Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  “The first time I came in here,” Rafe said, “I saw those crosses and knew I wanted one. I didn’t know why. I wasn’t a Christian then. I didn’t have any money, so I waited until Joseph went in the back, and I stole one.” Rafe touched the cross around his neck. “This one.” I looked down at Joseph, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He was starting on my right foot. “But I couldn’t bring myself to wear it. I mean, it bothered my conscience. So I brought it back. Patience was working, and I told her what I’d done. She gave me a Bible. You know, one of those little green Gideon New Testaments. She told me to come back the next day to talk to Joseph.”

  Joseph looked up at Rafe and smiled. He had a beautiful smile, full of really nice white teeth, but it only lasted a second. He touched a finger to the cross on his chest. “Fishhooks for souls,” he said. “And we’re the fishermen.”

  Rafe nodded. “Amen.”

  Joseph held up the sheet of paper, my poor duck feet outlined clearly in black. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “I need to cut the soles.”

  After Joseph disappeared behind the curtain, Rafe bent down and kissed me. “He and Patty are great,” Rafe said, keeping his voice low. “I wouldn’t have found Christ without them, but Joseph thinks I’m wrong to want to be a minister with a mainstream Protestant denomination. He thinks it’s a waste of time to go to school for eight years before you can preach. I can’t make him see that just reading the Bible isn’t always enough.” Rafe drifted over to look at the purses on the wall. “He says what was good enough for the first Christians should be good enough for the last.”

  “The last?”

  “Oh, you know,” Rafe said, “the ones taken up to Heaven in the Rapture before Armageddon comes and the Earth is destroyed.”

  The Methodist confirmation class I’d taken with Carol hadn’t covered the end of the world. “Is this scheduled for sometime soon?”

  Rafe shrugged. “Some people think so. It depends on how you read the Book of Revelation. Hey,” he said, changing the subject, “did you notice this?” He pointed to a framed certificate hanging above the counter. “It’s Joseph’s dishonorable discharge. He was in Vietnam, an officer and everything. After he found Christ he wouldn’t fight anymore.”

  The curtain opened and Joseph came back, holding up two brown leather cutouts shaped like my feet. He knelt beside me again, put his hand on my ankle. “Why don’t you pop upstairs, Rafe, and say hello to Patience and the kids?” he said. “While we finish the fitting.”

  “Great idea,” Rafe said. “We’d stay longer, but Jesse’s dad’s in the hospital and she has to get back.”

  Rafe lifted the curtain and took his turn disappearing. I felt uncomfortable being alone with Joseph, afraid he would ask me if I had found the Lord. He began to measure and then cut leather for the straps. I relaxed. I heard Rafe’s voice drifting down from wherever Patience and the kids were—in an upstairs apartment having milk and cookies or an attic sweatshop sewing sandals and welding crosses. Joseph stood up, soles and straps dangling from his hands. “I’m afraid I can’t finish them today,” he said. “It takes time to stitch them together.”

  “It must be hard work,” I said, standing, too. The floor of the shop felt cold under my bare feet.

  “A man has to make a living.” He looked around the shop, at the crosses on the counter, at the framed discharge on the wall. Then he turned back to me. “The real work is what’s hard,” he said. His eyes narrowed, as if taking my measure. I could hear Rafe coming down the stairs and wished he would hurry. “Not everyone is up to that.” I could see he didn’t think I was. No Patience, he was clearly thinking.

  I felt my heart in my chest, beating hard, the way I hoped my father’s still was. I imagined his blanketed body lying motionless in the glass cubicle at the hospital. My mother stretched out in her room, lying almost as still. Screw Joseph. “Life is what’s hard,” I said to him, and I heard my mother’s dark tone in my voice. We’re only born to suffer and die.

  Joseph’s eyes widened in surprise, as if he’d squeezed my arm and found muscles neither of us knew I had. Rafe stepped out from behind the curtain. “We’d better get a move on or you’ll be late,” he said.

  Joseph nodded. “The sandals will be ready this weekend.” I slipped into my flip-flops. Joseph picked my purse up off the floor and handed it to me, his calloused hand briefly touching mine. “I’ll pray for your father,” he said. “If that’s all right with you.”

