Anna was living the life that she thought she wanted; her work life was busy, but she spent many of her nights alone. She had left her small hometown for the big city with the hope of mending her broken heart, but that had not happened yet. She was having trouble facing the pain of her break-up with Jake, the love of her life, and she really missed her spunky, mischievous grandmother, Mayvee, whom she had left behind. Then one day, she gets a call at work that something has happened to her grandmother; she must come home immediately to be with her. Once she arrives, she discovers that while her grandmother will recover, Anna must stay with her for at least six weeks during her recovery. Gradually, Anna discovers that she is able to move past her broken heart to forgive Jake and move on with her life-and maybe find a new love. With the help of her grandmother, Mayvee, and an arrogant but handsome young man, Anna begins to discover a new life with lots of possibilities. She also learns to enjoy life more as Mayvee along with her "blue-haired bunch" of elderly girlfriends wreak havoc on their very peaceful small town. Be prepared to laugh a lot and cry a little on this extraordinary journey of a very ordinary girl.

Poker, Prayer, and Garden Wars

By Lorena Kiser

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Lorena Kiser
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-6446-5

Chapter One

Time is tricky. It possesses the power to silently steal away beautiful days and dreams with each passing second. Moments pass without recognition of wonder because of the domination freely granted to time. It slips by without notice. Once time has passed we are left without opportunity to gain it back. To many, time is a cruel thief. A powerful, unseen resource when gone can leave a deep wound or when appreciated can be the greatest asset we have. A beautiful relationship with time can be enjoyed in which bonds are traded for exhilarating freedom. When time is respected it can be collaborated with. There are places where schedules hold no prisoners and souls experience the genuine rest that peace offers. Anna Grace Justice didn't realize that time was tricking her. She had no idea that she could use time to her advantage. Her life was running at such a hectic pace that it seemed it would take years for her to catch up with her current responsibilities. Would she ever be able to turn in the bonds of time and grab onto freedom? Freedom to love the way love was intended, freedom to be loved and let love soak deep into the heart lingering there in a way that forever would change the pattern by which she lived.

Anna is busy. From sun up to sundown every second of her time is spent multitasking through never ending days. Going on about four hours of sleep each night, Anna packs her days with as much as possible to succeed in her job at an architectural firm and among her peers. She works as an executive assistant for General Engineering and Associates but sometimes she feels like she runs the whole company. The company would be literally inoperable without her, which is why they gave her a 2009 BMW for her two year anniversary with the firm. Its way better than the 1992 Honda that she left home with which only started two out of three times. Anna is reliable, dependable and suffers from self inflicted work-aholism, so the company continually expresses their appreciation with bonuses and piles upon piles of unfinished drafts that nobody else cares to do. Anna never complains about the ever increasing responsibilities at her job. Truth be told she is actually grateful for and prefers the tedious work that occupies her mind. Scheduling clients, going over legal documents, meeting with inspectors was just the tip of the ice-burg. She also never complains that even though she is a glorified secretary, she drafts most of the work her boss gets paid the big bucks for. She also never complains that he gets all the credit while she fetches the coffee. Her boss, Leonard, is a sharp dressed forty five year old with wrinkled skin who smells of alcohol and cigarettes which Anna has grown to respect. They have a mutual respectable relationship. He gave her a car and she gives him sixty hours a week of devoted servitude. He never complains about her work and she never complains about her workload. Anna's complaints, however, are of the small wrinkles that she has been noticing around her almond shaped green eyes that could be attributed to her job. The small, millimeter long creases are barely noticeable to the naked eye and look more like laugh lines than wrinkles, but Anna instantly knew at the first sight of them that they would quickly spread and mutate at the speed of light until they covered her entire face by her thirtieth birthday. Late nights at the office were definitely taking their toll on Anna's porcelain skin.

Normally she didn't even have to wear make-up with her dark long lashes contrasting her flawless pale skin, her features are very prominent and her lips very full and used to look great au natural. But as she recently caught a glimpse of herself in the office bathroom she decided now was the time to visit the Clinique counter at the mall. It hadn't always mattered to her how she fit in socially. Times had changed and she now finds herself caring more and more about material things and appearances. This could be attributed to the small superficial group that she now associates with for social purposes on her journey up the corporate ladder. These girls are ambitious, gorgeous, ruthless and mostly competitive. Anna was barely surviving just to stay in the competition at first. She wonders if she is slowly turning into one of them. Her click of city friends were nothing like the girls she grew up with back home who were already married and taking turns having wonderfully adorable children that would one day rule world. These city girls don't care how you are doing or if your day is going well. They care about what brand your shoes, purse and underwear are and if you want to stay in a conversation with them everything had better match. At first Anna was reluctant to talk to them but learned that hanging out with the right people at the office made work go a lot easier. The girls at Anna's office didn't care to get married and have children, these girls planned on ruling the world themselves. Which was fine with Anna at least they didn't question her about her non-existent love life. In fact they didn't really care enough to wonder why she never mentioned a special someone. Anna had not had very much luck with relationships. Marriage and family were a distant dream but for now she worked. She worked all the time. Actually she felt better when she was working. She felt powerful at work and at her job she did have it all together, unlike her life.

