I looked from a son who was growing more disconnected to me to a husband who was pushing me in unfamiliar directions. I had thought I had things under control. I had a plan. Stay here. Work. Save money. Stay minimally involved so as to make reentry into our real life easier.
However, the ground of my plans was shifting, disorienting me. I didn't know what was expected anymore. I looked at Dan, wondering where our relationship was moving. Or drifting. The longer he stayed here, the more he sounded like the rest of his family.
“I'll think about it.” This was a change in strategy and I had to retreat to reformulate my battle plan. “Do you want me to take the kids to Kathy's tonight or can you keep them?”
Dan considered. “I'll take care of them. What do you want me to feed them?”
I thought of the empty day he had ahead and tried not to resent the fact that meals were still my department. “There's a few leftovers in the fridge.”
“Sure. I can do it.”
Dan gave Anneke a kiss before he left. My world was ordered for the next twenty-four hours. I had hoped to ask him to come in this afternoon so I could grab a nap, but figured I was already pushing things with my supper request. I hoped it would be a quiet night at work.
But as I washed kids and cleaned house, I couldn't get Dan's request off my mind. Nor his recitation of that catechism slipping so easily off his tongue.
Coming to Montana had caused him to shed a disguise. Hard not to feel disoriented and unsure in the face of this “other Dan.” The Dan, I was sure, his family preferred to see.
I can't go to church. It's not who I am.
What could it hurt? Maybe just my pride?
And what would my sister say? She was the one who thought Dan's church was some kind of cult.
Well, I hadn't been feeling strong lately. Dan and I had reached some sort of détente, but it was as if we had reverted to the side-by-side living we had made for ourselves back in Seattle. If going to church could fix that, the price wasn't too onerous.
Chapter Eleven
Is her dress okay?” I asked Dan as I leaned across the backseat of the truck and reclipped the barrette in Anneke's hair. “Not too fussy?” Asking Dan was a waste of breath. He was no arbiter of fashion, but I was shooting in the dark here. No fashion or parenting magazines had any hints on what the well-dressed toddler wears for worship, so I was winging it. Though he had taken Anneke before, what she wore didn't concern me as much until this Sunday. I was along now and would see firsthand any reaction to her outfit.
Dan gave Anneke a cursory glance in his rearview mirror. “She looks fine, Leslie.”
I smoothed a hand over Anneke's gleaming hair.
Anneke, check.
I noticed a piece of toast crumb hovering at the corner of Nicholas's mouth. A quick swipe with my finger got rid of it before he could spin his head away. His dampened hair still held comb tracks and his apple cheeks shone with health and vitality. His gray cord pants were still clean, his yellow shirt tucked in and crisp.
Nicholas, check.
I pulled down the visor and took a few extra seconds to check my lipstick, tuck a strand of hair back into place. Was the lipstick too much? Did women even wear makeup to church?
Me, not so check.
“Is there something special going on today?” I asked as Dan maneuvered the truck between two minivans. “There seem to be a lot of people here.”
“The parking lot is only half full yet. Last time Anneke and I came, we were late and there were even more vehicles.”
The nervous fluttering in my stomach grew. Though I was in Harland at least three times a week for work, my drive never took me past the church. The only time I saw this many vehicles in one place at a time was at the mall.
I had thought churchgoing was out of fashion. At least that was the impression I got from the occasional magazine article that bothered to deal with the churchgoing segment of the population. Obviously the families exiting the vehicles were misinformed.
Dan got out of the truck and swung Nicholas out of his car seat. As I helped Anneke, my eyes were drawn to the church building. My stomach twisted and spun.
The church stood on the edge of town, the highest ground for many miles. Beyond the church and the houses tucked around it, looking away from town, I saw open fields and all around mountains sharply angled against a blue sky. God's house nestled in nature's cathedral.
The church was white, solid, with angled roofs and rows of stained-glass windows. From outside, it was hard to see the pattern. They were meant to be viewed from the inside, to let the light shine through them into the church. I knew the building had been put up in the heyday of the twenties, when prosperity was on everyone's lips and in everyone's bank account. It replaced an older, smaller version that Dutch immigrants had put up at the turn of the century. It bespoke solidity, community, and the unchanging nature of faith in Harland. Dan's family had been a part of it since the very beginning.
I reached out and blindly caught Dan's hand. He squeezed back, squared his shoulders, and we started walking toward our now-shared destiny. I guessed from the faint film of dampness on Dan's hand that he was as nervous about bringing me as I was about coming. I wanted to tell him that I wouldn't mess up, but we were already approaching the church and I could feel waves of reverence lapping at our feet, drawing us in.
We went slowly up the steps into the main foyer of the church. I caught buzzing conversation, a few heads turned our way, polite smiles, some frowns.
Don't look at your dress. It's fine. I forced my lips into a smile and held on.
A bank of boxes filled the back wall, each box labeled with a name. When I saw how many VandeKeeres there were, I felt the weight and history of Dan's family and community. Dan's father and grandfather had stood in this entrance waiting to go into the sanctuary beyond the large oak doors. I was walking across the floor that had been trod by Dan's ancestors and now his aunts, uncles, cousins, mother, sisters, friends, neighbors, classmates. A family… a community…, some now buried in the cemetery down the road from the church, some still very much alive, all anchoring him to this place. The sheer volume of his family, the community, the size of this building—I couldn't begin a tug of war with such an impressive arsenal.
