Page 7 of Second Chance Fate

Acting on pure animal instinct, he charged toward her in purposeful strides. It wasn’t until he got within earshot that he realized she was having a private consultation about medication with the pharmacist. Several medications, actually. He immediately backed off, giving her privacy and waiting in the wings for her to finish. While keeping his distance, he noticed Mrs. Arnold, who was in her eighties, struggling to load her wheelchair into the trunk of her car. He went out to assist her, and when he got back inside, she was gone. Poof. Vanished. He’d been so tempted to ask Valerie, the pharmacist, but he knew that was against the law and that she couldn’t give out personal information.

Then there was the Brewed Awakenings sighting. What made her stand out that day was that she was wearing a yellow rain jacket, but it was a perfectly sunny day. Caleb was trapped in a conversation with the Bartollo brothers. They’d just gotten back from competing in the monster truck show in Sacramento at Cal Expo and were fired up showing Caleb the pictures and videos. She walked in, and in the sixty seconds it took Caleb to extracthimself from the conversation, she was nowhere to be found. She’d vanished from the crowd of caffeine seekers.

Each time he’d seen her, she'd been alone, and each time, she left him with more questions than answers. Why was she concentrating so hard on that cantaloupe? Why did she have so many prescriptions? Why was she wearing a rain jacket when it was a clear, sunny day?

“Hem, ahem.”

The sound of a man clearing his throat cut through Caleb’s inner thoughts. He blinked and glanced over to see the mayor, Henry Walker, seated in the front row staring up at him with an expectant look. It was only then that Caleb realized that he’d completely zoned out. The entire congregation had disappeared. All three hundred people vanished. The only person who existed was her. The blonde beauty who had some sort of gravitational pull over him.

He had no idea how long he’d been standing behind the pulpit in total silence. It could have been ten seconds or sixty; he had no frame of reference because, to him, time had stood still.

Luckily, he was able to recover. He may feel like a fraud in some aspects of his job, but this was where he felt the most confident and at ease. He loved public speaking. He’d always had a gift for it.

Without even glancing down at his notes, he stepped away from the pulpit and moved to the front of the altar.

“If I asked everyone to close their eyes and think of the first thing that comes to mind when they think of the word love, I bet there’d be a lot of different answers.” Caleb watched as people glanced around at the people sitting beside them. He paused before continuing, “Let’s try it. Everyone, close your eyes.”

As the entire congregation did as instructed, Caleb’s gaze went straight to the back row, to his mystery woman. She wassitting with her eyes closed, and the corners of her lips were curling up at the edges.

Whenever Caleb was asked if he could have one superpower, what would it be, he never said he wished he could read people’s minds. Growing up, he’d overheard his dad counseling his fair share of people, and it taught him a valuable lesson at a very early age: nine times out of ten, you donotwant to know what goes on in people’s heads. There were some things you couldn’t unknow.

But, for the first time in his life, he would do almost anything to have that power. He wanted to know what love meant to this enigmatic, beautiful creature. Why did she have that tiny grin on her lips? Was she thinking of someone special from her past, or was it someone in the present? Was it from a memory, a joke, or an accomplishment?

The possibilities were endless.

“Okay, now I want you to think of the word love. What’s the first thing that pops into your head? Is it a word? A feeling? A place? A person? A color?” There was a scattering of chuckles, but he was serious. Some people thought of love as a color. He gave them a few moments. “Okay, now open your eyes, turn to your neighbor, and tell them what you thought of. If it’s a person, you don’t have to be specific. This isn’t some elaborate plan to trick you into confessing your secret crushes. But, hey, if it is a person and they are sitting next to you, I mean, it wouldn’t be a bad way to tell them.”

There was more scattering of laughter, and Caleb watched as people turned to the right and left, telling each other what their words were. As inconspicuously as possible, he tried to read the mystery woman’s mouth as she relayed her word to Betsy Sanders. Mrs. Sanders, who was in her late eighties, must have had trouble hearing her because the blonde beauty had to repeat her response again. Unfortunately, lip reading was not a skill hepossessed, because even the second time, he had no clue what she said.

“Okay, show of hands, who had the same answer as the person next to them?” He scanned the congregation and saw about a dozen hands raised. “So that’s about twelve out of three hundred? So approximately four percent of people had the same answer. Obviously, that number is based on proximity, and if we took a poll of the entire room, there would be more matches.” He walked back behind the pulpit. “But, I don’t think anyone would disagree that love is a big word with a lot of different meanings to different people.

