Meg's Best Man: A Montana Weekend Novella by Cynthia Bruner Page B

especially for the mountains. Meg had eaten a small lunch, done her hair and makeup, and tried on the dress. One look in the mirror and she knew she was going to wear it. There were only as many chances in her life to get dressed up as there were friends and family members getting married, and this was the only wedding this summer.
    She put on the heels and dropped a jacket into her messenger bag. On her way out the door she remembered the wedding present.
    It was heavy with a rustic wood frame, so she slung the bag back over her shoulder, hefted the painting into her arms, and started down the old logging road. She thought about something she had read in Proverbs that morning: “When you walk, your steps will not be hampered; when you run, you will not stumble.” However inappropriately, it had made her think about this very road. Of course it was meant to be metaphorical, but here she was, on a real road, carrying a big painting she was beginning to think was a stupid idea for a present anyway.
    She hadn’t stumbled yet. She made it to the end of the logging road and stood there, staring at the driveway to the cabin, which was much steeper. One of the guests, maybe even a friend, would drive by, or she might have to switch shoes and walk it. As she wondered just how literal “stepping out in faith” had to be, she heard a car engine. It sounded like her Jeep. Her heart raced a little and she looked downhill, where the sound was coming from.
    Around a bend came the exact twin of her old Jeep. And at the steering wheel was her brother, Mark.
    After she put the wedding gift in the backseat and he gave her a hug, he pinned her with a quizzical look. “Did you know I was coming? Because I didn’t even know.”
    “I installed a tracking system on your Jeep,” she joked.
    He looked at her like he wouldn’t put it past her. For all the years between them, they could still have been twins—same pale hair and pale gray eyes. Of course she didn’t have the “cool patch” of facial hair on her lower lip. Looking at him, she thought the distance between them in age seemed to have diminished now that he was older. “Are Mom and Dad here?” he asked.
    “Yeah, they dropped by my camper this morning.”
    “Africa time?”
    She laughed at the old joke. They never could be sure when they would get phone calls from their parents because their access to phones was often limited. She and Mark liked to joke that they forgot the world had different time zones. “Portuguese, I think.”
    He started the drive up to the cabin. He was taking his time, which didn’t seem like him at all. “Is the Jeep okay?”
    He laughed at her. “I was trying not to mess up your hair. You look really nice.”
    She grinned. Compliments from brothers were a rare thing, and they were almost always sincere. “So do you. Have you heard about Burma?”
    “Yeah, they told me. They were a little worried about where I’d live in the fall, but I have a dorm room grant for the first semester. But after my first semester I can probably get a dorm monitor job, and that would pay for the stuff I don’t want to have to pay for.”
    He had changed, grown up so much. She thought about how much older her parents, especially her mother, seemed after each of their missions. She never thought about how much more grown up their children must have seemed to them. She didn’t want that for her kids, to go away and come home to find them changed. She had a good childhood, and Catherine had filled in so many of the empty spaces in her life. But she still didn’t want that childhood for her kids.
    She thought about that walk God wanted her to take and remembered that he had a different walk planned for each of his children. She hoped hers involved being there after school, day after day, year after year, until her kids were just plain sick of her. She wondered if God would let her off that easy and not make her do something like a mission to Burma.
    “You’re