Who wouldn't be feeling a tad jumpy right about now?
At the entrance to the sanctuary, a young couple handed out papers to the congregants. I got one along with a polite smile. But as the woman looked at Dan, her smile shifted and her eyes crinkled with pleasure. “Hey, Danny. You coming to Mom and Dad's open house?” She looked from Dan to me. “Is this your wife?”
“Leslie, this is Barry and Lorna Nichols,” Dan said, introducing us. “My cousins.”
“From Uncle Orest and Aunt Gerda?” See? I could do the Harland connect-the-dots thing.
“No. My parents are Tenie and Jeff Smith.”
Huh?
“Sorry,” Lorna said, laying a friendly hand on my shoulder. “My mom is a sister to Dennis and Orest. She married a Nichols.”
Spin went my head. “Okay.” I'd have to get Dan to draw up a family tree so I could be ready for the next family confrontation. I thought Lorna said something about an open house? I was about to ask her but she bent over and shook Anneke's hand. She looked up at me. “Your girl is such a little VandeKeere. And this little boy—why, he looks exactly like Gloria's oldest.”
Okay, wasn't staking a Harland claim on Anneke enough? Couldn't she at least give me Nicholas, who, I knew from my single baby picture, was a miniature me?
“Wilma's sitting with Judy and Dayton and their kids, but I can see there's space for your family,” Lorna continued, glancing through the double doors to the sanctuary, of which I had, until now, caught only a quick glimpse.
Anneke tugged on my hand. “I want to see Grandma,” she whined. Her voice caught Dan's attention, and he quickly ended the discourse on crops and spray he and Barry had been having, and escorted me and Anneke down one of the aisles of t
he church. As we walked, I caught snatches of conversation, whiffs of perfume, and scores of unfamiliar faces bathed by diffused lighting filtering through the large stained-glass windows. I didn't know what to take in first—the people, the windows, the ceiling, the large pipe organ in the front of the church.
A symphony of light and color overwhelmed me, combined with smells and people all gathered in one place for an event that had nothing to do with celebrities or sports. I caught a sense of anticipation and community. I could see from the heads bent toward each other, the gentle murmuring of conversation all around us, that these people knew each other. From the quick smiles that people gave me and Dan as we passed, they all knew us, as well.
Community, I thought. I had never really been a part of any group of people other than work, and that was a fractured group at best. But as we made our way toward the front, I caught a glimpse of Delores. Though she was half-turned away from me, her voice carried like a mess sergeant's. I saw another couple that had come into my department. I had my own little connections, I thought as we came to the pew where Wilma and her children were sitting.
As Dan stepped into the pew, his mother looked at him, then past him to me. The pleasure that lit up her face made all the agonizing over my decision to come worthwhile.
Nicholas promptly wiggled his way onto Wilma's lap and granted her his most beguiling smile. My brief flash of resentment may not have been the most suitable emotion, considering my surroundings, but why did he always play the charmer with her?
Judy leaned forward in her seat and blew a kiss at her brother and waved at me.
Anneke sat between Dan and me, the toes of her best black shoes tapping out her happiness against each other.
I settled in, my gaze flitting from the gold and silver lines etched on the pale pink and silver painted pipes of the massive pipe organ to the intricate patterns in the stained-glass windows to the plasterwork on the ceiling to the antique wooden pews curved in a semicircle facing the front.
I saw age and beauty mingling with the reality that this had all been here longer than I had, longer than Dan's parents had, longer than his grandparents had. A heritage, I thought wistfully. A bedrock of history I had no experience with.
Dan had been baptized in this church, had grown up surrounded by these walls, these people. Though I had heard the stories and felt the weight of his legacy at the farm, this church—this unique community—brought into startling clarity the stability of Dan's past life.
And his present life?
Did I dare dwell on that? “Give it time,” Dan was fond of saying lately as if the depletion of my chocolate account was buying us the peace and stability we had been looking for since we got married.
Slowly the empty spaces around us filled and people greeted Dan and Wilma, smiling at me and Anneke and Nicholas, who blithely ignored them all.
It was as if everyone knew Dan, and by extension, knew me and our kids and where we had come from and what Dan had done in Seattle, how Dan's business had failed thanks to that man who had cheated us out of all that money.
My smile hid a swift flash of fear. If they knew this much about us in the short time we were here, how much would they know in a few more months? My weight? Our bank account balance? Where I hid the chocolates so the kids couldn't find them?
“Leslie, how's the garden?” Judy asked, leaning past Wilma and Dan.
I gave her a careful smile. Once Wilma and Judy and Gloria left on that fateful day, I thought it best if I simply let nature take its course in the garden department. Nature had a better handle on what to do with all those seeds than I did. I had no idea what condition a garden was supposed to be at by this stage. “It's… growing.”
“Well, that's what gardens are supposed to do,” Judy said, adding a quick wink to her comment, which made me feel even more uneasy. She knew I hadn't even so much as pulled a weed.