  Rafe dropped me at the house. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, her purse in her lap, ready to go to the hospital. She was trying. But when she began to back our Plymouth out of the garage, her foot slipped off the brake and onto the gas, and we flew backward. The passenger side of the car scraped against the door frame of the garage, metal squealing against metal.

  “Damn it,” my mother said. She found the brake and hit it hard. We both flew toward the windshield, slamming our foreheads, mine on the dash, hers on the steering wheel. When it was clear we were stopped for good, I unhooked my seat belt and got out to take a look. A long white scratch ran down the side of the blue car. A strip of metal trim hung down, held only by a bit of double-sided tape. I tore the trim loose and tossed it in the garage. It didn’t look like anything the car couldn’t do without.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I said, when I got back in. “We can always tell Dad I did it.” I was only half joking. I had almost flunked my driver’s test trying to parallel park. My mother was still sitting with her forehead resting on the steering wheel. I put my hand on her arm. “Are you okay?” I asked, afraid she was concussed or maybe bleeding.

  She raised her head. She was crying, but she looked more angry than sad. “I must have done something terrible in my life to deserve this,” she said.

  What could she have done? I tried to imagine my mother doing something really wickedly sinful. “Don’t say that, Mom,” I said. “You didn’t do anything to deserve this. Nobody deserves this.” This. Her life.

  “Then there’s no point to it,” my mother said, “and that’s worse.”

  MY FATHER WAS moved out of intensive care the next day and was released from the hospital a week after that. Carol had gone back to Tallahassee for midterms, so I drove him home. We headed down U.S. 1, me trying to drive as carefully as possible. I was afraid I might hit the brakes and scare my father to death. His lips still looked blue.

  “The doctor says I can go back to work next week, if I take it easy,” he said to me. “He says I have to do everything I can to avoid stress.” My father was still wearing the plastic hospital bracelet with his name on it. He coughed.

  “That sounds like a good idea,” I said, half listening, half trying to remember the CPR I had learned at camp.

  “And Jesse …” My father was looking, really looking, at me. It made me nervous. I slowed down.

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “The doctor said I should think about leaving your mother. He said staying with her, in the current situation—” he paused, picked at the bracelet on his wrist. “He said staying might kill me.”

  “Oh, Dad,” I said. The road blurred. Tears were in my eyes. My father held up his hand.

  “I haven’t come to any decision. I’m not the kind of man who takes his obligations lightly.” My mother, his obligation. He stopped, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t want him to die. Not in this car, not ever.

  “You do what you have to do, Dad,” I said. I knew, sooner or later, what that would be. I tried to imagine the house with just Bertha, Mom, and me. “Carol and I love you, Dad, no matter what.”

  “Don’t miss the turn.” My father pointed to the entrance to Indian Heights. I turned, though I wanted to keep driving up U.S. 1 until it ended somewhere in Maine.

  Carol called that night. After she talked to Dad, I got on the line.

  “I told Dad he should leave while he has the chance,” Carol said.

  “Hmmm,” I said. My mother was in the next room, either watching or sl
eeping through the news.

  “Does that mean you can’t talk?” I could hear music from several competing stereos behind Carol and pictured her standing in the hall of her dorm. I couldn’t imagine how my sister, who had never been able to read or sleep in the presence of even the slightest noise, could live on a floor with forty girls and as many sets of speakers.

  “Hmmm-mmm,” I said.

  “Are you still seeing Rafe?” Carol said, taking up the slack.

  “I guess so.” I looked down. I was wearing my new sandals. Rafe had dropped them off that morning, but other than that I had barely seen him. He’d apologized, saying he had to work overtime. I was afraid that just seeing me beside Joseph and Patience had made him change his mind. “We’re going out tomorrow night,” I said, which was true. I waited for Carol to say something about Rafe, something that would let me know what she thought about him. He’s so great, or what a shit. Instead she changed the subject.

  “I’ve got some big news,” she said. “Mac and I are going out.” Mac was the lone male in her special education program.

