Proper Goodbye
Connie Chappell
© Copyright Connie Chappell 2016
Published by Black Rose Writing
www.blackrosewriting.com
© 2016 by Connie Chappell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.
First digital version
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Print ISBN: 978-1-61296-780-6
PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING
www.blackrosewriting.com
Print edition produced in the United States of America
Your Wildest Dreams
Once upon a time
Once when you were mine
I remember skies
Reflecting in your eyes
I wonder where you are
I wonder if you think about me
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams
Lyrics by Justin David Hayward, lead singer and guitarist
in the rock band, The Moody Blues
The theme of reflecting on one’s dreams and memories, especially for lovers, is one that runs through Proper Goodbye.
The fondest memories I have of my father are the moments I found him captivated by two black-and-white photographs of my mother. So young, she was pregnant with their first child, not me, but my brother David.
While he studied these pictures with white, scalloped edges, music played in the background. The love songs seemed to transport him to another place in time where he’d been the photographer, a young husband and sailor in bell-bottom pants. In the image, an unseen wind blows Mother’s hair and accentuates her pregnancy. It was easy to see how his memories entranced him again.
His unwavering devotion and a scene very similar to the one shared here made their way into Proper Goodbye.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Author Note
Forget-Me-Nots
Farewell
Propositions
Wandering Delirium
Elephant in the Room
Old Ways in Good Repair
Road to Larkspur
Dead Ends
Angel’s Prayer
Baptism By Fire
Pedestal Worthy
Graveside Reunion
Lies at Sunset
The Day After
Forgiveness
Duties
A Season Not To Forget
Companionship
Barleycorn to the Rescue
Offense and Defense
Another Emotion Visited
Sunset
Wigged Out
Tormented Days
Change a Memory
Small Town Fears
Secondhand Grave
Where Do Old Tombstones Go?
Theme of Family
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Forget-Me-Nots
Sunrise quietly made its way into Abigail Walker’s life. Its hazy, golden rays eased into her bedroom and prodded her to open an eye. In the breath of a second before Abigail complied, she sensed what she would see. If the dawn could do more than prod, the worrying dawn would have said that its peek around the forget-me-nots printed on cotton curtains in the room next door found the child’s bed cold and empty.
A foe in the darkness had not snatched the child away. There was no reason for alarm, no reason to rouse her husband Cliff, lying beside her, from sleep.
Abigail opened her eyes to smile at a scene that was repetitive in her life: Her nine-year old daughter Beebe was curled into the cushion of the oversized chair spaced little more than the width of a nightstand away.
Folding back the covers, Abigail slipped her feet to the rug. She wore a pretty pair of mint-green pajamas. When she stood, the hems of the silky pant legs dropped down, skimming her ankles. Two short steps brought her within reach of her daughter. She lay a hand on her shoulder. The child stirred. Her gray eyes had just focused on her mother’s when Abigail said, “Morning, sweetie. Make room.”
With their coordinated efforts, Abigail managed to slip onto the chair with Beebe half-sitting, half-laying on her, her knees drawn up, and safely held in place by Abigail’s arms. This maneuver was easier achieved when Beebe was smaller.
“Daddy asleep?”
Their conversation was held in low whispers, more because the gentle moment called for it rather than to preserve the peace for the sleeping man.
“You know him. I’m not sure he would wake if the bed fell through the ceiling into the living room,” Abigail said. “Hopefully, they would land sunny-side up.” Both of them giggled.
Abigail had long since stopped asking her daughter about the circumstances that brought her into her parents’ room. Beebe simply didn’t sleep well. Cause unknown. She admitted to no bad dreams. Neither did the dark or anything in it frighten her.
Beebe’s wakeful nights occurred with no predictability. They weren’t as noticeable on mornings when Abigail found the cheerful one-year old in her crib, sitting up before she entered. The crib had at least contained the child where, when the time came, the standard bed did not.
Their chair was angled with its back to the window. Dawn extinguished the night, but cradled between the wingbacks, mother and daughter still sat in shadow. “I remember the first time I got up and found you asleep in the hall with your dolly.” It was a ragamuffin thing Beebe adored. “You’d climbed out of bed and played on the floor next to the night light. Do you remember sitting on that stool in the bathroom to watch Daddy shave?”
The head against Abigail’s shoulder nodded. “Why’d I stop?”
“Kindergarten. Catching the bus. One day, I realized you were more than merely smart, you were an exceptionally bright little girl.”
“What’d I do?” Abigail could tell her daughter smiled as she spoke.
“You were three when you carried the stool to this chair and used it for the climb up.”
“You didn’t make me go back to bed?”
