by Steve Amick
She growled in frustration. “Stop saying bored!”
They stood there glaring down the hall at each other. He wasn’t getting it. She turned again and marched back down the hall but this time kept going, past him, through the patio doors and out to her bike, calling back to him, “Just think about it, okay?”
It was one thing, she figured, as she pedaled away, not to be a perfect parent, to fall short of the goal. It was another to not even be aware there was a goal.
MID-JULY
45
WITHOUT CALLING AHEAD, the church’s New Building Committee dropped by to check on him. John Schank and Mrs. Katherine Delter and Mrs. Hiram Henderhoch. They said they were just stopping in to see how he was getting on and bring him “a few things” and collect up the pie plates and CorningWare that had accumulated after Mary passed and keep him informed about all the “latest” at the church. Mrs. Delter brought him something green-bean-and-mushroom-soup-based and Mrs. Henderhoch had a tin of ranger cookies, but niceties and casserole dishes aside, Gene could still tell it was the New Building Committee. They didn’t have to spell it out.
What was going on was this (and the visits and covered dishes weren’t making it any more comfortable or friendly): First Pres had recently come into a large endowment in the form of a vacant lot, adjoining the First Pres property, on the other side of the church from the parsonage. Initially, at the time of Gene’s abrupt retirement at the end of last fall, when Mary’s health took a turn and he decided to devote himself full-time to being by her side, the church’s response was one of support and accommodation. Besides, it would only precede his planned retirement by a matter of sixteen months. At present, the ministerial duties were being temporarily filled on a rotating schedule by the many capable lay clergy—there were even two women among the bunch, which he was glad to see—and visiting ministers and even Gene himself, who agreed to take the pulpit every other month or so, “to help everyone ease into the next step” was the way the board phrased it. He was glad to do it. Though Mary’s death had knocked most of the wind out of him, he could manage a simple, no-frills sermon now and again—dust off a first-year-of-seminary, connect-the-dots homily on straightforward topics like sacrifice or stewardship—and besides, it would help him adjust to this new phase of his life. After thirty-two years serving the same congregation, it would have been hard cutting it off abruptly, like turning a faucet, squeaking it closed.
But this limbo state couldn’t go on forever. The search committee was “making inquiries” about a permanent replacement. They all agreed it would be so much easier if they could slow the hiring process down, though the reason why it would be easier was a sticky topic usually left unvoiced: if they could hold off, the new parsonage would be built on the new lot and they wouldn’t have to kick him out of the present one. They shrank from elaborating too much on the details of this unofficial housing policy, keeping it vague. They would all “try their darnedest” to make it all work out. He wasn’t going to be homeless “any time soon.” They told him, “Don’t you worry!” Hopefully, they said, they could keep the old parsonage there for “as long as you think you still need it.”
They said that last bit like he might actually be going somewhere. But where? To stay with Ben and his fragile family? Washington state and Abbey, have her drag him around all day like one of her large dogs while she conducted her anger management workshops? Hardly. More than likely they meant a nursing home or death. That was probably it: he’d ministered to enough grieving widows and widowers to know the old maxim was true—one goes ahead, the other soon follows.
And after all, nonprofit organization or no, it made little financial sense to waste good riverfront real estate on a minister who was no longer ministering.
And all this was why he felt, to some degree, an inclination to turn his back on these people, this church that had been his family for thirty-two years. Because in the end, he was a problem for them, a burden. No different than a slobbering, doddering, pants-soiled distant relative a generation before his. The free housing was, he suspected, “really not a problem” only because they didn’t believe it would last much longer.
John Schank appeared too antsy to sit, standing and strolling around the room as the ladies talked, like he was visiting a historic home in Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum. Gene kept glancing at him, wondering if he was looking for plaster cracks and carpet stains and other damages to the property. He peered at the titles on the bookshelves and stuck his head in the den. “Oh!” he said. “I see you have a computer now. Isn’t that nice! Are you online?”
“A little,” he said. “It’s for the kids. They like me to e them, let them know everything’s okay.”
John smirked. “A little? I didn’t know it was possible to be online a little.” Still, Gene noticed he didn’t correct him on the “e them” part. “Have you seen the church’s Web site yet?”
Gene said he hadn’t. He didn’t even know there was one: couldn’t imagine who at the church could have designed such a thing. John squinted sideways up at the ceiling and began to recite: “Www-dot-presbyterusa-dot-org-slash-firstpres—spell that out—the first, I mean, then mich—that’s one word: firstpresmich—then slash-weneshfirstpres.” He looked to the ladies for confirmation. “Right?”
“I think I’d have to see it written out,” Gene said, making no effort to locate a pen. John slipped a fancy-looking one from his breast shirt pocket and wrote it out for him on the back of his business card from the savings and loan. Gene took it and thanked him.
“You’ll be very excited to see everything that we’re doing,” Mrs. Delter said.
Gene said he was certain he would and smiled wide and stole a glance at the clock. He wondered if he would get them out of there before the girl arrived.
The two women glanced at each other now, as if debating something between them. “We were going to . . .” Mrs. Henderhoch began, “. . . well, offer to clean, since the last time . . . But . . .”
