Love the Sinner

by Lynn Bulock

  A lady maybe seventy or so breezed in, and I marveled again how different California people of a certain age looked, compared to the Midwesterners I was used to. They dressed younger out here for one thing, and almost everybody was tan year-round. Unlike a lot of California ladies, though, this woman was letting her short, curly gray hair stay gray. It was silver, really, and looked very nice.

  She wasn’t rail thin, but definitely thin enough to make the capris and tunic-type T-shirt she wore look good. The mule-style sandals she wore had sensible, shorter heels and she had fire-engine-red polish on her nails, fingers and toes. “Dot—great, you made it,” Linnette said, putting the lid on the coffeepot and plugging it in. “Dot Morgan, meet Gracie Lee…”

  “Harris,” I said, sticking out a hand to shake. She had a nice handshake. “It’s so nice to meet you. And I really like that shirt.” I was babbling, definitely.

  If she thought I was babbling, Dot didn’t show it. She had a real thoughtful kind of look on her face and I wondered what that was about. Maybe I had one of those familiar faces for her. “Nice to meet you. You’re new here at Conejo Community—that, or you go to late service.”

  “New. I’ve never been to the church. Linnette found me in the campus bookstore a week ago.” Now I knew I was babbling, but Dot was still gracious.

  “Good,” she said. “We can always use new blood.” Between the coffee beginning to perk in the background and these two down-to-earth women, I felt right at home. This was going to be just what I needed.

  “So what does Christian Friends do, actually?” I asked my companions a couple minutes later when there were four of us sitting around in chairs waiting for the coffee to be done and for a couple more people to show up.

  The newest arrival was Lexy, who was one of those tall, slender blondes in black leggings. She would have made me nervous—or at least intimidated—if Linnette and Dot hadn’t been there first. As it was there was just enough cellulite in the room to make me less conscious of my despised derriere.

  “Drink coffee and talk, mostly,” Linnette said. “Listen to each other’s problems. Not to solve them exactly, but more to just listen.” She didn’t get any further in her explanation before three more women hit the room at once. They couldn’t have been more different. One was tiny and Asian, close to fifty probably, and already talking when she got through the threshold. There were two conversations going on actually—one directed at the women who came in with her and one at somebody on the other end of a tiny cell phone.

  “Paula,” Linnette mouthed in my direction under the stir of the women coming in. The second one had to be Heather. She was a limp-haired pale blonde in her early thirties who might have been quite attractive under other circumstances. However, she had the circumstances of a damp pregnant lady, which doesn’t tend to make anybody look attractive. Her black leggings were baggy at the knees and pouched a little at the seat, and her pink rubber sandals squished underfoot. The third woman had to be her mother. She had the same blond hair, a face that relayed what Heather would look like in thirty years if she didn’t use a lot of sunscreen and wore a sour expression to rival Paula’s.

  Before I could say anything, Paula plopped herself down at one end of the semicircle of chairs and opened a portfolio. I don’t dislike many people on sight, but in her case I could make an exception. Between the cell phone when she came in and her overall perfection, she looked like the type to drive me nuts. “All right. Why don’t we get the meeting started? I’m sure some of us are in a hurry to go home.”

  She glared at Heather and then gave me the fish eye. I could see what Linnette had meant in her few words earlier. If I hadn’t decided to dislike her already, her words to Heather would have swayed me.

  Paula was a pain in the neck. I could tell that much from my first five minutes of getting to know her. Anybody who actually cared that Heather was getting the floor wet, and said so, instead of worrying if she was going to catch pneumonia or something, had to be a pill. Everybody else in the group seemed to be real pleasant, so I guess Paula had to be the “one” there is in every crowd.

  Linnette appeared to be in charge here, and she didn’t seem to like Paula all that much, either. She masked it better than I probably did. “Paula, you know we don’t take notes here. Christian Friends group stuff is confidential. That means what’s said here stays here.”

  Paula sniffed. “I remember that. But I have to write down things about the phone call I just finished. It’s about a very important closing tomorrow.” I should have figured she was in real estate. “Besides, you have all the beginning stuff to go through. You won’t get back to me for ages.”

  Linnette shrugged, sort of a “whatever” look on her face, and went through what appeared to be a set opening to the meeting. She explained a little bit more about Christian Friends, we had a brief prayer and she offered anybody who wanted the chance to get a cup of coffee. I took her up on it, and noticed that Heather and the older woman with her did, too.

  “We have one newcomer tonight, and a few others who are still fairly new to the group, so if we could make introductions…” Linnette looked down the row at people, and I hoped that I wouldn’t have to go first. It felt like junior high again in here.

  “I can go first, because I’m not really here for myself anyway.” The older blond woman spoke up. “I’m Sandy and I’m here because my daughter needs help.”

  Hoo boy. And I thought Paula was going to be the resident pain. Sandy, here, was definitely in the running.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, her daughter was nodding. “I know it sounds awful, but she’s right. I do need help.”

  Linnette looked like she wanted to say something, but didn’t get the chance. Heather went on. “Six months ago, my life was perfect. I had a job I loved, a nice apartment, had met the guy of my dreams, the whole bit. Jack was a little older than I am, but he was witty and charming and funny. When I talked to him, I felt like I was the only woman in the world.”

