The Transformation

by Terri Kraus

  His quick answer surprised him. “No. I’m very interested. Show me what you want to do.”

  Robert stayed in the truck. It was a nice morning, cool but sunny, and Oliver felt safe enough to leave the windows nearly all the way down. There was nothing of value to steal in the truck, plus he had parked right outside the coffee shop, where he sat by the window. He had to waste at least another forty-five minutes to allow the morning rush of traffic to thin enough to make the return trip home with a minimum of anxiety.

  He unrolled the blueprints and placed the salt and pepper shakers in the far corners, his coffee cup on another and the large sugar dispenser on the other. The lines of the existing church building stood out in bold, and he traced them with his fingertip.

  Very nice proportions.

  He rearranged his improvised paperweights and flipped to the next sheet—a transparency, with the architect’s rough sketch detailing the interior modifications: lighting, cabinetry, counters, tables, built-in booths, bar, serving area, downstairs kitchen—and a host of other nonmajor projects. Widening a staircase. Adding another.

  I don’t know. Making a church a nightclub …

  He had agreed quickly to provide an estimate, and his quickness nearly unnerved him. Being spontaneous and decisive was not his nature, and he knew that.

  Do I want the job, or did that woman just get me all jangled up? Or was it the building as well? No, probably more her than stones and mortar. Yeah, it was her. Jangly.

  He stared outside. Two pedestrians with earnest, going-to-work grimaces passed by, each wearing earbuds and holding a tall cardboard cup of expensive coffee.

  She got me all jangled. Well, jangled isn’t the right word. Jangled is confused, sort of. She got me.… Then he started to think about Samantha, what she was wearing, and how the folds of the black silk fell in such an easy manner.

  He shook his head and drank the last of his coffee. Since he had ordered a plain coffee, refills came free. Getting up for one gave him a chance to change the tone of his internal dialogue and get back to the subject of this project—the project for the woman in the black silk kimono jacket. He shook his head again.

  But I need the work—we need the work. And, somehow, I feel like I’m supposed to be here.

  He stood and debated on that third cup. The clerk behind the counter smiled and held up a half-filled pot. The question was answered. He walked carefully back to the table, not wanting to spill.

  What if I have to stop somewhere on the way home now? Where? It’s not like the turnpike, where you know how far apart the rest stops are.

  She had beguiled him, he knew, because he ignored that warning in his thoughts and took an unusual third cup in one sitting. Maybe the caffeine was making him a little bold and edgy.

  And these are big cups too. Free refills.

  None of what she planned to do with the church was beyond Oliver’s skill as a carpenter and contractor. Cabinets, booths, some knee walls, a bar, lights, bathrooms—he could do all of that. The additional stairs might be tricky, depending on the thickness of the floor. The commercial kitchen downstairs … well, for the kitchen equipment, he would subcontract that portion of the job. He knew a kitchen guy who did good work and had done a number of restaurants in Greensburg, near where Oliver lived.

  Better for him—better for me.

  I could do this.

  A sudden furry bit caught his attention. In the truck, right outside the window, Robert the Dog had sat up and was looking out the window of the truck. Oliver could see him stretch, then circle around a few times on the seat and disappear from view.

  But … I would have to commute. My heavens, commute? In that traffic? Every day? This will have to be for some big bucks for me to take the job.

  At the far corner of the transparent overlay Oliver noticed, for the first time, some penciled figures nearly erased. However, because of the angle of the hard morning sun, the architect’s sharp, definitive figures were still visible. A dollar sign caught Oliver’s attention. The architect must have roughed out an estimate for the work. Oliver knew some architects were good at that sort of ballpark guess on costs, though some came in with dollar amounts that were laughable—like estimating labor costs at only $20 an hour.

