As a teenager, his one real interest was church. He wanted to become a pastor, and he spent hours reading his Bible. Sometimes Janine would find him, after school was completed and homework was finished, lying on his bed asleep with his open Bible on his chest. He memorized large portions of scripture and talked a lot about seminary. Jim wanted his son to have a more profitable future, and he insisted that he get a degree from the state university first.
Keith worked his way through school by taking the master control night shift at the local TV station. After a few months, several photographers walked in and quit as part of a power play against the general manager. The GM responded by handing one of the cameras to Keith. “You think you can operate this thing? A tractor-trailer full of cows just turned over on the Interstate. Take this camera and bring me back footage of cows running up and down I-10.” Keith took the camera and the cables and the keys to one of the station’s old trucks and went to the scene of the accident where he was able to successfully photograph terrified bovines dodging both Animal Control agents and the sheriff’s deputies who had been sent to retrieve them while equally terrified drivers did their best to avoid hitting the animals. When he returned to the station, the GM reviewed his tape and then announced, “Congratulations, Kid. You’re now a photographer. Of course, you’ll still have to do master control too until I can get somebody else hired.”
So began Keith’s career. He was an amazing photographer because he was able to capture not just the images, but also the emotions and the personalities of his subjects, and he soon proved to be talented in all areas of news. By the time he was twenty-two—two weeks before his college graduation, he was promoted to night-time news director.
A month after graduation he met a pretty young intern named Cassie. Cassie was one of many girls who interned at the station hoping that they would land a permanent spot on the news desk and ultimately become the next Diane Sawyer. But she was different from the others he had met—she was intelligent but not overbearing and sweet without being weak. Like Keith, she had grown up in a Christian home, and when she was a teenager she had thought it might be fun to be a pastor’s wife.
Keith was instantly smitten. Two months after meeting Cassie he asked her to marry him; three months later they did marry in a small but sweet ceremony in church with all their family members and a few close friends present. Two months after that, Cassie found out that she was pregnant, and Keith was elated. He started looking for a small house with a yard that he could buy cheaply and fix up. Two more months passed and Cassie was diagnosed with leukemia; one month later she and the baby were dead.
Kris remembered standing at the cemetery with her brother on the day of the funeral. She had been so heartbroken for him that day. He did not speak during the service, but he kept wiping the tears away from his eyes with his left hand. Under his right arm he held his Bible—the one with his name on it that his parents had given him for his sixteenth birthday. Just before the casket was lowered into the grave, Keith gently laid his Bible on top of its lid and buried his faith with his wife and his child. From that day forward, he never spoke of God again unless he was using profanity.
Everything about Keith changed after that. Saying that he could not stand to stay in Phoenix, he applied as a photo journalist with a cable news network and was hired. His conservative hair cut gave way to shoulder-length locks. His conservative clothing morphed into jeans and T-shirts with odd conspiracy theory slogans. Each time Kris saw him, which was more and more infrequently, he appeared to be sporting yet another huge tattoo on his hairy, tanned arms. Even so, in spite of all his body art and general messiness, he was still one of the most handsome men she had ever seen.
He had an interesting career. Keith had covered almost every war and rumor of war which had occurred in the last decade and most of the natural disasters. His work had taken him across the nation and across the globe. He had met presidential candidates and Midwestern tornado survivors—hurricane victims in Haiti and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He won numerous awards.
But over the last few years Keith had become increasingly paranoid. He was consumed with the notion that the federal government was declaring war on the American people and was involved in a nefarious scheme to purposely bankrupt the country and enslave the citizenry. After eleven years, he suddenly left his job, cashed out his pension plan and his bank accounts, and purchased a small cabin “somewhere near the Lincoln National Forest.” There he waited for “the end”—whatever that might be. Keith apparently believed that one day, for reasons known only to him, federal agents would storm his small property, and he would die in a glorious firefight defending his final home. But Kris was pretty certain that when “the end” finally did come for Keith, it would happen in the early morning hours when he was alone after consuming a lethal quantity of alcohol.
Kris had been so overwhelmed by her own problems for the last few years that she had not had a whole lot of time to think about her brother. Still, sometimes in church she would see his face, and she would ask God to help him. But she held out little hope that there was anything that even God could do for Keith—after all, Keith really did not want His help.
Chapter 8
As soon as she had gotten the phone call from her mother, Kris had immediately reserved a ground floor apartment in Building 2. Building 2 was located within comfortable walking distance from the main gate and the dining hall. Since Jim and Janine would be walking everywhere, she wanted to make sure that they were well located so that they would not have to go further in any one direction than was absolutely necessary. Holding that unit meant that she had to get their paperwork signed immediately, though. On Sunday afternoon, she drove out to the house with the lease agreement, the disclosures, and the inventory forms. The inventory would take the longest—every item in the house had to be listed and described and logged and cataloged into the FMPD personal assets inventory list. Her parents had collected so much stuff over 45 years of marriage—the inventory was going to be awful. Kris felt tired just thinking about it.
