“Still waiting for that miracle?” He grinned.
“It means I’m done, Norm.”
Her simply stated pronouncement vanquished his grin. “You don’t mean done with the church? Don’t say that. There are other options.”
“I don’t want you to feel guilty about my decision in the least.”
“How can I not?”
“Don’t, Norm.”
“Take a furlough,” he said, anxious, “but don’t turn in your shield. You may be disillusioned by the church, but give God another chance.”
“I don’t think I’ll find God inside the church. If I find Him again, I think I’d rather find Him outside the church. We might be able to reconnect on neutral ground. It’ll take some getting used to. It’ll be hard on Olney.”
“Olney will work through it. I’ll have a talk with him.”
“No. Let me do it.” Truth was, she already prepared him.
“I’m sure, by now, he’s waiting outside.”
“Well, this is it.” Beebe put out a hand. It rested in Norm’s for a moment. While the dark afternoon loomed beyond the glass, she wound back around the board table toward the door.
When her hand rattled the knob, Norm rushed to say, “You may not think you touched us at Trydestone. Know that you have. Olney is just one example. There are others. Don’t forget about your Sunday morning walks with little Jonah. He’s your true-blue.”
Mentioning Jonah Young made her smile. The six-year old liked to meet her at her office door on Sunday mornings and walk her in to services. “Thanks, Norm. This is my first firing. It wasn’t so bad.”
“Aw, shucks, ma’am, credit’s gotta go to the quality of the person I had to work with.” He winked.
She adjourned their mutual admiration society on that note and stepped out into the hall, but not quickly enough for her peripheral vision to miss his crestfallen expression and his chin drop to his chest.
Closing the door softly, she found a worried Olney Jones waiting with his trusty dust mop and his trashcan on wheels. Olney was friend, custodian, member of Trydestone’s flock, and expectant to the point of pain. By the slump of his shoulders, he finally believed the outcome Beebe predicted: She was not the deacons’ pick.
Throughout the last few weeks when prospective pastors walked Trydestone’s halls, Beebe tried to ease Olney down the path that would ultimately lead to her resignation from the Blessed Lutheran Church In All Its Wisdom. (She tried to be less cynical in Olney’s presence, but was not always successful.)
Olney was the first church member she met who was not a deacon. Her first memory of him was kneeling before the monument sign out at the corner of the church yard, where the sidewalk met the street. He added her name, letter by letter, beneath the church’s name. She could imagine his misery when he replaced her name with Phillip Dixon’s. Given his duties at the church, she saw Olney on a daily basis. They knew a kinship. He correctly interpreted her sighs, struggles, and lackadaisical efforts when her dissolving faith worked against her. His never faltered.
Olney’s dull eyes followed Beebe’s approach. He fell into step alongside her. The dust mop hitched a ride on his cart, its one wheel squawking in opposition.
He was an older gentleman, his timidness oversized for his small frame. Olney appeared stooped as if Beebe’s battle with God hovered weightily over him. Cynicism aside, God did nothing, she wanted Olney to understand. What she felt was supreme indifference. It was a one-sided venture. That fact sparked an inkling of guilt. She was the reason Olney no longer stood tall.
Olney was a casualty of the mistake she made many years ago. The ramifications of which, she strangely felt, were just beginning to surface. She was never cut out to be a minister. She got that wrong. Her rebellious attitude proved that.
She pegged the church as a refuge for a young woman’s loneliness. As a minister, she would always have a church family within reach and be the guiding hands in its spiritual well-being. For a long while, she flourished. The blossom began dying on the vine during her last days in Kansas.
Beebe and Olney strode away from the board room without a word between them until they stared in at her office through the doorway.
“I’m going to need some boxes. Can you round up three, four? Not too big,” Beebe said.
Olney grumbled something, then disappeared.
Beebe walked over to the office window to again peer out at the lot, empty except for her red Ford Taurus. It sat forlorn in the small parking alcove set aside for the pastor’s car.
Olney returned, apologizing. He scrounged up only two decent boxes. Beebe gathered personal items and transferred them to the desk. Olney packed them. When Beebe’s activities slowed, Olney picked up the nameplate from the desk’s front edge.
“No, Olney, I don’t want that.” Along with her name on the engraved plate was the title she cast aside: Pastor. She took the nameplate from him and lay it face down on the oaken desktop.
His face fell. “Why can’t this be fixed?”
She laced compassion into her voice for his sake. “I know my giving up the church hurts you, my good, good friend, and I’m sorry.”
“But why?” Olney truly couldn’t understand. He was a simple man with simple fixes. Something for stains, something for shine, a squirt of something to replace elbow grease.
“Olney, please. We talked about this. We knew what was coming. I want you to make peace with it.”
“I won’t, Pastor Bee—”
She waved a hand, cutting him off. “Not pastor. Not anymore. Not ever again.” Then she tempered her tone. “Don’t you understand? I can’t find myself. I can’t find the pastor I used to be.”
