The Cedar Tree (Love Is Not Enough) by Danni McGriffith Read Free Book Online

and reheated them, he could maybe take a paper towel and scrape off the black stuff…
    "Well, if you run across one that can cook, grab her, is my advice," he said.
    There wasn't enough bacon grease in the can beside the stove to fry toast in, but it didn't matter since the bread in the bag he opened had sprouted green mold. He reheated the speckled eggs and carried the skillet to the table. Disgustedly, he banged it down along with a sleeve of crackers.
    His grandfather thoughtfully eyed the skillet. "Looks like we'd better bless this." He launched into one of his long prayers. Finally, he scraped an egg onto his plate and reached for the crackers. He forked a stiff piece of egg onto one of them and crunched it. "You comin' to church with me this mornin?"
    "The Campbell girl gonna be there?" he asked instead of refusing as he had the other times before when his grandfather asked.
    The old man reached for a jar of grape jelly on the table between them. "Katie? She usually is. Why?"
    The coffee in the pot on the stove boiled over. Swearing, he sprang from his chair.
    "Just wondered," he said as he returned with the pot and poured the coffee.
    His grandfather looked up. "Don't be gettin' any ideas about her."
    "Why not?"
    "She ain't like any of the girls you've ever known." The old man's gaze leveled. "You need to leave her alone."
    He stared back. "Why?"
    "Number one…she's taken. Lance is a good boy and he's been crazy about her since she was a little girl. Two…you don't have what she needs, so there's no point."
    "What don't I have?"
    "You don't have the Lord, is what you don't have. I guarantee you she's never in her life heard language like what I just heard."
    He angrily ate his breakfast. What was the old man's problem? He wasn't a complete barbarian…he knew better than to swear in front of nice girls or his mother. Besides, it wasn't any of the old man's business or anybody else's…aside from that Lance dude, possibly…if he made a play for Katie. If she didn't mind, why should anybody else?
    If his grandfather was going to try to run his life, he'd leave.
    He crunched the last cracker spread with butter and grape jelly. "Does that mean you don't want me to go to church this mornin'?"
    "No. It means I want you to come to church because you have an interest in your soul, not because you have an interest in a girl—" the old man's eyes leveled again—"who is taken."
    Scowling, he rose abruptly. "I got it, Gramps. Geez." He carried his dishes to the precarious mound in the sink.
    His grandfather sighed. "Son, I'm just sayin' chasin' Katie ain't like tryin' for the jackpot at a rodeo, or seein' how many bases you can steal. She don't know how to play games."
    He turned. "Maybe I won't play this time."
    The old man regarded him with troubled eyes. "Somebody'll get hurt. Whether it's you, or Katie, or Lance, or all three of you, somebody's fixin' to get hurt if you don't leave her alone."
     
    ***
     
    After his grandfather left for church, he sat undecidedly frowning into his coffee cup. Then he swallowed the last of the brew and rose to change his clothes.
    Thirty minutes driving down a winding canyon road later, he arrived at the unassuming church the old man attended with his congregation. Inside the door of the white frame building, he ran his hand over his hair—longer than any other man's there—and glanced at the clock behind the pulpit. Quarter past ten. From his knees in front of the elders' bench, his grandfather's voice already rumbled through the building, addressing the Almighty like a personal friend.
    He stood in the small foyer curiously scanning the room across the congregants bowed heads. For some reason, it pleased him to find the inside of the building just as he remembered it from when he had sat swinging his legs beside his mother a few rows from the front. The elders, his grandfather and Irvin—a big man with greying hair slicked back—still sat on a hard wood pew behind the pulpit at the