by Haven Kimmel
“I know.”
“Right.” He gave her a rueful smile. “My mom. The Minister of Information.”
Rebekah sat down on Peter’s futon couch; the cabin was starting to warm up and she felt sleepy. Peter carried his duffel bag into his bedroom, went into the kitchen, and began making tea. He didn’t need to ask if she wanted some (she did) or what flavor she preferred (mint and chamomile—he already knew). She was flooded with a sense of well-being all the more potent for what had preceded it; this day had been like driving too fast over a hill that could make a car go airborne.
The tea was done and Peter was back in the living room so quickly Rebekah wondered if she had, in fact, dozed off for a few minutes.
“It’s hot,” Peter said, handing Rebekah her favorite stoneware mug.
“Thank you. Peter, we need.—”
“Beckah, are you pregnant? Is that what you meant by what you said to my mom?”
Rebekah blushed furiously, put her cold hands against her face. “I haven’t been to the doctor yet, but this morning I used one of those stick—”
“A home pregnancy test?”
“Yes, and it made a plus sign so fast it seemed to be in neon.”
Peter sat back against the couch, closed his eyes. “I guess I don’t need to ask if—”
“If what?”
He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “If there’s any chance that someone else is the father.”
Rebekah was uncertain what she should do with her body, her face. Would a normal woman scream, commit an act of violence? All Peter was saying was that she had experienced one relationship and he had experienced another. His disappearance, his college student, and now this question—he was outlining for her, because she’d been too blind to see it, who she had been to him. She took a sip of tea, calmly. “No, there’s not a chance.”
Peter nodded, rolled his own mug between his hands. He finally looked at her and winked. “Sure it’s not Claudia’s?”
Rebekah gave him a steady look, and not as if she found him funny.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a cheap joke.” He took a sip of tea; his own favorite was Red Zinger. “No chance of an abortion, I guess.” Peter said this with a tone of resignation bordering on the theatrical.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No chance of turning back time, either.”
“Sweetheart,” Peter said, taking both of Rebekah’s hands in his and turning her slightly toward him, “I don’t want you to go through this alone, I really don’t. I don’t know what it means—I can’t think…” He pulled one hand away and ran it roughly through his hair. “I can’t get my mind around it.”
“I can’t either.”
“I want to help, I do, but—did Mom tell you about the tour? Rebekah, this is so important to me, I should have done it years ago. I feel like, like if I don’t do it now I will have missed my chance and I’ll never know if I could have been—”
“I understand.”
Peter sat back, looked at Rebekah with such intensity she felt a familiar heat start at the back of her neck and travel down her spine. “You do?”
“I do. I do understand.” She meant it. Even though she had been raised knowing she would never have a career, much less a vocation, she had recently been able to see that life gives you openings both false and true, and that one of the measures of genius is knowing which doors to walk through and when.
“It’s going to be so great,” Peter said, taking her hands again. “People underestimate these do-it-yourself tours but they can really create a groundswell of support for an unknown artist. Green Day sold something like forty thousand—”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“No. Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s just…I see a real chance here, Rebekah. And I know I’m really young, maybe it could wait—”
“Aren’t you twenty-six?”
Peter nodded, sipped his tea. “Yeah, like I said, I know I’m young, but—”
Rebekah tried to pinpoint when twenty-six had become young. Imagine, she thought, someone questioning Vernon’s manhood at twenty-six, when he was working sixteen hours a day trying to save his family’s farm, when he had a wife who couldn’t get pregnant and he was waiting on a call for the ministry.
“…some towns I know ahead of time where I’m going to play, other places I’ll…”
In fact, Vernon wouldn’t have taken kindly to being called a “boy” at sixteen, and maybe not at six.
“…a few covers, maybe ten altogether, and I’ll alternate them in different towns so I don’t get tired of them myself. Listen to this, I just learned this on Friday—no, on Thursday I learned this.” Peter was up and grabbing his guitar before Rebekah could say anything. He sat back down beside her and tuned it up and there it was: a Martin D28 and a whole lot of hours Rebekah had worked for Hazel to purchase it. She counted on her fingers, squinted her eyes. More than two hundred hours, actually. Peter began playing a series of sweet, bouncy chords, sang: I could while away the hours / Conferrin’ with the flowers…
She’d only seen The Wizard of Oz once, but would always remember it. Peter knew how to choose that kind of song, the one that touched his listeners without hurting them. Although in truth, Rebekah didn’t know who his audience was. As far as she knew, she was the only person who’d ever heard him play. That had been the case until Mandy, at least.
She clapped when he finished; told him the whole thing was wonderful, that people would love it. He sat back down next to her, talked a while longer about the music industry, its level of corruption. He knew he was entering a den of vipers, but what choice did he have, really?
“You should do this if it’s so important to you.”
Peter’s eyes filled with tears, and he put his arms around her, drew her close. “Oh, thank you, thank you, you are so great to see it this way.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.” Peter stood up with his guitar, uncomfortable.
“Will you tell me what happened? Why you stopped calling me?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. The guitar was put away, the pot was put back on the stove for more tea. Finally, he rejoined her in front of the woodstove. “I don’t want the truth to hurt you.”
