A Tale of Confession, Redemption and Reflection
By Haron Wachira
“Dad has been drinking too much,” he said.
She knew that.
“You will have to help him somehow,” Ken said when his mother did not react to his preparatory words.
Or leave him. She entertained the idea but kept it under wraps in her mind.
But no amount of preparation could have steeled her for the inevitable breakdown she suffered upon returning to a home where her husband spent the entire day immersed in alcohol.
***
A few days after G came back home from the hospital, Lina brought Timothy and Grace over to visit. This was the first time for the couple to step into G.’s home.
Dan was not at home, but he later came, drunk to the heel, while they were eating lunch, and did not seem to care less whether his drinking embarrassed him or hurt others.
“Karibuni, welcome,” he said, excused himself, and escaped to the bedroom.
Towards the end of their visit, after several hours, Grace tentatively broached the subject.
“About your husband,” she started, halting at each word, “I hope I am not overstepping your welcome to us into your home, G.,” she said, very tenderly.
“Oh, not at all, Grace,” G. said. “It’s clear to me you are asking out of concern.”
“I am available to help where I can. I have some experience in counselling,” Grace explained.
“I wish he could accept help,” G. confessed, her voice heavy with resignation. “It’s a relapse. After many years.”
“If you’re up to it, we can start today. Right here,” Grace, ever decisive, proposed.
“How?” G. asked.
“Confrontation,” Grace guided. “Wake him up. Tell him to come and bid us goodbye. The effects of the alcohol should be largely gone by now.”
G. rose from her seat and walked purposefully to the bedroom. Despite the brace on her neck and the metals and plastics in her body, she moved steadily, without limping. Timothy’s gaze followed her every step.
She returned with Dan, gripping his hand as a mother might guide a wayward child.
“Dan,” Grace addressed him directly. “I’m the one who requested this meeting.”
“A meeting?” Dan’s expression was puzzled. Though he appeared sober, his demeanour still betrayed the signs of a man accustomed to drinking.
“Your wife has something to say to you, and we, her friends, want to support her as she tells you she’s had enough of your drinking,” Grace continued.
Dan looked from G. to Tim and Grace, then turned to Lina with an appeal for help.
“Lina, please, my sister. Tell them I’m not a bad man. Or am I?”
“You were a good man, my dear,” G. interjected. “And you can choose to be a good man again. But I’ve had enough of the man you are now. Either change or…”
Tears welled up in Dan’s eyes.
“I can’t change,” he admitted, his voice choked with emotion. “I would like to, but I can’t.”
“You can, Dan. We can help. Shall we?” Grace, the problem solver, offered.
He said yes. That same afternoon, Grace and Tim drove Dan to a Christian rehab centre. And three months later, they brought him back, a healed man. In preparation, Lina had come over to help G. with the cooking, since Grace had told G by phone that they’d be bringing Dan back home.
G. had wanted to go visit Dan during his time at the rehab. But Grace had explained that it was not allowed. The rehab’s policy was to let all decisions emanate from their clients. They could leave or stay — it was all up to them. For three months. No family or other visits. Until graduation.
“I am very happy for you,” G. said to Dan, embracing him to welcome him home. She meant it.
She wasn’t sure she was happy for herself though. There was still the matter of the woman associated with the monthly debit G. had stopped. Magdalene Wanja, the cause of the confusion that caused G. to drive in reverse gear like mad, ending up with a broken neck and a crushed rib cage.
Dan’s three months in rehab may have done him good, but her three months in hospital hadn’t yet resulted in the healing of her marriage.
She hadn’t told anyone of this complicated detail of the trouble in her marriage. While Dan wallowed in drink, she could have chosen to leave him and it would have been understood…. But could she? Where would she go? Their business was jointly registered. She had no other source of income or home. The dispute on her father’s land left her with nowhere to go. She’d have to fight through a messy divorce from Dan to force a division of their assets.
She saw the playouts — in family meetings; in front of hostile lawyers; in court, most likely before an unsympathetic male judge—and it made her depressed.
Then, out of nowhere as they sipped the hot, milky tea Lina had made, Dan said, “There is something else I need to say.” They all paid attention.
“I need to go to the bank and cancel a standing order.” His tone was laden with a hint of remorse.
G. felt a sudden pang in her chest, but she maintained her composure, waiting for him to continue.
“What about?” Grace pursued.
Dan looked down, dejected. Then he looked up at G. tentatively. His eyes were still reddish from his now conquered drink habit. But the tears that welled up in them softened G.’s heart.
“Ah!” He said, banging his hands hard against his thigh.
“I am sorry,” Grace apologised, thinking she was the cause of Dan’s consternation.
“Tell them,” G. said. “It’s about Wanja, isn’t it?”
