shengminmei262

@@@@@"We've been going to services together three times a week for the last four months Jack pulled up, and she bent to grab the handles of her various bags"He's going to take spring semester off to travel with this really wonderful gospel groupIt's an actual tour, with a booker and everythingThe group is called The HummingbirdsYou should hear him - he sings like an angel 138 "I'll bet," I said She kissed me again, softly, on the cheek"I'm glad I came, DaddyAre you glad?" "More than you could ever know," I said, and found myself wishing she'd fall madly in love with Jack That would have solved everythingor so it seemed to me then x We had nothing so grand as Christmas dinner, but there was one of Jack's Astronaut Chickens, plus cranberry dressing, salad-in-a-bag, and rice puddingIlse ate two helpings of everything After we exchanged presents and exclaimed over them - everything was just what we wanted! - I took Ilse upstairs to Little Pink and showed her most of my artistic outputThe drawing I'd done of her boyfriend and the picture of the woman (if it was a woman) in red were tucked away on a high shelf in my bedroom closet, and there they would stay until my daughter was gone I had clipped about a dozen others - mostly sunsets - to squares of cardboard and leaned them 139 against the walls of the roomShe toured them onceStopped, then toured them againIt was night by then, my big upstairs window full of darknessThe tide was all the way out; the only way you even knew the Gulf was there was by its soft continual sighing as the waves ran up the sand and died "You really did these?" she said at lastShe turned and looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortableIt's the way one person looks at another when a serious re-evaluation is going on "I really did," I