Avra's God

by Ann Lee Miller

  Avra hooked her hair behind her ears. “Do you still need help with calc?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would eleven tomorrow work for you?”

  Kallie’s puzzled green eyes peered up at her. “Eleven’s good.”

  Avra scrawled her address across a page from her notebook and handed it to Kallie. “See you tomorrow.”

  She strode away, hearing Kallie’s faint “thanks” behind her.

  She’d bet Kallie didn’t miss all four proms in high school, didn’t have a geek like Morgan as her only admirer.

  Avra sat at the dining room table, her books fanned around her. She twisted a pencil in a plastic sharpener. Shavings dropped onto the rough draft of her report. Her gaze drifted out the window where Cisco threw the football to Kurt. His muscles flexed and relaxed in fluid motion. The pencil tip snapped inside the sharpener.

  The screen door smacked shut, and the guys’ footsteps scuffed across the kitchen floor. Cisco followed her brother into the dining room. Kurt sailed through the room and flopped onto the living room couch. Cisco pulled out a dining room chair and straddled it backwards. He lifted his eyebrows at her. “Hey kid, what’s with the shy girl thing? Red face, looking down, the whole bit.”

  He’d shoved her out of her comfort zone by walking into the room. She scraped the shavings into a pile and glared at him. “I’m sharpening a pencil.” She knocked the sharpener against the table, trying to dislodge the lead.

  “I meant at dinner the other night.”

  “I embarrass easily, okay?”

  “Hey—” He held up his hands. “I’m not dissing you. I’m all about being embarrassed.” He reached across the table and took the pencil sharpener from her. He pried the lead out with the paper clip from her report and handed it back. “Homework?” He jutted his chin toward her papers.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. They were just having conversation. She relaxed her shoulders, softened her tone. “Report on Y2K.”

  He raked his fingers through his hair. “You wanna hear embarrassing? My pop holed up with some dude in an underground house—stockpiled food, water—then Y2K was a bust.”

  “Everybody’s dad has idiosyncrasies.” She shrugged. “Mine alphabetizes cans in the pantry.”

  “My dad ditched his family.”

  “My dad counts things.”

  “My dad lives on a sailboat behind the boatyard.”

  “When I was a baby, Dad counted all the hairs on my head. He said God does it, and he wanted to see if he could do it.”

  He stretched across the table and fingered her hair. “Sounds reasonable. I could get into that.” He tugged and released the tendril as he stood.

  Her scalp tingled. She didn’t want him to leave. “Lots of people are left by their fathers.”

  He flipped his chair around to push it under the table. “Easy for you to say. Things function at your house. At mine, they dysfunction.”

  “You do have a perfect Dad.” Her voice was quiet.

  Cisco grunted. “You’ve never met him.”

  “I’m talking about God.”

  “Man, Avra, you’re hitting me out of left field. What’s God got to do with this conversation?”

  Make him understand. She bit her lip, staring into the deep brown of his eyes. “God will never ditch us.”

  “Listen, I know you’re sincere, but it just sounds so out there. Not where I live.”

  “Check out church sometime.”

  He shrugged noncommittally. “Your dad invited me.” He moved toward the door. “I think he likes me.”

  “What’s not to like?”

  Cisco’s eyes swerved to hers. He lifted his brows.

  Her face heated under his gaze. “That’s not what I meant—”

  “See ya, Avra.” He pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. The screen door squeaked open, then shut.

  Jesse’s gut clenched as he slid into his seat one second before Professor Marquez cleared her throat to begin class.

  In the flurry of notebooks popping and paper shuffling, Kallie dropped a folded sheet of paper on his desk. He covered it with his Lit book and grinned when she returned from the waste basket. Her face gave nothing away. What did Kallie think about You’re Callin’ My Name? Did she guess he’d written it for her?

  He scanned the paper. Promise ... delves below the superficial ... melody brings out the pathos—what the heck was pathos? He thumbed to the glossary of his Lit book. Pathos—expression of strong or deep feeling.

  He rubbed his thumb across his chin, reading the rest of her comments. She liked the song. His jaw relaxed.