“Place looks real shipshape,” John Schank confirmed. “Real tidy.”
“We were going to offer some housecleaning help,” Mrs. Delter said. “But . . .”
“But now it doesn’t look like you really need it!” Mrs. Henderhoch added, and John gave a little smile and—unclipping his cell phone from his belt, holding it up as if by way of explanation, as if that were now a proper way to say goodbye—stepped quietly out the side door, toward the garage and the back lawn as the ladies continued to volley back and forth. “The other thing we were going to offer was—and if you’re not ready for this, we completely understand—”
“No rush at all!”
“—but I’m thinking, from the way you seem to have pulled things together here a little better, with the cleaning and all, that maybe you are ready for it . . .”
“It’s just . . . if you ever want some help sorting through Mary’s things—”
“Her clothes and that sort of thing—”
“With figuring what to do with it all—”
“A charity . . . or perhaps there are some items Abbey will want one day—”
“—and you’d like a woman’s help . . . well, there’s no rush.”
Gene thanked them and smiled but didn’t say one way or the other. He wondered if John Schank had just stepped out temporarily or if he’d had to leave. He hoped it was the latter.
Mrs. Delter smiled. “It’s nice to have everything a little more organized now, isn’t it? More tidy like this . . . Is someone staying with you perhaps?”
At first, he thought this came out of nowhere. But of course, she was trying to make a connection to the recent improvement in his housekeeping. And though the real explanation—his arrangement with the girl—was perfectly defendable and aboveboard, he knew he wouldn’t go into it with them. It was none of their darned business, truth be told. Even if he was shacking up with some chippie, it wouldn’t be any of their business. This whole situation was beginning to feel like a halfway h
ouse, like his life had to be monitored and reviewed and authorized.
“Sometimes, lately,” he said finally, because it was true but avoided everything they were asking, “I do things for no reason, like put my shoes in the freezer. Really. I open the freezer and my shoes are in there. I just . . . ‘space,’ as the kids say. I do odd things and I don’t know why I do them.”
The ladies made polite chuckling noises about how they were all in the same boat, how gosh, none of them were teenagers anymore, and then rose to withdraw, both of them diminishing the importance of the casserole dish and the cookie tin, as if these were things that, if they never saw again, it was just as well. They both theorized that John Schank must have had some business that called him away and that was fine, just fine, whatever was happening was fine, showing about as much concern about the return of Schank as that of the casserole dish and cookie tin.
Then they were gone. He put “Thursday’s Child” on the stereo and cranked it up loud, relieved to be rid of them and looking forward to the girl’s arrival. Ten minutes later, he noticed her standing out there, in her cutoffs and halter top, repositioning the lounge chair out at the edge of the patio, moving it more into the sun. She was wrestling it with one hand, the other sandwiched between the pages of a book, and he wondered why she hadn’t popped in first to tell him she was there.
He opened the tin and joined her out there, holding out the ranger cookies before him. “I come bearing wondrous gifts,” he announced, “that taste slightly of coconut.”
“Hey,” she said, looking up, selecting a cookie. “That guy earlier?”
“What guy?”
“The guy that came out of your house. With the little cop mustache?”
She was talking about John Schank. The “cop” description threw him for a second, but that’s who she meant. And if she’d seen Schank, he’d probably seen her. “You were here when he left? When did you get here?”
She shrugged. “I saw you had visitors. I didn’t want to bug you.”
This wasn’t good. “Where were you?”
“Right out here.” She indicated the space she now occupied, the lounge chair, the end of the patio. “You probably can’t see me from the house, the way I had it turned. And I was slouched down and all. But I’ve been out here a while.”
“I didn’t realize. Did you talk to him?”
“He talked to me, more like. Or at me. That guy the new minister or something?”
“Hardly.”
“I didn’t think so really. But he sure acted like he owned the place. What was his deal?”
“What did he say to you?”
“Oh, he was just bossy, telling me how it’s church property and stuff. Only members of the congregation should be here. I started to say I used to come when I was little, when my folks both lived here, but he didn’t seem to be actually looking for an answer. He just wanted me to clear out of here. Like I was riffraff. Loitering.”
He felt a growl of exasperation leak out. “What is wrong with that man? That is not how you build fellowship . . .” What ever happened, he thought, to Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not . . . ? He could feel real anger brewing and, thinking of the riled-up Christ cleaning house with the moneychangers in the temple, he had to question if he even should try to contain it. Perhaps it was all right to feel something like this. Perhaps it was appropriate. “Didn’t you tell him you have my permission? That you’re welcome?”
Kimberly frowned. “I didn’t want to go into all that with the guy. I just acted like I was leaving. I didn’t get the connection—if he was your son or family or anyone who mattered . . . So I just apologized and started gathering up my junk like I was leaving. But he kept hanging around—he was looking up at your roof and the power lines and the rain gutters and he had one of those metal tape measures like a construction guy and he was measuring stuff—parts of the yard or something. He even, like, got down on his knees a second. I think he was measuring the length of the grass!”
