pantry. While she waited for the water to boil, she unloaded the dishwasher. “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean,” was Karen’s favorite mom-ism. It had been instilled in her by her own mother when she was growing up and reinforced by her first boss at The Hamburger Shack, where Karen had worked as a waitress throughout high school. Neither her mother nor her boss put up with anyone standing around idly while they worked. And they both found that there was always work to be done. As a single mother, Karen had found the “clean, don’t lean” philosophy to be the key to her survival. If she wanted any leisure time, she had to take advantage of moments like this. She was amazed at how much she could accomplish by capturing otherwise wasted minutes.
She finished unloading the dishwasher before the water boiled, so she grabbed the broom to sweep up crumbs from last night’s dinner. The whistle of the teakettle interrupted her work. She poured the steaming water into the mug and finished sweeping the kitchen and dining room while the tea steeped. After adding honey, she took her tea and yesterday’s newspaper into the den, hoping to find some interesting article to divert her attention. Even though she would regret her abbreviated sleep later, Karen was thankful to have a few quiet moments by herself before beginning the activities of the day. She had long since learned that she had to allow herself some “me” time for sanity’s sake.
“Family Home Lost in Fire” read the headline on the first page. Too depressing. She scanned the rest of the page. One article discussed potential solutions to the problems of overcrowded roads, another the dilemma of where to build yet another area high school as the region continued to grow, and a third compared snowfalls this year so far to predictions made by forecasters last fall. Finding nothing of interest in the first section, Karen pulled out the Region section. She was interested in a report on the results of the last year’s standards of learning testing. It seemed that area school children had exceeded expectations. That was good news. Nothing else of interest caught her eye.
She laid the newspaper aside and sipped her tea. It had cooled to lukewarm. “Yuk.” Karen popped it into the microwave to reheat it for a minute. While waiting, she pondered the question that plagued her nearly every morning. What to have for dinner? She went to the garage and surveyed the contents of her freezer. “Let’s see. There’s chicken breast, pork chops, and ground beef.” She grabbed a frozen package of ground beef. Tacos, it is.
As she turned to walk back into the kitchen, a sudden, sharp pain radiated through her left foot. “Ouch.” She grabbed her stubbed toe with both hands, dropping the frozen meat on her right foot. “Umph. Ouch.” She released the left foot and reached for the now throbbing right one. If anyone had peeked through the garage window, they would have seen Karen hopping up and down, grabbing first one foot and then the other. That is until she mistimed her hopping and wound up with both feet in the air. She landed with a thud on her bottom. Her head jerked backwards and banged on a chair, launching a pile of long-forgotten clothing into the air and unto her head. Karen had placed the boys’ outgrown clothing on the chair last summer with the intention of delivering the items to Goodwill.
Karen sat on the floor, covered in clothing, massaging both feet. “I must look ridiculous,” she said aloud. She giggled at the thought. The giggles turned into all out laughter, which continued until she found herself with tears running down her face. The laughter released the tension she had been feeling. It also seemed to have soothed the pain in her feet. Karen wiped the tears and set about the task of picking up the far-flung articles of clothing. “What have we here? Why, it’s one of the chairs from the flea market. I wonder where the other one is?”
She found the other chair on the far side of the garage behind Austin’s bike. Karen had picked up the pair for next to nothing and had planned to strip them of their badly scratched finish and give them a new coat of stain. Fortunately, the upholstered seats were in good shape. When she purchased them, she had no real need for two more chairs, so they had been relegated to the garage. If she could find a table for the kitchen, they would come in handy. Of course, she would need more than two chairs. “A project would be good for me. This will be perfect.” For now she would leave the chairs in the garage. She passed a hardware store every day on her way to and from work. She made a mental note to stop in soon and pick up the supplies she would need to begin the project.
She located the dropped package of ground beef and went back to the kitchen, where the microwave was beeping incessantly. She gave the tea a thirty-second warm up, then took the cup back into the den. She still had a few more minutes before she needed to begin her day. Her gaze fell on the Bible gathering dust on the end table. There was a time when she faithfully attended church and began each day by spending a few minutes in God’s Word. That seemed a lifetime ago. When had she laid aside those habits? I guess after Jeff’s death, I got busy and just didn’t have the time. She knew that this explanation was only partially true, like so many things she told herself concerning Jeff’s death and the rocky time in their marriage that had preceded it.
Remembering the comfort the Bible had brought her in times past, Karen picked it up and flipped it open to Psalm 23. “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want.” She read the familiar passage. “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.”
He restores my soul. Karen read the words again, fully aware that it was no coincidence that she stumbled onto the chairs needing restoration just before read this verse. Furniture restoration had been a hobby of Karen’s for several years, although she hadn’t worked on anything since Jeff’s death. She wondered if there were similarities in the process God used to restore souls and the process she used to restore furniture. She would have to give that some thought.
She finished reading the Psalm and took a moment to pray—another habit that had fallen by the wayside in the past year or two—she felt more at peace than she had in recent memory.

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