She had called first; they knew she was coming. When Janine opened the door, however, she did not seem very excited to see Kris.
“Hi, Mom,” Kris kissed the side of her mother’s face, and although Janine returned her greeting, she was very quiet. She was so subdued that when they were both seated at the dining table in front of the forms, Kris commented to her mother, “You know when I left here the other day I really did not think that you were going to do this. What made you change your mind?”
“Honestly, your father called several of the agents he has worked with over the years about listing the house. He even talked to Brad Stillmer—you know your dad and Brad don’t get along very well but Brad has one of the top agencies in Phoenix. They all told him the same thing—we could realistically expect to have the house on the market for two years while we are waiting for an offer. With Social Security being eliminated in 90 days, there is no way we can go on that long. We won’t have any money to live on. So your dad told me to call you.”
“I am really sorry, Mom. I do think that you will like this place, though. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t…. Is Dad here—because both of you need to sign these forms.”
“He’s outside trimming the plants. He still has a lot of misgivings about this, so don’t push him too hard.”
Janine walked outside to call her husband. Kris could hear the television set blaring in the next room—it was tuned to the World News Network—Jim’s favorite channel.
“Hundreds of deaths have been reported in the Gulf States over the past week. Residents of the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana are bracing themselves as an unknown illness spreads through the region. Those affected reportedly experience, in the earliest stages, weakness resulting in difficulty walking, standing and breathing. Severe upper respiratory problems have been reported throughout the region—in hundreds of cases these symptoms have resulted in coma and death. Regio
nal hospitals and local physicians are reportedly being overwhelmed with new patients, and physicians are unable to determine the exact cause of this airborne illness, which is believed to be a virulent new strain of flu.”
Kris stared at the images of suffering patients admitted to Gulf Coast hospitals.
“Krissy, where did you go?” she heard her mother call.
“I’m in here, Mom. Have you seen this? It’s horrible. It looks like some new aggressive strain of flu.”
“Yes,” her father answered, “that’s been going on for days down there. This is why I get a flu shot every year. Do you have some paperwork for us?”
“Sure do,” Kris turned her back on the television and returned to the dining room. “I have the life-lease contract here, along with the application set of paperwork. I have marked each place that both of you need to sign.”
Jim glanced through the life-lease contract. “These contracts are just like mine, I suppose. You can take the time to read every word, but you can’t change anything so what difference does it make?”
“Even so, Dad, I am leaving you a copy of everything and the brochures. The community has a lot of rules about everything—when the laundry is picked up, how to report maintenance issues—everything. You can’t even replace a light bulb on your own. I really encourage you and Mom to read all of the paperwork carefully, and, of course, you can ask me if you have any questions about anything.”
Jim and Janine each signed the life-lease. “Now on this form I just need the name of your bank, the bank account numbers and routing numbers and the approximate balances.” Kris pointed to where they should input the information. Janine got out the checkbooks so that she could fill in the forms.
“And finally on this form, I need the make, model and model year of the cars and the VIN numbers.” Jim took those forms outside to get the information Kris had requested.
Kris turned to her mother. “I know this is difficult, but the last thing we have to do is inventory the house.”
“Inventory the what? What are you talking about?”
“You are transferring the furnished house to FMPD. That means we have to break down exactly what the furnishings are—all of the furnishings. It’s the government—they are real sticklers for this kind of stuff so we have to make a list of everything in here before the house is transferred.”
“I assumed that we would be taking some of the furnishings with us,” Janine looked very depressed.
“Mom, the units come fully furnished, and they are small—only about five hundred square feet. None of your furniture would fit.”
The two women started in the kitchen, counting the cutlery—service for eight of one set, service for twelve of another. Over forty-five years Janine had collected multiple sets of dishes—some had been gifts from her own mother and still others had been gifts from Kris. In her new residence she would not have room to store any of them. She put aside the small decorative tea pot with matching cream picture and sugar bowl that Kris had brought her back as a gift from her vacation to visit Ben’s family in Connecticut—she would take that with her to W. The other items were counted and logged into the FMPD household inventory spreadsheet on Kris’ laptop.
The kitchen took an hour and a half, and then they moved into the entry way. The only items in this room were the round marble table that usually held an arrangement of fresh cut roses and the ornate old grandfather clock from Germany. The clock, which had been handed down to Janine from her great grandfather, was a stately antique. The wood was heavy mahogany; the top had been carefully carved so that tiny smiling baby cherubim flanked the edges—one on each side of the face. The large brass pendulum swung evenly behind the glass that protected it from the elements; the edges had been meticulously hand painted with gold. On the hour, every hour, the clock played Brahms Lullaby for one full minute. It was a one of a kind, priceless piece, handed down from parent to child, generation after generation.