  I hated to hear the “was” portion of what Heather said. Didn’t sound like this was a relationship with a future. And I felt all misty over her description of Jack. I’d had one of those guys myself, before he went and drove his car down an embankment.

  “Anyways, all that fell apart when I went and got pregnant. I waited a couple weeks to be sure. Maybe if I’d told Jack right away when I thought I knew what was going on, things would have been different.” She was trembling now, but I had news for her. She didn’t just go and get pregnant. Ol’ Jack had helped a whole bunch, and now I was not so thrilled with him, suspecting what came next.

  Heather was twisting a handful of tissues now, and her voice was shaky, but she went on. “I finally told him and he just blew up. We had this screaming fight where we said things I’m pretty sure neither of us meant. Five months and four days ago, Jack Peterson walked out of my apartment and just vanished.”

  Her mother made a face like she’d swallowed lemons. “Of course you never called the police.”

  Heather shrugged. “Mom, he’s a healthy grown-up. We weren’t married and he didn’t even live with me fulltime or anything. Isn’t it enough that he canceled his cell phone and there wasn’t ever any new activity from him on our joint credit cards? I think that told me what I needed to know.”

  “Well, it didn’t tell me anything. I want to find out how to hit that jerk with child support. Maybe even some kind of legal damages, with the kind of distress he’s caused you. You lost your job—”

  “It’s a sabbatical, Mother.” Heather sounded tired. This seemed to be a conversation they’d had before. “I just started it earlier than I’d planned.”

  “Well, there’s precious little money coming in, either way.” Sandy rolled her eyes. Maybe I’d be just as dismayed to have my adult child come home pregnant, unmarried and with her life spinning out of control this way. I hope I’d be compassionate instead. Maybe it was a good thing Heather was here, even if her mother dragged her. Everybody else
looked a little more compassionate than her mother.

  “We’ll be okay.” Heather sounded braver than I could have been. For that matter, she sounded braver than I felt in my own current situation. She was rummaging around in her bag. “You asked if I had any pictures last time,” she said, looking at Linnette. “I finally managed to dig one up. It’s not all that good, just a printout from my digital camera on photo paper. Jack wasn’t much for having his picture taken.”

  She passed it to Linnette, who looked at it and smiled. “He’s quite handsome.”

  “Show it to everybody. You might as well all see the guy I’ve been crying over.” Heather motioned, sounding wistful.

  Linnette passed the picture around, with everybody looking at it briefly and passing it on. Then it got to me, and after a glance I started to pass it on to Dot. But then I couldn’t. I looked at it again, hard.

  This couldn’t be. Maybe I was seeing things. I reached for my own wallet and pulled out the one studio shot I had of Dennis. It didn’t take much comparison for me to feel very, very ill.

  I must have suddenly looked as awful as I felt, because even Heather was looking at me strangely. I passed my picture over to her along with her own. “I think I might have an idea of why there’s been no activity on that credit card.” I handed her the photo. “I’m Gracie Lee Harris, and I’m here because one night in August my husband, Dennis, drove his car over the side of an embankment and nearly died.”

  Heather looked down at the picture. “That’s Jack.” Her voice was small and panicky.

  “No, that’s Dennis. And he’s been in a coma for five months. And he’s definitely, without a doubt, already married to me.” Wasn’t he? Seeing all this gave me more than a few doubts. It also made me lose it about the same time Heather did. This looked like the end of anything else worthwhile happening at the Christian Friends tonight.

  “I’ll get more tissues,” Linnette said.

  “And maybe a bucket,” Dot added. I looked over at Heather. As pale as she was, Dot’s idea might have been a very good one.

  2

  “This can’t be right. It can’t be happening,” Heather said, ending on a wail.

  I wanted to agree with her, but I couldn’t. It was happening, and the crazy thing was, it made sense in the oddest kind of way. Dennis having another woman on the side explained plenty of things.

  Linnette and I were the only ones left in the room with Heather. Heather’s mom had been the first to bail, followed quickly by Paula. I have no idea where either of them went, but nobody seemed to miss them much. Dot and Lexy had stayed for a while to try and help Linnette calm us down. Heather was too upset to say much. She mostly muttered or sobbed instead.

  “You know, a lot of things in my married life look different when I take this into consideration,” I said to the two of them. “How long have you known Dennis, um, Jack?” It was hard to know what to call him around Heather.

  “Almost two years. We really hit it off, but he said he’d…uh…just gone through a bad divorce…”

  She trailed off and I could finish the sentence for her, “And then he said that maybe you would be the one to restore his faith in the female half of the human race. And could he move in while you got to know each other better—right?” Even his lines didn’t change from woman to woman.

  “Oh, no. You mean you heard it, too?” Heather wailed again. “I should have known something was funny. He was gone so much of the time on business.”

  “And he never gave straight answers about where he was. Or the money he was spending.” She nodded in agreement. Something else dawned on me, and it made me even more ill than I’d been before. Had he even intended our marriage to continue once he moved to California himself? Knowing Mr. Charm, he was ready to break things off then, but just couldn’t do it.