  “Wasn’t he dating your friend, Nona?” Mac, according to Carol, was always dating one of the girls in the program, each taking a turn as Mac’s girl of the month. Now that the girl was her, she’d forgotten her earlier cynicism.

  “Don’t worry,” Carol said. “Nona’s still my friend. She understands. We’re relaxed about it.”

  “Well, you certainly sound relaxed.”

  “Don’t let the tone fool you,” Carol said, keeping her voice light like she was making a joke. “I’m smoking a lot of pot.”

  Rafe was late that night. When he arrived, he apologized for the second time that week. He’d had a flat, he said. All the way to and from the movie, he hardly spoke. This is it, I was thinking. He’s trying to think of a way to tell me he doesn’t want to see me anymore. As we rattled down U.S. 1, heading for Luna Heights, I consoled myself. Joseph was right. I didn’t have what it took to be a minister’s wife. I wasn’t even sure there was a God.

  When we parked in front of the house, Rafe turned to me. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said and actually fished in the pockets of his cords and pulled one out. Bright copper, it shone in the light of the nearly full moon.

  “You first,” I said.

  “I was thinking,” he said. I winced. I knew what was coming. “I was just thinking,” Rafe repeated, “that I love you.”

  I was amazed. He loved me. I felt a sensation like warm hands cupped around my heart. Rafe had said that’s how it felt when Jesus loved you. Maybe Rafe and Christ both loved me. Amazing. Rafe cleared his throat. “Your turn.”

  “I was thinking that I love you, too.” It seemed rude to answer otherwise.

  Rafe smiled hugely. “Then I guess we’d better get married.”

  His logic threw me. I didn’t know what to say. I was seventeen. My mother would hate it. My father would hate it. Carol would hate it. When we were little, my mother used to joke that if Carol and I got married before we were twenty-five, she’d write us out of her will. It wasn’t a joke, really, except about the inheritance, since there wasn’t any money. I looked across the street at my house, darker, if possible, than ever. Carol had left. Soon my father would leave. My mother, well, she was already gone. My life was another NASA disaster. You flip a switch and, boom, the mission goes bad. You are just stuck there, the oxygen running lower and lower, the moon and the earth impossibly far away, nothing outside but nothing. Rafe put his arm around my shoulders.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “We might as well get married.”

  Epilogue

  One by one, my family left the house in Luna Heights.

  Carol graduated and took a job teaching kids with multiple handicaps. She loved her students and they loved her. In the summer, she helped run a camp for them as well.

  I married Rafe at a sunrise ceremony in the outdoor amphitheater at my father’s junior college. The pictures show Rafe in an embroidered shirt and Joseph’s sandals, me in a Mexican wedding dress with a daisy chain in my hair. A friend played “Greensleeves” on the flute.

  Bertha, our last surviving pet, came in from a walk one day and fell over, victim of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

  My father moved out of the house. Then he divorced my mother.

  But my mother, abandoned by us all, alone in the house in Luna Heights, fought back. Emergencies always brought out the best in her, made her determined and brave. She quit drinking; she quit smoking. She ground up her Valium in the garbage disposal, plastic bottle and all. She went into withdrawal and might have died, but the last thing she did was turn on every light in the house. Mrs. Boggs, noticing how unusual it looked, called the police, who found my mother and called an ambulance.

  In the meantime, my father had another heart attack. By then he was living in an apartment, a glorified motel room, and dating a woman who worked at the college. He brought me an amber bracelet from a cruise they took to the Bahamas, but it was too late for him to start again. He had more heart attacks. He stepped down as provost to manage the college’s bookstore, but even that was too much for his health. He retired.

  By then, I was a Methodist minister’s wife. Rafe and I had moved to Tallahassee to go to Florida State University, the school Carol had attended. Though he was only an undergraduate, Rafe was offered a church nearby. North Florida was full of small rural congregations that couldn’t afford to pay a minister who’d already gone through seminary. So they made do with retired and student pastors. Our church was about thirty miles south of Tallahassee at a crossroads marked by a blinking yellow warning light. It was the poorest county in Florida, a county without a doctor, a county whose only ambulance belonged to the mortician.