  Kallie’s affirmation rubbed salve into the part of him Dad rejected. Dad would never hear his songs. Creating music, or any art form, was pretty much loafing in Dad’s mind. A man labored hard with his hands or his intellect. That much he’d absorbed from his father. He worked hard at his music. Not that he ever expected to see any appreciation from Dad.

  After class, Jesse stood outside the door till Kallie stepped out. “Thanks.” The connection he’d felt that first day slid back into place as their eyes connected.

  “Anytime.” Unasked questions swirled in the green depths of her eyes.

  Questions he didn’t want to answer.

  Avra led Kallie through her living room. Kurt and Drew sprawled on either end of the couch, hair damp from showers, their usual Saturday morning ratty T-shirts and gym shorts replaced with board shorts and this year’s shirts. As if a girl like Kallie would give them a second glance.

  “Kallie, my brothers. Kurt and Drew, this is Kallie,” she flung over the railing on the way up the steps.

  Kurt’s eyes swerved from the TV to Kallie and stopped as if somebody hit his internal pause button. “Hey.” Oh, yeah. He had it bad. She’d seen more than one guy on campus look at Kallie like that.

  “Hi ya,” Drew said. “You can come watch ‘Sponge Bob’ with me when Avra bores you cross-eyed. I’ll save you a seat.” He thumped the couch cushion beside him, flinging dust particles into the morning sun.

  Kallie jogged up the stairs behind her. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She closed the door after Kallie. Her porcelain doll, Justine, watched them from her faded floral pillow sham with layers of pink skirts fanned around her. Justine’s nose tipped in glass disdain as though the room were too shabby for her.

  She glanced at Kallie. “Don’t mind my brothers’ drooling.”

  Kallie sank into the lumpy, slip-covered chair in the corner. “I always thought I’d like to have some brothers.” Her features clouded. “Maybe then I’d understand males.”

  Avra laughed. “They’re all about bodily functions—the louder the better.”

  Kallie smacked her forehead with her palm. “So simple. I hope you explain calc as well as you do guys.”

  An hour later Avra stretched the kinks out of her back. “So, if f of x equals three x minus six, and g of x equals three, then to find f of g of x, substitute x from f of x with g of x, and solve.”

  Understanding lit Kallie’s face. “I get it! I really get it!” She high-fived Avra. “Thanks.” Kallie pushed up the sleeves of her shirt to her elbows. “You’re so together.”

  “Me? I thought you were together.”

  Kallie held up a hand. “Whoa, girl. I don’t have a clue about what I’m going to do with my life. I was a voice major in Miami, but I’m going to pick up business courses. I need something stable.” She picked at her cuticle. “My parents divorced. My grandparents divorced. I’ve got to take care of myself. But not with math, that’s for sure.”

  She offered Kallie a pretzel rod from the jar on her desk. “I said I couldn’t help you with calc because I was jealous of you. I’m sorry.” She glanced at the wrought iron cross over Kallie’s head and back at Kallie. Coming clean felt good.

  Kallie’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Jealous of what?”

  She cracked a wry smile. “All the guys turn and watch you walk by.”

&nb
sp; Kallie’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope.” She’d settle for one guy in particular. No. Don’t even go there.

  Kallie dismissed her words with a quick shake of her head. She sucked the salt off her pretzel and stared out the window.

  The rustling of leaves from the giant oak was the only sound in the room.

  Kallie sat up straight and rubbed the small of her back. “Actually, I do have a brother. Maybe more siblings, for all I know. My dad and his new wife had Stevie.” She counted on her fingers. “Seven years ago. The last time I saw him, he was a newborn. I’ve got a suitcase full of issues.” She shivered as if to shake off the memories. Her tone lightened. “I should be jealous of you.”

  Avra chewed on the inside of her cheek. Boy, had she been wrong about Kallie. “Yeah, you’re jealous of my calc grade.”

  “Duh.”

  Laughter rippled between them, and she looked up at the cross.

