A Change of Heart

by Philip Gulley

  No way she could ever put them in a nursing home now. She’d go to college, they’d make sure of that, but then she would have to come back and take care of them in their dotage, wiping their drool and laundering their undershorts.

  Amanda rolled to her side and thought of Ralph and Sandy, her real parents. As bad as they had been to her, she wished them well. How weird is that? she thought. I get mad at the people who helped me, but aren’t angry at the people who would have ruined me. Then she felt even worse for thinking ill of Miriam and Ellis.

  She knew he didn’t do it on purpose, but sometimes Ellis made her feel she had to choose between them and her parents, like it was a contest with her affection as the prize.

  For seventeen years old, Amanda Hodge was unusually perceptive, but some things she’d never understand, like why Ellis couldn’t believe his brother had changed.

  A few weeks before, she’d seen her parents at the Kroger. They’d stood in the produce aisle, visiting. Her parents had been looking at a two-bedroom house next to the school. “Maybe we can work things out so we could spend more time together, like regular families,” her parents had told her. “We can start over.”

  She hadn’t mentioned it to Miriam and Ellis. Not yet. She’d thought about starting small, maybe living with them on the weekends. She suspected Miriam wouldn’t mind. Ellis, on the other hand, would achieve orbit. She’d been ready to ask him right before she’d hit the streetlamp and would have if not for that naked man in Ned Kivett’s window.

  She watched out the window as snow began to spit against the windowpane, wondering why it was some folks, once they made up their minds about someone else, could never believe something good about them. And there in the darkness, she began to pray God would soften Ellis’s heart, so it wouldn’t break the day she went home.

  Seventeen

  Home for the Holidays

  It was two days before Christmas, and Dale Hinshaw was in his element. In a fit of Yuletide nostalgia and powered by a new heart, Dale had resurrected the progressive Nativity scene. It had been two years since the church’s last progressive Nativity scene, and they hadn’t had time to rehearse, which made it’s flawless production all the more miraculous. “I tell you, the Lord’s just got His hands all over this one. You can just feel Him here,” he’d said to Sam while they were setting up the manger in Harvey Muldock’s front yard.

  Dr. Pierce and Deena Morrison were the blessed couple, Joseph and Mary, standing in Fern Hampton’s driveway beside her privet hedge, looking both elated and fittingly sober after birthing the Messiah. As for Jesus, he was borrowed from the Baptist church, it being a barren year for the Quakers. Nine months old, the infant was performing in his second pageant, and he had risen to the occasion, wrapped in swaddling clothes and reposing in Harvey’s front yard. Harvey’s beloved Cranbrook convertible was parked alongside the manger, sporting a festive string of blinking Christmas lights along its bumpers.

  The heavenly hosts—Miriam and Ellis Hodge and Stanley Farlow—were praising God in front of the Harmony Friends meetinghouse, while the shepherds—the youth group in bathrobes—were abiding in the empty lot next to Opal Majors’s house.

  It took twenty minutes to navigate the progressive Nativity route, with cookies and hot chocolate awaiting the weary pilgrims at Sam Gardner’s home, which he’d offered before consulting his wife, who was at that very moment cleaning chocolate milk from her new dining-room carpet. Hordes of citizens had descended upon their home, driven by pure nosiness. Dr. Neely, who’d owned it before the Gardners, hadn’t entertained many visitors, and rumors of its beauty had circulated for decades. Now the curiosity seekers were tromping through the rooms, peeking into medicine cabinets and inspecting closets.

  “Quite a place you got here, Sam,” Asa Peacock said.

  “The quilt on your bed is especially nice,” Jessie Peacock added. “Is it a family heirloom?”

  A crash came from the general direction of the front parlor just before Kyle Weathers sauntered around the corner and into the dining room. “Sorry about that, Sam, but you really shouldn’t have lamp cords out where people can trip over them.”

  Back at the meetinghouse, Dale Hinshaw was exhorting the heavenly hosts to appear a bit more cheerful, though it was difficult to repeat “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!” with a high degree of enthusiasm for two hours straight. Especially if you’re the Hodges and had had a ferocious argument on your way to the meetinghouse to praise God and encourage good will toward men.

