Connie best remembered night three’s sermon, “Finding Your Joy.” The picture was strange and less beautiful than those that preceded it: a forest overhung with vines, darkening at the center of the canvas into a thicket. “People today have lost their joy, or never touched it in the first place,” the reverend said as he created a tangle of green shapes. “I see these folks who are wandering around, numb. They’re dependent on drugs, alcohol. They’re slaving away in an endless quest for material wealth. They’re angry at their folks, their brothers and sisters, their kids, even. They cling to resentment from old arguments until it’s the resentment clinging to them, binding them, wrapping them up like spiders trapped in their own webs. They’re lonely, lonely, lonely,” and with this he turned to the congregation, still holding his brush, his eyes the very picture of sympathy, his apron a battlefield of colors. “I’ve traveled all over the country, my friends, and do you know the most common problem I find in the lives of the folks I meet? More common than addiction, anger, and all manner of sin? Loneliness. I met a man in Texas with eight children, dozens of grandchildren, a loving wife, and many friends. And still he was lonely, lonely, lonely to the brink of despair. People hugged that man and told him they loved him every day, but still his heart was like a piece of meat packed in ice.
“Why? Why?” Reverend Raleigh seemed on the verge of tears. “Why does this happen, when it’s so simple? When the escape from life’s traps, when the balm for all of our wounds, when the cure for pain is offered us at no cost whatsoever?” He dropped his head and allowed for a lengthy silence among the congregation members, some of whom touched handkerchiefs to their faces. Then he threw back his head, heaved a deep breath, and tuned again to his painting. “Christ has a store of joy for each of us, not just in the afterlife, but in this life.” He set down the green brush, picked up a clean one, and dipped it in white. “Paul says, ‘Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’ And that love, my friends, is the source of the purest, realest, brightest, and most enduring joy to be found in this world.” With this he drew the brush down from the top of the thicket, creating a shaft of brilliant sunlight. At the edges the white paint blended with the green, creating streaks of shadow—a stab of warmth through the cool mist of the forest. “Could it be simpler? Ask Jesus Christ for joy. Make yourself His, and follow His laws. And He will flood you with joy. It’s the simplest message I will give you this week, my friends, one you’ve heard a thousand times, but have you ever really listened? ‘Ask and ye shall receive.’ Why aren’t you asking?”
Connie wept. At the end of the service they sang “Just as I Am” and Connie came forward, knelt, and prayed with the reverend.
The Nazarene church taught that there were two transforming moments in every Christian’s life: the first when one invited Christ into one’s heart and was born again, the second—this was the more difficult one and could happen years later, if ever—was sanctification, when one was freed from one’s sinful nature. The church taught, and Connie believed, that everything could change in a moment. The light could be thrown on. Connie had felt the call many times and had gone to the altar and prayed on her knees, and every time she had felt a euphoric cleanness for a few days before she again fell to sadness, anger, covetousness, and self-pity. During the wonderful periods of sanctification she had wished to die in an accident in order to be truly free of sin when she met God, but even this wish was a fall from grace.
This time was different, though. Her motivation was clear: to have joy in this life. On the few occasions she had seen joy, she had been afraid to reach for it, suspecting that to do so would constitute a sinful lust. Now she recognized this fear as her mortal nature at work, refusing to let her truly give herself to Christ. Reverend Raleigh taught her that she could have joy and be sanctified—that the two were one.
On Sunday morning, the six paintings were displayed in the narthex and sold at silent auction, the proceeds going to help fund Reverend Raleigh’s traveling ministry. Connie had taken part, bidding much more than she could afford on the painting of the thicket with the glorious shaft of light, but someone outbid her.
