“That’s what I figured,” Francine said. “She knows about Dolores and Monika, doesn’t she?”
“Either that or she suspects. It sounds like she and Rev. Campbell have been through the other-woman thing before, more than once.”
It did, but Francine could feel no sorrow for the woman. Instead of defending her husband, she should have been thinking about the lives that lay in ruins because of him. “How can she support him, Stuart? She’s the one who could stop him for good, at least get him out of a position where he continues to harm people.”
“He’s her husband, Francine, whatever else he is, he’s her husband and the father of her children. She’s probably protecting her children as much as she’s protecting him.”
Francine didn’t believe that. “Her children are grown with their own families. They can handle the truth. A better guess is that she’s doing it for herself. Maybe it’s important for her to be First Lady, more important than anything.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
Francine sighed. “Look, I’ve kept you on the phone long enough.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’m glad you called. What were you doing anyway?”
Francine paused, not wanting to tell him. “I was updating my resume and sending it out online.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I know how you feel, Stuart, so before we argue about it again, let’s just say good night. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night.” She held the phone until he hung up. Then she went back to look at the want ads in the newspapers she’d bought.
~ ~ ~
At work on Monday morning Francine found herself smiling as she thought about the giggles she’d heard coming from the master bedroom of the Amen-Ray home when she’d gotten up. Evidently, Sly and Dawn’s working trip had led to a reconciliation.
“What’s on your mind?” Mother Harris asked. “You’ve been going from broad smiles to flat frowns all morning.”
Francine looked up from her task of counting the money in the cash register. Mother Harris was right. She had a lot on her mind today. She was grateful for the happy thoughts about Dawn and Sly. They were a welcome relief. “Well,” Francine said, grinning, “I’m hearing things and they’re sounding like Sly and Dawn have worked out their problems.”
“Praise the Lord,” Mother Harris said. “I’m happy for them. They’ve always been a special couple, one of my favorites.”
“They are special people,” Francine agreed absently, her thoughts now turning to Monika’s situation. That girl was special and she didn’t deserve the treatment Rev. and Sister Campbell were giving her. Thank God, the teen was also strong, willing to fight for a chance to know the family she’d never met. Thank God, too, she didn’t have to fight alone.
Mother Harris nudged her arm. “Now tell me what’s making you frown.”
Francine glanced at the clock. Since they had about fifteen minutes before the store opened, she sat down on the stool next to Mother Harris. “It’s Monika. Well, not exactly Monika, it’s her father.”
“Stuart’s been keeping me updated on that.”
“So you know Monika and I went to his church yesterday?”
“What?”
Apparently, Stuart hadn’t gotten around to calling Mother Harris with the latest news. “Yes, ma’am, Monika tricked me into following her to her father’s church yesterday.” Francine gave Mother Harris the details of the call Monika had made to her on Sunday morning. “The sorry excuse for a minister basically pretended he didn’t know who we were. I could have slapped him, but Monika seemed fine with it. She handled the situation very well. Almost too well. You know what I mean?”
“You expected her to get upset?”
Francine knew she would have been more upset than Monika had been. She had even been upset on Monika’s behalf. “Wouldn’t you expect that?”
“I’m not sure,” Mother Harris said. “We’ve all been praying for Monika. Maybe the Lord’s protecting her heart the way we asked Him to.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Francine said, liking the idea of the Lord keeping Monica safe. Either you believed in the power of prayer or you didn’t. “I hope you’re right. Monika is a great girl and Rev. Campbell should be happy to have her as a daughter. His wife—now, she was a trip—was all nice at church. She told us they had three boys and always wanted a girl, and he stood there like a jerk. Can you believe it?”
“Unfortunately, I can. I’m sure you didn’t expect him to acknowledge Monika right then and there, did you?”
“I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t all the pleasantness. His wife seemed to be a nice woman, a godly woman, but she showed her true colors when she showed up at my house last night.”
“What?”
Francine told Mother Harris the details of Sister Campbell’s visit. The woman knows the kind of man she married and she’s covering for him.”
Mother Harris got up and wiped down the counter that Francine had already cleaned. “Don’t be so hard on her. She’s his wife. What did you expect her to do?”
Francine waited for Mother Harris to turn to her. “Well, if she knows the kind of man he is, she needs to stand up for what’s right. That’s the Christian thing to do. If she doesn’t, she’s letting him do the things he does, which makes her as much to blame as he is. The only reason he can get away with anything is because people keep quiet, or worse yet, cover for him.” Francine knew that to be the case with Temple and Bishop Payne, and she could see little difference between him and Rev. Campbell. They were cut from the same cloth.
“You’re being awfully harsh, Francine.”
“I’m not being harsh,” Francine said. “I’m telling the truth. If Sister Campbell sits there next to Rev. Campbell and pretends he’s all that when she knows he’s not, she’s perpetrating a fraud, as the brothers would say, and she ought to be held accountable.”
Mother Harris put the cleaning cloth down and went to flip over the Closed sign and unlock the door. “You’ve got pretty strong opinions on this subject,” she said when she came back to the counter.
