“Of course it did. That’s only natural,” Roger said.
“But then he said he didn’t mean it and that I had taken all of it the wrong way! All he wanted was a little proof that I really loved him and wasn’t just going through the motions because I was getting on in years. And I said, ‘What sort of proof?’ And he thought about it a little, but the way he wrinkled his brow, I knew the thinking was just for show and he already knew what he was gonna say, had probably gone to bed the previous night knowing exactly what he was going to say. I said, ‘Just spit it out, Ben.’ And he said he wanted to sleep with me before the wedding.”
“I see.” Roger cleared his throat. “If you’re asking me if you should sleep with him, Megan, I think you already know the church’s position on that sort of thing.”
Megan nodded. “I do, Pastor. Of course I do.”
“I can’t say enough how much Ben’s in the wrong here, Megan. If you want me to talk to him, either with or without you present, I’d be glad to.”
“No. It’s not that. I know he’s wrong. But I’m wrong, too. Because I think that if I really loved him, I’d do it. I’d want to do it. I mean, I’m twenty-five years old, and I’ve been dating Ben for eight years, and I’m still a virgin! What kind of twenty-five-year-old is still a virgin?”
“One who cares about the next life more than this one.” The more Roger thought about it, the more he wanted to kill that boy. “One who cares about the spiritual quality of a union as much as the physical!”
“But Pastor, if you really and truly love a person...” Megan covered her hands with her face. “But I don’t, Pastor! I don’t love him one bit!”
“Then you shouldn’t marry him, and you certainly shouldn’t have sex with him.” Roger put his hand on the girl’s head. She was breathing heavily and her shoulders were heaving up and down. “There, there.”
“I don’t love him because I love someone else,” she said softly. Megan looked up into Roger’s face. She stood. And then she kissed him. Roger pushed her gently, but forcefully, away.
“Oh, I see,” he said. “No. I’m afraid I couldn’t. My wife. You understand.”
Megan nodded. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Of course not,” Roger said. “We were talking about very emotional topics.” Roger cleared his throat. “Here’s what I think we should do. With your permission, I think you and Ben and myself should have a meeting to discuss his, uh, proposition. I won’t hesitate to let him know just how inappropriate I think it was. Sometime next week, yes?”
Megan fixed her ponytail and smoothed down her denim skirt. “I’ll check the schedule to see when you’re free, Pastor.”
“Good girl,” Roger said. “Would you mind closing the door on your way out?”
Roger sat back down at his desk. He opened his laptop. The information on hair loss was still on his browser. Roger ran his fingers through his hair and decided that he had probably overreacted. There was plenty of hair up there, after all.
WHEN ROGER GOT to the airport, he spotted George waiting in the arrivals lobby.
“The kids aren’t coming,” she said simply. “Vinnie missed his flight, and Helen’s at the hospital. Little Alice fell from the roof or a tree, I don’t have the whole story, but they ran some tests and they think she’s going to be fine. Just a broken collarbone and a minor concussion. I was away all afternoon running errands, so I didn’t find out any of this until late this afternoon. When I heard, I tried calling you at the church, but no one was answering so I thought you must have left already. I drove down here like a madwoman. We should really get cell phones, Roger.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “So, it’s just us this weekend?”
George nodded.
“Well, in a way, I’m glad of it,” Roger said. “All the travel. It’s been a long week. A long day, too.” He took his wife by the hand. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
“My spot’s terrible,” George warned him. There was nothing left in short-term, so she had been forced to park in long-term.
On the walk over, she told Roger that Patsy might come to dinner that weekend.
“How nice,” Roger said, though he wasn’t really paying attention.
“Oh, and I forgot to tell you. There was a message for you this morning. An old professor of yours died. Katherine something... Or Carol.”
“Carolyn Murray?” Roger asked.
“Yes. That was the name. Were you very...”
In the middle of the airport parking lot, Roger sat down. “Oh, God. Carolyn.”