“Nothing could hurt me more than—”
“Okay, the truth is that we were just dating, you know? Like I said, I’m young, I don’t want to be tied down. You seemed perfect because you didn’t ever ask for anything. I’ve had”—Peter shook his head—“girlfriends who were just on me all the time. Where had I been, where was this relationship going, on and on and on. You never asked those questions.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“We just had a good time; we were friends, weren’t we?”
After he’d offered her a slinky nightgown (“This isn’t mine,” she’d had to tell him); after they’d brushed their teeth in the usual pattern—Rebekah first, carrying her overnight bag into the bathroom, Peter following; after they’d settled in and Rebekah had grown used to the hard futon sofa, she heard Peter begin to snore in the other room, lightly.
She looked around at the cabin in the faint light from the woodstove. It wasn’t the same place she had loved, and she wasn’t the same person who had loved it, so she tried to see it that way, as the museum of another person and another time. She wished she were still that other Rebekah, or that she could find the Peter who loved her. Without them she was hopeless. She was asleep before she knew what had hit her.
Chapter 4
“THAT WAS A FOUL, I’m quite certain,” Amos Townsend said after Claudia had smacked the ball out of his hands. He’d been dribbling toward her with a casual ease that left the ball unguarded on the up bounce.
“I didn’t touch you,” Claudia said, dribbling twice and taking a sixteen-foot jumper. “Ten to four.”
“It was foul in other ways. Can we take a break—how’s that go again?” Amos moved his hands around in meaningless semaphore, as if trying to remember how
to make the letter T, for time-out.
Claudia retrieved their water bottles from the corner of the court, handed Amos his. He was bent over, hands on his knees, gasping for air.
“I’m dying,” he said. “Why aren’t you dying?”
“I don’t know,” Claudia said, surprised. She was a little tired, a little hot, but mostly she felt great. “Maybe it’s this court.” It had been impossible for Amos to find an available gym in December in Indiana, so he’d gotten the use of the indoor court at the Nathan Leander Church of the Nazarene, which was carpeted. A full-size basketball court inside a church, stretched end to end with low-pile indoor/outdoor carpeting.
“Maybe carpeting makes it more Christian.”
“It is hard to keep up with all the rules.” Claudia bounced up and down, keeping her knees warm and loose.
“I thought you hadn’t played in years.” Amos took a drink of water, wiped his forehead on his T-shirt.
“I haven’t. This is easier than moving furniture all day, though.”
“Well,” Amos put his water bottle down, stretched. “It’s actually easier than writing sermons, too. It’s probably too late to become a professional, huh?”
Claudia looked at Amos, who probably hadn’t even seen a basketball game in more than twenty years. He was six three to her six five, both of them over forty. Amos still believed they were giants. She tried to imagine them standing next to Yao Ming or a half dozen other really tall people. “It’s too late in many, many ways,” she said, passing Amos the ball.
They played another thirty minutes and Amos rallied at the end, but not enough to beat her. The final score was 30–22. After they’d returned the basketball to the closet, where there was a great deal of sporting equipment (“There is much about the Nazarenes I do not know,” Amos had remarked), they changed in their respective restrooms and met in the snack bar, which had coffee, soda, and juice machines, and two more machines filled with chips, cookies, and microwave popcorn.
“I don’t know if I can go back to your church after this,” Claudia remarked, sitting down with a grape juice and bag of peanuts.
“We’re inadequate. I never knew.” Amos came back to the table with a cup of coffee and a giant cookie. “I looked around, but I can’t find the tanning beds.”
Claudia coughed, nearly choking on a peanut. He was right. Other places combined coffeehouses and bookshops; Indiana was probably right on the verge of putting tanning beds in evangelical churches. “The one nearest my house is called A Place to Tan.”
“I like that, it’s to the point.” Amos stretched his legs out, rested them on an empty chair. “It would be easier if everyone would just admit they’re depressed. A lot less skin cancer that way.”
“Is everyone depressed?”
“I’ve always thought so. Maybe I’m wrong. Are you depressed?”
Claudia shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
Amos studied her a moment, weighing, or so it seemed, his next comment. He took a sip of coffee.
“Are you?” Claudia asked, uncomfortable.
“I am not…unaware of the human condition, and I’m fairly clear on my own. Given those facts, it only follows that one would be—concerned.” He gave Claudia a sheepish look, as if he knew he’d taken an end-run around the question. “I think everyone, from the beginning of recorded time, has been depressed. It just follows. Jesus says in the book of Matthew, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” That’s some kind of loss He’s talking about. The Beatitudes are meant to comfort the poor in spirit. Maybe that’s all I am, maybe all you are, the poor in spirit.”
Claudia watched Amos, expecting him to add something but he didn’t. “You say those words and all I hear is static. We’ve heard them so many times they no longer mean anything.”
Amos let his head fall back and hit the wall. “Oh, when a man’s flock turns against him, and using his own words, no less.”
“I don’t really mean it.”
“No. Well, you’re a better person than I, if you don’t.” He drank his coffee, continued to look bemused. “Want to tell me what’s new in your life?”
