Chapter 21

Life was good – a cliché, yes, but true anyway. We moved into our new apartment, the one with two bedrooms, and Abbie grew like a weed. Al was more beautiful than ever. I didn't care that she had more lines around her eyes and her mouth than other women her age. I didn't care that her hands showed the ravages of years standing on street corners in rain and sun and cold and wind. I even ceased to care that she'd been a prostitute, or that she'd run away to be a prostitute again. Between my forgiving her, and my confession of my own sin, and Abbie's birth, all that ceased to matter.

Al loved me and I loved her. We both loved Abbie. And she loved us, with the unadulterated love a child has for her parents when those parents are doing their very best to raise her right. And over us all was the love of God.

Al went to church with me every Sunday. She read along with me – she didn't want her own Bible, she said, because even though she was becoming interested in it, she loved leaning against my shoulder and following along with me. She sang the hymns, though I knew that at least some of the doctrine there was a puzzlement to her, even if she didn't disbelieve it altogether. She didn't pray, but she was respectful when the rest of us did. She brought Abbie with us from the first, and without ever having to say it made it plain that Abbie would grow up in church. That alone would have made me love my wife, if I hadn't loved her already.

We had as happy a marriage as it's possible to have when one spouse is a Christian and the other isn't. All too often such marriages experience strain and dissension, and sometimes even come apart. I'd worried about that when I married Al, knowing the stresses and knowing what the Bible says about it. In fact, I'd never forgotten the Bible's remarks about mixed marriages. Darvin, in that note he'd written the day Al asked me to marry her, had reminded me of the Bible's position. And I'd never lost sight of that.

But our marriage was working. Al's English was flawless now, as good as mine, and I hadn't heard her use a swear word in a long while. We sometimes walked on Central – though it hadn't been a place she'd loved when she was a prostitute, there was even on Central a nostalgia factor. And every rare once in a while she'd see someone she'd known before, and always she'd shudder, and comment on how old the woman looked, and put her arm around me and thank me for marrying her.

I thanked her for what she was in my life, and I thanked God for giving her to me. I didn't know how that overshadowing love of God would work in Al's life, though I knew it was working. What else was I going to look to as the cause of her devotion to church? No, church is not God, and attendance is not salvation, but she wouldn't think of missing church now any more than I would. God was working on her, and that was why I could be easy in my mind about the Bible and its teaching regarding the unequal yoke.

I even began to hope that the yoke wouldn't forever be unequal. I continued preaching the Gospel, sometimes using words, and though I'd never given up, for I knew that God would bless His Word, hope was a fire burning more and more brightly within me.

There came a Sunday night when Abbie was six months old. She'd had an ear infection – a child who never has one of those is merely a robot – and had been cranky all week, but that night she was feeling better and was sleeping peacefully in her crib. Al had ordered me to sit down on the sofa while she did the dishes, for I'd been working hard all week and trying to help out with Abbie besides, and was tired. When she'd put the last dish in the drainer and dried her hands, she went in to check on our daughter.

Coming back into the living room, she sat down beside me, picking my Bible up off the coffee table as she did so. She rubbed her hand over the cover for a moment, feeling the smooth grain of the leather, and then she began flipping through it. I had a book in my hand, but I lowered it to my lap to watch her. She still had her hair done up as she'd had it for church – pulled back off her forehead and tied with a white ribbon. It was an unusual hairstyle for her, and I looked at that forehead, with its lines of old pain and suffering, and remembered all the times I'd smoothed her hair back with my hand.

Finally Al looked up from the Bible and caught me gazing at her. "You need to take up art," she said with a smile.

"I have," I told her. "And the art I'm most interested in is sitting beside me with a delightful overbite."

"I used to wish my parents had gotten me braces. Now I'm glad they didn't. I love it that you love my overbite ... and the fact that it sets me apart from everyone else is nice too."

I nodded, but didn't say anything.

Al lifted the Bible a bit, and her face grew serious. "Alan, why are you still preaching to me after all this time?"

I gently lifted the Bible from her hands and began turning pages. When I found the place I wanted I handed the Bible back to her and pointed. She didn't need to ask just which verses I meant, for they were underlined. She read them aloud, slowly.