Faith moved through the next week on autopilot. The wake and the funeral were a blur in her mind. She shook hands, accepted condolences, and murmured platitudes, but she retained none of the actual words, and the faces were all a blur.

After the funeral, close friends and family had gathered at Mama's house, where the church had brought in enough food to feed an army for a week. Faith and Josh had chosen Mama's over the church; it just seemed more personal and fitting somehow.

Faith put a few butterbeans, a slice of roast, and some rice and gravy on a plate, but she mostly pushed it around with her fork, only managing to force down a few bites. Finally she dumped the lot in the trash, took a glass of iced tea, and retreated to the back yard. She was sitting on a wooden swing hung from the branches of a large live oak when Aaron found her.

"Tell me what I can do to help." He perched on the edge of the swing, his body angled to face her.

Faith looked wearily at him. She knew he only wanted to ease her pain, but somehow his presence was more than she could handle.

"I can't deal with everything," she said. "You telling me about the abortion and then Mama's death, it's too much."

She twisted the engagement ring on her finger while she talked. Noticing Aaron's eyes straying to her hand, she looked down.

"Maybe I should just return this."

She started to remove the ring. Aaron reached out and caught her hand.

"Wait, Faith."

She looked up into his pleading eyes.

"Don't make any decisions yet. You're distraught. I understand that. Take some time. I'll wait for you to contact me."

That's how they left things.

The subsequent days blurred, a haze of pain and disbelief. She managed to collect statistics for her part-time job at the newspaper. She was relieved that she worked from home, because she cried every day as she wrote the obituaries with a fresh awareness that each of the deceased had been someone's loved one. In the mirror swollen red orbs replaced her usual green gaze. She clutched Kleenex as though they were her lifeline to sanity.

Since her graduation from college in December, Faith had not looked for full-time employment, planning to wait until after her wedding. The hours previously spent in preparation for the big event now stretched endlessly, allowing too much time for introspection. The television filled the air with sound but didn't distract her swirling thoughts. Finally, she decided to fill the empty hours with Mama's journal. Armed with a fresh box of tissue, she retreated to the sanctuary of her bedroom. After arranging a mound of pillows against the brass headboard that had once been her grandmother's, she made herself comfortable amongst the jumbled covers that she only straightened on cleaning day.

#

PLEDGED

"Like newly purchased earrings, a marriage promises a bright untarnished future, pledging the 'happily ever after' of fairy tales."

David said it was love at first sight. Not so for me. I was just looking for someone who would play a game of ping-pong. We were both newbies, part of the incoming freshman class. I wasn't looking for love; I had four years of college ahead of me. Studies and career were paramount. He was open to combining the three. In the end, his logic won the day.

I found his humor irresistible and his intelligence a challenge. Our verbal sparring lent intrigue to every encounter. The fact that he had gorgeous beagle eyes, a Roman nose, and an inviting lopsided smile was a bonus, as was the runner's body that corresponded to the hunting-dog eyes.

I found out later that my looks were what first piqued David's masculine interest.

"I picked you out of the crowd at registration," he told me after we set a wedding date. "I told Andy, 'See that girl over there, the petite, leggy one with the tight bottom and nice body.' 'The brunette wearing the short blue-jean skirt?' Andy asked me. 'Yep, that's the one,' I told him. At that moment you turned and flashed a smile at the guy behind you in line. 'She's going to be mine. Those green eyes and pearly teeth are going to smile just for me,' I said. And I was right."

Although masculine lust fueled his initial interest, he claimed my quick wit and spunk set the hook. He wasn't looking to marry a Southern debutante, oozing honey and without an original thought.

Holding true to my quest for knowledge, I toyed with David that first year. We dated sporadically, but I refused a steady relationship. He would take out other girls, but he always came back to me.

"Tell me you don't like me, Syd," he once begged, "and I won't bother you any more."

"But I do like you," I responded. "I want to be your friend."

Later he told me that those were words no guy wants to hear. They spell doom for an amorous relationship. Yet, he persevered.

Our sophomore year, the relationship began to change. By Christmas we were engaged. He convinced me that marriage did not have to mean an end to my aspirations for a degree and a career.

"Marriage," he said, "will give us more time for study. We won't have to haul our books to a rendezvous point and back again. We can keep each other on course academically. We'll use birth control until our careers are established, and – I can quit taking cold showers."

He never did propose to me, or I to him. We simply talked about the pros and cons of marriage and then set a date. That may not sound particularly romantic, but romance is not just a grand gesture. Romance was woven into our camaraderie.