It was Dan’s turn to nearly fall. “You knew?” he asked, astonished.
“Tell them!” G. hissed sharply, new anger over the matter threatening her composure.
“There was a woman, yes,” he said repentantly. “Past now. While in rehab I believed in Christ and got saved. I am done with her.”
G. jumped up, a sudden flush of relief and joy engulfing her. She rushed to Dan with her arms spread out and embraced him; first with a bear hug, the cast on her neck getting in their way. Then she kissed him all over his face. Wildly. Dan had to pull himself back to say, “Thank you. I love you, G.”
“Thank God. Thank you, Lord,” Timothy’s baritone voice rang above the sounds of happy crying from Grace and Lina, and G.’s high-pitched screams of joy.
When the noisy celebration ran itself down, G. informed the party that they did not need to go to the bank; and that she had cancelled the standing order. She spared Dan from the self-torture he would have suffered had she also told them, or him afterward, that Magdalene Wanja was the cause of her accident outside the bank.
After lunch that afternoon, Lina and Grace teamed up in the kitchen to wash the dishes, and Dan went for a siesta in the bedroom. Tim sat on the sofa seat that G had sat on the night Dan came drunk, directly facing the framed flowers on the wall; the flowers he had sent her so many years back when they were both teenagers.
G. came slowly from behind and sat next to him on the soft sofa seat, exactly as they had sat on the hard, weathered bench during Terry’s wedding. She had been stowing away the table mats that had been used over lunch and noticed what now engaged his attention.
They both looked at the dry flowers, each one bathing in the deep end of the memories the flowers triggered.
“Terry asked about your gift,” G. said. “The flowers.”
“Why?”
“She grew up here, seeing these,” she said, pointing to the wall. “Don’t you see?”
“What did you tell her?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You did not answer her?”
“I did. I played it down.”
“How?”
“I showed her the ones I dried while at the hospital,” G. Said. “I told her I would set them all as a collection.”
“That wasn’t an answer,” Tim said.
“I know,” she confirmed.
“Perhaps it’s time to let them go,” Tim suggested.
“To where?” G. asked. She understood him. She was playing hardball.
“To the dustbin…” he started, then saw her clasp her mouth with both her hands in dismay, and he stopped.
“No,” she objected firmly. “No.”
“They might do more harm than good,” he persisted, looking at her, extending his hand towards her to express solidarity in their predicament.
“How?”
“If he… if Dan, now my new brother in the Lord, found out they came from me, he might see me very differently,” Tim said.
G. pondered for a moment, then a spark of inspiration lit up her expression. With a jovial tone, she exclaimed, “The wall collection. Generalize.”
Initially, Timothy seemed puzzled, unsure of her meaning. However, as G. rose from her seat and retrieved a carton, spreading on the floor the dried flowers she had preserved during her hospital stay, understanding dawned upon him.
They heard a rustle of clothes. Tim panicked.
G. smiled at her husband. “Pass over there, please, Love.” she pointed to a seat that was well away from the paraphernalia on the floor.
“Why, what’s going on?” Dan asked.
“My collection of gifts while in hospital,” she said, sure of her words. “I am assembling them into a collection.”
Dan had been facing G. directly, as he had come from their bedroom. Now he turned, making a connection between the spread-out items on the floor and the display on the wall. His eyes shifted between the finely framed version on the wall and the unpreserved dry flowers on the floor.
G. and Timothy were breathing in sync, slowly, as if they awaited, helplessly, the impending detonation of a timed bomb.
Grace and Lina came into the sitting room at that very moment, and both halted at the door between the kitchen and the sitting room, noticing the unfolding spectacle.
Dan’s expression solidified as he appeared to reach a decisive conclusion about the link between the dried flowers on the floor and their framed counterparts on the wall.
At last, he nodded with understanding, a subtle smile playing at the corners of his lips as he voiced his thoughts, “Ah, I understand now. Old habits die hard.”
Everyone reacted. Grace and Lina looked at the flowers on the floor, then at the framed version. Tim and G. exchanged glances.
“Some never die,” Timothy said cryptically.
At which Lina commented, “Some are re-learned late in life.”
The mystery of the dried flowers was solved, albeit differently in each one’s mind. Different perspectives, no doubt. But no one needed to elaborate on his or her interpretation of their shared reality.
All’s well that ends well! After a journey of twists and turns, the series on ‘Mystery of the Dry Flowers’ finally comes to a conclusion.
What are your thoughts on the conclusion of the series? How did you feel about the series as a whole?
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please leave a comment below, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Thank you for reading.
Disclaimer: All characters, locations, and events depicted in this book are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events or locales, is purely coincidental. This work is created for entertainment purposes only and does not intend to portray real individuals, organizations, or occurrences
Haron Wachira 