Olney hung his head. She turned away from his grief, but from the corner of her eye, she saw Olney slip her engraved nameplate out of its wooden holder and tuck the plate in his left breast pocket, over his heart. He lay a hand on both.
For a moment, she squeezed her eyes tight, then opened them to scan the room. They slid from the extended desk drawers, to the closet with its door standing open, to the twin bookcases. There was nothing else she wanted. Everything with any thread of religious connotation was left in place for the incoming Phillip Dixon.
The packing was done. It took—she looked at her watch—less than ten minutes. Olney spent more time than that hunting down boxes.
She gave the carton on her desk a resolute thump. Another closed carton sat in a guest chair.
“Looks like I have everything. One box for each of us. You don’t mind helping me get these to the car?”
“I don’t want to, but I will.”
Olney Jones got one box up in his arms. Beebe Walker hoisted the other. The chubby woman and the slight man strolled side by side down the tiled corridor that would intersect the front hall and push her out into a blustery afternoon with her bosom drained of spirit.
* * *
Gauzy moonlight drizzled across the country road. Yates sat with Terri in what passed for transportation, his banged-up Jeep Cherokee. They were parked across from a cemetery and what Terri termed the caretaker’s house.
For the three-hour road trip, Yates bundled Terri into the back seat, cushioning her on all sides with blankets and pillows. She sat up now. Yates could almost feel Terri’s will to live slip from her body with each labored breath. An eerily cold sensation slithered over Yates’s shoulder, before being pulled through the driver’s window, lowered a few inches, and out. It made sense to Yates that nearness to all the natural haunts of a graveyard would lure her will away.
That spring, he drove Terri Miller to Larkspur, Michigan, to die. He knew why the woman of sixty-six would die. She had AIDS.
And not much time left. He didn’t know why the caretaker’s house. Why the cemetery. And he didn’t know why Larkspur, for that matter. Why would she come back to this place he learned just today was her hometown? It was possible an extremely old and quite faded wanted poster for her hung on the post office wall. The charge was levied thirty years ago, and she avoided the town since then.
This was the extent of his knowledge about her distant past. He asked her for more often enough over the last ten years. She could be one stubborn woman. Stubborn enough to disappear from his young life when school started each year, though he begged her not to. Tough enough to live on the streets.
Yates Strand shivered. “How long are we going to sit here?” By his calculations, they were close to their eventual destination.
“We’ll sit here until I’m ready.” Her squawk brought up a cough.
He tried to keep a small pot of anger brewing over her contrariness because if he didn’t, he’d cry like a baby.
After another few minutes, the upstairs light was doused. It was early, but the house slept. Yates watched Terri through the rearview mirror.
“Okay, let’s go into town.” Her words eked out through a held breath and the uncompromising pain brought by the movement of leaning back against the pillows.
He bit his lip. Her condition was so fragile.
The Jeep sputtered and shook, then started. Its headlights cut through the darkness. He followed the road that veered closer to Lake Huron and the heart of Larkspur’s compact downtown.
Yates still wore his nursing duds. He went straight to Gaven House that March afternoon, as he did every afternoon after school, to check on Terri.
Gaven House was a large residence in an old and deteriorating neighborhood. The house doubled as a hospice for people suffering the last stages of AIDS and who would receive no care elsewhere without the benefit of insurance. Gaven House was a privately run charity ward. More than charity, Eddie Gaven provided love and comfort. Eddie Gaven afforded respect to the people he and other volunteers nursed. He was afflicted with the disease himself. Well, the earlier version. Eddie carried the HIV virus.
Gaven House was a blessing. Gaven House gave Terri a home and a level of care. Yates volunteered several hours each week. He owed the establishment whatever he could give.
Today, and for as long as her energy lasted, Terri promised to help him cram. Yates, twenty-three and on track to graduate from college, was scheduled to take the nursing boards tomorrow and the next day. Instead, when he arrived at Gaven House, he found Eddie out front.
Eddie pushed himself off the porch steps and met Yates halfway down the front walk. He carried his smile with him. But smile or not, Yates’s heart beat at a rib-breaking crescendo. Eddie was heading Yates off. That could only mean one thing: Something was wrong with Terri.
“What happened?” Yates’s voice shook.
“It’s nothing like that.” Eddie waved Yates’s fearful thoughts away. “Terri and I had a long confab today. A long, long confab. Hell, she wore me out.”
“What about?”
“Terri wants to be moved.”
“Moved? Where? Why?”
“She’ll tell you. Her mind is made up. I can’t hold her here. I can’t force her to stay. This is what she wants.”
When Yates entered Terri’s small room, he found her sitting in an old recliner wedged in the corner beside her bed. She presented him with a piece of paper, the results of an internet search.
Had she rallied enough that day to sit at the computer? he wondered. Gaven House kept one in the common area. Then he noticed the print date encoded along the paper’s bottom edge. A month ago. She’d been significantly stronger in early February.
