Games of the Heart (Crimson Romance) (4 page)

Then he topped the icing on the cake with, “We’re praying for you.” Who the “we” were I had no clue, but he beat all land records as he dashed to the silver Lexus parked next to my dusty SUV.

I’ve been a happy camper, a cranky one, and also ticked off big time. Right then I skidded to a halt in the third category, with black marks on the pavement of my mind. Let the cookies crumble where they may. Handling sixty puberty-crazed kids in a youth work program, preparing sermons, doing outreach at shelters and missions, keeping tabs on activities, and counseling kids and their parents was making my half-empty cup permanently slosh all over my good intentions. Vacation Bible School? Nietzsche said that which doesn’t kill us will make us stronger. And when I get to heaven
if
Mr. N is there, I’m going to give him a tiny little bit of my mind. I give pieces of my mind out so often, you realize, that I can only spare a bit, but Nietzsche is going to get it.

Pastor Bob’s comments about, “This place is not financed by prayer. Money talks in this city,” irked me and made my breakfast lurch and become a fat belch.

My office is barely big enough for a woman with skinny thighs to move to the desk, but I made it anyhow. I poked
the
memo, moving it with one finger. I read it. I flopped in my typing chair. Then read it again.

I’ll cut to the chase. The pastor and the board, with pressure from parents who had decided that they wanted VBS, but never got around to organizing one even though all the advertisements went out to the community over the last month, voted last night that the teens, who didn’t work during the day, could run it. Of course, mind you, no teens had volunteered nor heard about this, and their youth minister, moi, didn’t know nothing no how, either. Bottom line? Two hundred children would show up at Desert Hills at 9:00
A.M.
Monday morning, and I was to give them a week of Godly training. Oh, me and whatever teenagers I could scrounge up in just over forty-eight hours.

You might wonder what happened to the children’s ministry leader who should have been in charge of VBS. Me, too. Every workplace has skeletons, yet Desert Hills seems to be over its national average. “Oh, just taking some time off.” “Guessing she needs a vacation, baby on the way and things.” “Something like a sabbatical.” Even Vera looked off into the distance and got a soft look on her drill-sergeant face, which was so nipped and tucked it was hard to tell if she was smiling or grimacing. Only thing she said was, “You’ll need to talk to Pastor Bob about this, Jane.” So I stopped asking because my first question about the children’s ministry leader had to be to good old Ab Normal himself. Clashes happen, even in churches, and the District Council in its wisdom sometimes pulls ministers away from their flocks, such as me being yanked screaming and kicking from that inner-city church. Somebody was bound to spill the beans eventually. See, contrary to the word on the street, I can be patient.

A few minutes later Vera dropped her plentiful posterior in the straight-backed chair across the desk from me, plunked a cup of coffee in front of me, and rolled her big brown eyes. The need to know what happened to the previous children’s minister was far, far away in another galaxy.

“Read it? Didn’t have the heart to tell you over the phone.”

“I know VBS is good for kids and great PR, but honestly, Vera, can I handle this?”

She tipped back the coffee mug, pursed her lips, coated deeply with layers of pink and lined with red, which perfectly matched the Hawaiian print of her form-fitting shirt. Vera wiggled her eyebrows up, squished her nose and said, “Beats the heck out of me.”

“Thanks a bundle.”

Holding the doorframe to the cubicle Vera said, “Harmony Miller is waiting to see you. She’s got a nasty bruise on her arm. Thought you should be the one to ask about it.” Then she lifted her eyebrows, and I saw a fleeting bit of grandmotherly emotion cross her eyes. “Want me to stay?” Again, as Vera reached for my now-empty cup, even her face, plasticized by surgery, softened.

“Is she in your office? She wasn’t in the foyer when Pastor Bob and I had our chat.”

“No, think she went to the kitchen to help prepare the lunch the women’s group is taking to the rescue mission. The Daily Bread Team feeds about hundred each day and sometimes more on Fridays. But hey, you know that, since you’re there often enough. Either you like what they’re doing or you’re going for the free lunch — just kidding.”

Have you ever noticed when people say, “just kidding,” they’re really not kidding at all?