Just then a group of kids walked to the front of the church and picked up the various guitars that were set out on the stage. I recognized Tabitha as she sat at the electric piano. She glanced our way with a self-conscious grin. A young man settled himself behind a drum set that had been hidden by a screen. Everyone turned to Tabitha. She nodded once.
And music the likes of which I never thought a person would hear in church started up. It filled the building with pounding rhythm. A screen rolled down from the front and words flashed onto it from a projector somewhere in the building.
I wonder what John Calvin's impression of this would be, I thought as I rose to my feet with the rest of the congregation. Everyone started singing,Anneke and Dan singing right along.
Of the gathered people, it seemed only Nicholas and I didn't know this song.
I kept my eyes on the screen, listening intently, determined to make my own spot in this place, however temporary it might be. Amazingly enough, the melody was simple and the words easy to sing, and by the third verse I caught right up.
At the end of the song, I chanced a sidelong glance down the row. Wilma's benevolent expression was a pale imitation of the one she usually lavished on her beloved offspring, but hey, I took it for a cautious peace offering.
I think I can do this, I thought as we settled into our pews after the third song.
The minister came to the front. He was a middle-aged man, slender with thinning blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He had a friendly smile and I noticed him glance our way, then hold my gaze. For a terrified moment I thought he was going to “out” me and make me stand up and introduce myself. Then his eyes moved on and I breathed a sigh of relief.
As he read from the Bible, I became distracted by Anneke squirming onto my lap, fiddling with my necklace, then wiggling off again. But when the minister was finished reading, he said, “This is God's Holy Word,” with an authority that caught my attention.
He then clasped the sides of the podium and looked around again, smiling. He started talking about what he had just read. About God as invincible. As raw power whose spoken word created life. “Yet,” the minister said, “His greatest victory was when He became weak and vulnerable. When He kept all the angels, that would have leapt to do His bidding, at bay. He overcame darkness by letting His light be snuffed out.”
I tried to follow along, but he was kind of losing me with the light thing.
“When Jesus hung on the cross, when He gave up His life, He became a powerful force that broke the power of Satan forever. It was His weakness, His letting go because of His great love for us, that gave us our greatest strength. We, too, must learn, in love, to let go.” I glanced sidelong at Dan, his chin resting on Anneke's head. She had slipped into his lap during the service and now had her head tucked into Dan's neck, her hair falling over her face.
Let go. Become weak. Foreign concepts to me.
“Before giving us everything, before giving us all His love, all His grace, all His peace, God requires everything. All our love, all our lives, all the things that we scramble so hard to achieve. All we have is from Him; to return it to Him is an act of faith. Of falling gracelessly into the arms of grace. Of letting God's love hold us up.”
I closed my eyes as his words wound around my soul. Falling into the arms of grace. These poetic words touched a hunger buried deep in my soul. Grace. Falling. Letting go. It sounded so easy. So peaceful. I liked the idea of God's love holding me up.
But that would mean letting go. Letting God take control.
Be careful, Leslie.
I heard Terra's voice of warning like a clear bell sounding, dangerous waters ahead.
I was pulled back to reality. I couldn't give this God what He demanded. Everything? Dan? My children? My dreams and plans?
Something inside me closed, fist hard.
I concentrated on my hands, letting my mind slip away to other things. The housecleaning I had been putting off and should have been doing that morning. The laundry that was piling up. And I should really weed the garden.
Soon he was finished and we started
singing a song that had an older tune. The words were vaguely familiar. I think I'd heard them on the Christian radio station I listened to from time to time on my way to or from work. It was about the Father's love. Vast. Beyond measure.
I sang along but couldn't connect with the words. In my mind I was already driving home, planning the work I had to do yet.
But as I looked at Dan, I caught a glimpse of that hunger I'd seen on his face before, and I felt like he was slipping away from me again.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
U know where I stand on this whole weakness thing. Don't become like Mom—blaming everyone else—weak and afraid. I told U church was 4 weak people. Doesn't this prove that? U are woman, hear U roar. Hear me roar. U need to come and see me. Cut loose. Be my sis again.
Terrible Tempting Terra
Chapter Twelve
Wilma came and picked the kids up?” I held my cell phone and stared out at the parking lot where Kathy was supposed to have been in a few minutes with my kids. I had looked forward all week to taking them shopping for Dan's birthday. Last year Dan and I were so busy keeping our heads above water that his birthday simply floated by, one more casualty of trying to keep things going. This year things were going to be different. I was even going to attempt the impossible. Dan's favorite chocolate layer cake.
“When did she do that?”
“Earlier today. She sounded like she ran it past you.” Kathy's voice had a note of surrender. “She said she wanted to take the kids shopping.”
My heart downshifted. Shopping. Right. Way to steal my thunder,Wilma. “She didn't tell me a thing.” Had I said something on Sunday that gave her carte blanche to push her way further into our lives? Maybe she assumed we were now best friends? I pressed down my anger as I leaned against the cold brick wall of the hospital. “Then I guess I get to drive home all alone.”
The Only Best Place Page 15