  At two in the afternoon Avra sat in the deserted Student Union paging through her Humanities text. The remains of a bagel lay in a paper basket beside a Styrofoam cup of iced tea.

  She yawned and closed her eyes, leaning back in the hard plastic chair. She thought about Saturday’s conversation with Kallie. She’d been praying for Kallie three times a week for over a month. She never would have believed it, but Kallie had needs after all. Calc tutoring was a given, and maybe she even needed a friend.

  Cisco appeared in the doorway, and a herd of moths careened to life in her stomach. He sauntered across the room toward her, his Walmart uniform unbuttoned, exposing a snowy T-shirt. “Avra, what up?” He sat down across from her.

  The guy oozed enough testosterone to disturb any girl’s equilibrium.

  He waited for her to say something.

  “You know that essay we have to write for Humanities on how the arts answer life’s unanswerable questions?”

  Cisco grimaced. “Yeah.”

  “So, give me an unanswerable question.”

  His lips flattened into a thin line. “Why does a man check out on his family after eighteen years? Why does he wake up one day and decide he can’t live with the problems another day?” The pain in his eyes begged for an answer.

  Lord?

  Cisco pursed his lips. “Arts—drumming—doesn’t answer squat.” Cisco slouched in his seat. “I don’t know. Maybe it releases some anger. Psychobabble might say the rhythms give me structure, patterns. But drumming doesn’t answer the ‘why.’ All I know is that after two and a half years, he’s not coming back.”

  “You just wrote your paper.”

  “Great.” His voice was flat.

  “Do you ever see your dad?”

  “Not much. What’s the point? He’s over us or he wouldn’t have left.”

  “Maybe he’s only over your mom.”

  “That’s what he says. But I don’t care.”

  “Yes you do.”

  His eyes swerved to hers. He stared hard at her as seconds ticked by. Finally, he blew a breath out.

  I’m so sorry you hurt like this. She reached across the table and gripped his hand.

  He looked down at her hand and back at her eyes, emotions she couldn’t read playing across his face. What if he thought she was after him? She pulled her hand back into her lap, her skin recording the warmth of his skin, the feel of his thick knuckles under her palm.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I gotta go to work.” He stood. “Thanks for getting me started on my paper.” He reached over and tugged a lock of her hair. “See ya.”

  Sun shone through the window and splashed prism colors across his empty chair. What made him trust her?

  Chapter 4

  Jesse lay on his back on the storage shed’s attic floor.

  Kallie sat cross-legged three feet away. “Breathe with your diaphragm. Here.” She reached for a hymnal and swiped it across her jeans leg, dislodging the dust. “When you breathe with your diaphragm, the book will move.” She set the hymnal on his stomach.

  The scent of autumn rain mingled with dust. He gritted his teeth. Dad’s music sitting on him—how fitting.

  Kallie scrutinized him as the hymnal rose and fell, his breathing the only sound in the room. He felt like a frog on the dissecting table. How long would she watch him breathe?

  She edged away from him.

  He sat up, slinging the hymnal across the floor toward the stack. “Okay, enough breathing already. I’m going to hyperventilate.”

  “Sing from your diaphragm. Open your mouth wide to let the full sound out.”

  Twilight’s magenta lit the room, leaving the corners in shadow. Cool air streamed through the window. He watched Kallie’s mouth and followed her voice through warm-ups.

  Kallie touched his arm. “No, like this.” She sang the notes again.

  “Here.” She placed his hand on her diaphragm and breathed in and out. “Do you feel it?”

  Her body warmed his fingers and his palm through her T-shirt. “Oh yeah, I feel it.”

  She pushed his hand away. “Okay, follow me through the scales.”

  His voice melded with Kallie’s. He felt the connection somewhere deeper than the sound in his ears.

  Kallie led him through diction exercises and into You’re Callin’ My Name.

  But you’re that mysterious pond in the woods.

  Nobody knows how deep.

  Nobody knows you’re even there.

  Their voices stilled in the middle of the song as though they’d planned it. Moonlight and dew-heavy air spilled onto the floor near the window.