After this awakening, Connie’s past came into very sharp focus, and although she was determined to claim her joy and live without regret, she did wonder where her life had gone. Had she never bothered to make one? Had something been missing in her? Or had she been cheated, and, if so, by whom? Her husband? Gene? What if she had awakened to the Lord earlier, maybe during her teen years? Maybe she could have studied music, developed a lovely voice, and had a ministry like Marlene Bailey, the church organist. Connie entertained these thoughts briefly, then drove them from her mind, the way her mother used to feed the neighbors’ dogs scraps, then chase them from the back porch. One thing was clear, though: she must stop waiting for someone to love her and start focusing on God’s laws if she were to access the store of joy that Reverend Raleigh had spoken about.
Could it be that now, through Bill Howard, God was offering Connie a ministry? One that would sanctify her?
Connie let Gene stay at Enrique’s for dinner, thinking that his presence might make her self-conscious when Bill called back. She warmed up leftovers, and no sooner had she sat down to eat, than the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Connie? This is Bill Howard.”
“How are you?”
“Just fine, and you?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“Connie, I so enjoyed talking to your group last week. I’m calling to possibly take you up on that offer you made. I’m here for a couple weeks, and I have quite a few speaking engagements at churches in the area. To be honest, some of these towns, well, I can’t even find them on a map. Murphy? Where on earth is Murphy?”
They laughed together.
“I have use of one of the church’s minivans, so I’m not asking for a ride or anything, but I could use a guide, someone to help me find these churches, who wouldn’t mind sitting through my presentation again.”
“Bill,” said Connie. “It would be my pleasure to serve as your guide. There’s no reason to take up a church van. We’ll use my car. It will be my contribution to your ministry.”
“Are you sure? I have quite a few of these engagements. You might want to trade off with some of the other women.”
“Well, if I can’t do it some night, then I’ll call one of the other Dorcases, but I would love to do it. When is your first engagement?”
“Tomorrow.”
In the lovely hour Connie had to herself after the phone call, she allowed herself to indulge in a new fantasy. What if she had awoken to the Lord earlier in life and ended up in Africa? She would hold a little black child, a famine orphan, in her arms. In this fantasy her arms were strong, golden, and ropy, not thin and pale. There, there, precious child. You’re safe now. Christ loves you, as do I. We will find you your store of joy. And the child would sniffle and gaze into her eyes trustingly, then lay his head on her breast.
IT WAS SWEET of Liz Padgett, who knew the severity of Abby’s mother’s condition, to show support in the ways she did. But Liz’s gestures, such as draping an arm over Abby’s shoulder as they walked down the hall at school, seemed luxuries that came with being the prettier friend. Abby hesitated to initiate them, out of a dim knowledge that it would look like she was hogging Liz, or attempting to rub off some of her beauty, or even trying to hurt her the way children do their infant siblings with hard kisses. So she simply enjoyed the warmth of her best friend’s touch and, maybe, the little attention it brought her.
“Oh, another one,” Liz said upon opening her locker one afternoon.
“What?” Abby asked.
Liz bent, hooking her hair behind her ear. Both girls wore their hair long and straight. They were the only ones at Eula High to do so and, without each other, neither would have had t
he nerve to be so behind the times. Although no one yet had the audacity to copy the wild frizzed, bleached, and ratted styles they saw on MTV, the gentle featherings of the early eighties now had higher peaks and wider sweeps and were cemented in place with hairspray and often given kink and volume by a perm. Even the boys were tentatively poufing out the wings of their middle-parted hairstyles.
Liz opened a tightly folded piece of paper, read it, and rolled her eyes.
“What is it?” Abby asked.
Liz handed the note to her. “I’ve gotten a few of them.”
The typewritten note read,
REASONS TO BE SAD:
The Russians have hundreds of nuclear missiles pointed at our heads and we could all die right now if Gorbachev pushed a button.
REASONS TO BE HAPPY:
Liz Padgett exists.
You are beautiful!!!!!
“How sweet!” Abby said. “Who is it from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who do you think it’s from?”
“Come on, Abby. Honestly, do I care?”
“Sure, why not?”
