Forgivin' Ain't Forgettin' Read Free

pretty-faced woman. A faint smile of enchantment and approval played on the church mother’s lips as she pondered how God would bring the marriage in her vision to pass.

chapter one
    E
ar-piercing screams filled the air. Cassidy Beckett tucked the towel around the baby and hugged him closer. She kissed his wrinkled forehead and rocked back and forth.
    “What’s the matter with it?” Minister’s voice crackled with hostility.
    “I don’t know.” Cassidy gulped, and more of her tears fell onto the bundle in her arms. Earlier, she had cleaned him up the best she knew how, then rubbed lotion on his tender skin. Now Cassidy pressed her cheek against the baby and sniffed, holding his soft scent inside her nostrils until her lungs gave way. “I don’t know how to calm him,” she cried, her voice shaking with each word.
    “Well, you better hurry up and figure something out.” Contempt blazed in Minister’s eyes as he stared at the baby.
    Cassidy’s cell phone hummed a series of notes, and she forced herself to stop thinking about Minister and the baby. Focusing on the present, she answered the phone. The caller had the wrong number, and after a polite exchange, Cassidy ended the call as the cab she occupied merged with the stream of traffic aiming for the next off-ramp. She was at least ten minutes from her destination, and so she had time to check her messages, and she logged in the code. One message waited in her voice mail box. Cassidy gritted her teeth and sighed from a place inside that was tired of dealing with Sister Maranda Whittle. She quickly scribbled Maranda’s number on a small notepad, then called the number, ready to take on Maranda for the last time.
    “Praise the Lord!” Maranda answered after the second ring.
    “Hello, Sister Whittle. This is Cassidy Beck—”
    “Oh, yes, Cassidy,” Maranda cut in. Maranda smiled a full beam whenever she spoke to Cassidy at church, so Cassidy imagined Maranda was fully charged now. “I’m so glad you called. Have you given any more thought to our previous conversation?”
    Cassidy’s stomach burned. “No . . . not much.”
    “The Sparrow Ministry could use a young woman like you. Why don’t you come to our next meeting?”
    No can do. Cassidy could not make the next meeting, the reason enfolded in personal conflict, which she would never unfold with Maranda or anyone else. So why couldn’t she just be blunt and answer Maranda with a no? Like the other times they’d spoken on this topic, her tongue hardened, and she could not lift it to speak one word that would let Maranda know without question she wasn’t interested in joining the Sparrow Ministry. Maranda stated the time and place for the next Sparrow Ministry staff meeting, probably assuming Cassidy was writing the information down. As if she sensed Cassidy’s desire to hang up, Maranda rushed through an oration on the ins and outs of the Sparrow Ministry that she had shared with Cassidy once before. “You be blessed,” Maranda tooted at the end of the call.
    “You, too,” said Cassidy.
    “Here we are,” the cabdriver said. Cassidy suddenly realized the driver had parked in front of her house. He came around, opened her door, raised his cap, and scratched his bald, dark-colored scalp. He put his cap back on tight, and only the woolly gray sideburns were visible again. Cassidy stretched her legs through the doorway and vacated the burned-popcorn-smelling car she’d spent sixty minutes of her life in. As the hem of a denim skirt dropped below her calves, she smiled up at the three-story semidetached dwelling standing before her. The bulbs in the pine boxes that bordered the second-level windows had bloomed while she was away, and a breeze encouraged the tiny flowers to wave and bow at her as if they were welcoming home royalty.
    After a sigh of optimism, Cassidy said, “It’s good to be back.” She harbored no doubts, questions, or regrets. Leaving San Diego, returning to her children,