“You’re kidding.”
“I could be wrong. I wasn’t totally staring. I was trying to make it look like I was packing up and leaving, you know?”
Okay, now he was angry. In the thirty-two years he’d lived in the parsonage, he’d never felt so invaded. “You could have told him to come talk to me if he has a problem. You could have told him off, for all I care. The man needs a little of that, I suspect.”
“Really?” She looked surprised, as if he’d told her she could burn down the church if the mood hit her.
“Certainly. He doesn’t own this church and a few clear, direct reminders wouldn’t hurt.”
“Darn,” she said. “Now I wish I’d said something. I just assumed I was supposed to be polite to him. Else I would’ve come up with something good.”
“Like what?”
“Something that would freak him out real good. I should have said I was your secret concubine—and I’m recuperating after having your baby so I need to sit out here and relax so please go away, else I’ll scream for my luuuuvv-ahhh, the minister?”
“Well,” he said. “That would be something. My goodness.”
She laughed at her own audacity. “The guy bugged me!”
Gene took a ranger cookie for himself. They were terrible for his various conditions, he knew, but they were so good, he couldn’t resist. “I think it’s probably best that you held your tongue.” He said this and yet he knew that a small part of him wished she had said all that and wished that he could have watched John Schank’s reaction through the kitchen window and seen the horror wash over him as the man suddenly saw his former pastor in a whole new light.
LATER THAT EVENING, he got online and decided to investigate the First Pres Web site.
What came up first was a shot of the steeple, with some other doodads floating around the perimeter, labeled things like LOCATION, HISTORY, CONGREGATIONAL DIRECTORY. Then there was a spot in the bottom corner that read, WE’D LIKE YOU TO VOTE! and there was some funny clip art, a retro-looking man with oversized gloved hands and a perfectly circular fedora-topped head, sliding a ballot into a ballot box and beaming with pride.
Voting—he was sure this meant they’d already found a replacement for him. It’s a short list, he thought. They’re asking the congregation for input on which new minister to hire. Just great. If things were actually moving that fast, he might soon be in a position where he’d have to think about leaving his home. Because the new parsonage was still a long way off. They’d have to put the new man and his family right here. He’d be shoved out.
He clicked on this thing that said VOTE!
Okay, they weren’t asking for input on candidates. Right away, he could see that. Because the picture now was a crude bird’s-eye view of the block, with the church itself marked with a cross, the squiggle of the Oh-John up above. On the other side of the church, on the new lot, the site of the future parsonage, there was a little drawing of a hard hat. On the other side, where his house should be, there was a big cartoon question mark.
He read on. It said, We’re taking a poll. At such time as the current parsonage is no longer in use, what should we do with this property? One vote per family, please!
There were six options listed: PLAYGROUND, PARKING LOT, PHYSICAL FITNESS COURSE, YOUTH CENTER, VIP GUESTHOUSE and OTHER. Rolling over them with his cursor provided more information: the first three plans would involve razing his home. The next two would most likely adapt the existing building to a new use. The only option, it seemed, that would not be dubbed the Eugene A. Reecher Memorial was the parking lot.
He couldn’t believe it.
In the artist’s rendering for the playground, there was a little merry-go-round pretty much in the exact spot where he’d slept with his wife for three decades. And right where he now sat at his desk, where he’d written almost every sermon they’d ever heard from him, there would be something you sat on that looked like maybe an elephant or a hippo, with a big industrial spring und
erneath to give it bounce.
He was tempted to submit something really juicy under OTHER, but he thought better of it. Better not to go off half-cocked but mull it over first. After all, they were being very accommodating to him, letting him stay here. This really wasn’t his home anymore. Besides, they only wanted one vote per family and he didn’t want to waste it on something dumb.
He clicked out of there, fast. The whole thing made him want to do something rash and such an instinct, he knew, was never sound. So, instead, he composed an e-mail to his daughter, Abbey, avoiding all mention of the Eugene A. Reecher Memorial Teen Hoodlum Hangout and Obstacle Course and all the rest of it, and then decided what he’d composed was boring and erased it, opting not to send it at all.
But he was fuming. Not wanting to stew any further, yearning for a distraction, he broke down, ignored the personal vow he’d made to stop looking at filth, and called up the first site he remembered, Ultrateen.com.
It was shameful, he knew, but so would be showing up at his children’s homes, homeless because he’d done something reckless and upset the board of trustees and gotten himself kicked to the curb—maybe e-mailed an alternative suggestion that they open a Starbucks in the parsonage. True, this was a lousy reason to look at porn, but for now, it was the best he could do.
46
NOAH YODER HAD A KNACK, he knew, for recognizing marketability. Not just things, products, ideas—but even just the names for things. He could tell you pretty much if any movie was going to be a stinker or do big box office, just by hearing the name of it—and with absolutely no knowledge of the movie itself (say, for example, he’d been out of the country, in Europe for a month). All his friends—the ones who truly knew him—thought maybe he should have gone into marketing and brand strategy and become some sort of packaging genius. But here he was twenty-four already—what was he going to do? Start a whole new career at that age? Please.