“I’m sorry, Roger,” George said after a while. “Was she very important to you?”
“No,” he said and in that moment, he decided that Carolyn hadn’t been. George offered him her hand, and Roger took it. He stood up and brushed the dirt off the back of his khakis. “I feel a little silly. I’ve had a very long day, and I was just tired and surprised, I suppose. She’s only five years older than us, George.” Roger laughed. “Makes me feel old.” Roger laughed again. “What do you say we stop for dinner on the way back? There’s a Chili’s a couple of exits from here. You can just follow behind me.”
GEORGE WAS STILL in the bathroom, but Roger was already in bed. In point of fact, eleven was way past his bedtime, and normally, having stayed awake this late, Roger would have fallen immediately sleep. What was keeping him awake was the topic he had specifically avoided all evening.
“George,” he called out. “I’ll never understand that boy!
“I mean, honestly, what have we ever done that’s so bad? We never beat him...”
This was not, strictly speaking, true, and even as he said it, Roger knew it. On several occasions, a belt had been used on Vinnie. In Roger’s experience, though, a belt was not nearly the same thing as a beating. A belt was about discipline, and discipline was about love. No one ever got particularly injured from a belt. A beating, on the other hand, lacked control. Children emerged from them with broken fingers, swollen eyes. This had never happened to Vinnie. Not once! (By the time his two daughters were of age, Roger had retired the belt entirely.)
“We supported Vinnie’s decisions even when we disagreed with them...”
Roger was thinking of the Yale graduation, of course.
“Maybe there wasn’t always much money, but he never lacked for food or clothing or any of the basic needs. I mean, George, you grew up poor! And so was I until my mother married my stepfather! And that man beat me silly—not that I didn’t probably deserve it, but still. I mean, that’s beating.” Roger laughed, and then he stopped.
“So, what is it George? Why do they hate us so much? Because it’s not just Vinnie. It’s Patsy, too! I’ve prayed over it, and I’ve asked God, and I just don’t understand. All our parishioners love me, you know. Megan always says how she wishes she had had a father like me! So, why?”
George came out of the bathroom. She was wearing a smart pair of cotton pajamas (a Christmas gift from Helen). “I don’t know, Roger. I wish I did.”
George Just before Sleep
BUT SHE DID know, of course. It was just pointless to tell Roger these things. She got into bed.
“Tell me, Georgie, is it so wrong that I wanted our children to have a rich spiritual life?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“Me neither,” Roger said. He turned onto his side, flipped off the nightstand lamp, and closed his eyes. “Maybe I shouldn’t have belted Vinnie,” Roger whispered. “I mean, had I to do it over again, I probably wouldn’t have belted him. But we were so young when he was born.”
“You were twenty-one,” George whispered back. “I was only twenty.”
“You were a baby!” Roger said.
“What did we really know about anything?” George looked at the digital clock. It was nearly midnight. In the glow of the clock, she noticed the phone, and she was reminded of the phone call that had begun her day. She tried to remember if she’d ever met Car
olyn Murray. She could vaguely recall a tall Jewish woman with curly hair. Nothing more. George’s memory had been more than a little selective since menopause, cancer (and its various treatments), and her experiments with antidepressants.
Even though Roger had only been gone a week, she had missed his body in bed. His warmth and his heft and his scent. She pressed herself against him. Above all things, this, she thought, I will miss. She suspected that heaven was probably a long shot for her, and though she would never confess this to her husband, she had never really believed in the place. But if she should make it to heaven, it could only ever be a relative paradise. At this late date, she was willing to admit that paradise was this man in this bed, and that there could be no other. This was the paradise for which she had cheated, lied, and blinded herself. The other didn’t exist.
“Roger,” she whispered. “Are you still awake?”
There was no reply, and so George felt emboldened to continue.