  Rafe got two hundred dollars a month, and we got a trailer to live in. It was parked so close to the white frame church I could put my arm out the bedroom window and touch it. One day, when I was helping paint the fellowship hall, I dropped a bucket of paint on my foot and said, “God damn it,” loud enough for every member of the congregation to hear. I was still seventeen. I had kids in the youth group I led who were older than I was.

  After a year, Rafe had a crisis of faith. He had been having arguments with the minister who was his supervisor, and then that minister, who had problems of his own, went into the pine woods and killed himself with a shotgun. Rafe thought God had stopped loving him. He decided that he shouldn’t be a minister. We moved to a big rental house in Tallahassee. Because my father was too ill to live alone, he came to live with us. After spending several months on the psychiatric ward of a VA hospital, my mother moved in, too. Then Rafe decided that God had just been testing him, that he was called to be a minister after all. God loves me; God loves me not. The agonies and ecstasies, the ups and downs of it, were too much for me. We got a divorce. My parents, both ill, both living on my father’s pension in separate rooms in my rented house, decided to remarry.

  Carol and I went with them to the Leon County court house and witnessed their marriage. Then we all went to lunch. My parents bought a double-wide mobile home and spent their days playing Scrabble. They got very good at it. My father knew more large words, but my mother was cleverer at getting triple scores with the simple ones. The games went on for hours and, more often than not, ended in a tie. My mother took my father to the doctor, counted out his pills. She bought new cookbooks and began experimenting, making picture-perfect Shrimp Creole and Chicken Cordon Bleu. Since she’d stopped smoking, she said, everything tasted better.

  I helped do the shopping and ran errands for them during the week. Carol, married by then to a fellow special education teacher and living in south Georgia, took care of them on the weekends. My father pretended he wasn’t dying, my mother that she didn’t live in a trailer. They slept in separate rooms, though sometimes, my mother told me, she would go in and lie down beside my father. He was afraid of dying alone.

  The last time my father was in the hospital, I stopped by the trai
ler to pick up my mother for visiting hours. We were going to take him clean pajamas. He hadn’t had a heart attack this time. He was just in to have his medicine adjusted. As we were going out the door, the phone rang. “Hello,” my mother answered, then after a pause, asked “Who is this?” But no one was there.

  When we got to the hospital, an orderly stopped us in the hall. We would have to wait, he said, the doctor was with my father. He showed us into a small staff conference room with posters on the walls about proper hand-washing procedures. After a few minutes, the doctor came in. My father had had another heart attack, he said. Just a little before, the nurse had been in and saw my father sitting up in bed watching TV. When she came back, my father, who had just turned sixty-five, was dead, the phone in his hand.

  “Oh, God,” my mother said. If my father had called the trailer, then her last words to her husband had been, Who is this?

  The young nurse came in, and she had obviously been crying. “He was watching the shuttle launch,” she said. “He told me you used to live near Cape Kennedy.” She wiped her eyes. “We talked about how beautiful the liftoff was. All that fire.”

  At my father’s funeral, several people went out of their way to tell me how often a widow dies within a year of her husband. Their remarks struck me as both out of place and, in my mother’s case, misguided. My parents were not Ozzie and Harriet. My mother did have health problems, especially osteoporosis, her bones thinned to near transparency on the X rays by her years of smoking, drinking, and sleeping. She tucked the sheets in on my father’s bed and broke her back. She picked up a can of tomatoes from the pantry and broke it again. She was always breaking bones, but unlike my father’s bad heart, it didn’t seem like something that killed you. Carol and I thought she’d live for years. We were good daughters. We made plans for taking care of her. We were bad daughters. When we were together, we complained about her bitterly.

  But the people at my father’s funeral were right. She barely made it a year past his death. She’d sold the trailer and had gone to live with Carol in Georgia. Without my father to take care of, she went back to bed, went back to feeling the black boot over her head. She had nightmares. She told me she dreamed one night that the phone rang, and when she picked it up, it was my father calling. He said, “Why haven’t you come to pick me up?”