• • •

I saw the bruise before I focused on Harmony. It was fierce and covered much of her forearm, more purple than black. I’d always thought she looked like a very young Meg Ryan, but her vocabulary could have made a sailor squirm, until I reminded her that even this kitchen was part of the church. Lately it would only make a Marine squirm.

“What’s on the menu for the Daily Bread today?” I flopped an arm on her shoulder and felt her stiffen before she wiggled out. I dropped the arm. She wouldn’t have been the first kid, or adult, to show dislike for a pushy preacher. Second guess? More bruises under her scruffy T-shirt.

“Chicken or cheese sandwiches, pickles, chips, and fruit,” she replied and moved out of my reach, rubbing her shoulder. “Always, coffee, water, soda, and milk, too. We’ll leave the platters of veggies, hummus, and pita bread for the crowd that comes at night.”

“Sounds better than the stuff I have at home. Harmony, you wanted to see me?” I asked in a light, hopefully non-threatening way. I stayed close, but didn’t touch.

“No,” she snapped in response.

Harmony wasn’t like the whiney kids in the youth group. This was the first I’d seen she had a temper and honestly? It made me feel a micron better because all the fight hadn’t been kicked out of her like some of the kids that I’d known who had been tossed from one foster home to another.

We both stared at her feet in dusty, ragged, high-top basketball shoes and then, I hope without her knowing, I allowed my gaze to travel to her face, noting she could be the Goth poster girl since black was the only color of her wardrobe. As I looked into her blue eyes, I could see a frightened little girl in there. I continued, “Vera said you asked for me. I have time now. Want to come to my office with me or when you finish?”

She turned away. I wondered if she was willing her eyes in another direction, then she turned quickly, only to turn away again before saying, “I didn’t want to talk to you. Vera said I should.”

“We’re finished here for now,” said one of the women, placing the sack lunches in a box. “Thanks, Harmony. See you at the mission? You can get a ride over with me in about an hour if you’re going to help serve again today.” I waved to the ladies and then whispered to Harmony, “Want to head out of here and get something cold and slushy at Starbucks?”

Harmony looked at me for the briefest second. We walked into the hall and toward my office and then she finally said, “I gotta’ find a better place to live.”

I would have closed the door, but there wasn’t one. Taking a breath, I vowed to respond in my quiet voice, even if I were shocked, which I knew I’d be. “Are you hurt? Were you assaulted? Did someone touch you inappropriately? Molest you?”

It’s the media’s fault, you know, that when you think of Vegas, you think of beautiful people having the time of their lives, living large, spending free, and doing stuff that would make their granny’s hair turn even bluer. Don’t get your knickers in a knot. Las Vegas is fun to visit, and at least eighty-five percent of the area is a fine place to live, work, and raise a family.

The media, advertisers, and who knows who have created an adult playground where the neon lights, four-story-high fountains, and even art museums rub belly buttons with addicted gamblers, hookers, and half-wits who come to drown their troubles in the flash, glitz, and glitter that’s Vegas, baby.

Don’t believe me? Drive off the Strip just a mile, and the city, like the rattlers found just miles from New York, New York and Paris casinos, will rise up and let its fangs sink into you. Actually, it could pluck out your heart if you have one. It makes you wonder why so much poverty lives like bosom buddies with the likes of lush casinos and high-rise resorts. And mega churches. If you’ve ever flipped the remote control and stopped at
Cops,
you could have seen what it’s like where the Vegas tourists don’t frequent.

As Harmony and I sat trying not to look at the bruises on her arm, I thought of this. Harmony lived under the glamour radar, way below it, like a piece of paper that’s picked up in the desert wind and tossed around. As with other kids in my pastoral care, her world involved struggles with the courts, little financial support, foster parents who have forgotten why they got into fostering, and the scum that prey on street kids. It took about two minutes when I came on board as the youth minister to figure this out, and I still can’t get my heart to mend.

Harmony was one of the lucky ones — then, at least — as she did have a foster home, a clean bed, and food if she stuck around for meals. It was better than when I’d first met her and she was living beneath an I-15 overpass.

“Harmony, look at me. Who hurt you like this? You have legal rights, you know, even if you’re not an adult.”

“No, ma’am, no one did anything to me like you’re thinkin’,” she said, and tried ineffectively to pull the sleeve of her shirt over her elbow.