“You know what you were saying this morning about Adam and Eve? I have an answer now. Sin is good, in a way. I mean, we need sin,” she said. “Because without sin, there wouldn’t be any possibility for redemption.”
There was still no reply.
“Roger,” she said. “I’m dying.”
A snore.
“And I don’t want a Christian doctor either,” George said. “I want an atheist doctor or anyone who doesn’t believe in the possibility of an afterlife.”
Another snore.
“Roger, I don’t believe in Jesus. The closest I ever got to Jesus was under that ceiling in the Slickmart. I wasn’t exactly in my right mind at the time, so that ought to tell you something about my relations with him. But I don’t believe, Roger! And I have never believed. When we first met, I just said I believed because I wanted you. I fell in love with you, and you were so certain. Are so certain. And what I wanted was to be certain like you.”
More snores.
“And I have never liked being called George.”
PART IV
Baby One More Time
TEN YEARS LATER
THE FUTURE
Closing Time at the Hoot and Holler
THE WAITRESS KICKS off her clogs and leans her elbows into the counter. “Tom, lemme give you a hypothetical,” she says.
“Shoot,” replies Tom, the greasy spoon’s owner and chef.
“My daughter goes to school with this girl,” says the waitress. “Guess you’d call the girl a good friend.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The girl’s got herself in the family way, if you catch my drift.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the family’s not rich. They can’t afford another mouth. And... Well, what’s your opinion?”
“My opinion is that sucks,” says Tom.
The waitress laughs a little. “Big time. But what would you do?”
“Well, supposedly, there’re some doctors that’ll do it off the books ’round here,” says Tom.
“That’s what I’d heard.”
Tom looks around the diner. Just one customer left. An ancient man who’s been eating the same piece of cherry pie for the last two hours. Tom’s pretty sure the guy’s asleep. He takes off his apron and drapes it over the oven handle. “But you can’t count on those illegal guys. Like, they could take your money and not do it just for spite. Or they could have monkey-business tools—a wire hanger and a bottle of schnapps. And the girl could get sick. Or die. And they’ll know at the hospital what happened. They’ll know. They can tell. And the girl could even get hauled into court. The parent, too. It’s a bad situation is what it is.”
The waitress nods.
“It’s a bad situation is what it is, is what it is,” Tom repeats.
“You said.”
“How old’s the girl?”
“Like I said, she’s a friend of my daughter’s. So, same age as Britt.”
“How old’s Britt these days?”
“Fifteen,” says the waitress with a little sigh.
“They grow up right quick,” he says. “But back to your hypothetical. Wait, is it a hypothetical or an anecdote about someone you know? ’Cause it can’t be both.”
“I guess the second, then.”
Tom nods. He puts his hands on the waitress’s shoulders. “You be wanting any company tonight, Patsy?”
“Yeah, Tom. You know anyone?”
Patsy wakes the old man with the pie, and Tom shuts off the lights. They drive in separate cars to Patsy’s little two-bedroom house, of which the best thing that can be said is that it is not on wheels. They tiptoe past the bedroom where Britt’s sleeping, and then they go into Patsy’s bedroom. They both smell like French fries and the sex is comfortable and dull. She likes the taste of him and she surprises him by sucking his cock for a spell. When it’s done, Tom embraces Patsy from behind.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“Just sleepy is all,” she replies.
“You know what we were talking about before?” Tom whispers.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if it were my daughter...,” he says, “if it were my daughter, Patsy babe, I’d fly up to Canada. It’s legal there, and you can get it done in a real hospital or clinic. Somewhere nice and white and clean. I’d do it over the girl’s spring break—assuming that worked out timing-wise. I’d tell everyone we were going on a little vacation. We’d stay a couple of days, make sure it all come out OK, then we’d turn around and fly back.”
“Flying’s expensive,” Patsy says.
“You could drive.”
Patsy nods. “Driving all the way to Canada’s expensive, too.”