We found out much later that a counselor might have told us we were too dissimilar to find contentment in a long-term relationship. We would have failed miserably on a compatibility profile. Luckily, we were too enamored to notice. By the time we did, we were too committed to let mundane opposites tear us apart.

#

A folded newspaper clipping was stuck between the pages of the journal. Faith extracted the scrap, and smoothed it out. It was one of her mother's columns. She had read a lot of her Mom's recent stuff, but this one was dated 1986. Faith would have been about a year old when it was written. She read the title and nodded. Her parents had been opposites in a lot of ways.

#

When Opposites Attract: the Incompatibility Myth

BY SYDNEY LANDER

Opposites attract, but when the novelty wears off they tend to repel. Some label this reversal 'incompatibility' and consider it the death knell of a relationship. I beg to differ. I categorize it as a challenge requiring creative compromise.

Take David and me, for instance. We fail most compatibility inventories, yet we have been happily challenged for over 15 years, making our marriage an adventure.

My favorite spices are cayenne pepper and chili powder. His are garlic and more garlic. Shortly after our blissful nuptials, I made a pot of spaghetti. He took one bite. Tears began to stream down scarlet cheeks. After he gulped down a glass of iced water, he demanded, "What did you do? Spill a bottle of pepper in there?"

"What do you mean? That's not even hot," I responded after tasting a sample.

He swears I have scalded all of my taste buds into oblivion. I accuse him of walking around with 'paper-mill mouth.' His garlic breath rivals the stench of the local chemical refinery.

Our compromise: He eats Mexican on my birthday, and I submit to Italian on his. When we dine out, we frequent buffets where we can each indulge. Our dinner table has four shakers: salt, pepper, cayenne, and garlic powder.

Spices are not our only mealtime challenge. David came from a family addicted to television. He thought supper should be ingested while watching the boob tube. My family believed mealtime should be spent around a table with a lively discussion, followed by a game.

Again, we compromised. The television is silenced during the evening meal. Afterwards, David is free to indulge his television addiction while the kids and I play games.

Our television and movie preferences sometimes merge, usually when it involves a good love story. He enjoys blood, guts, and gore, which – of course – I loathe. I can't resist a good tearjerker, but he prefers a happy ending. I encourage him to watch violence with his buds, and I invite the girls over for a good cry. The two of us still snuggle up together for a romantic thriller.

David is a football fanatic. When LSU is on the gridiron, he becomes a one-man cheering squad. The neighbors can hear his, "YES! Wha Whoo!" If I'm going to watch grown men bashing into each other, I prefer they do it at lightning speed on skates, wielding a stick that doubles as puck handler and weapon.

There is no compromise for sports; we just ignore each other's lunacy on game day.

I think you get the drift. David and I have numerous areas of incompatibility. After years of marriage, we've learned that give and take can be fun – as long as one partner doesn't do all the giving and the other all the taking. To keep that from happening, I sometimes hide the remote.

#

Faith stopped reading. She peered at the soggy mass of facial tissue in the trash. She had been adding to the mound daily. Now, she wonderingly stroked dry cheeks and traced the upward curvature of her lips. Mama had managed to reach from beyond the grave, induce a smile, and ease her pain.

When she'd opened her bequest, chuckles had not even made the list of possible responses to its reading. Yet here she sat, smiling at Mama's description of the differences between her and Daddy.

"Are Aaron and I compatible?" she wondered.

Faith had been standing in line to get advanced tickets to The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King when a cell phone rang behind her.

"Now?" a masculine voice asked. "Not now. I've been in this line for three hours, and I'm within sight of the kiosk."

A hand landed on her shoulder. She turned to find herself looking into worried brown eyes that were only a few inches above hers. With his free hand, a good-looking guy pushed back a thatch of brunette hair threatening to obstruct his view. He flashed her a quick smile that momentarily erased the anxiety in his eyes, replacing it with an inviting gleam. For a brief moment, his tanned right cheek sported a dimple.

"Look, I have to go. It's an emergency. Can you please buy me a ticket?" He grabbed her hand and wrote a number on her palm before he thrust a $20 bill into it. "That's my number. Call me when you have the ticket. We'll rendezvous. Thanks, uhh, what did you say your name is? Mine's Aaron."

That was how they met two years ago. Both enjoyed fantasy – films and books. That was their point of compatibility, and it pretty much diverged from there. Or did it? He liked to cook; she liked to eat. She enjoyed singing, while he enjoyed listening. Both possessed inquiring minds, and they loved to discuss diverse topics. Their strongest tie, though, was faith. God was equally important to them. But could God guide them past Aaron's confession? Faith wasn't sure. In fact, she wasn't even certain she wanted Him to try.

With a sigh, she turned back to the journal.