  Jesse stretched and groaned. “Quitting time?” He could just make out Kallie in the shadows.

  “Yeah.”

  They both reached the steps at the same time. Kallie’s shoulder bumped Jesse’s, startling him off balance. He stumbled and grabbed for her, ending up with a fistful of the back of her shirt. Kallie teetered and clamped onto his arm, a nervous chuckle slipping out. Blackness shrouded the lower portion of the steps.

  He fumbled for her hand. “We’ll go down together.”

  They matched their steps, the quiet magnifying the sand grating under their shoes as they moved down the stairs. Her hand was smooth in his. When they stepped into full moonlight, she let go. The instant coolness of his palm felt wrong.

  He led the way toward the pines. “Thanks for the lesson. I owe you.”

  “You’ve got the pipes to be a vocalist. Ever thought about a rock career?”

  He stepped onto the sidewalk, Kallie close on his heels.

  Stars glowed beyond the streetlight halos.

  He rubbed the night’s dampness from his arms. “Every day.”

  “Why aren’t you going after it?”

  “Might preach.” What made him blurt that out like an attack of Tourette’s?

  Kallie tripped on the uneven sidewalk. “You mean like a priest in church?”

  He caught her arm as they stepped over broken cement in the sidewalk and wished for another excuse to keep touching her. “Something like that. My dad’s a preacher.”

  Kallie stopped and stared at him. “You’re kidding. I’ve never even spoken to a minister, not even my priest.” She stepped off the curb. “So, you want to preach because your dad does?”

  He let out a dry laugh. “No. I don’t want to have anything to do with my dad or his religion.” More Tourette’s. What was it about this girl?

  “You’re weirding me out.”

  The bridge lights winked in the distance. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s not something I’ve ever talked about.” He filled his lungs. “When I was six, an old preacher came to our church. Before he left, he squatted down, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Jesse boy, I believe God wants you to preach.’”

  “That’s it? You have to be a preacher because some old man said so? What about your God-given musical talent?”

  Jesse grabbed the back of his neck. “Why have I remembered what that man said for a decade
and a half?”

  “Would God make you do something you don’t want to do for the rest of your life?”

  “If He’s anything like my old man.”

  Kallie turned at a brick walk with grass sprouting through the cracks. He followed. She jogged up the two steps and slipped behind the screen door. “Well, I hope God’s not like your dad—or mine. ‘Night, Jess.”

  The latch clicked shut in the porch light. A paint chip dropped to the stoop. He’d just lobbed his life into her court for the second time in a week—first the song, then telling her something even Cisco didn’t know. She’d knocked him off balance ever since the day they met. He headed for home, his mind sliding back to the day he almost stumbled over her in the church shed.

  Under his damp shirt, his back had been stiff from hunching over his guitar. The final notes hung in the air, mingling with the scent of gasoline and cut grass. Heat radiated from the shed’s tin roof, chasing away the cool of the rain. He stood and stretched. His eyes caught on a stack of hymnals—his father’s music. Bitterness churned below his ribs. He shoved his guitar into its case and clattered down the steps.

  What the—? He halted short of stepping on the sleeping girl. Her curled form imprinted on his mind in the seconds before she woke. Her head rested on her arm. Silky, white-blonde hair spilled across her shoulder. Tanned legs tucked close to her body in the dim light of the landing. Her eyes blinked open.

  He grinned. “So, who are you? One of my adoring fans?” His grin spread. “Usually, I keep them awake.”

  She stared at him stupidly, slogging toward alertness. “Kallie… came in out of the rain… tired from unpacking… just moved in… today. Nice tunes—unfamiliar, but nice.”

  “Just nice?” He grinned at her again. “I wrote them.”

  Kallie studied him with eyes the color of evergreens. “Nice enough to put me to sleep.”

  Out in the sunshine, he stumbled, the full force of her beauty hitting him. Long legs brought her nearly to his height. A sliver of skin peeked between her shorts and T-shirt. His eyes flitted away. He wanted his equilibrium back, and it wouldn’t return as long as he stood there with a silly grin on his face.