  Oliver held the page up to the light. The architect had itemized a dozen different sub-projects and assigned a figure to each one. When he saw the sum total, Oliver nearly dropped the paper. The architect had figured a total cost of over $400,000 for what Oliver had already figured, in his head, to cost no more than $150,000—a ballpark figure, sure, but a job for which Oliver would have been daring to bid a total price of $200,000.

  Samantha might be expecting a bid twice as large as he was preparing.

  And now the job has gotten more interesting. Maybe the commute wouldn’t be so bad.

  He set the paper down and sipped at coffee cup number three.

  Maybe I could sort of camp out in the church and not worry about commuting. There was a shower downstairs.

  As this option came to mind, Oliver noticed that Robert had sat up again in the truck and was staring at where Oliver was sitting, making it apparent the dog thought it was time to go.

  Whatever the traffic will be, it will be. We can leave now.

  Oliver turned onto his street, and Robert the Dog began to wiggle in a subtle but obviously excited way, realizing they were home. Oliver slowed and carefully drove along a narrow driveway and onto a narrow parking area next to the garage.

  Oliver lived in an efficiency apartment he had created above the detached garage. His mother lived in the house—a not-so-big old farmhouse where Oliver was born and raised. It was nearly in the shadow of the Jeannette Memorial Hospital, recently acquired by some large health organization, though they had not yet changed the name out front. The house lay three blocks from the high school and two blocks from the football stadium—the recent home of the most heavily recruited quarterback in all of high school football in western Pennsylvania. Oliver did not play sports in high school but was a football fan.

  His mother would be at work, Oliver knew, so he let Robert run the yard for a while, then whistled for him and the dog tore up the steps and into the apartment. He felt pretty sure his mother had never liked Robert but merely tolerated him for Oliver’s sake.

  For the next three hours, Oliver made lists, extensive tabulations of everything this job might require. Miss Cohen said she was looking for excellence and quality. Oliver made two columns for two kinds of materials. One he labeled Mahogany, though the supplies listed were not mahogany; they were materials at the top end of their category. The other list was labeled Pine, designating lower-end materials. If she suddenly developed colder feet, fiscally speaking, then Oliver would already have a clear idea of how low the bid could go without sacrificing the integrity of the project.

  He started a separate page for the staircases. He had explained to Samantha that morning that he would not have a firm number on them until a qualified structural engineer looked at the floor and they had a chance to tear up either a portion of the floor or get into it from the ceiling below.

  Oliver worked sitting at his kitchen table, tapping at his calculator, and scanning Web pages to check prices. While Oliver worked, Robert the Dog slept in a cozy alcove at the end of the main room of the apartment.

  Some carpenters hesitated to show their home to clients, supporting the cliché that the shoemaker’s children never had proper shoes. But Oliver had spent a long, long winter doing the work in this apartment and had built a stunning interior space with high, vaulted ceilings and hardwood flooring. The back of the garage faced north, looking down a long hill, with Jeannette some three miles distant. The town looked better from there than up close, and Oliver had carved out a covered porch with screens and built-in seating—where Robert now slept—with a set of French doors to the ap
artment that could be closed in cold weather.

  His bedroom area contained not much more space than required for a king-size bed, with two eyebrow windows above. This, his inner sanctum, was as cozy as a berth on a luxury liner, with wainscoted walls. The bathroom was small but done entirely in granite and glass tiles with a waterfall shower and heated towel bars. The streamlined “bachelor” kitchen faced west, catching the afternoon light, and there Oliver had used stainless steel appliances and poured concrete counters, stained and etched (after seeing such a style in an Architectural Digest magazine featuring some millionaire’s home in Nantucket or Cape Cod or someplace out east where the wealthy have vacation homes). Oliver liked to cook and enjoyed the extras he had put into the kitchen.