What I had been told about Harmony, I hated. This I got from the gossip grapevine of the kids in youth group, where the haves and the have-nots were divided like the North and South in the Civil War and no Abe Lincoln in sight. Wise up, sure, I listened to gossip. At the core of every good lie is a nugget of truth; the point of being a minister is to tell the difference. While I wasn’t a pro, I never hesitated to go to the source and find out what the score was. Last week, I cornered Harmony and asked straight out. It was simple, and she told me in simple sentences. No mom was ever mentioned, and she’d been dragged around with her dad. A few years ago, he was sent to prison for embezzlement and fraud as a result of his gambling addictions. He was serving time in the state prison system.

“I thought you were with a new foster family until your dad gets out of prison? He’s about to be released, right? End of summer, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” A flicker of something was in her eyes, definitely not hope. That made me squirm.

Then the flicker fluttered out, and she withdrew into a robotic stare focused somewhere above my head.

She stood planted as if she might decide to run, so I walked to the other side of the desk and sat down, piled papers that didn’t need to be straightened, and tried to pretend everything was right in every way. “What happened? Sit down.”

Apparently I passed her test because she sat in the straight chair and said, “The foster care people are nice enough.”

“Just nice enough wouldn’t have caused those bruises. Did they hit you?”

“It was a birthday party for someone, at least that how it started, and what the balloons said that were tied to the trash can near the front door. Lots of people there, motorcycles on the lawn, and I went to the room I share with another girl to hide after some jerk rode a Harley through the kitchen.”

“You were part of the party?” It wouldn’t have been the first time, and Harmony would not be the last to get mixed up with a mess that even adults shouldn’t mess with. “Is that how you got hurt?”

“That was later. The other girl? She left. Told me I should, too. About a half hour later, the fighting started. Dishes and furniture crashing. I got out when these guys, friends of the foster parents I guess, came pounding on my door. Asking me to party.” She nibbled at a fingernail that was already too short, slowly looked at me and said, “I got out the window.”

“You’re on the second story, Harmony, right?” I’d dropped her off after a church dinner one evening. She’d pointed to a room, dimly lighted, at a house with peeling stucco, a car on jacks in the front drive, and graffiti on the wooden fence surrounding the yard.

“Yeah, I jumped then tumbled on the old sofa they pulled outside a few weeks ago, when they had a fire in the living room.”

I wondered for the millionth time why some adults bred. Shouldn’t there be a Brady Bunch Bill, with a seven-day waiting period or something like that? It’d save kids like Harmony from a miserable childhood that would haunt them forever. I forced myself back to reality and the girl in front of me. Harmony was battered, tattered, and didn’t smell too grand either, if you want to know the truth.

Harmony focused on her right index fingernail and worked her way to the pinkie, like someone eating corn on the cob. “I went for a walk. There’s a park near us, people hang out nearby. I thought of coming here, too, maybe sleeping in the courtyard, but the buses stop running at eleven through the neighborhood. I walked around a lot, and when I got back to the house at midnight, the place was crawling with cops. Police were everywhere. Didn’t want anything to do with that sh — ah, stuff.”

“Do you want me to drive you the hospital? Did you get hurt from the fall, or did someone assault you?” I knew she’d told me once, but I asked again. I couldn’t bear it if she’d been physically abused, and I promised myself I’d call Child Protective Services the instant we finished talking. There was no way on God’s green earth, or even in this city that never sleeps because it thinks it’s the best thing since pockets, that this child was going to go back to that foster home that evening or any time.

“I missed the sofa, but this … ” She glanced at her arm and then stopped talking as a few youth group kids, the “haves,” passed near my office. Only as they walked toward the indoor gym, did Harmony say, “This happened when a bag lady who thought my backpack was hers walloped me. She won. I’m just fine. I can take care of myself, but I just need to find another place to sleep.”

“We’ll get ice for your arm, okay?”

She stood up. She didn’t move. “Ya think the pastor would let me sleep on the bench in the foyer? Inside the church? I’m honest. Ask anyone. I won’t bother or hurt anything. I never snoop at stuff. Dad will be out of jail in September, so I won’t be a bother for long. Once his parole is over, we’re going back to California.”