  Sam spent the rest of the evening studiously avoiding his wife, who shot him dark glances when no one was likely to notice. He was dreading the time when the last person would leave and was giving serious thought to leaving with them, maybe heading off to a monastery for a time of spiritual renewal or some such worthwhile endeavor, until Barbara settled down and he could come home, sometime around Easter.

  Though the goal of the progressive Nativity scene was to further the gospel, it was taking a fearsome toll on the marriages of its participants. Dr. Pierce and his newlywed wife, Deena Morrison, were engaged in a whispered debate about where they would spend their first Christmas.

  “We spent Thanksgiving with your parents,” Deena hissed. “Surely they’ll understand us wanting to see my folks.”

  “I just worry about my mother. This could be her last year with us. She’s not doing well.”

  “Your mother is sixty-six years old and will outlive us all,” Deena said, leaving unspoken what she really thought of her mother-in-law—that witches don’t die unless doused with water.

  They’d pause from their argument to smile at the people walking past, then pick it up again when they fell out of earshot.

  An occasional pilgrim, upon seeing Mary and Joseph, would inquire as to the whereabouts of the Christ child, and Deena would have to explain that it was a progressive Nativity scene and the Son of God could be viewed three blocks north at Harvey Muldock’s home.

  In early December, Sam had asked the elders to postpone the church’s Christmas celebration until March, when things were less hectic and people needed a holiday to lift them over winter’s hump and carry them into spring. It had gone over like a root canal.

  “Why, I’ve never in all my life heard of such a thing,” Fern Hampton had said. “Everybody knows Jesus was born on Christmas Day. It says right there in the Bible that they’d gone to Bethlehem for the holidays. You ought to read your Bible more, Sam.”

  Then he’d suggested a more contemplative Christmas program, perhaps some silent worship on Christmas Eve, maybe having Asa Peacock sing “Silent Night,” then standing in a circle, lighting some candles, saying a prayer, and then going home to bed.

  “I’d like to think that after everything the Lord has done for us, we could do a little more for Him,” Dale Hinshaw had said, pausing for dramatic effect. “I believe the Lord is calling us to do a progressive Nativity scene.”

  And that’s how Sam found himself sweeping up the pieces of the lamp Barbara had inherited from her grandmother. That the lamp was hideous and she’d been trying to dispose of it for several years mattered little; it was the principle of the thing—this pack of jackals slinking through her home, snooping through her rooms, spilling hot chocolate, and making a general mess of the place.

  A minister’s wife! How’d she get roped into that? It wasn’t that she didn’t love Sam; she cared for him deeply. She even thought highly of God. There were just days she wanted a secular life in which she didn’t have to be on display as a model of Christian virtue.

  That summer, her father had given Sam and her a bottle of wine, which they’d partaken of on their fifteenth anniversary. Opal Majors had rebuked her for placing the empty bottle in the recycling bin in front of their home. “You think this town wants to know about your drinking problem? Why can’t you hide your nasty little habits like good Christians?” The day before, Barbara had gone to Kivett’s to buy two wine glasses, and Fern Hampton
had spied them in her shopping cart. “I hope those are for iced tea,” she’d said.

  Five years at the same church, and the honeymoon was over. No more hiding your bad side and putting your best foot forward. The vows had been made, the marriage consummated, and both parties had their eyes wide open. Sam and Barbara knew the church, the church knew them; annulling their union would take too much effort, so they worked it out. And every now and then, something wonderful happened; they saw one another in a new light and remembered why they had gotten together in the first place. But the night of the progressive Nativity scene was not that time.

  Sam had a theory about Christmas and its toxic effect on marriages. In a word, gifts. This was the seventeenth year he and Barbara had exchanged presents, he was running out of ideas, and the strain was building. The year before he’d given her an exercise bike, something she hadn’t asked for, which she thought implied a general lack of fitness.

  “You think I’m fat, don’t you?” she’d asked.

  “Not at all. It’s just that you can’t do your walking when it’s snowy outside, so I thought you’d enjoy having an exercise bike,” he’d explained.