  The big living space was open, with a built-in computer desk in one corner and a widescreen TV on a long wall surrounded by custom bookcases. The walls were a pale gray-blue. A scaled-down highback leather sectional in dark brown and an easy chair upholstered in a soft fabric with shades of blues and browns provided comfortable seating. A plush Berber wool area rug bordered in leather lay over the apartment’s hardwood floors under the seating area, and on it sat a sleek coffee table, the home of the “coffee table book” on the great cathedrals of Europe that had been Oliver’s gift to himself a dozen Christmases ago. After seeing the apartment, a few of Oliver’s acquaintances had made offers to buy it from him outright—until they found out his mother lived in the house beside the garage and was not planning on moving anytime soon.

  The floor was double-insulated and the automatic garage-door opener was the quietest he could find, but he still could feel the garage door rumbling below as it ratcheted itself open. He heard his mother’s old Buick rattle inside. He heard a slam and the garage door wheezed shut.

  He sighed, long and loud. Robert raised his head. The dog had heard the door as well. Then the dog laid his head back down and shut his eyes. Oliver thought Robert was squeezing them too tightly. He waited a long ten minutes, then stood and headed downstairs.

  If I don’t, she’ll just call me. Might as well be preemptive.

  “I was praying for you this morning. In that terrible traffic. Getting lost. I was worried sick,” Mrs. Rose Barnett said as she shuffled along the linoleum floor in her kitchen. Oliver had offered, often, to replace the old floor with tile, but his mother would not hear of it.

  “The linoleum is not worn through. No need to spend money on fancy stuff. You think I can afford what you spent on your kitchen? Well, I can’t. And I won’t,” was her reply.

  Oliver knew she could afford it but never pushed the issue further than making the offer.

  Rose Barnett was a few years past retirement age and looked even older, her white hair done up in tight curls once a week at Lucy’s Shear Beauty Salon, reminiscent in shape of an old leather helmet that football players wore a hundred years earlier. Her face was narrow, pinched, both by time and personal inclination, cheeks not sunken in, but neither full with youth nor vitality.

  Oliver smoothed the plastic cover over the threadbare tablecloth as he sat at the kitchen table. His mother rewarmed the coffee she had made that morning, before she left for her job behind the counter at the Italian grocery store a few miles down Route 30. Every day she would come home with a bag of meat and cheese ends—the last inch or so of the ham loaf or cheese brick, whatever they couldn’t sell to a customer—and if she was alert, she would grab them and take them home and make soup or ham salad or melt the cheese on noodles.

  “Did you get lost? You ever been to Shadyside?” she asked her son.

  Oliver shook his head. “No. I found it right away. I’ve been through there a few times. You pass it if you go to the museums and take Fifth Avenue.”

  “What kind of church was it? An old rundown place like you thought?”

  She poured some skim milk, straight from the plastic jug, into her coffee. She knew Oliver drank his black, so she placed the jug back in the refrigerator.

  “No. Well, it is old, but not rundown. It’s big. Like a real church.” He tried to explain it to her, even tried to show her the pictures he had taken with his digital camera.

  “I can’t see a thing on this silly little screen,” she complained, squinting. “What do they want to do to it?”

  Oliver hesitated. Do I tell her the truth and weather the storm now, or wait? “Some sort of coffee shop. Maybe serve some food. You know, fancy pastries and such.”

  His mother’s eyes, narrow and close-set, grew even narrower. “Still God’s house, isn’t it? Crosses and stained-glass windows? God’s house. Sacred. Money changers in the temple. I wouldn’t do it if I were you. Could easily bring about God’s anger. You don’t want an omniscient and all-powerful God angry at you, do you, Oliver? It’s not the way I raised you, is it now? Turn your back on God and deface a house of worship? God’s wrath is on those who curse His house. I think that’s in the Bible. I’m pretty sure it is.”

  Rose wore knit pants with sewn-in creases and a loose-fitting floral print blouse, and she clutched at its faded pink plastic buttons. “Oliver, you’re a good boy. You’ve always been a good boy. You’ve always obeyed me. You don’t have to do this kind of work. I bet your father wouldn’t have done it.”

