Home Another Way (29 page)
“No,” I said. And I meant,
No, don’t apologize.
Because he was right. My tears were not for Memory or Robert. They were for me.
I sniffled, aware of the weight of Jack’s arm across my shoulder, the scent of his deodorant. This was where I had wanted to be since our first breakfast at the diner. Another feeling rose to the surface like curdled milk. Not quite lust—oh, yes, I knew that well—but something warmer and more vulnerable. I tightened my grip on the pillow. It might as well have been made of cellophane.
“I didn’t want to come back to Jonah,” Jack said, voice muffled against the top of my head. “After seminary, God forgive me, I didn’t want to come back. I had such big plans. There was so much need in the city. In all my youthful idealism, I thought I could make a difference.
“And there was Allison.”
“That girl in college,” I said.
Jack disentangled himself from me and paced across the room once, twice. He leaned against the dining table, nodded. “I loved her. I thought I loved her. She got pregnant,” he said. “I told you I wasn’t perfect.”
I watched him, light blue dress shirt unbuttoned and untucked, hanging loose over his white undershirt, looking perfectly imperfect, and my initial shock dissolved into relief.
He wasn’t immune to pleasure, to base human instinct. His confession made him all the more accessible. He was no better than me.
“By then,” Jack continued, “the summer after graduation, everyone was wondering why I wasn’t home yet. I gave dozens of excuses, told dozens of lies. The guilt ate ulcers into my stomach. I couldn’t sleep. My hair started falling out. I kept picturing the look I would get when people—all those people who had put me up on the stupid pedestal for so long—found out what I’d done.”
“You fell in love.”
“Maybe in your world, Sarah, but not mine. I was a fornicator having a child out of wedlock. Godly, Christian men don’t do things like that. Pastors don’t. And Jack Watson sure as heck didn’t.”
“You didn’t have to come back here.”
“That’s what I tried to tell myself. Every day of that year Allison and I were together. But, in the end, I knew this is where the Lord wanted me. I’d known since I was eight. So I asked Allison to marry me. Obviously, she said no. She didn’t want to be some backwoods pastor’s wife. She had her big plans, too.”
“And the baby?”
Jack withered into himself, head slumping forward, arms crossing stiffly against his chest. “She had an abortion. I didn’t do anything to stop her. Some part of me thought it would make things easier. No one would ever know what I did.
“Except me. I wake up every day knowing.”
I went to him, stood in front of him and reached out to take his hand. My fingers brushed against his wrist instead.
His jaw tightened. “I’ve never told anyone this.”
I nodded slightly and, heart thudding in my ears, kissed his cheek.
Jack’s mouth found mine, and we fell against each other. It felt so good to be touching someone. Him. He rubbed his thumb over the button at the nape of my neck, the only button on my dress, but didn’t open it. I pulled his T-shirt from his pants and slid my hands up his back.
“No,” he said, and he shoved me away. “That’s enough.”
I slapped him.
The blow surprised both of us, whipping across his cheek with force enough to turn his head, my palm print red in his skin. I recovered first, and raised my arm to hit him again, but he caught me, his grip an iron shackle on my wrist. My other hand tightened to a fist, and I hammered Jack’s chest until he restrained that, too. We stood there, panting, staring at each other, bodies rigid with adrenaline. I twisted from his grasp, stepped back.
“Sarah—”
“Don’t. Just don’t.”
I left the office, stunned, face itchy with humiliation. I’d never been refused before, not like that, with a man staring back at me, his eyes dark with disgust. And I don’t think I’d ever wanted to be wanted more. I didn’t know how to handle it.
I stumbled around the hall, searching for my coat, finding it finally hanging on the vestibule coatrack. I opened the front door just enough to squeeze outside, and ran into Adele on the front steps, puffing on a cigarette.
“I know how much you miss her, honey,” she said, smoke corkscrewing between her lips.
“It’s not that,” I said.
“What is it?”
I hesitated, feeling like a character in a cartoon with a haloed cherub perched on one shoulder and a pitchforked devil on the other. I could eat my embarrassment, keep my mouth shut, and go home. But I was the little girl in Memory’s story, the one who broke her doll, and I wanted Jack to hurt as much as I did. I wanted him to pay for not loving me.
“I-I’m not sure I should say, but I need to tell someone.
