Forever Friends (14 page)

With that, Charlotte thought of the cookbook committee, Nadine, a few others.

“You owe them more than just this angry letter. You owe them an explanation, and I'm not sure you have a clear one, even for yourself.”

Marion was very directed, very focused.

“Why are you leaving the ministry?” she asked pointedly.

Charlotte felt the tears gather and fall.

“Because I can't believe they treated Lamont this way. I can't believe that they would make a woman memorialize her husband outside because she didn't feel welcome in her church anymore.” The words choked in her throat.

“You never took away her welcome. That group of women you socialize with never took away her welcome.
Nobody made your parishioner feel that way.” She stopped and started again.

“Granted, those men had no right to do what they did, but they did not represent the entire church. You've said yourself that the others in the congregation rallied around this family, especially in the end.”

Then the counselor sat up in her chair and leaned into her client. “And really, Charlotte, you were actually shocked by how they responded to this young man? Come on,” she said, resting her chin in her hands, “you're not that naive about church folks, are you?”

Charlotte turned away. “No,” she whispered. “I know; I've known.” She hesitated, examining herself for answers. Then she glanced up and noticed the picture of the gardener, the one her therapist had kept on her wall for years.

She looked over the painting, recalling how much purpose and direction it had brought her through the past couple of years. Then she spoke of her pain again.

“I'm just tired of everything feeling so barren all the time. I'm tired of planting seeds and watching the ground, and adding a little water and watching the ground, and putting on some fertilizer and watching the ground, and never seeing anything. I'm tired of chopping the weeds and dancing around flat dirt and tending and never seeing anything. I just need more.”

There was a pause between the two women.

“What about your father?” Marion asked at that point.

Charlotte was taken aback by an attempt to connect the two situations.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Have you had any more dreams?” Marion responded.

Charlotte considered her recent nightly rest, the pictures in her mind, the journaling, but she remembered nothing new. She couldn't think of a new stage in her dream analysis. She shook her head.

“So, according to your dreams, you still have not reunited with your father, you've still not gotten together? You always manage to get sidetracked, and he's still an enormous, looming figure in the scenes?”

Charlotte thought about the question, having had no recent dream to consider. The previous ones had all been similar—her father, a larger-than-life presence, unapproachable, unavailable, somewhere in the scene, while Charlotte was always involved in some sort of decision-making process, some distraction, something that kept her from going to her dad.

“Why do you think you can never get to your father?” Marion asked.

“I don't know,” the pastor answered.

Marion waited, but there was no other response.

She answered her own question. “Is it possible that you're afraid that if you do finally get to him, finally find your way to him, that you'll discover that he really isn't the man you think he is? That he didn't just turn you and your sister down when you needed him because he was busy or uncaring but rather because he really wouldn't have been able to change the way things went anyway?” She seemed reluctant but determined to analyze her client's dreams. “Is it possible
that just as you have been gravely disappointed in the men in your church, in the institution itself, that you've stayed away from your father all these years because you've worried that you'll be gravely disappointed in him?”

Charlotte was confused. “But I've already been disappointed in him. When I needed him, he turned me down. How could I be more disappointed than that?” She sincerely wanted answers.

“Yes,” Marion replied, “you were disappointed then.” She did not even notice that their designated time together had passed. “But I think there may still be a part of you that believes that if he had taken the two of you, if he had been in the home, if he had done anything, life would have been different.” She spoke delicately, gently, the words a quiet possibility.

“I wonder if you haven't given your father magical properties, made him bigger than he really is.” She took a breath. “And the truth is, maybe life would have been different. Maybe Serena wouldn't have died, maybe your mother would have gotten sober a lot earlier.”

She stopped briefly and then continued. “But maybe nothing would have been different. Maybe there still would have been heartbreak and sorrow and death. Maybe your father is no more than just a man and would have been unable to change the course of events in your family's life, even if he'd had wanted to, even if he'd tried.”

Charlotte's mind was reeling. Images from her dreams flashed, pictures of her father, and she suddenly recalled snippets of a recent conversation she'd had with Bea. The
older woman had come to see her to talk about her husband's struggle after having learned something about his brother's past. “He was so let down,” she had said. “So disappointed in him.”

“But what does that have to do with the church?” Charlotte asked, trying to shake off the muddled memories.

Marion waited to explain, letting her client catch up to what had been shared.

“Maybe your expectations of church folks, your hopes and desires, as genuine and admirable as they are, maybe they're just a little higher than can be realized.” She studied her client.

“People are people, in church or out of church. We go forward one step and back three. Your father, the deacon, the teenager in trouble, your women friends, everybody deserves grace.”

Marion was silent for a while, collecting her thoughts, appearing as if she wanted to finish with just the right thing.

“Write your letter if you feel it is time to leave, but make sure you are clear that this is not a reactionary decision, that this is not a choice based upon the behavior of a couple of men, that this is a decision about
your
heart,
your
desires,
your
needs.”

And this part she said with a lot of strength: “Don't kill what may be happening underground, growth that may be occurring where you can't see it; don't destroy that with your bitterness. You owe them that. Make it plain,” she said, remembering the phrase often used by preachers. “Keep it
clean.” And then time was called. Charlotte's session was over.

So Charlotte had waited. She had waited for more than six months. She had talked to Jessie and Margaret and Louise and Beatrice, separately and together. She had gone to Grady and to the deacon board to express her disappointment and to Peggy to express her apologies for how members of the church had behaved.