“The chair was better than the chilly, hard floor. At least I had an eye on you and was pleased you used the flannel shirt Daddy left in the chair as a blanket.” As the midnight journeys continued, the mother’s trained ear, alert to sounds in the house and her child’s restless movements, became desensitized to the occasions when Beebe settled down in the chair.
“Don’t need the stool now,” Beebe said, her arm tightening around her mother, which Abigail sensed to mean nothing in this world could separate them.
“That’s because my bright little girl grew longer legs.” She kissed the top of Beebe’s head.
Neither of them mentioned how Abigail always kept a throw and small pillow in the crook of the chair arm for her daughter’s nocturnal visits. Neither of them mentioned how someday, Beebe would truly outgrow the chair. She was almost there now. Soon, she would be ten. Double digits. A division in time.
With the mother’s nudge, the two began to move, unfolding themselves, like twin butterflies emerging from the same cocoon, their faces images of the other.
Barefoot, neither of them bothered to step over that one creaky floorboard on their way to the door. Cliff Walker would rise only at the alarm clock’s ringing persistence. He’d push his feet into battered slippers and begin his day without ceremony. No stretching, no moaning, no yawning.
Then one day, he’d scuff across the bedroom in the trailing shadow of his child’s abandoned habit. Without a glimmer of conscious thought, Beebe would forsake overnight stays in the chair.
Farewell
After forty-six years on God’s earth and nineteen years with the church, Pastor Beebe Walker was sacked on the first Monday in March.
She couldn’t say the turn of events was totally unexpected that afternoon. From her office window inside Trydestone Lutheran Church, she watched two men out in the parking lot. They shook hands at the bumper of a silver Toyota. The Toyota bore Tennessee plates and belonged to Phillip Dixon, the man who would move to Cassel, Maryland, and replace her in the pulpit. The other man, Norm Rogers, was Trydestone’s head deacon. Another few strands of dialogue passed between the men. Through the glass, she clearly recognized the future camaraderie they would know. Deacon Rogers genially slapped Phillip Dixon on the arm, then turned and hurried to the church’s side entrance.
Trydestone’s pulpit had not been given without reservation when she moved to Maryland from Kansas nine months before. Her arrangement with Trydestone consisted of filling an existing void as interim pastor while the search for a permanent one ensued. She had a better-than-even shot at snaring the job. The problem was, a rather ominous void existed simultaneously inside of her.
Today, Beebe’s focus remained fixed on the Toyota as it exited the lot with its thin line of exhaust trailing behind. When it was gone from view, she pulled in a deep breath that straightened her backbone. By now, she thought Norm must be reseated in the deacons’ board room, where two other deacons waited, all worthy representatives of Trydestone. A glance at her watch told her it was time for her appointment with the search committee.
There was a strategy to the order of the appointments that day. The committee met with Dixon first, made the offer, received acceptance, then brought Beebe in to relay the bad news.
Slipping away from the window, she followed a dimly lit hallway to the board room. Once inside, she was surprised to find Norm Rogers alone, standing at another expanse of windows, looking out. The demeanor in the room felt casual, not what she anticipated. Twisting his wide torso slightly toward her when she entered, he said, “Come in. The wind’s picking up.”
A large meadow adjoined this side of the church. It was open and flat. A rush of brittle, dry leaves whisked through the air, then dropped to tumble against tufts of field grass, listing to the right, surrendering to the wind.
Beebe took a place beside Norm. His fists were bunched in the pockets of dress slacks. The top button of his shirt was undone; the knot in his necktie loosened. A sports coat lay folded over a nearby chair back.
Matching Norm’s relaxed stance, Beebe slipped her hands into the side pockets of the dress she wore. The curious discomfort she felt in the last weeks and months was oddly at bay. When Norm offered no more than the weather report, she said, “You released Raymond and Stan early.” The Morrow brothers were the other two deacons who made up the committee.
“Yeah. Didn’t need them really. They were just dragging me down.” He turned his teasing eyes her way. “In all honesty, it seemed like triple teaming, given the circumstances, because, Beebe, my friend, as of now,” he said, draping an arm around her shoulders, “you’re fired. I hope that doesn’t come as too much of a shock.”
“I’m glad I heard it from you, not from someone at Lutheran Central.” Her hand patted his before he withdrew his meaty forearm. “That’s how it went in Kansas.”
“Kansas. Yeah. That was a tough sell.”
Trydestone’s board of deacons knew about Kansas. When church elders removed her from Kansas and sent her to Maryland to be Trydestone’s interim pastor, they forwarded a work history composed of their words. Norm and Beebe sat on many occasions while she reprised the story, adding a dalliance of emotion here and there, and not just sideswiping the heartache.