  We were surrounded by most of a box of tissues littered around the floor and our laps, and Linnette patted my hand when I needed it. That was fairly often. I was in better shape than Heather, but not by a lot.

  I still felt sick and dizzy, and every time I stopped to remind myself to breathe, a new question popped up. It seemed to be the same for Linnette, at least the question part, because she kept asking about things she could do. “Do you want me to call Pastor George?”

  “No,” Heather and I answered in unison. I don’t know about her reasons, but I figured the time to meet the pastor for the first time was not over this debacle. Not tonight, anyway.

  “All right, then. We’ll wait a while on that, shall we?” Linnette nodded.

  “Yeah. I think I want to go home.” Heather gave me a plaintive look. “Would you come by tomorrow and take me to the place where Jack is? I have to see this for myself. I keep thinking that maybe this is a mistake. Maybe it’s not him after all….”

  Why did I feel a hysterical laughing-and-crying fit coming on? Oh, I know. It was because my normally weird and horrid life just got ten times worse in the space of one hour. My head hurt, and I was real glad I’d never gotten around to those cookies. As it was, the coffee wasn’t exactly sitting well. There was a bitter burning at the back of my throat that I hadn’t experienced since I was pregnant with Ben. I could only imagine how awful Heather felt.

  I was pretty sure what she’d discover at Conejo Board and Care. The man she called Jack Peterson was my husband. That wasn’t going to keep me from taking her there, though. No matter what it was going to do to my life, this was a young woman who needed some closure, and I could probably give it to her.

  I took a deep breath. “Sure. What time should I pick you up?” I had classes in the morning, but so what? School might just go on the back burner for a while.

  We settled time and directions and everything, and then Heather looked around the room for the first time in a while. “How am I going to get home?”

  “Maybe your mom is still here someplace. Do you want to go looking for her?” Linnette stood up, and we both followed her. A quick check of the building didn’t yield any sign of Sandy, so we headed for the parking lot.

  There was a big Lincoln idling in the rain in a parking spot close to the church. “That’s my mom. At least she waited for me.” Heather sounded so plaintive I wanted to hug her.

  She trudged to the car and got in. I was just glad to see her lovely, sympathetic mother hadn’t locked her out. Linnette and I watched the Lincoln peel out and then looked at each other.

  “Last time you’ll invite a stranger to your group, huh?” I said. I expected her to agree with me, but she shrugged instead.

  “Nope. I’ll keep doing it. This whole mess was meant to be tonight, Gracie. God has reasons for things. Nothing that strange happens by coincidence.”

  Even in California, I felt like adding. She was right, though. Heather and I would never have met on our own. She might have gone through years of wondering what happened to her fiancé. I, meanwhile, would have been blissfully ignorant of what Dennis had been doing on all his business trips around the state, but surely there was something good that would come out of this knowledge, as well. I just couldn’t figure out what it was right now.

  “I think it’s time we both went home,” Linnette said softly. “You okay to drive?”

  “I think so. There should be some interesting conversation with my motherin-law once I get home. For a change I almost hope she went to bed early.”

  That, of course, would have been too easy. If I’d wanted to talk to Edna about things that couldn’t wait, she would have gone to bed by the time I got home. There seemed to be days at a time when we only met at the care center in Dennis’s room or over a rare, silent dinner.

  Tonight she was still up, sitting at the dining room table reading the paper. I’d almost forgotten, before moving in with Edna, that you could get your news that way. Shows how computers have warped our lives.

  “That’s just out of the question,” Edna said ten minutes later. “Becca is coming tomorrow and visiting her daddy. There just won’t be room for another person in
the schedule.”

  “Well, we’ll have to make room. It’s important for Heather to see him for herself.” Of course it was important for Becca, Dennis’s daughter, but she hadn’t exactly been beating a path to his door so far. The few times she’d come, she’d timed her visits to avoid me. I suspected that was on purpose. We had yet to meet in the time that I’d lived in California. That was just the way Becca wanted it, apparently. Tomorrow was shaping up to be a dandy day.

  “Couldn’t she wait a day? It’s not like it’s really probable that this man she’s looking for is Dennis,” his mother argued.

  “Oh, I think it’s more than probable. I think it’s about a ninety-five-percent certainty that the man she calls Jack Peterson is Dennis.”

  “Peterson? He called himself Jack Peterson? Oh. Well, maybe she ought to come along.” Edna’s color was pale suddenly and her voice was soft and hesitant. Something about that name changed her mind. That was a shame, because I was almost hoping she’d been right before. It would be a giant relief to me if Heather came tomorrow, looked at Dennis and said that she’d been mistaken. Now I was back to believing that wasn’t going to happen.

  “I think I’m going to bed. Looks like I’ll need the rest,” I told Edna. Not that I expected to sleep all that much.

  Normally at night I got on the computer to trade instant messages with Ben for a while. Instant message sessions with one’s own offspring no longer struck me as a weird or unusual event. Before the accident, instant messages had been one of my major forms of communication with Dennis, as well. He roamed the state with a laptop, and it was cheaper than the cell phone.