Casting Down Imaginations Read Online Free Page A

back to Texas, but I am not sure if that’s
really true. I stopped following his career a long time ago and could care less
what he was doing.
    Snapping
back to the present, I put the picture back into the box that Kevin was
packing. If I was going to get everything done I didn’t have time to travel
down memory lane.
    “When are
you going to come back home?” Kevin asked.
    “I don’t
know, Kevin. Probably Christmas.”
    “Christmas?
Dang, that’s a long time!”
    I
laughed. He’d asked me that same question over and over again for the past two
weeks. I guess he was hoping my answer would change, because I always got the
same response from him.
    “There
you two are.”
    Kevin and
I looked up to see Daddy standing at the door.
    “Kevin, I
told you to keep her from packing, not help her!” he joked through a smile.
    “Sorry,
Daddy,” Kevin said.
    Daddy
walked over and patted Kevin on the head, then sat down on the corner of the
bed.
    “Are you
going to be able to fit all of these clothes in your suitcases?” Daddy asked.
“You know the most you can have on the bus is three.”
    I looked
at the clothes on the bed. “No, but I’m going to fit in as many as possible.
What I can’t take with me I’m giving away.”
    “Okay,”
he said. “If you insist.”
    I opened
one of the garbage bags and began to stuff it with the folded clothes that I
decided to give away.
    Daddy
smiled at me. “My baby girl is about to go to college.”
    He must
have been reading my thoughts. I smiled back at him.
    “Don’t
you start crying on me now, Daddy,” I warned. We had a joke going on about
which one of us would cry first. Neither one of us would admit that we thought
the other would win.
    “I’m not
going to cry,” he insisted. “But I know after you leave I will.”
    “Karen
was crying this morning,” Kevin interjected.
    Daddy’s
face lit up.
    “No I
wasn’t,” I argued. “Kevin, what are you talking about?”
    “At
church,” he answered. “When y’all were in the front. You were crying, I saw
it!”
    Daddy and
I laughed, realizing that he was referring to earlier this morning when the
church handed Anaya and I our scholarships and we said our good-byes to the
congregation.
    “That
doesn’t count, Kevin,” I told him. “We’re talking about which one of us will
cry first when we have to leave each other .”
    “You
did,” Kevin insisted. “I saw you crying Karen. Daddy, you won.”
    I decided
to let it go. Some things were left better that way, and I could see that in
Kevin’s heart he knew and understood what he saw.
    “You need
me to help you pack?” Daddy asked.
    He wanted
to spend some extra time with me, too. Daddy never even packed his own clothes
when he had somewhere to go. There was no way he really wanted to help me.
    “No,
Daddy, that’s okay. I think Kevin’s doing a good enough job helping me out.”
    Kevin
looked up from his work to show all of his pearly whites.
    “Are you
sure?” Daddy asked.
    I thought
about it. “Well, if you want you can move all of this furniture down to the
basement for me. That stuff is heavy. I know I won’t be able to move it by
myself.”
    A blank
look came over his face. “What are you talking about? Who said anything about
moving furniture?”
    “Mama
did,” Kevin answered.
    Daddy’s
eyes went from me to Kevin, then back to me. “Are you serious?” he mouthed in
my direction, not letting his voice carry out for Kevin to hear.
    “She said
she wanted the room completely bare by the time I leave in the morning. I know
I’m not getting up at the crack of dawn to move all this stuff downstairs, so I
was gonna get it done tonight.”
    He
chuckled in disbelief. “But where are you going to sleep if you do that?”
    I
shrugged my shoulders. “Well, I was just going to put some blankets down and
sleep on the floor.”
    Kevin
jumped up. “Oohh, can I come? We can pretend like we’re camping!”
    “No,”
Daddy said sternly. “Kevin, you will