He scanned the sheet that provided driving directions to another hospice, along with other general information. “What’s this?”
“We’re going there. Get me ready.”
“Why? Why are you doing this?”
“Come on. We don’t have a lot of time.” Her attempt to collapse the recliner’s footrest lacked the strength to complete the task.
“Talk to me, Terri. Tell me what prompted this.” Yates looked around. The extra pillows and blankets Eddie promised for the move lay on the foot of Terri’s bed. These items represented Eddie’s firm conviction that nothing would alter Terri’s decision. Stubbornness would never drain out of her.
“I’ll tell you along the way.” For a woman whose clothing hung on her slight frame, she could be wearisome.
“But does it have to be right now?”
“Yes, today. We’ve got a long trip, and I’m high maintenance.” She paused to catch her breath. “You can see the place closes at nine.”
“This place is in Larkspur?”
“I know. Get me ready.”
The full brunt of realization dawned. He thought he prepared himself for her eventual death, but this option never entered the realm of possibility. This was unfair. “Terri, you can’t do this. No.”
“Yes, I can, and you’ll help me. Now get moving. Stat.”
He stared, he knew, with sad spaniel eyes. She commented on those the first day they met. He’d been thirteen and scared.
“This is the nursing life, Yates. Get used to it. We can cram for those boards along the way.”
So, this had been her plan all along, Yates thought.
Now they crept forward, looking at the numbers painted, nailed, and otherwise affixed to Larkspur’s downtown businesses. He steered the Jeep to the curb, several parking spots back from the hospice named Crossroads. It also doubled as a homeless shelter, senior center—and based on the advertisement written on the sandwich board out front—a bingo hall on Tuesday nights. This was Tuesday. The place looked full.
In an earlier day, the old bricked storefront looked like it operated as a department store. It was located on Battlefield Road, which ran parallel to the main drag, and intersected with Standhope. The street names signified the weighty counter-pull of life. In Terri’s case, though, she could neither stand, nor hope; Battlefield spoke for itself.
They sat and watched lights again, and the clock. Twenty-two minutes before nine.
“Should I get you inside?” he asked.
“No. Let’s wait.”
“What for?”
“For the people to clear out.”
He gave a slight nod. He’d honor her pride and privacy issues.
With these few moments, he reminisced one last time about the past, about the tail end of his childhood, about summers at his house, about her never-wavering impact on his life since the car accident, when she saved his father with her own nursing skills.
“Every day. Every day of your life, Yates,” his father, Arthur, told him, “pray for Terri Miller. Thank God she helped me.”
Yates stood by his father’s hospital bed when Arthur accomplished so much with a few simple words for the wandering Terri. “Come back and see us,” he said.
An invisible tether tugged at Yates. He sensed its tug at his father and Terri, too. A handful of hospital visits took them through that last week of summer. When school let out each year thereafter, Terri Miller returned, and she stayed until classes took up again.
Yates prayed for her still. It was natural that she came to him when the merciless disease put up a better fight than a warrior-of-one could combat. They were close, like family, but not.
Yates turned some in the front seat. “Remember the summer I learned guitar, me and Bobby from up the street? We were pretty good, huh?”
He saw Terri’s grin. “You two stank that first summer. But I admit, your fingering improved. I said so the n
ext June. You and Bobby stuck to it.”
“When school was ready to start that first summer, I said, ‘All we need is a drummer.’ Remember, you were there.” The conversation took place in the garage.
“I was right there on the stool by the workbench,” she said.
For a male in his first year of teenage life, sensitive Yates accepted Terri without reservation. She was the cushion of adult supervision that summer, since his mother began working again at the county library’s research desk. Terri checked in, hung for a while, like that day in the garage, then left Bobby and him alone to admire her because they knew she lived life on the lam. For Yates, it was more. He loved her outright. She saw through him at the hospital, clear through to his soul and his sadness at even the thought of losing his father.
“I still can’t believe what you did. The next June, you arrived in a pickup with a drum set in the back. Where’d you find that lady?”
“I told all this before. She owed me a favor, so I asked her to drive me with the drums.”
“Yeah, but you took lessons. You were awesome, Terri.”
“A natural,” she said. “Who knew?”
“Now, that was one radical summer.” Yates and Bobby called themselves Metal Mouths, for the braces. “The next summer, there wasn’t much time for music. Bobby and I were business magnates. Still using Metal Mouths. Metal Mouths Lawn Service.”
“I cut more grass that summer than I ever imagined.”
“But it was fun.”
“It was fun, but not as much fun as the next summer.”
“I couldn’t believe when Dad came home with that ice cream truck. Mom had a fit, but we drove it every day.” Yates’s mother’s fit was quickly curbed by his father. Such a curbing was not standard practice in the Strand household. “It was you, me, and Bobby that summer, all summer long.”
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