The Abstinence Teacher (17 page)

INSIDE, THE
Tabernacle didn’t look like much: a big open room with a low ceiling, white walls, and gray industrial carpeting. Two smaller areas—the lobby and the Young Apostles’ room—were carved out of the larger space by temporary office partitions. Tim said good-bye to Carrie just inside the main entrance—she was on the Loaves and Fishes Committee, which served refreshments in the lobby—and continued into the Sanctuary.

It was quiet in there, a field of empty white folding chairs, and Tim paused at the back of the room, as he did every week, to savor this moment of homecoming. No matter what else was going on in his life—how distracted he was by problems with Abby, Carrie, or Allison—he never failed to be cleansed and lifted up by these first few breaths of sanctified air. He could feel God’s presence surrounding him, a calm but still mighty benevolence radiating down from the ceiling and up from the floor, and his heart swelled with a mingled sense of awe and gratitude and humble pride that a man such as himself could have his own small part to play in the ceremony that was about to unfold.

He headed down the center aisle toward the altar, a low wooden platform that also served as bandstand for the Praise Team. His fellow musicians were already onstage, tweaking their amps and instruments and glancing over the set list, professionally oblivious to the Prayer Squad meeting taking place directly in front of them. About a dozen church members were swarming around Alice Palmiero, a mother of two not much older than Tim, who’d recently been diagnosed with
ovarian cancer. It looked from the outside like a loving rugby scrum, hunched bodies pressing close together, hands wrapped around shoulders and resting on backs, a low murmur of supplication rising from the group. Tim knew what it was like to be at the center of all that powerful energy—the Prayer Squad had taken up the cause of his sobriety shortly after he’d accepted Jesus—and he hoped Alice was drawing the same comfort and reassurance he had from the knowledge that he wasn’t alone in his trials, that good people wanted him to get better, and wanted the Lord to know it.

A little off to the right of the prayer huddle, Youth Pastor Eddie and Elise Kim were standing with their arms outstretched, their ecstatic faces tilted toward the ceiling. Tim wasn’t sure if they were satellites of the larger group or bystanders with a separate agenda. He slipped between them as unobtrusively as he could and stepped onto the stage, nodding hello to Bill Spooner, the lead guitarist and bandleader, who was down on his knees fiddling with his pedalboard, an elaborate miniature city of metal boxes and multicolored wires.

“Brother Mason.” He spoke softly, acknowledging Tim’s arrival with a sardonic salute. “Rock on.”

“Amen,” Tim muttered in reply. “Turn it up to eleven.”

FOR TIM,
Sunday worship was an easy gig; all he had to do was tune up, plug in, and play. His Fender Jazz Bass and Peavey amp were already up on stage, right where he’d left them last week, and the week before that. He didn’t bother taking them home anymore.

Unlike a couple of guys from the Praise Team—Bill fronted a popular oldies band called Gary and the Graybeards, and the drummer, Ben Malinowski, played in a jazz trio that had a regular Saturday night booking at the Red Roof Inn in Gifford Township—Tim no longer had a musical life outside the Tabernacle. That world was just too fraught with temptation. He wasn’t the kind of reformed alcoholic who could spend
the night in a bar drinking nothing but Diet Coke, nor was he the kind of reformed pothead who’d have an easy time passing a joint to the next guy without taking a toke for himself, or the kind of responsible married man who remembered to mention the existence of his wife the instant a pretty woman started flirting with him. He wished it were otherwise, but he’d never figured out a way to separate the rock ’n’ roll from the sex, drugs, and booze that always seemed to come along with it, the good and the bad tied up in a thrilling, sloppy, ultimately toxic package. He remembered laughing about Little Richard years ago, thinking how pathetic it was for a performer of that stature to have found it necessary to denounce “the Devil’s music,” but he’d reluctantly come to accept the possibility that Mr. Tutti Frutti had a point.

Which was sad, because Tim loved to rock, and knew how good he was at it. A bass player who could sing harmony, he’d been recruited by all sorts of bands over the years—Southern Rock, New Wave, blues, punk, rockabilly, funk—and still got calls from musicians who knew of him by reputation or remembered him from shows stretching all the way back to the mid-eighties, and he always had to fight down a surge of excitement before regretfully declining their invitations to audition.

