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A male friend, but she didn’t say that to him. She wouldn’t do it now, but she’d done it then, just to survive.
“It took me a while to get out of that lifestyle. It’s always tempting to go back. Alcohol does numb your problems for a while. But it is addicting, and it also eats up all of your paycheck, and I was sick of living hand-to-mouth, never having enough money to pay for anything, and always being looked down on by people because I was poor and worked a dead-end menial job.”
“You sure people looked down on you? Was it just your imagination?”
“It might’ve been.” She considered that. After all, she didn’t go around judging people, not normally. She hardly thought people wasted a whole lot of time judging her. But the thought was there. “Maybe it was just me judging myself. Finding myself lacking. I still do that.”
“God doesn’t think you lack anything. He loves you.”
That should sound odd coming from Griff, but it sounded like something he would say.
“So you were taught that growing up? It’s a lot easier to believe from childhood up, I think.”
“No. I wasn’t Amish, but my childhood is similar to yours. Strict parents that thought religion was more important than relationships, and I rebelled. I rebelled younger than you did and ran away from home when I was fifteen. I probably was in everything you were, even worse stuff.”
“So how’d you get out?” She had figured as much. Figured he was into all the bad things.
“I had a preacher take interest in me. I wasn’t interested in religion, but he got me off the street, helped me get cleaned up, and showed me that relationships were more important than religion. I... I pretty much hit rock bottom, and I didn’t really have anywhere else to go but up. He helped me get my high school diploma, and I ended up in community college at the same time, and I found out that I wasn’t as stupid as what I thought I was.”
“So you got a degree?”
“A couple of them. I practiced law for a while.”
She gasped. “You are a lawyer?”
“Shh. It’s not something I’m proud of. I think you’ll find that there is a huge similarity to religious people who think religion is more important than relationships, and people on the other side who think they know everything and look down on everyone who aren’t as enlightened as what they are. At least I saw a lot of similarities, and I didn’t want to be that, any more than I wanted to be religious without a relationship.”
“So you left?” He had to. He’d been working as a line cook in her diner for years. He certainly wasn’t practicing law. He didn’t have time.
“I did. I made a lot of money, because I was determined to be successful. Determined to not fall back down in the pit that I’d come from. But you don’t get any more satisfied with a lot of money than you do with a lot of religion.”
“I see,” she said, although she wasn’t sure she believed it. Money seemed like it would solve a lot of her problems. It would give her the prestige she craved.
“Having men look up to you like you’re something special doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a bunch of dust admiring more dust. It’s the Creator we should want to admire. It’s the Creator that we should want to have a relationship with. It’s the Creator that we live for. He owns everything. Money doesn’t matter; it’s all God’s.”
Now she saw what he meant. That if she was just getting money so other people could admire her, their admiration didn’t mean anything. Or at least it shouldn’t. Because they weren’t anything but more of the creation.
“I never heard anything like that before,” she murmured, still thinking.
“I guess I thought about it a lot while I was working my way up the ladder, thinking that I should be more satisfied than what I was. I just wasn’t. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to make enough money to have your bills paid, but beyond a certain threshold, where you’re living comfortably, it doesn’t really mean anything. It definitely doesn’t give you more satisfaction or more contentment.”
“So you gave it all up?” she asked.
“Kind of. I walked away from it. I... I guess I was looking for something else, and I happened on the diner and you, and that seemed to be just exactly what I needed.”
“So you had just left your job when you met me?” She had never suspected that he was a high-powered lawyer.
“I’d been gone for a couple of weeks. Just drove around on my bike. I went south first, but there’s just something about the lakes that call to me. Lake Michigan is my favorite. I suppose, when I was sitting in my office in Chicago overlooking the water, I spent a lot of time staring at it in contemplation.”
“It grows on you. There’s definitely something about it that calls to me as well.” She couldn’t believe he was a lawyer. Here she was, didn’t even have a high school diploma, and he was working for her. And not only working for her, she’d been taking advantage of him. Treating him like... Not like he was less than, or like he didn’t really matter. But like he was replaceable, when she realized now that he wasn’t.
“I don’t like to mention that I used to be a lawyer. It...changes the way people think about me. I don’t want them to think that there’s something special about me, or different, or better. I’m just dust the way they are.”
“I guess I agree. It definitely changes what I’ve been thinking. But for a while now, I felt like I needed to apologize to you.”
“Apologize?” He sounded truly baffled.
“Yeah. I... You’ve been a good friend. And I have not. I realized that on the ride up here, I guess. You’ve always done whatever you could to help me. And I just kind of assumed that you were going to be there. I never thought about how you might feel or even acted like it was important that you stay. I’m sorry.”