Tom shrugs. He gets up to go to the bathroom. “That’s what I’d do.”
Second Opinion
THE LITTLE WAITRESS calls her sister-in-law, Lacey, on the phone and presents the same hypothetical situation to her.
Lacey sighs, then says, “I heard of a place just outside DC that does it.”
“A nice place?” Patsy asks.
“Well, I haven’t been there personal, but a woman I worked with, her cousin I think it was, had a similar situation to... And I think she just drove up there, got it taken care of, and drove back.”
“Do you have any idea how much it cost?” Patsy asks.
“A couple thousand. Maybe it was less than that, I’m not sure. I remember that she had to use cash.”
“And you’re positive it’s a nice place?”
“I really don’t know, Patsy. Like I said, I’ve never been.”
Patsy thanks her for the tip.
“I wish I could do more,” Lacey says.
“It was just a hypothetical,” Patsy says.
“Oh God, it’s all turned into such a bad business.” Lacey sighs. “It used to be so easy. I mean, it was never easy, but it was so much less awful than—”
Patsy interrupts her. “It was just a hypothetical, OK, Lacey?”
“I understand,” Lacey says, and then, because she adores her niece and because she can’t help herself, she cries out, “poor Britt!”
Preparations
THE NEXT AFTERNOON at work, Patsy tells Tom that she’s going to need a couple of days off.
“How long you reckon?”
“Three days. Little trip to our nation’s capital,” she says brightly. “Heard they just broke ground on that stupid Iraq memorial.”
“Take a week,” Tom insists.
“Nope,” she says, “only a couple of days.” Patsy wants to keep the trip as tight as possible. She and Tom are in the middle of flipping a house—it’s only a cheap little nothing in DeLand, but it’s still a big deal to them. They bought the property “as is” for a steal in a foreclosure auction. Tom thinks they’ll be able to double their money just by cleaning the place out, repainting, planting a tree or two, and not much else. She wants to be back in time for the weekend so that she and Tom can start the process of clearing out the house’s interior. “I plan to be back for the weekend.”
“Honestly, Patsy babe, I can take care of this part of the flip without you being there.”
Patsy shakes her head. “I’ll be there.”
Tom nods. Patsy’s a hardheaded little gal, and when she sets her mind to something, there’s no convincing her otherwise. For instance, Tom would very much like to be married to Patsy, but she’s against it. He would settle for living with her, but she’s against that, too—she thinks it would set a bad example for her daughter if she lived with a man to whom she’s not married. “You need any extra money?” he asks.
“I’m OK.”
“You want I should come with you? I haven’t been to DC for a while.”
Patsy shakes her head. “We’ll be fine. I’m gonna stay with an old war buddy in Bethesda. And you gotta look out for our business interests, Tom.”
“Call me on the road,” he says.
“Will do.”
“Take care, Patsy.”
She kisses him on the cheek even though they’re at work and Patsy doesn’t like to “parade” their personal relationship. Incidentally, all the other employees know perfectly well that Tom is Patsy’s beau, and none of them cares at all. Tom is a kind boss; Patsy is a hard worker; both have had their share of hard times; everyone wishes them well.
Patsy kisses Tom hard on the mouth.
“Whoa,” he says. “What was that for?”
“I gotta take off early,” she apologizes.
Tom smiles at her. “You should take off early more often, darlin’.”
PATSY’S FIRST STOP is the bank. She has been saving money for her daughter’s college since the day Britt was born. Every week, no matter what was happening in Patsy’s life—e.g., the death of her mother, the death of her husband, the time she got fired, the time she got laid off—no matter how little money she had or how meager the deposit, Patsy put whatever she could into Britt’s college account. Today, for the first time ever, she makes a substantial withdrawal, $3,600 cash, and she tries very hard not to hate herself for it. She feels ill, thinking of both the penalties she’ll pay and the violation to the account’s spirit. But what can she do? Most of her own cash is tied up in the flip.
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