Her small apartment is so lonely she does all she can to stay out as much as possible. Her home, if one would call it that, is simply a place to sleep and change clothes. The one bedroom apartment has three small windows. Anna hadn't bothered to find curtains for them, so the open windows against the institutional green paint that covered all four walls and the two petitions that separated the bathroom and the bedroom from the living room matched in a weird pitiful way. The furniture is minimal and consists of a red overstuffed couch with scratched up coffee table that goes perfectly with the bare scuffed up hardwood floors. All of her photos and books are still tucked in the boxes they traveled the nine hours from home in. The first couple of nights there were too hard for her so she just declared within her heart that anything that would make this place appealing to be in was out of the question. It's funny how when a person exists in a pitiful state they don't fully understand just how bad it is until it gets better. In Anna's mind all was well in the ugly apartment that was less than decorated and looked more like an abandoned hospital ward. She didn't want to decorate the place to encourage any notion of actually spending time there. When Anna was alone there her mind drifted to the pain she held of lost love and the fear of never finding a mate. Well, at least not one that actually loved her back. She determined after her first week at the place she was not going to mentally walk down that path every evening. She handles stress at work like a pro but was not so great at handling the tortures of single-hood. She felt as if she had an infirmity in which held no cure. Silently longing to hold a tangible piece of a love that she had no promise of ever owning. Rejection had scarred her heart so severely that she almost purposefully ruined her chances with all the "great" guys her only normal office associate insisted upon her meeting. Her friend Susan, the normal one, was about twice her age and actually had a daughter about Anna's age. Susan bleached her hair blond and wore too much make up in a feeble attempt to at least look like the other girls at the office. Susan knows every single young man on the entire east coast due to her diligent search for a husband for her daughter. The daughter recently married, and Susan apparently wasn't ready to give up her position in the chase and constantly reminded Anna that she shouldn't be spending so much time at work and should be concerned about starting a family. Anna lately tries to avoid Susan in a very discreet manner. She truly loves Susan and was thankful to have a genuine conversation once in awhile. It was just that Susan thought Anna was pitiful now and she only knew the half of it. Susan has no idea how lonely Anna really is. Panicked at the though of poor, optimistic Susan dropping by one evening for a chat caused Anna to cringe a little. She honestly didn't think Susan could handle the shock of the reality of the ugly apartment and the loneliness that was so apparent you could almost smell it in the stale air. So she gave up dating and also gave up her only chance at a halfway normal friendship all because of a man that had stolen her dreams and ran off with her heart.

She desperately wanted romance yet ran from it just as fervently as she dreamed about it. So she returns to her lifeless cave in an exhausted frenzy to brush her teeth and hurry off to sleep before her mind settles just enough to drift toward him. It was him. Every man she met and every date she went on she found a small piece of him. The beautiful amazing man that she had loved for most of her life. He haunts her thoughts and she found early on that staying overwhelmingly busy in some way caused her to feel like she was winning the battle. If her mind is busy on work, it is not on him. That is until she is alone. This is why at first she continued to go on endless blind dates and attend parties and functions that she held no interest in at all. Feeling like as long as she is distracted, he is out of the picture. Then she realized all the blind dates made her miss him more and more. So she quit dating altogether. Currently she works. Three years have passed and she keeps hoping for the day she will forget him forever. But it doesn't take a lot to swell up those emotions of love and hatred as he often crosses her mind.

Jake Trinton Smith. As far as men go, he was exceptional in every way. Good-looking, energetic, athletic, hard-working, fun-loving........the list could go on and on. They were childhood friends and maintained a close friendship all through their childhood into adolescence and it carried on over to their adult lives. Jake was always smiling. His teeth were perfectly straight and his thin lips willingly displayed them most of the time. He had dark brown hair that always seemed to be shaggy two days after his last hair cut. His blue eyes smiled as much as his lips and they would slither away into a thin line as he laughed. As his eyes would minimize, a small dimple would grow in the middle of his left cheek. But when he was not laughing his eyes were large and round and sparked an instant image of a cute little puppy. Most of the girls that Anna went to school with made it very well known that Jake was by far the best looking guy around. Anna didn't notice it until the day he was telling her goodbye as she stood in an airport parking lot with his mother as he flew off to defend the country.