Promise this will stay just between us?”
“Of course, honey. You go ’head, just get it off your chest.”
So I told her what Jack told me, about Allison. About the baby. When I finished, I clutched her arm with both my hands, feigning urgent secrecy. “You can’t tell anyone,” I said.
She bobbed her head up and down like a Pez dispenser. “You have my word.”
I trudged back to the truck, a fizzy concoction of shame and satisfaction sloshing around my gut. By tomorrow night, the whole town would know.
Jack could hear the congregants gathering in the Grange hall; they were louder than other mornings. Then again, usually he was rushing around at this time, ten minutes before the service, either shaving his week-old stubble or washing cream cheese off his tie. So maybe he just had never noticed all the commotion outside his door. Today he’d been on his knees since before sunrise, praying for wisdom, for words.
His mother had called him Thursday morning; she’d heard this awful rumor from Aggie, who said she’d found out from Editha, who said Sarah told Adele the day before. Of course it couldn’t be true. When Jack didn’t deny it, Maggie hung up with a smothered, “How could you?” Moments later, the phone rang again. Ephraim Joseph assumed it was merely gossip, but still, did Jack know anything about this? After that, he’d taken the phone off the hook, stuffing the receiver under the couch cushion until it stopped buzzing.
He wasn’t angry with Sarah. Not anymore. But he had been, the sting of betrayal poured, like rubbing alcohol, into his own guilty conscience. More than once he resisted the temptation to go to Luke’s cabin and confront her, until he realized his indignation stemmed not from Sarah’s tongue, but the glaring white spotlight on him, burning the skin of a man who’d been hidden in the dark too long.
He had no more secrets now.
Standing at the door, head against the painted wood, hand hesitant on the knob, he felt the speculation, the scandal buzzing on the other side, vibrating up his arm, in his ears. “ ‘But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day,’ ”
he whispered. “Help me, Father.”
He stepped out into the hall. Mouths snapped closed, people sat, and the silence blossomed into murmurs and clucks. Patty began playing the first hymn, but Jack touched her arm. “Not today,” he said.
The podium, only ten feet from where he stood, seemed miles away. He counted the steps, eyes focused on the glass of water waiting for him, liquid quivering with each footfall. Finally there, he took three gulps of water and gripped the sides of the pulpit.
“I’d like to ask the Sunday school teachers to take the children to their classes now. We’re going to have the sermon first this morning.”
Several women stood, motioning to their students, gathering them in like mother geese and ushering them to the two upstairs classrooms. Jack finished his water, rubbed his mouth. He felt a scab on his bottom lip; it fell off in his hand, and he tasted blood.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard, or haven’t heard. But we all know that gossip gets around this town like children playing a game of telephone; starting at one end of the line with ‘Jack had fish for supper last night and didn’t brush his teeth’ and, after whispering in the ear of twelve giggling little girls, ending up with ‘Jack has a fishy mother peeling sprouts in his sneakers.’ ”
The congregation tittered in that nervous Cheshire-cat way, each person seeming to recall his or her own contribution to the rumor parade, and Jack continued. “But it doesn’t really matter to me what you know, or think you know, or who you told or didn’t tell. In the book of James we’re told to confess our sins to one another. So that’s what I’m going to do.
“Yes, when I was in seminary, my girlfriend got pregnant and had an abortion. And, no, I didn’t try to stop her.”
The murmuring crescendoed again, and Jack let it ebb away on its own, wishing for another glass of water. “I think for many of us who have grown up in the church, in small towns where not much of anything happens, we can overlook the fact that, yes, we too can be tempted. I’d allowed myself to forget that. So, when temptation struck, instead of saying to myself, ‘Even Jesus was tempted,’ I ran away from God, because I was ashamed that I, Jack Watson, could be struggling with such sins. And I fell. I fell hard.
“I’m here before all of you now, asking your forgiveness. For lying to you about why it took me so long to come back here, and for thinking that I was somehow above being tempted. But I also am asking you to forgive me for being a rather pitiful shepherd.
“I’ve stood here, week in and week out, preaching from this pulpit that Christ’s blood is sufficient to cover all sins. That His blood is all we need, and in believing on Him, we are forgiven. Salvation is His gift to us, and we can do nothing to earn it. But I didn’t live my life like that. For the past seven years, I’ve been trying to prove to God that I am worthy of His forgiveness. And that’s pure pride, too, thinking that my sin is too big for God’s mercy.”
