Hometown Promise by Merrillee Whren Page A

to bring it up. He was trying to make some kind of amends, and bringing up his bad behavior wasn’t going to help. “Then what happened?”
    “I called my former boss.”
    “You did? Why?”
    “Because when he fired me, he told me he was doing it to wake me up. And if I needed any help, any time, he said I should call him.”
    Juliane was impressed. If Lukas had been her employee, would she have done the same thing, or would she have washed her hands of him? She was ashamed to admit that the latter was probably more likely. “Why did he do that?”
    “Because he saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself—potential.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “I’m not sure I can explain it exactly.” Sighing, Lukas shook his head. “My former boss Bill Martin is a Christian, and he never failed to let me know that God loved me—no matter what I had done. That was his message even when he was firing me.”
    “Did you believe him?”
    “Hardly.”
    “Then why did you call him when you were arrested?”
    “He was the only person I knew that I thought would help me.”
    “What about your family? Your grandfather?”
    “I wasn’t close to my family for a long time.” Lukas lowered his head and ran a hand through his hair, then shook his head. “Whoa. You don’t want to listen to my life’s story.”
    “I’ll listen if you want to tell it.” Juliane didn’t miss the surprise in his expression when he looked her way.
    He took a big gulp of his drink, then gave her a crooked smile. “You might have noticed my grandfather’s German accent.”
    “I did. What does that have to do with your relationship with your family?”
    “Well…being a dumb kid, I was embarrassed that everyone in my family spoke with heavy accents. I had no idea what it took for them to escape from East Germany and communism.”
    “Wow! They did that?”
    Taking another swig of his cola, Lukas nodded. “See? Everyone who hears that is impressed, but all I could see back then were parents who weren’t like everyone else’s.”
    “You were ashamed of them?”
    “Yeah. Dumb, wasn’t I?”
    “Should I agree with you?” Juliane smiled, then bit into another pretzel.
    “It doesn’t matter whether you say so. I know I was. I was dumb about a lot of things.” Lukas continued talking without looking at her, almost as if he were telling the story to the empty chairs across the room. “I was also on the shy side, but when I got my first taste of a beer buzz, I wasn’t shy anymore. I fit in. I wasn’t that geeky kid with the foreign parents. I was somebody cool, or at least I was under the mistaken impression that I was.”
    “How young were you when you started drinking?”
    “Fifteen.”
    “Were you drinking all the time?” Juliane asked, wondering how young her dad had started.
    “In the beginning, I only drank at parties on the weekends. That’s pretty much the pattern I followed through myschool years—binge drinking on the weekends. But occasionally I drank during the week, too. I was getting my courage from a bottle.”
    “So are you saying that you alienated your family with your drinking?” Juliane took the last pretzel and popped it into her mouth.
    “Mostly I alienated my grandfather. He was the one trying to reach out to me. My parents had other things on their minds.” Lukas let out a harsh breath. “Near the end of my senior year in high school, my mother died of breast cancer. For most of my high school years, my parents were consumed with her illness, and my drinking was pretty much under their radar.”
    Juliane felt a burst of sympathy. She hadn’t known that Lukas had lost his mother. “So are you saying that because of your mother’s illness, they weren’t paying much attention to you?”
    “Yeah, I guess I’m saying that.” Lukas grimaced. “After I went to college, my father moved back to Germany. The Berlin Wall had come down, and Germany had been reunited. He wanted to see the family