“Of course I do,” Francine said. “After what I’ve been through, I should.” She studied Mother Harris. “I’m surprised you don’t hold stronger opinions.”
Mother Harris’s lips curved downward in a slight frown. “Oh, I do hold opinions,” she said.
“Well, tell me. If you think I’m wrong, I want to know.”
Mother Harris sat down and folded her hands primly on her lap. Then she raised sad eyes to Francine. “You’re so harsh. Don’t you have any compassion for Sister Campbell? You didn’t know what was going on at Temple. Why is it so hard to believe she doesn’t know what’s going on with her husband?”
“Whew!” Francine reeled from the blow of that comparison. “Maybe I deserved that, but I wasn’t married to Bishop Payne. I wasn’t sleeping with him. A wife has to know, doesn’t she? How could she not know, especially after all those years?”
“What if she did know, and didn’t do anything? What penalty would you assign to her?”
Francine shrugged. “I know I’m not the one who hands out penalties, Mother Harris, and I’m not saying I should. It’s just that he wouldn’t get away with it unless she allowed it. There are probably a lot of preachers’ wives out there right now covering up for their husbands, and the way I see it, they’re as guilty as their husbands. Besides, Sister Campbell does know. I know she does. She’s just blaming the women like her man is some kind of catch.”
“She does have a point, Francie,” Mother Harris said. “Some women do go after pastors. You know that.”
“I know, but that’s not the case here.” And it wasn’t the case with Bishop Payne.
“I hear you,” Mother Harris said.
“But you don’t agree?” Mother Harris looked away, causing Francine to wonder at her anxiousness. “Is something wrong,
Mother Harris?”
Mother Harris met Francine’s gaze and took her hand. “I’m going to tell you something, Francine, that I’ve never told anybody. Not anybody.”
Francine felt a shiver of fear trickle down her spine. “What is it?”
“I was one of those wives.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mother Harris took a deep breath. “I was a wife who turned a blind eye to her minister husband’s philandering.”
Francine couldn’t have been more surprised if Mother Harris had said she’d gotten drunk and done lap dances at a local bar last night. “What?”
“You heard me. In the early days of our marriage, Rev. Harris wasn’t as faithful as I expected a husband to be.”
“And you did nothing?” Francine accused, unable to fathom the strong, godly woman she knew Mother Harris to be doing nothing.
“What was I supposed to do? Tell me, what was the right thing to do?”
Because Mother Harris had asked it, Francine fully considered the question before answering. A compassion she hadn’t felt for Sister Campbell flowed through her being. “What did you do?” she asked. “I know you did something.”
Mother Harris glanced at the door, making Francine wonder if she was praying for a customer so they would be forced to end the conversation. “I did what any good wife would do. At first, I pretended I didn’t know, and when that became impossible, I told my mother I was leaving him.” She gave a wry smile. “Do you know what she said to me?”
Francine had no idea, and the ghosts reflected in Mother Harris’s eyes made her wonder if she wanted to know.
“She told me that preachers were different men. She said some things had to be overlooked if I wanted to have a happy home.” Mother Harris laughed, a hollow sound. “I remember how crushed I was. Betrayed first by my husband, the man I loved, and then by my mother, the woman I thought would always have my best interests at heart.”
Francine draped an arm around the older woman’s shoulders. “So you kept quiet?”
“For a while. It was a few years before I took a stand. And the stand I took was much worse than keeping quiet.”
Not imagining Mother Harris doing anything really awful, Francine waited for more information.
“One of them got pregnant. Rather, he impregnated one of them, a woman in our first congregation. She told him. He told me. I think that was the eye-opener for him. He wanted to confess all, take responsibility for the child.”
“That was a good thing. Your husband sounds like he learned his lesson.”
“He did, but I didn’t.” She lowered her head. “He asked me to stand with him, to forgive him. He said we could weather it together. I told him that if he acknowledged that child, I’d leave him and let everybody know this woman wasn’t the first.”
Francine’s arms dropped from the other woman’s shoulders. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Mother Harris?”
Mother Harris glanced over at her. “Yes, Mother Harris did that. Of course, I wasn’t Mother Harris then. I was Sister Harris, Pastor’s wife.”
“What happened?”
“We didn’t publicly acknowledge the child, but we did provide financial support, generous financial support. Reverend looked for and got an appointment in another town—that’s when we came to Faith Central—and we continued to live our lives, build a ministry.” She looked at Francine, her lips curving in a smile at some secret memory. “He was a changed man afterwards. I’m sure he never thought about cheating again and I’m also sure his heart was broken that he could never acknowledge his child. We never discussed it again, not even when we wrote the checks each month.”
Francine pulled Mother Harris into her arms. “I’m so sorry,” she said, wishing she could absorb the woman’s pain. After all these years, her pain remained alive.
When Francine pulled away, Mother Harris said, “It’s fitting, don’t you think, that we never had children of our own? Do you think that’s enough penalty for the pastor’s wife who didn’t want to face her husband’s sin, and who, as a result, committed an even worse sin?”