  She’d accepted his explanation, just barely, but he knew the pressure was on to improve upon last year’s performance.

  Under the guise of visiting Shirley Finchum at the hospital in Cartersburg, he’d driven to the city the week before, to the north side where all the rich people lived, and had bought a dress she’d been eyeing in a catalog. The sales clerk had helped him select a matching bracelet, earrings, and shoes. It had set him back three hundred dollars, all his funeral money from that year.

  Kyle Weathers had almost spoiled his surprise when he’d been poking around in the basement the night of the progressive Nativity and found the package hidden behind the furnace. He’d tromped upstairs, where he’d found Sam and Barbara in the kitchen. “Hey Sam, there’s a package of some sort next to your furnace. I’d move that if I were you. Gets too hot, it might catch on fire, and up goes your whole house, kids and all.”

  Fortunately, the doorbell had rung just then and diverted Barbara’s attention, so Sam ran downstairs and moved the sack behind some shelves in the old coal bins.

  When the last of the crowd had left, he’d cleaned the kitchen, while she’d gone upstairs to put the boys to bed. He bided his time downstairs, hoping she’d fall asleep before he came to bed, but there she was, under the blankets, her bedside lamp on, reading.

  She looked up from her book. “What was that package next to the furnace? Did you move it?”

  “Just an old sack that had fallen down there,” he explained, as he slipped into his pajamas and slid into bed. “Looks like it had been there for years. Probably when the Neely’s lived here. I threw it away.”

  She thought momentarily of reviving their argument about his volunteering them for things without checking with her first, but decided against it. She didn’t want to quash the meager bit of holiday spirit they had left. Besides, the chocolate milk hadn’t stained their carpet and Kyle Weathers had done them a favor breaking the lamp, so she let it pass. She turned off her light, kissed Sam goodnight, snuggled in next to him, and promptly fell asleep.

  Sam waited until she was snoring before rising from their bed and tiptoeing downstairs to the kitchen pantry, where, in search of carpet cleaner, he’d spied an unfamiliar box on the top shelf, behind the flower vases.

  Sam had never been good at waiting until Christmas to see what he’d gotten and had been making regular sweeps of the house the past few weeks sniffing out his presents. Somehow, he’d missed this one. He scooted a kitchen chair across the floor, stood on it, pulled down the box—it was deliciously heavy—and opened it. An eighteen-volt cordless drill with a complete set of carbide-tipped drill bits. He was elated, thinking of the holes he could drill with it.

  What a wife he had!

  He repackaged the drill just as it had come, placed the box back on the shelf, arranging the flower vases in front of it, then crept upstairs to bed. He looked in on the boys. They were lying perfectly still in a sugar-induced coma, their mouths ringed with the remnants of hot chocolate. He bent and placed his face against his younger son’s cheek until he stirred. “Love you, buddy,” Sam whispered in his ear.

  “Love you, Daddy.”

  Children, Sam thought contentedly to himself, are the berries.

  Across town and three miles out into the country, Ellis Hodge was not feeling nearly so blessed. It had been a horrendous day and had not improved when he and Miriam had bickered all the way into town about whether or not to invite Ralph and Sandy to Christmas dinner. Now he was terribly unsettled and pacing around the house while Miriam and Amanda were asleep upstairs. Amanda hadn’t smiled in a week; Miriam was similarly depressed. Even his livestock seemed more distant than usual.

  This morning had been worse. In an effort to lighten the mood, he’d asked Amanda what she wanted for Christmas. She’d looked up from her blueberry pancakes, then asked him to give her the one thing he couldn’t give. “I want you to love my father again. That’s all I want. I want you to remember when you were little and he was your brother and you played with him in the hayloft and swam in the creek and shared a bedroom and stayed up late at night to talk. I want you to love him now like you loved him then. That’s all I want. If you can’t give me that, then I don’t want anything.”

  Then she’d excused herself and gone upstairs.

  Miriam had busied herself picking up the dirty dishes and carrying them over to the sink, while Ellis sat at the breakfast table stunned into silence.

