Page 23 of Sing with Me

And there was no one to call.

Usually, if he worked too hard at the office, he didn’t crash. He’d go home to his house and stay awake for hours more. His mind would go a mile a minute and not calm down. It mattered not if he had coffee or other forms of caffeine. His mind was wired to go, go, go.

If Isobel was in Italy, Diehl would call her to talk on the phone. She was usually on audio only—for reasons he was beginning to understand—but it would be morning on the Amalfi Coast, and she would give him her listening ear.

Right now Diehl badly needed someone to listen to him hash out his life’s worries.

How could he move on?

Chapter Six

Sleeping fitfully through the night, Diehl woke up again when dawn broke. He pulled aside the sheer curtains, opened the French doors, and stepped onto the wooden balcony.

The rush of waves onto the shore was at a consistent time signature. Back and forth, back and forth. He watched as the sky lightened up.

“God is turning on the light,” Grandpa Brooks used to say.

Diehl closed his eyes and let the morning breeze wash over his face and through his hair. He could feel Grandpa pat his head and say, “Diehl, I pray that someday you will serve God.”

He had never forgotten those words. Why would Grandpa say such a thing to a then ten-year-old boy who could hardly differentiate Jesus from Santa?

I pray that someday you will serve God.

Oh, if only Grandpa knew how far away Diehl was to that prayer. Granted, some nine or ten years after Grandpa said that, Diehl accepted Jesus while he was in college.

Accepted.

That was almost twenty years ago. Like old news.

Today he felt that he had unaccepted Jesus. He felt so distant from God.

He looked up at the brightening sky. The clouds stretched across the sky, wispy clouds here and puffy clouds there. He couldn’t remember all their names, but Grandpa had known. He had studied the clouds in the sky—back in school, he said—and could name them all. Cirrus this and altocumulus that.

Diehl hadn’t paid too much attention to all that Grandpa said as the four grandchildren walked about the beaches of Seaside Island minutes from St. Simon’s Island, shoveling up more sand than seashells.

All he had remembered were those words.

I pray that someday you will serve God.

Diehl couldn’t see how. After college, he and Isobel went to graduate school. Both earned their MBA. Both got jobs at his father’s company. They partied a lot, to say the least. They had many friends. Sometimes Isobel hosted dinner parties on her own without Diehl. It seemed that her daily life consisted of going from party to party.

To be honest with himself, Diehl couldn’t recall whether Isobel changed at all. She had always been an extrovert. As for Diehl, he’d rather keep to himself and come home to a quiet house after work. He had friends, but not all over his house every Friday night.

Then the kids came, and Diehl thought the partying would stop. Nope. Isobel carried on. The parties moved from Atlanta to Hawaii and the Amalfi Coast. Destination parties and all that.

Diehl stopped keeping up.

Perhaps that was when his marriage died.

To this day, he wondered if he and Isobel ever loved each other at all—or whether they were simply using each other to fill in their own lonely spaces.

He couldn’t pin down a reason he had married her. Was it because she was the life of the party?

She played hard, and then she died. Their children were the best things that came out of their marriage.

By the time eight o’clock rolled around, Diehl could barely keep his eyes opened. He had to get dressed and let Chef Joseph in to cook breakfast. He hadn’t showered because he wanted to go back to bed as soon as he let the chef in.

Chef Joseph did not have a key to the house. However, Skye did. Brinley had entrusted her spare house key to Skye.

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