“I’m sure that you’ve all heard the saying that claims love covers all sins. Or that love conquers all. That love is a verb, not a noun. That love heals all wounds. That’s what the world says, but the Bible has a lot to say, too. First Corinthians talks about what love is and also what it isn’t. It says that it’snotrude, arrogant, or jealous. Actually, have you heard the term ride-or-die? That’s the kind of love that First Corinthians is talking about. It is not keeping a scorecard of rights and wrongs, through thick or thin, good or bad. This love is going to bear all, believe all, and have eternal hope, and it will never end. I mean, that is a powerful love.

“Those are all very nice sentiments, and I believe that love is all those things. But as muchgoodas love does, I would argue it is used to cause just as much pain, maybe even more. How many things have you witnessed people do in the name of love that hurt others? As restorative and healing as love can be, it can be equally toxic and damaging. Love can be weaponized and used to prosecute people.”

Caleb went on to speak about the eight different types of love that fell under the umbrella of those four letters. He told stories that demonstrated each one of the types of love he’d named. Some of the examples he gave were planned, and othershe thought of in the moment. Like the one he threw in at the last minute when he thought about what love meant to him. He wasn’t sure why his favorite movie popped into his head, but he decided just to roll with it.

“Those of you who grew up in this church know that my dad was and is, to this day, the biggest Robin Williams fan. He loved Mork and Mindy, Mrs. Doubtfire, Patch Adams, and Good Morning Vietnam?—”

“Popeye!” Brick Matthews shouted from the back of the sanctuary. There were some scattered chuckles of amusement in the audience at Brick’s crowd participation.

Brick and Caleb’s dad had been rivals from elementary school through high school, but then they’d served in Vietnam together, and during their time in the service, they became as close as brothers.

“Yes, Brick, and Popeye.” Caleb pointed to his dad’s best friend before continuing, “Myfavorite Robin Williams movie is Good Will Hunting. I’ve probably seen it at least fifty times. For those of you who haven’t, Matt Damon plays a genius kid from Boston, who is, to quote Casey Affleck, ‘wicked smaht.’ He grows up in foster care, and he gets into some legal trouble because of his anger issues. The only way he can avoid jail is to go to see a counselor. The problem is, Will is smarter than all of the professionals he is court-ordered to see and is able to manipulate them into refusing to treat him. All except one, Robin Williams. There’s a scene on a bench that Matt Damon refers to as aTaster’s Choice momentthat happens after Will tries to pull the same thing with Robin’s character that he’s pulled on all the other therapists.

“Robin’s character says he sees right through Will and tells him that he doesn’t know anything. He’s a scared, cocky kid who’s never been out of Boston. He could tell him all about Michelangelo, but he’s never stepped foot in the Sistine Chapel.He says he could quote Shakespeare, ‘Once more unto the breach,’ but he’s never been at war. He’s never held a dying friend in his arms.

“He says Will might have experience with girls, but he doesn’t know what love is. He says that Will hasn’t ever been vulnerable with a woman. He’s never known someone who could level him with her eyes. He tells him that he’s never felt like God put an angel on earth just for him, who could rescue him from the depths of hell, and that he doesn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love be there for her forever, through anything, through cancer. He says he doesn’t know what it’s like to sleep sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in his eyes that the term visiting hours does not apply to him. He tells him he doesn’t know about real loss because that only occurs when he loves something more than he loves himself.

Caleb walked back out in front of the pulpit. “I remember the first time I saw that scene, I was probably only eleven or twelve at the time, but I thought, yeah,thatis what love is. It’s not the big, over-the-top grand gestures. Sure, those are nice, but those big, extravagant things aren’t going to hold your hand in a hospital room. They aren’t the things that are going to be there when you get news that you’ve lost a loved one, or you’ve lost your job, or a pet, or when tests come back and it’s not the news you wanted. I was lucky because I recognized that love. It’s the love I saw every day between my parents. Everyone seems to want to know why I’m still single.”

There were some murmurs in the crowd, a few laughs, and even a few people shouting out guesses.

“Well,Ithink a big part of the reason is because Iknowwhat kind of love is possible between two people, and I will not settle. Love can mean a lot of different things to different people. But when it is healthy, I think that love doesn’t take thingspersonally. I believe love doesn’t hold someone’s past against them. I believe love is grace to allow someone to be better than they were before. I believe the most profound core of what love is, the power it holds, is connection. I think the greatest gift love can give anyone is to make them feel seen, heard, and not alone, to be their safe place, their peace.”

Caleb's mind raced as he neared the end of the service, wrapping everything up. He was speaking on autopilot as he finished the service, already crafting what he would say to the woman who had eluded him for months. He was determined to catch her before she had a chance to disappear again.

He was giving his final thoughts as the prayer team took his cues and moved to their places in the front of the congregation. He invited everyone to bow their heads and instructed anyone who would like to come to the front to speak with one of the members of the prayer team to do so now.

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