In three years her life had become a race. The problem with that was she had no idea what the finish line looked like. When would enough become enough. Before she left home, she didn't care about anything but her relationships with the ones she loved. She was happy working at a job she loved with under-privileged children making barely enough money to keep her hunk of junk car safe to drive. That was before she realized that the rest of the world actually did care about outward appearances. She didn't realize at the time how significant the trade off would be. Giving up her inward convictions to chase after outward success was a gradual process. It didn't happen overnight. Anna was not truly aware that she had changed as much as she had.

Guilt had begun to consume her about not visiting her grandmother. Maevylin Sophia Justice. The amazing woman who had raised Anna, and also had corrected at least a thousand people on how to correctly pronounce her name. Pronounced May-va-lynn. Mayvee as she was known, was an incredible woman of strength and faith. Anna desperately missed Mayvee, the two adored one another. It was just that she was so busy taking a weekend off to fly to the middle of nowhere was almost impossible. The visit would mean that she would disappear from her world completely. Believe it or not there was no cell phone service and the internet did not exist in the place called home. Her grandmother lived in Carterton, a very small town in southwest Virginia. The Appalachian Mountains, that she once loved as a child now almost made her ashamed when peers in her new life found out where she was born and raised. Her city friends immediately informed her that if she ever wanted to be anyone at the firm she better never let them find out from whence she came. Anna was once proud of her heritage and was now spending a lot of her time trying to rid the accent and escape the ridicule of the mountain repute. Going home would definitely be as difficult now as it was when she had decided to leave. It shocked everyone that she was moving away but things had changed so much since he had left. She could not find a job that paid what she wanted to earn. Also with everything that had taken place the first year after he joined the military she couldn't stand the way people treated her anymore. Looks of pity and quiet whispers made her want to snap in a very unkind way toward the people she loved and respected. Sure things happened, but she had gotten over them, at least was trying, and it seemed like no one would let her forget. She would call home when she missed her grandmother. When she first left home a deep sickness set into her heart longing for just a hug, or smell or taste of home would have given her. She had been in love with every tree and hill in the country. She learned to numb herself of this feeling and now a letter or phone call was enough to keep her going.

Anna was thinking about her grandmother as she walked into her dark, gloomy apartment. It was only eight o'clock but with the latest wrinkles showing up this morning, Anna thought it would be a good idea to at least try to get into bed by 9 p.m. Hopefully she would be tired enough to go to sleep. If not she would just get lost in a new book she picked up on the way home. She passed the couch, went straight for the bathroom. Anna brushed her teeth, washed her face, put an extra coat of the anti-wrinkle cream (that she also picked up on the way home) all around her eyes and snuggled up in her worn out, uneven bed. The first few minutes were rather awkward. This was definitely a new experience. Usually she literally passed out of exhaustion the minute her head hit the pillow, which strangely was exactly how she liked it. Tonight she was lying here with a seemingly good book, about to give it a try when she realized she had no reading lamp. Figures. The naked bulb hanging in the middle of the room made it even more uncomfortable. Plus, how could Anna expect to drift off to sleep with a 100 watt bulb dangling directly above her? Good grief, can't I catch a break? Anna sighed as she climbed up and headed toward the corner of the living room that housed her unopened boxes. There was one marked bedroom and Anna remembered a small reading lamp that she had since she was a little girl. Reading was something that she had used to absolutely love. All the other girls in the fourth grade played with dolls and watched Disney movies while Anna got lost in the world of written word. Anna quickly spotted the lamp in the box and as she reached for it she saw a familiar picture frame. She couldn't help picking it up. It was made of macaroni noodles and covered in purple glitter. She made it at vacation bible school when she was eleven. Just the sight of it brought so many happy memories. Inside the frame was her absolute favorite photograph. The same day she made the picture frame the photo was taken. It was her and Gran. Both wearing dresses and standing in front of the church that Anna attended all of her life. Gran, eighteen years ago at age seventy was still strikingly beautiful. She had piercing blue eyes that sparkled. Her frame was slender and dainty. She was not very tall but, eleven year old Anna only came up to her chest. The photo boasted the two biggest smiles Anna had ever remembered.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Poker, Prayer, and Garden Warsby Lorena Kiser Copyright © 2011 by Lorena Kiser. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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