  “She just doesn’t understand,” he’d finally said. “I welcome him back into the family and everything is hunky-dory for a couple of months and she goes back to stay with them. Then the next thing you know he’s drunk and slapping her around again and treating her like dirt. Can’t she see I’m doing this for her? I don’t like being this way. I would love to be on good terms with Ralph, I’d love to have my brother back, but it’s not that simple.”

  Miriam didn’t know what to say, so she hadn’t said anything, which Ellis mistook for anger, which is why he’d spent the day in the barn and bickered with her all the way into town that evening.

  Argument is unfamiliar terrain for them, and they don’t traverse it well. They’re at a distinct disadvantage compared to those couples who lose their tempers on a regular basis and have honed their reconciliation skills.

  So Christmas Day passed quietly as an unspoken strain pervaded their home. Amanda received a new pair of blue jeans and a radio, which she politely thanked Ellis and Miriam for, then asked if she could go for a walk.

  “Where to, honey?” Miriam asked.

  “Oh, just around. I’ll only be gone a few hours.”

  “All right then. Dress warm. It’s cold outside.”

  She walked the three miles into town. An occasional car whizzed past. A mile out, she spied the water tower; then came the school and the meetinghouse and Kivett’s Five and Dime. She walked through the town and out again, heading toward the tourist cabins where her parents lived. She paused in front of their door. A string of lights was taped around the inside of their window, flashing in a tired cadence. Ralph spied her through the window. He opened the door and drew Amanda to him, overwhelmed with pleasure.

  “I’ve come home,” Amanda whispered in his ear. “I’ve come home.”

  Eighteen

  Another Christmas Day

  Sam Gardner was picking up the Christmas wrapping scattered across the living-room floor. Ordinarily a safe undertaking, it was made perilous by the remote-control cars buzzing around his feet, zipping and zooming along the hardwood floor.

  “Watch out,” Levi cried, as Sam stepped toward a crumpled mound of gift wrap. Sam swung his foot wide to miss the car, lost his balance, and toppled onto the couch, shell-shocked.

  Christmas was getting more dangerous by the year.

  Barbara bustled in from the kitchen, the pleasant scent of roa
st turkey in her wake. “Sam, we don’t have time for you to take a nap. Folks will be here any minute. Let’s get cracking.”

  A family Christmas dinner had been Barbara’s idea. Two weeks before, she’d convened a family meeting and laid out her platform. “We have this big house, and we just sit around on Christmas Day in our sweatpants, staring at one another and taking naps. Well, this year’s going to be different. We’re having your parents and Roger and Sabrina over and we’re going to sit at the dining-room table in our nicest clothes and use a tablecloth and enjoy a nice meal.”

  Sam and the boys had been miserable ever since.

  “Get off that couch, pick up this mess, and get your suit on,” she barked at Sam.

  “You there,” she said, pointing to the boys. “Go take your showers, brush your teeth, and get dressed. Your father will help you tie your ties.”

  “Ties!” Addison shrieked, collapsing to the floor with a tragic flourish.

  “Ties?” said Sam. “We have to wear ties?”

  “Sam Gardner, I am trying my best to teach our sons good manners, and you’re not helping.”

  “Come on, guys. Let’s get dressed,” Sam said without the slightest hint of enthusiasm.

  He deposited the boys in the shower and began pulling on his suit. The year before, Harvey Muldock had given him a tie that showed dogs playing poker. He hadn’t worn it yet, but now, in a passive-aggressive gesture, he pulled it from the tie rack, threaded it under his shirt collar, and fashioned a Windsor knot.

  He hustled the boys through the bathroom, combed their hair, laid out their clothes, then clipped on their ties just as the doorbell rang. They marched down the stairs, the picture of gracious living, though thoroughly miserable.

  His father, attired in his funeral suit, appeared as somber as his son and grandsons.

  Sam’s mother was wearing a strand of pearls that hadn’t seen the light of day since Eisenhower was in office. She studied Sam, then licked her hand, and smoothed his cowlick. “Don’t our men look handsome,” she exulted. “Just look at them.”