The Promise Read Online Free PDF

looks on their faces, if Tom would have let her replace the broken glass and get a decent frame for it. But he wouldn’t hear of it. “That’s the original glass and frame,” he’d said. “The same one my grandfather put the photograph in when my dad gave it to him. I don’t ever want to change it. Why do you care how it looks anyway? It’s not like we’re trying to impress anyone. None of the other picture frames match.”
    Holding the portrait up again, she looked it over. Not only was the glass broken and the frame bent, but it was also all scratched up. Not in a way that made it look old and collectible, but in a cheap and crappy way. She wasn’t even sure if it was real wood.
    She looked at Jim’s unsmiling face again as he stood there behind his father. She was struck, by contrast, how much Jim smiled these days . . . and how little Tom did. Tom’s typical expression now looked more like Jim’s stern image in the portrait. They were probably close to the same age.
    Tom and Jim had always been so much alike; everyone thought so. That was, until seven months ago, before Tom’s sister Michele got married. Just before that, Jim and Marilyn had gone through a major marriage crisis. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, Marilyn had moved out of their big house in River Oaks. Tom was afraid she’d left for good. But God seemed to do a remarkable work in Jim’s heart that turned everything around. Jean smiled as she remembered that amazing scene at Michele’s wedding when the two of them danced for the first time. That beaming smile on Jim’s face.
    Jim was smiling almost every time she saw him these days. He was probably smiling right now. She looked down at Tom’s face in the portrait. Why don’t you smile anymore, my love?
    Carly started crying. “Mom!” Tommy yelled. “Carly won’t give back my truck.”
    â€œI’ll be right there. Don’t you grab it from her.” She lifted the broom off the floor and put it in the hall closet for now, then carried the bent anchor and portrait into the family room. She’d leave them on the kitchen counter for now, out of the kids’ reach until Tom got home.
    Hopefully, he’d come home in a better mood than the one he’d been in the last several weeks. No, more like the last several months. He said it was just some things going on at work but that he didn’t want to talk about it.
    She needed him to be in a better mood soon. She had something more important to talk with him about than this portrait falling in the hallway. For the last several mornings she’d been fighting off waves of nausea. She was pretty sure she knew why.

 6 
    T om pulled up in the driveway of his three-bedroom/two-bath home, in an older but nicely kept subdivision in Lake Mary, Florida. Just like he had every weekday and some Saturdays for the last five years. Occasionally, before losing his job, he’d have to work late or else come home late because he’d get stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-4. Most of the time he got home right at 5:30, so that’s what he did today.
    It had been quite a day. Off and on, he’d checked the local online news websites to see if anyone had run the story about the botched robbery attempt at the Coffee Shoppe. No one had. He grabbed the leather strap of his brief bag and looked up. The sight through his windshield generated a completely opposite reaction from the pronounced joy and excitement he’d felt when he first pulled up in this driveway five years ago.
    Back then, he was a king coming home to his castle. Just one year out of college, he had a great job, a promising future, a lovely wife, and a new baby boy on the way, Tommy Junior. His father hadn’t bought his first house until he was thirty. Tom had him beat by seven years.
    As it turned out, he was actually the proud owner of a house inflated