Claudia ran the palm of her hand over the top of her hair. “Not much.” Was she allowed to lie to her minister? “Not a lot. I mean—something has happened, but it’s not that big a deal.”
“Oh?”
“I have a—someone has come to stay with me.”
“Is that a good thing?”
Claudia shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Maybe. I doubt it. It’s too soon to tell.”
“You’ve lived a solitary life for a while now.”
“Yes, since…since Ludie died.”
“And that was comfortable for you?” Amos broke his cookie in half and offered it to her.
“It was,” she said, nodding. “It makes me realize you never know when someone or something is going to appear. I mean, it happens on television all the time—a fifty-year-old woman finds out she has a twin she never knew about, or a brother resurfaces who’s been gone for decades. I’d never thought it applied to me.”
Amos looked shocked. “Can I tell you something?” he said, leaning toward her.
“Yes.”
“This is completely confidential.”
“I assumed it was.”
“Well, yes—what you say to me is confidential, because I’m your minister. But you aren’t obligated to keep my confidence.”
“Okay.”
“My wife, Langston. She had a brother who disappeared thirteen, fourteen years ago; they’ve never heard of or from him in all that time. Recently she got a call from him.”
“You’re kidding.” Somehow her baby robbery already paled in comparison.
“Nope.” Amos dropped the last of his part of the cookie in his mouth, wiped his hands on his gym towel. “He was cautious, didn’t tell her where he was, but he sounded, in her words, as if he’s thriving. I’ve never”—he swallowed, looked down at the table—“seen her the way she was right after that phone call.” Amos laughed, and Claudia saw the slight shine of tears in his eyes. “She’s the moon and the stars to me; I thought I knew everything about her. And yet I’d never seen her unreservedly happy before. But she was that night, after she finished yelling at me because of my primitivism. Oh, and for causing her to live in the wasteland of Haddington, where we still don’t have caller ID.”
“So she could have seen his phone number.”
“Maybe,” Amos said, using what Claudia guessed was the same tone he used with his wife, “unless he called from some other city or from a pay phone or using one of those whatsits you can get in a gas station.”
“A phone card.”
“Exactly. I told her that her brother might not have even called if we’d been living some place more sophisticated. It was his faith that we wouldn’t have a real telephone that allowed him to contact her in the first place.”
“Good argument.”
“Thank you. It worked.” Amos swept his cookie crumbs into his empty cup. “I didn’t mean for us to talk about me. That wasn’t very professional. Tell me more about your own visitor.”
Claudia looked at him, thinking how funny it was, all those years of Ludie’s ministers, men pedastalized (perhaps even coffinized) and kept distant from their humanity. Claudia had assumed that’s what it meant to choose the profession, or that it was a prerequisite for choosing it—the warmth in the pulpit that could be faked if necessary, the blameless cold reserve in person. But here was one, a minister who had taken on his task like any other craftsman, and Claudia loved him. She loved him simply, like a friend or kindred spirit, as one loves one’s peers. “Next time,” she said. “It may come to nothing, and anyway, your story was more interesting.” She handed him back the other half of his cookie, rose from the table, and threw away the plastic bag from her peanuts. The Nazarenes, she noticed, did not recycle, so she slipped her juice bottle into her gym bag. “But thanks for talking wit
h me.”
“My pleasure,” Amos said. “Come back any time.”
“Get—we’re gonna have to turn it—get your end straightened up there,” the man said. His face was nearly purple with exertion, and his WWF cap had been knocked crooked, revealing a hat-shaped dent in his forehead.
Claudia didn’t say, she would never say, that she had suggested they tip the love seat a long time ago. It was a sleeper, with a single bed built in, and awkward. Right at the very beginning she’d said, “We ought to turn this on its side,” not like a woman who’d just beaten her minister in basketball, but as a polite suggestion from someone who worked at the place and moved furniture every day.
Rebekah passed the open delivery door, carrying something into booth #42. Claudia got just a glimpse of her. In fact, all morning Rebekah had moved through the store like a ghost, a blank expression on her face.
The Undertaker. That was the character on the man’s hat, Claudia recognized him now. One of the Cronies was fond of him, too. She had no idea what any of it meant, what this character did or why. She turned the couch into the position she’d originally suggested, squatted under her side of it, and lifted. The Undertaker lifted his side and backed out the door into the freezing, bloodless day; he breathed heavily and didn’t meet her eye.
A black Ford F150 was waiting with the tailgate down, and the man puzzled a moment over how to get the couch into the high bed without a ramp. This was what he’d bought such a gigantic truck for, right? Claudia wanted to ask. The bed liner was unscuffed. It seemed the man could lift the couch no higher. Claudia didn’t tell him that if he put his end down, she could easily take care of it. She stood there, letting him make his own decisions. She knew what he looked like under the barn coat and black sweatshirt; his arms were the size of hams, but not strong, and his belly and chest were weak and white. After a lifetime of being a healthy farm specimen of a boy, he’d become a reclining, television-watching, soda-drinking captive to the modern time-saving conveniences, and he was under the weight of a piece of furniture he could hardly lift with a woman who was at least six inches his superior, and Claudia remained silent.