Liz narrowed her eyes. Abby knew that they were supposed to be together in their disdain for boys at Eula High. Like their hair, it was something that set them apart. But the difference, which Abby hardly needed point out, was that Liz had until recently dated a handsome college student who would come all the way from Boise to see her, while the few self-conscious attempts Abby and her male friends had made at “going together” had always died of neglect after a few weeks, to the relief of both parties.
“So what?” Abby responded to Liz’s wordless accusation. “I wish I had a secret admirer.”
Liz shook her head and closed the locker, and the two walked down the hall. When they passed a trash can, Liz tossed the note in.
On the exterior, Liz was a good-natured, diligent girl, a favorite of her teachers and the first everyone called when they needed a babysitter. But what they labeled a fine work ethic—the fierce determination with which she studied, volunteered, played tennis, and wrote for the Eula High Gazette—was, in fact, a means to an escape. The quietest of rebels, Liz hated Eula secretly and with her every fiber. From grade school she had found teachers dull, the townspeople dim, the big sky that everyone claimed to be so beautiful desolate, and life under it boring beyond words. Once Liz had accepted, and then embraced, her odd tastes and disruptive thoughts, they had led her even farther from the Eulan mindset: she decided in junior high that she was a Democrat, and then, when she was a sophomore, an atheist. Liz would escape Eula, and do it in the right way. She would have a great life, the kind of which Eulans didn’t even dream, because no version of it was presented to them on TV. With this type of motivation, getting straight As was a cinch.
This escape was what Liz and Abby called the Big Plan. They seldom spoke of it by name, but it was an undercurrent in much of their communication. If a teacher praised Liz’s work, Liz could, in bowing her head humbly, shoot Abby a quick glance that said, Another one for the Big Plan, and the corner of Abby’s mouth would rise. The greatest step in the Big Plan was the one they had most recently taken: both had applied early-decision to Stanford. Liz often reflected on how lucky she was to have a partner in crime and an open-minded audience to her cynical views. She shared everything with Abby except for her atheism; that was her private, precious distinction. Abby still prayed.
When Liz got home that evening, the sweet, skunky smell of marijuana and the sound of MTV greeted her before she even opened the front door. Great. She’d have to study in her room. She had spent her whole life escaping Winston and his friends. There was no need for Liz to go through the living room, but Abby’s curiosity about the secret admirer that afternoon prompted her to see which friends Winston had brought home and if any would offer her a hit of pot. She would, of course, sharply refuse any such offer. What she came upon resembled the scene of a massacre: near-horizontal bodies with splayed limbs in a trash-strewn room. Only Jay sat up when he saw Liz. He coughed—politely, somehow—and Winston finally noticed her.
“Hey, sis,” Winston said in a cowboy voice, “git on into that kitchen and rassle me up a beer!”
Liz put her fist to her hip impatiently and rolled her eyes. Then she gestured toward the joint, which had gone dead in the ashtray. “That stuff causes impotence, you know.”
“So they say, but my experience proves otherwise.” Winston began grinding his pelvis.
Liz grimaced and turned. Before she mounted the stairs, she heard Jay say to Winston, “You’re a fucking retard.” Of all of Winston’s friends, he was the least moronic.
Abby, at this moment, was with her father, taking one of their long walks along the lakeshore. It was the time in the evening when the lake glowed as brightly as the sky, and the trees created a mottled, black border between them. Curled beech leaves crunched underfoot, and the pop of a shotgun sounded, then echoed, causing the starlings that loaded a tree to take flight, rising like bubbles released upon the opening of a pop bottle.
“Pheasant season,” said Chuck, in answer to Abby’s unasked question.
She nodded. Then, after a moment, she said, “I miss Mom.”
“I know, sweetie.” Chuck reached over and put his hand to his daughter’s head, then let it fall to her shoulder. “Would you like to go down there next weekend?”
“Is that all right?”
“Of course it is, Abby. I’ll call tomorrow and reserve you a plane ticket.”
“Do you want to come, too?”
“No, I’ve got work. I just went. I’ll go down with you for Thanksgiving. I’ve already spoken to your mom about it.”