The more she rehashed the Kansas story, either verbally or in the privacy of her thoughts, the more cynical the telling became. The Blessed Lutheran Church In All Its Wisdom sent Beebe to Bixler, Kansas, with an assignment. She was to infiltrate the four Lutheran churches there. (On those occasions when cynicism ran rampant, she used infiltrate rather than counsel as a descriptor.) Her mission was to set the four churches on a path to merge into a single, more viable one. She was not only the emissary for the Blessed Lutheran Church In All Its Wisdom, but a replacement pastor at one of the four.
She spoon-fed the Bixler Lutherans. She broke down barriers. It took eighteen hard-fought months, but eventually, the membership at all four churches accepted the idea. The actual vote was sixty-six percent in favor. Majority rules.
Her intervention perpetuated the future survival of the Lutheran church in Bixler, creating a more potent vessel to complete God’s work. She made Bixler’s community of Lutherans understand that the day of a landscape dotted with a multitude of church steeples had disappeared. Their losses were numbered alongside the quaint corner drugstores and corner groceries.
Corner bars seemed a bit more prolific in Bixler. She nearly frequented one last July when she drove east with her suitcases packed and riding in the trunk.
Her disappointment at being relocated rose to the point of anger and tears. Church elders blindsided her with the news of her relocation after the merger’s success initially brought nothing but accolades. They couched their decision in the guise of a reward. She balked nonetheless. Yes, Trydestone was a healthy, growing church, but she wanted the Bixler church.
Her heart and soul were wedged inside that living, breathing triumph. As an elder on high explained, excising her from the Bixler church was strategic. (Elder on high and excising: yep, more cynicism.) The church’s post-merger stratagem provided just compensation for the thirty-four percent who disagreed with the plan, but had it stuffed down their throats. Not seeing Beebe in the pulpit made the merger more palatable for those in the minority. Less palatable for Beebe was the chunk of choking deception caught in her throat. It never entered her mind that she would not be the one to take the reins once the merger was nothing but a bad taste. That measure of masked deceit she laid at the elders’ feet.
Norm fished out Beebe’s feelings over the last few months, concurrently with Tyrdestone’s search efforts. The elders expected her to be a shoo-in. However, a congregation expected its pastor not to be shoehorned in. That’s where the Morrow brothers stood, she suspected. Norm, though, wanted Beebe’s wounds to heal. He counseled her to accept Trydestone. Every heart is asked at some point to leave something or someone behind while it yearns and aches for a different outcome. Despite her attitude, Norm encouraged her to remain in the pulpit as part of his recovery plan for her. She agreed, but knew she only gave Trydestone her best imitation of a good pastor.
“I can’t get it back, Norm,” she said one evening after a board meeting broke up and the others went home. By “it,” she meant the internal fire necessary to ignite her faith.
“Politics was played back in Kansas. I won’t deny that. The situation was difficult. How could it not be? People’s live
s. Their faith. Their support of their church. Changing times counts for a lot of it, but you fought through it all and left Bixler better than you found it. You did that.”
She shot him a sideways glance. “The church betrayed me, Norm, after I did its bidding. I wanted God to step in. I wanted a miracle.”
After a thoughtful pause, he said, “It is my profound opinion that God goes silent on us all at some time or other.”
She allowed the words the insightful layperson spoke to the ordained minister to sink in and make their mark. She remembered them again today while they watched eerily brilliant sunbeams shine through a hole punched into thick clouds, the color of an ugly bruise. Then as God had gone silent, the opening to the heavens slammed shut and the afternoon mimicked the darkness that shadowed Beebe’s heart.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” she mumbled to herself.
As if adopting the little dog’s persona, her funny friend scratched the skin behind his ear. “No, we’re not.” The tone Norm used wasn’t humorous. It said, that’s the point. “You know, your first few months here were fine. I thought that.”
“I tried, but I couldn’t let go despite the fact that Trydestone offered everything I wanted in Kansas. Everything. It was billed as the prize. But the prize was a misfit for the battle. They didn’t mesh,” she said. “This work I’ve chosen shouldn’t be about me, I know. But my feelings have come front and center. And yet, in that framework, I’ve lost myself entirely.” The sentiment she described gave her a jittery feeling as if electricity prickled her spine.
“I’m here, Beebe, if you ever want to talk. I’ll continue to pray for you.”
Norm’s words sounded like a conclusion to the issue. Beebe’s conclusion ran another course entirely. It was apparent to her that an undercurrent of cynicism doesn’t work from the pulpit. It’ll get you fired every time. Once was enough for her. “You know what this means.”
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