She had spoken of her anger and dealt with it. There were even a few of the deacons who said that they were sorry, several who surprised her with their remorse. Peggy, the most astonishing one of all, made amends with those from whom she felt estranged.

The pastor had tied up loose ends. She had gone with Lamont to his trial and spoken in court as a character witness. The missing CD player had strangely reappeared in her office; she still didn't know where it had been or who had taken it. She had visited the young man in prison, sharing in the disappointment of his long sentence but promising to visit again.

She had encouraged Lana and Wallace to get into counseling, helping them find a suitable therapist. She had been with Dick when his brother died. She continued to work on her issues with Marion, and finally, when spring and summer had passed and autumn was fast approaching, she felt it was time to go: Charlotte sat in her car and remembered leaving.

On her last Sunday there was a potluck dinner in the church fellowship hall after the service. The tables were
filled with all the foods the Hope Springs church was known for. Chicken pie, barbecue, pinto beans, turnip greens, sweet potato casserole. Charlotte stood at the door and watched as the women hurried in and out of the kitchen, removing the lids of pots and dishes and placing serving spoons beside them.

She thought of the cookbook the church women had put together, the pride and family histories measured and offered in the recipes they submitted. She recounted the first meeting about the book, the excitement of some and the indifference of others, the give-and-take process always a part of community projects. She studied the women as they moved about the fellowship hall, their confidence in their ability to cook and serve, the secure sense of themselves that always emerged when food was involved. She thought of their lives of service and nurture, their quiet ways of affection, and appreciated how far they all had come in the past three years, the friendships, the trust, the surprise of intimacy.

She watched as some of the men filled cups with ice while others searched for chairs and pushed them beneath the tables, the banter that played between them, the teamwork, the camaraderie, the unified effort to prepare a place to eat.

She watched the children sneak past mothers and grandmothers, snatching up samples, and she remembered why she loved this place, remembered why she had come and stayed. Even if church folks mess up everything else, she thought, they always know how to feed one another.

“Sure hope you're hungry,” Beatrice said as she sped past Charlotte to place her prune cake next to the pies and cookies.

“She still thinks you might have a kink or two in need of loosening,” Louise said as she came up behind the pastor.

“Does anybody ever eat that cake?” Charlotte asked.

“Actually,” Louise replied as she walked over to the table with her bowl of green beans and then returned to stand next to Charlotte, “it really isn't awful.” Then she smiled as she watched her friend bark orders to the other women in the kitchen. “And it does have a way of working things out.” She put her arm around the young woman.

Peggy DuVaughn came in the side door, and Charlotte noticed that it was Grady who stopped pouring the iced tea and walked over to hold open the door for the widow as she moved inside. The pastor could not hear the conversation, but she saw the deacon speak a few words and reach up to take her dish. Peggy held it out to him, and just as he took it Charlotte noticed that he squeezed the back of her hand. And they stood that way, a brief and tenuous moment of reconciliation, until Hope crawled past Lana and Wallace and bumped into the back of Grady's legs. They both looked down at the little girl and laughed, the moment past but not forgotten.

It was all just as it should have been, laughter, stories, too much to eat, and the lingering notion that sitting together around the table and enjoying food and fellowship make the best memories of church. The young pastor recognized in her farewell dinner, in her reception of the gift of being fed
by those she had served, that even though their journey together had felt like they had merely stumbled forward at times, gone backward at others, still somehow they had managed a little progress. There had been a bit of knowledge gained, a little hope stored. And Charlotte was at peace that pastor and church had walked together. They had cried and wearied and prayed and laughed and eaten and been filled and walked together.

They wished her well as she traveled to visit her father and then to the Southwest where she had taken a job as director of a women's shelter. It had all seemed quite appropriate to everyone. And even though it was lovely and pleasant and meaningful, an event of self-understanding and acceptance, it was not, however, the real celebration of good-bye. It was not the one she would hold in her heart. Her friends had planned that one.

On the first weekend of autumn, a cool September day, the cookbook committee took their pastor to a labyrinth garden somewhere south of Atlanta, Georgia. Louise and Beatrice had suggested it, deciding that this would be the best place for them to say good-bye.

And so it was that late that evening, under a night sky filled with stars and a round white moon, the women walked the garden path, hands held and silent. The older women had written prayers for their young friend, and when they quietly approached the end of the labyrinth, standing in the center, surrounded by large decorative pots filled with rose glow and purple sage and gathered around a mosaic of
colored stones pressed into the earth, the face of a woman, each of them read her petition.

“Health and wholeness,” Margaret said as she placed a small strand of purple beads around Charlotte's left wrist.

“Acceptance,” added Louise as she handed the young woman a scarred but still beautiful conch shell she had found at the beach many years earlier.

“Home,” Jessie had prayed. “Give this child a home.” And she placed at her feet a small glass bottle filled with dirt collected from two continents.

“And peace,” Beatrice had prayed the final prayer. “A clean heart.”

She stepped forward with a small pink rose quartz like the one Jessie had brought back from Africa for Louise. It was shaped like a heart with a hole in the top. A string of brown leather was pulled through, long enough to fit over the young woman's head. And as she draped the necklace around Charlotte's neck, the women had all gathered closer.

A fountain flowed nearby, the sound of running water a cleansing reminder to Charlotte of her childhood baptism.

“We are forever friends,” Jessie said, the words like fingers dipped in cool water, wet upon her brow.

“That means we will always care for you, always be there for you,” Margaret added, remembering the significance of her friendship.

“We will always wish the best for you, always want only good things for you.” Louise reached up and wiped a tear from Charlotte's eye.