“All right.”
Somehow they had lost the trail. They walked through tall grass so thick and stiff it went up their pant legs and pierced their socks, then they stopped at the edge of the park to remove foxtails. This park was empty; the cement-and-plank picnic tables were bare and peeling. Concrete ramps led down into the water where, in the summer, people eased their motorboats in the lake for waterskiing. In spring the lake contained runoff from the faraway mountains, and was clear. But by the time the water was warm enough for swimming, it was also thick with green algae, a bloom caused by fertilizer washed from the fields into the creeks that fed the lake. “Frog nog,” Mr. Padgett, Liz’s father, liked to call it. It could give you hives.
The Padgetts owned a boat, and Abby had been out on it many times. She liked to lie on the bow and hold the rail, letting the wind whip her hair, as Liz’s brother, Winston, and his friends water-skied—friends such as Jay Cortez, an unskilled but fearless water-skier who crashed through the wake but refused to let go, often returning to the boat with pink water-burns across his ribs. Strange, that a boy like Jay could have such a gentle younger brother.
“I’m helping Lina’s son with a science-fair project,” Abby said.
“Jay?”
“No, Enrique.”
“Smart kid?”
Abby nodded vigorously, but her eyes became desperate with the awareness of another emotion overwhelming her. It won, that image that was always vying for her attention, of her mother telling her with clinical coldness in her eyes (although she held her hand tight), “It’s renal cancer, Abby, kidney cancer. It’s not good.”
Abby’s face crumpled; she was crying. They stopped and Chuck wrapped his arms around her. “I know, Abby. It’s too hard. We weren’t made for this.”
They stood awhile, then Abby wiped her face with her hands, and they walked on.
The mention of Enrique had, in Chuck, brought on a brief rush of thoughts of Lina. It was like, in the shower, when the warm water finally kicks in. “Why don’t you tell me about this kid’s science project?” he said.
And she did.
Chapter 9
It had been with mixed pride and shame that Lina said in confession that first time, “I slept with a married man.”
There had been a long pause. This was quite a departure from the un
kind thoughts and foul language Lina usually confessed.
“That’s a very serious sin. You’ve broken the sixth commandment,” Father Moore said.
“I know, Father.”
“Is this a one-time fall?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Will you be in a situation with this man again? A situation of temptation?”
“Oh, no.”
“Seven Hail Marys and seven Our Fathers.”
But the next week, Lina said it again—quickly this time, like a child who believes a swift admission might diminish the crime and avert a spanking. “I slept with a married man . . .”
Father Moore, who had never before addressed her by name in the confessional, said, “Lina, not again!”
“. . . twice.”
“Lina, you’ve got to stop this. It’s not right. It’s a very dangerous sin.”
“I know, Father. I’m weak. I tol’ myself not to do it again, and then I did it.”
Father Moore counseled her on ways to guide her mind back onto the path of righteousness and entreated her to avoid being alone with the man at all costs. Finally his voice softened, and he said, “Pray for strength, my child, and I’ll pray for you.”
“What is my penance?”
“Twenty Hail Marys and twenty Our Fathers. Consider the wife, Lina.”
For a moment Lina thought he meant the Blessed Virgin, but then—oh, yes, the wife, Sandra. “Thank you, Father,” she said.
Neither Lina nor Chuck had been able to mention Sandra’s name to that point. She had been staying with her parents in Salt Lake City, and Lina assumed that divorce was not far off. Maybe they were waiting for Abby to graduate, so she wouldn’t have to endure the talk of the kids at school. But Lina didn’t ask for details. The idea of Chuck as a divorced man alternately thrilled and scared her.
“I think she’ll be back on Tuesday,” Chuck muttered as they lay together one afternoon that week.
Lina nodded and allowed a few minutes for the woman’s mention to fade. Then she carefully wrapped the sheet around her and sat up. Chuck pulled it away. “Stop it!” she hissed.
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