Page 87 of Left Behind

Linette was struggling not to cry. “Oh, honey, you’re so welcome. Come on, Wiley. We need to get that order called in, so the wait time isn’t too long. Ava looks like she’s getting hungry.”

“Right,” Wiley said. They stepped out of the room and, as soon as they were out of sight, stopped to listen.

Ava was giving herself the lowdown on her new life, her new look, and that pizza was on the menu.

“She’s okay now,” Wiley said, and reached for Linette’s hand as they walked back to the kitchen.

“I’m ordering pepperoni for Ava, but I plan to order another kind, too. What’s your favorite, pretty lady?”

“As long as it doesn’t have anchovies or pineapple on it, I’m good to go,” she said.

He laughed. “I knew we were a good fit,” he said, and called in an order for a pepperoni and a supreme pizza with extra cheese, then kissed Linette again. “Just making sure you still taste as good as you did a while ago.”

“Wiley Pope, you are outrageous,” she said.

“So I’ve been told. We have sweet tea, Coca-Cola, and orange soda in a can. Name your poison.”

“I’ll have the tea, and don’t float my ice,” she said.

“Lots of ice. Got it!”

Moments later, they heard little footsteps in the hall, and then Ava appeared and crawled up into her seat at the table, eyed the two adults, and then glanced out the window. The sun was already on the other side of the mountain. Dusk was imminent.

“Bubba, can I show her my new swing?”

“Absolutely,” Wiley said. “I’ll turn on the porch light, and the streetlights will be coming on anytime now.”

Linette was on her feet within seconds. This was an invitation she did not take lightly. They went out the door hand in hand, and Wiley could hear Ava talking all the way across the yard.

A few moments later, Ava was coming down the slide with a smile on her face, with Linette standing at the bottom to catch her. Ava giggled, then moved to the swing to show Linette how high she could go, and then how she climbed the little ladder to get to her playhouse. As soon as she was up, she leaned out the window and waved down at Linette, and to Wiley’s delight, Linette waved back and blew her a kiss. The look on Ava’s face was pure joy.

By the time they went back inside, Ava had decided Bubba’s almost wife was nice. After the pizza arrived, they were all at the table, trading bites of the different kinds of pizza, and laughing at the stringy cheese that just kept stretching and stretching, when Ava suddenly announced, “Miss Mattie couldn’t eat this.”

“Who is Miss Mattie?” Linette asked.

“She was Ava’s babysitter back in Conway,” Wiley said.

Ava picked up a piece of cheese and slurped it into her mouth like a noodle, then added to Wiley’s explanation.

“Miss Mattie dropped dead. That’s why Corina was losin’ her mind tryin’ to figure out what to do with me.”

Wiley needed to shift the conversation. “So, why couldn’t Miss Mattie eat pizza?”

“No teeth,” Ava said. She picked a piece of pepperoni off her slice and popped it in her mouth.

Wiley took a quick drink to keep from laughing, and Linette was suddenly wiping imaginary sauce from her chin. They couldn’t look at each other for fear they’d lose it anyway, and didn’t want to laugh about the only woman in Ava’s life who’d been kind to her.

“Well, that explains a lot,” Wiley said. “Mac and cheese in the blue box. Soup in a can, and burglar meat. Easy food to chew.”

“And sometimes a pudding cup,” Ava added.

Wiley smiled. “Right. Sometimes a pudding cup.”

Linette was so taken with the way Wiley dealt with this child—his little sister. And the longer she watched them, the more she realized how alike they were. Neither one of them had a filter when it came to saying what they were thinking. They were both matter-of-fact. Ava had learned how to deal with adversity all on her own, and Wiley was the dark horse of the Pope brothers. Quick to act and react, and both of them had saved their own lives, just in different ways. That’s when she knew in her heart how much she needed them to love her, because they needed her to find the way to love themselves.

Ava was savvy about adult relationships in a way most children weren’t. She’d seen Corina flirting, and men coming and going from their apartment her whole life. As far as she was concerned, that was how the world of adults worked, but this was Bubba, and his world was different, and she needed to know where her boundaries were now, so she asked.

“Bubba, is she staying over?”

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