**Author note..Doing this series in nine short vignettes...hope you enjoy it.
*
From a strictly comfort standpoint, it had been pure lunacy for Nancy Grubbs to make the move she had the previous Summer. Having moved to Canton with her Daughter once she'd finished high school, Nancy didn't really start missing Pensacola until the first morning in November the wind chill dipped below freezing. By January she was ready to leave Ohio and move back to Florida. Only thing stopping her was the two feet of snow piled up in front of the door.
Sadly, the main reason she'd made the move in the first place (money), was still an overriding issue. With her divorce finalized and no chance of either one being able to afford the house on their own, not to mention in the current market the place just wouldn't sell, Nancy found out her Aunt from Ohio was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's, and the family was going to put her in a long term care facility. Rather than allowing them to put the Aunt's house up for sale however, Nancy on a lark asked if she could come north and move in.
It would provide a fresh start after a crumbled marriage and a career on hold because of the recession. She decided to bring her 18 year old Daughter Lacy along simply because the girl was nowhere close to being able to take care of herself. There was a small community college close by, and despite the definite change in lifestyle and scenery, Nancy thought she could make it work.
As with most of the things in her life over the past five years, the best laid plans went Ka-Plooey.
The first thing she found herself gravitating towards once she'd settled in Canton was a small church a couple of blocks from home. Before she found a job, or even before she'd really figured out her way around town, Nancy felt a strange, almost instinctual pull to see what was going on inside the modest facility that was actually located inside a somewhat run down strip mall.
>From what some of the members of her distant family in the area had told her, the spot she was living use to be one of the nicer places in Canton, but given the eventual backslide due to the economy and jobs leaving the area, the neighborhood she'd moved to had lost much of its luster. While Nancy had seen poverty in her life, it was usually driving through the bad neighborhoods to get to where she was headed. Having a Husband with a good job for all those years helped make for what she thought was an idyllic life. In a rye turn of fate, Nancy slowly came to understand, given her current situation, she wasn't exactly a Rockerfeller herself once she'd dropped anchor in Canton.
Having grown up in a rather devout southern Bible-Belt family, worship had been a significant part of her youth. Given the inevitable angst that came with her teenage years, plus marrying a man that was steadfastly non-religious, Nancy had gone several decades without attending services regularly. So it was nothing short of a revelation when she walked through those doors one Sunday and found something to fill a little of the emptiness that had taken over inside her.
The 50 or so members of the congregation quickly embraced her and before long Nancy had put her bookkeeping skills to work helping out as the church's secretary and treasurer.
Despite the void it was filling in her own life, Nancy couldn't get Lacy to come to church with her. Knowing how she was at Lacy's age, Nancy understood what her Daughter was going through, especially given all the upheaval with the divorce and subsequent move. It didn't take long however before Nancy started to see some signs Lacy had fallen in with the wrong crowd.
The first inkling she got was when Lacy began coming home a little later and later every night. She certainly didn't want to give her nearly 19 year old Daughter a curfew, but they were living in a new town and Nancy worried, appropriately so, what could happen to a naive and pretty girl at those late hours. It wasn't long into that first Fall semester of community college that Nancy could tell Lacy was starting to blow off some of her classes as well. Money was tight enough as it was and Nancy simply felt disheartened seeing that tuition money essentially flushed away.
By that time Nancy had taken a part time job at a packaging company to go along with the small amount of money she was making helping out at the church. Still, she was working long hours with very little to show when one night at about 1am Nancy stumbled out of bed to get a drink about the same time Lacy was just coming in for the night.
Immediately noticing the disheveled state of her Daughter's clothing and inhaling the clear smell of alcohol and pot wafting from her staggering body, Nancy could also see several fresh hickeys beginning to sprout across the front of Lacy's milky white neck and chest. Too tired to pick a fight, Nancy simply shook her head and scowled at her Daughter with real contempt before carrying herself back to bed.
The one rock Nancy seemed to have found in the otherwise chaotic maelstrom of her life was the pastor at the church she's found a home at. His name was Calvin Grady and if you've seen the televangelist TD Jakes, you have a pretty good picture of Pastor Grady.
A loveable teddy-bear at heart, on first glance anyone who saw him walking down the street might be inclined to quickly find their way to the other side. Despite being 6 foot 2 and weighing every bit of 325 pounds, the warmth of his smile or comfort of his chuckle instantly drew people in. Having spilled her guts to him about all the problems of her life, big and small, since she'd joined the church, Nancy couldn't think of another man who listened as well as Calvin, and earned her trust so quickly.
That wasn't to say Pastor Grady didn't take on the persona of an old-time fire and brimstone preacher when the time called for it. Nancy vividly remembered the first time she saw him work himself into a lather during a Sunday sermon, watching him literally sweat through his expensive blue dress shirt as he waved his Bible high in the air. Nancy could still feel the goosebumps rise on her forearms recalling how his low, soulful baritone voice rose in volume until it rattled the windows of the small office spaced that served as church, urging his congregation to be tireless soldiers as they served God.
Nancy felt as if she was capable of anything after one of Calvin's rousing sermons, but also felt at total and complete ease during their occasional one on one pep talks. Sharing the details about the strained relationship she had with her Daughter was about the only thing that kept Nancy from going completely over the edge.
Other than both being in their early 40's, on the surface Nancy and Calvin seemed to have little in common. He was black, and in both personality and stature came across as bigger than life. Nancy was a shade under 5'3" and was so soft-spoken, people often times had to ask her to speak up in casual conversation. Calvin had been raised for a Father who was a struggling jazz musician and spent a great deal of his youth roaming the hardscrabble streets of inner city Memphis. Nancy's Father had been a renowned doctor for many years in the Tampa/St. Pete area, and her youth came with all the trappings.
While they both had been raised in households that valued religion, Calvin came from a background of unscripted rambunctiousness when it came to worship, while Nancy was reared in a much more staid evangelic environment.
Still, when Calvin closed his huge black hand around her tiny white one in an attempt to comfort her when Nancy began crying beside him one day, she felt an undeniable kinship to her new pastor. When she wiped the tears from her eyes a few seconds later and saw him staring reassuringly down at her, she felt something else she couldn't quite place.