Jack stopped, looked out over the crowd, harsh fluorescent casting a yellowish veneer on everyone’s pasty winter skin. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
No one whispered, and most people stared at their hands or the floor, or at the huge crack in the plaster on the wall behind him, just above his head. “So, I guess that’s it,” he said, and turned to leave the podium. Then he stopped, faced the congregation. “No, wait. While I’m here, I have one more thing to confess. Clara, I need to tell you, I hate deviled eggs.”
The small, white-haired woman sat next to her husband, and she leaned on Ephraim Joseph’s shoulder as she rose to her feet. “Reverend, I don’t think there’s ever been something easier to forgive, and more welcome to hear, because I hate making them.”
There was laughter then, and like driving through fog, the tension, thick one minute, was suddenly gone. People poured from their seats to the pulpit, to Jack, his mother first in line to wrap her thin arms around him. Jack squeezed back and said, “I’m sorry I tried to be perfect.”
Maggie touched his face. “I’m sorry I wanted you to be.”
Through the crowd, he thought he saw a flicker of orange in the vestibule, where one of the double doors was propped open with a cinder block. He shook some more hands, accepting apologies from those who had helped spread the rumor, and watched until he saw it again. Red hair.
Sarah’s hair.
He motioned to Beth. She looked toward the door and nodded, then made her way to the back of the room.
Jack knew he would have to face Sarah soon. But not today. For the first time in a long time, he felt clean. He wanted to delight in that for a while, and—God forgive him—he didn’t want Sarah to ruin that for him right now.
He saw me.
I had come early and parked on the road, waiting until everyone clamored into the Grange for the morning service.
There were few stragglers—due, no doubt, to the brouhaha I began. By ten the doors shut tight, and as I snuck up the front stairs I wondered if they were locked.
They weren’t.
Creeping into the vestibule, I hid behind the one closed inner door and listened, concerned Jack would be ousted from his pastoral position and publicly humiliated, or perhaps something more antediluvian, like stoning. I had no clue what overzealous Bible-thumpers did to their prodigals.
But, as I’d listened, Jack seemed focused—not quite relaxed, but not apprehensive, either—and lighthearted, almost, as if he was relieved he no longer carried his secret. And the congregation responded warmly to his confession, giving hugs and handshakes. When his head turned in my direction, I jumped back behind the door, but my stubborn hair didn’t follow. I should have worn a ponytail.
Moments later, Beth tapped me on the shoulder. “You’ve been spotted.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s not a private meeting or anything. Why don’t you come on in?”
“No. I just wanted to, you know, make sure your brother was . . . okay.”
“Just go talk to him. He’s not even mad.”
Why wasn’t he angry? I forsook his trust, dangling his sins—well, he considered them sins; I thought it nothing more than living life—across the clothesline, all his unmentionables flapping in the wind. If Jack had done such a thing to me, with all the feelings I had, the desires to please him, to touch him and be close to him, a betrayal of this magnitude would have destroyed me. I’d want blood.
Jack, however, seemed unaffected.
“He doesn’t need to talk to me,” I said.
“Sarah—”
“Just leave me alone, okay?”
I climbed into my truck and maneuvered through the throng of vehicles, the mirror on the passenger door scraping along the side of some white van, fingernails on a chalkboard. I drove blindly, thinking of Jack. He rebuffed me the other day because he didn’t love me. Not the way I wanted—no, needed—him to. How stupid I was to think he could. The stains left on me by my parents went deep. Too deep to be scrubbed out by a six-month stay with good Christian folk and a handful of charitable deeds. I’d never change. My grandmother raised me to, at the very least, remember that.
She had told me never to go into the parlor. That was what she called it.
The Parlor.
And, really, how ridiculous to call it that, a small room in the basement of an aluminumsided, vinyl-shuttered ranch in a suburb of Trenton, New Jersey. But my grandmother decorated it in burgundy and navy, all brocades and velvets, with gold rope tassels on the drapes and a faux-mahogany sideboard she found in a yard sale for forty-five dollars. She sipped tea there with her Holy Roller pals every Wednesday afternoon.