Francine didn’t know what to say. She wanted to comfort Mother Harris but she didn’t have the words. “What happened to the child?”
Mother Harris smiled, a real smile this time. “She grew into a lovely young woman and she came looking for her father.”
Francine couldn’t help but notice the similarities with Monika. “What happened?”
“Nothing. She was a married woman with children of her own. She didn’t want to be acknowledged. She only wanted to meet him.”
Francine thought that maybe the woman had wanted Rev. Harris to want to acknowledge her, wanted him to publicly claim her as his daughter despite her words to the contrary. “Neither of you tried to change her mind?”
“We tried, but she didn’t want it for her children, her family. They were happy,” Mother Harris said. “She just wanted to meet him, thank him for the money over the years, and let him know things had worked out well for her. By then, Reverend was well known and a child of his past would have become a major scandal, much more so than it would have been at the time the child was born.”
Francine thought the entire situation was sad. Reverend and Mother Harris had missed out on children and grandchildren for no reason at all. “Do you still keep in touch with her and her family?”
“It would be hard not to. She lives here in Atlanta and she and her son go to Faith Central.”
Francine’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“It’s a real mess, isn’t it?”
Francine thought it was, but she didn’t say so. She wondered who the son was but she didn’t ask.
“It’s George Roberts,” Mother Harris said. “George is my husband’s grandson.”
Francine slumped back on her stool. “George?”
Mother Harris nodded. “Now you understand his hostility. It’s not all about you.”
Francine’s heart ached anew for George. She’d known about the pain he felt because of the closeness he’d shared with his sister, but to have that burden added to the burden of the circumstances of his mother’s birth must be nearly unbearable for him. “Does he know?”
Mother Harris rubbed her hands together and pressed them to her mouth. When she lowered them, she said, “I’m sure his mother told him, though we’ve never spoken of it.”
Francine could hardly believe what she was hearing. “But you see him every Sunday.”
Mother Harris released a heavy sigh. “I know. There have been times when I’ve wanted to say something, times when I’m sure Rev. Harris wanted to say something, but too much time had passed and it was easier to leave things unsaid.”
Francine felt an overwhelming sadness for Mother Harris and for George and his mother. How could they live with the lie all these years? “Oh no,” Francine said, a new thought occurring to her. “Did Toni know?”
Mother Harris squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m sure she did.”
“But she never said anything, not even to me, and I was her best friend.”
Mother Harris reached for Francine’s hand. “That’s the way things were,” the older woman explained. “Nobody talked about it. It was an awful secret that was forced on them all.”
“How did they live with it?” Francine wondered aloud.
Mother Harris lifted her slight shoulders in a shrug. “Rev. Harris was dead by the time George and Toni were old enough to understand, so it wasn’t as if they had to see him every Sunday. Their mother had made peace with it, the secret, a long time ago.”
Francine didn’t bother to wipe at the tears that rolled down her cheeks afresh as she thought about the torture Toni must have gone through knowing that she was repeating her grandmother’s pattern. Why didn’t I listen to her? Why didn’t I try to understand? “Toni must have felt so alone,” she told Mother Harris. “I can see how she would have been reluctant to bring her problem to her mother and George. I was truly th
e only person she had and I turned my back on her. How could I have done that, Mother Harris?”
Mother Harris squeezed Francine’s hands. “You thought it was the right thing to do at the time, Francie. You can take comfort in the knowledge that your intentions were good. I don’t have that excuse. I wanted to punish my husband and save face because of my pride, no other reason.”
“Good intentions won’t bring Toni back or lessen George’s pain. What are we going to do, Mother Harris? How are we going to make it right?”
Mother Harris gave a light laugh. “That’s my Francie,” she said, “always wanting things to line up in a way that makes sense. Some things just don’t make sense. Some things can’t be made right because they can’t be undone.”
Francine shook her head. “I can’t accept that,” she said. “There has to be something.” Those words ended their conversation as the door chimes signaled the arrival of the day’s first customer.
Chapter 27
Francine was still reeling from her morning conversation with Mother Harris when she got home Monday night. You never really knew what other people were going through, she thought to herself. She never would have guessed any of the things Mother Harris had told her this morning, and if anyone but Mother Harris had told them to her, she wouldn’t have believed them. At least now she understood where George’s hatred of her was based and she better understood the depth of Mrs. Roberts’s pain. Much of it had nothing to do with her, Francine now knew, and accepting this made her realize how much she’d taken on herself unnecessarily.
Francine wished there were something she could do for them. She now agreed with Stuart that allowing George to berate and blame her was not helping him, and that her leaving town would not help George or his mother. But there had to be something she could do, she thought as she climbed the stairs, heading for bed. When she reached the landing of the second floor, she stopped in surprise at the sight of Dawn trooping from the guest room to the master bedroom, her arms loaded down with clothes. “Somebody moving?” she asked with a knowing smile.
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