  Oliver let the comment pass. He would not talk about his father—not now. Perhaps never with his mother. “Mom,” he said, even and calm, “it’s not a church any longer. It used to be a Presbyterian church when it was built—like over a hundred years ago.”

  His mother shook her head, as if resigned to be saddened further by her elder son. To her, Presbyterians were not real Christians but only pretended to be. It was an old argument—one Oliver would not revisit today.

  “The congregation got too small, and they sold it to the Korean Christian Church.”

  “Koreans? Like from Korea?”

  “Yes, Mom. There is a large community of Koreans on the north side of Pittsburgh.”

  Under her breath, she muttered, “All the more reason never to go to Pittsburgh.”

  “And then the church became too small for them …” Oliver continued.

  “The Koreans?”

  “Yes, and they moved to a bigger building.”

  “Now … who bought it?”

  “A very nice woman.”

  His mother waited. Oliver knew he would have to continue.

  “Samantha Cohen is her name,” he added.

  His mother bent closer to the table. “That sounds Jewish. Is she Jewish?”

  Oliver shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Maybe. I don’t know Jewish names.”

  “It’s Jewish, alright.” Then he watched as his mother, left hand at her chest, her right cradling her forehead, said, “Jews defacing God’s holy church. I never thought I would live to see the day when my own son is a part of such … heresy.” She glowered at him.

  Oliver knew better than to argue, at least right now, so he leaned back, tried to force down a sip of very hot and very bitter coffee, and let his mother’s talk remain unanswered. There would be no defusing it, once the fuse had been lit. Oliver knew this from a lifetime of trying to quench, or ignore, that sputtering, hissing, ever-closer-to-the-explosion fuse.

  The air had turned a springtime chilly, so Samantha grabbed a zippered sweatshirt from the hook in the hall closet. Her father would have a veritable conniption fit if she left the house without proper—meaning warm—outerwear. He insisted she carry a sweater or coat or shawl if the temperature was at all on the chilly side. Even though he wasn’t home, Samantha humored him.

  She walked toward the church, which was only a few blocks from her house. While negotiating the purchase, she had spent hours inside the former church building, but all during daylight hours, not having seen the interior after sunset. She needed to spend time inside, determining if the stained-glass windows allowed enough li
ght in via the streetlights to be visible, or if they would have to install some sort of outside illumination. She did not want to have to go to that expense or trouble, knowing that any outside lamps would need zoning board approval.

  No need to aggravate that starchy board more than necessary. I’ll be asking for enough favors as it is.

  She waited for a break in the traffic on South Aiken, jogged across the street, and from the corner, noticed a diminutive man standing in the shadow of the stone port cochere. Samantha was not a woman who could easily be intimidated, and if she ever became so, her level of anxiety depended on the size of the perceived threat.

  Unless this guy has a gun, I have no need to be nervous, she told herself. He’s too tiny to be a threat to anyone. Even though she remained calm, she reached into her pocket and wrapped her fingers around the tiny canister of pepper spray attached to her key chain. Her father insisted she carry it. She had objected some, but now was glad she had it. Her hand, hidden in her pocket, thumbed the spray canister around, so she could easily extract the weapon.

  The church is on the busiest street around. Why would any criminal in his right mind pick this place to stage a mugging?

  She stopped at the corner, for just a moment.

  But then … criminals are not known for their logical approach to their business, are they?

  She walked at an even pace toward the church. As she drew nearer, the small man, wearing a dark overcoat that was at least five inches too long for him, stepped out of the shadows.

  “Miss Cohen,” the man called out. “How fortuitous is your visit.”

  Samantha leaned forward and, without taking another step, squinted, as if squinting would help her pierce the darkness. “Mr. Han?” she called out. “What are you doing here so late?”

  Mr. Ito Han bowed at the waist, a long, slow bow, precise and deliberate. “I am honored that you recall me, Miss Cohen. Our meeting was not long in duration.”