Kris had always been fascinated by the clock. Some of her earliest memories involved standing in front of that clock watching the pendulum swing in its rhythmic motion and hearing the tick-tock as the hands moved around the great gilded face. When she was five, her mother had promised her that she would give her that clock as a wedding present. Kris still remembered the tingly feeling she had felt at the time—the pure joy of knowing that one day that clock would stand in her home and sing its pretty melody. Keith was about a year old, and as the days passed after the promise, Kris had become concerned that when he got older he might not be willing to let the clock leave the house, so Kris had taken a key and carefully scratched her initials, in a very small scrawl, into the base of the clock as proof of her ownership. If Janine had found them—and she almost certainly had—she had never said anything about them. As Kris knelt down she could still see the tiny KM which she had carved over thirty-five years ago.
“That was always your clock, Kris. Take it with you to your apartment. It has been in the family for generations; I can’t see just giving it to somebody else.”
“I always loved this clock so much—but I can’t take it. My unit is only two hundred square feet. I didn’t even have space to unpack the boxes I brought with me when I moved in—there is no way that I can squeeze this in.”
“I always wanted to be able to give you this as a wedding present. I spent so much time thinking about and planning your wedding when you were a little girl. I am so sorry that we never got to share that together.”
“I know. I used to spend hours thinking about what it would be like to get married—about my dress, about my first home. It just never worked out. Ben and I thought about getting married, but the time was never right, and then the market crashed, and he was gone.”
“There are lots of men in the world besides Ben. I never wanted you to marry Ben,” her mother’s tone was very firm.
“I know that you never could stand him, but you didn’t know him. Ben had a lot of good qualities.”
“I knew everything about Ben that I needed to know. He was a self-serving flake. From what you have told me he still is.”
Kris looked directly at her mother. “No, you didn’t know him. In the seventeen years that we were together, you never let him come to this house even one time—not for Christmas, not for my birthday, not for anything. Do you have any idea how difficult that made things for me? He was my life-partner and my business partner and every time I wanted to visit my family I had to say, ‘I’m going to see my parents, but, sorry, you can’t come.’”
“I’m sure you never said that to Ben even once. And you knew why he couldn’t come over. You were living together unmarried in sin. I was not going to encourage that by letting him come over and hang out as if he had some right to be here. He didn’t. The whole situation was godless and wrong.”
Kris shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. Ben and I were in a committed relationship. We stayed together a lot longer than a lot of married couples do. This whole ‘you need a marriage certificate’ thing is just a generational idea that you have because when you were young, people didn’t live together. Now everybody lives together, and nobody thinks it’s wrong except you.”
Now it was Janine’s turn to disagree, “When I was young, Woodstock was going on. My generation was getting high and having sex outdoors in the mud. So don’t talk to me about being old-fashioned. This is not generational—this is about what God’s word says about how people should live.”
“No, it’s just about how you interpret it. You think God would have been happier if I had spent all of those years working like a slave totally alone? I believe that God wants His children to be happy. I’m a child of God, and He loves me just the way I am,” Kris repeated the portion of the Believer’s Victory Chant that she recited to herself when she felt insecure.
“You’re a child of mine too, and I love you just the way you are, but that doesn’t mean that I approve of the way you live, and neither does God. God doesn’t bless sin, and when you insist
on living in ways that directly contradict what He has told us in His word, you cut yourself off from the life that He has for you. The truth is, if you had been willing to stay alone for a while, rather than wasting all of those years on Ben, you would probably have met a great guy and gotten married. But that was never possible because Ben was always in the picture, and you were always in a ‘committed’ relationship with an unreliable, selfish dope.”
Kris just stared at her mother. The two of them had had this exact conversation probably twenty or thirty times since the day she had met Ben. It used to enrage Kris so much that she would leave the house when her mother started, but today she was just tired. Ben was gone; she was alone; life was a disappointing mess. So why were they arguing over this again?
“Well, Ben is gone now and married to somebody else, and I am totally alone, which is probably how I’ll be for the rest of my life, so you and God can both be happy. And I don’t know why you bother to even bring this up since it’s all in the past anyway.”
She clicked the inventory list and entered the description—one antique grandfather clock, imported from Germany, musical. “Dad never came back with the papers on the cars. I need to go find out what happened to him because I’m going to have to leave soon so that I can get ready to go back to work tomorrow.”
She walked outside to find her dad. She needed to talk to him anyway before leaving their house this night, and now would be a good time. Jim was standing outside by the pool hand-watering the rose bushes with the garden hose.
“Did you get those forms filled out?” she asked as she walked up to him.
He used the hose to point in the direction of the paperwork; he had laid it down on the patio table.
W: The Planner, The Chosen Page 9