Luckily, Bill Spooner had remembered him, too; they’d played a lot of the same clubs in the early nineties, back when Tim was in a grunge band called Placenta, and Bill was the main songwriter and lead shredder for Killing Spree, a locally famous death metal trio that had released a couple of well-received albums on an indie label out of New Brunswick. Bill had called out of the blue a year and a half ago to ask if Tim could bail him out for a single gig on Sunday morning.

“It’s at my church,” he said. “Just four songs. I can teach ’em to you in half an hour.”

“You go to church?” It didn’t even occur to Tim to hide his amusement. Killing Spree had done the whole Slayer trip—studded bracelets,
gratuitous references to Satan, pictures of dead animals projected onto a screen behind the band—without offering the slightest hint that they might just be kidding around.

“Dude,” he said. “This church saved my life. You know, after Jill died. I was in a dark place.”

“Jill died?” Tim felt like an idiot. “I didn’t know that. I’m really sorry.”

Bill and Jill had been a famous rock ’n’ roll couple back in the day. Black leather, tattoos, hair hanging in their faces. They went everywhere on Bill’s Harley, wore matching fringe jackets with the Killing Spree logo on the back, a skeleton with a cigarette in its mouth, blasting away on a tommy gun.

“Three years ago,” Bill said. “We were living out in Pennsylvania. She was having a baby, and something went wrong. They saved the little one, but not her. Can you imagine? The guy I was, with a dead wife and a newborn baby to take care of?”

“Not really,” Tim said.

“I came home to live with my parents.” He gave a soft laugh of amazement. “Man, I was a mess. Then this guy invited me to his church.”

“And now you’re inviting me,” Tim said.

“You don’t have to believe,” Bill assured him. “You just gotta play a couple of songs. And besides, it’s all the donuts you can eat.”

“What the hell,” Tim had said. “I’m not doing anything on Sunday.”

TIM AND
Bill went out to the lobby after sound check to grab a cup of coffee. It was just starting to fill up, and there was a cheerful cocktail party vibe in the air, lots of hugs, handshakes, and
how are you’s
. Ever since his first visit to the Tabernacle, Tim had been struck by the warmth and fellowship he found there; almost without exception the church members were kind and openhearted, nothing like the grim Puritans he’d expected. It had been the same with the punks and
Deadheads he’d known in his wilder days: despite their fearsome reputations in the outside world, they usually turned out to be surprisingly normal once you got to know them.

Carrie was standing behind the snack table, trying to console Evelyn Braithwaite, who’d lost a son in Iraq a year ago, but was still mourning as if it had happened last week. Tim raised an eyebrow in commiseration as he passed—Carrie had complained more than once about what a trial it was, having to listen to Evelyn recount the same half dozen memories of Jason every week—and she replied with an inconspicuous flutter of her fingers, as if she were typing a brief message on an invisible keyboard.

Bill’s wife, Ellie, arrived just as they were finishing their donuts, a big-boned, flustered-looking redhead with a three-month-old baby cradled in her arms, and her four-year-old stepdaughter in tow. Little Gillian was a delicate, slightly unnerving child, eerily reminiscent of her late mother, a black-haired waif with pouty lips and an expression of lofty disdain for the world. Tim felt a small shock of recognition every time he saw her, a window into a crazier time, drugs and motorcycles and shrieking feedback from a Marshall stack, glassy-eyed chicks with white makeup and black lips.

Bill hurried over to greet his family, lifting Gillian into his arms, then planting a hard, lingering kiss on Ellie’s mouth. Maybe it was just for show—Tim didn’t always trust married couples who carried on like teenagers—but it didn’t look that way. Bill was at peace with his new life, liberated from the past. He didn’t seem to mind that he’d lost his hair and put on weight, or traded in his biker’s vest for an outlandish Hawaiian shirt with hot dogs and hamburgers printed on it, just like he didn’t seem to mind that Ellie couldn’t hold a candle to Jill; he accepted his second wife the way he accepted Jesus—unquestioningly, with delight and gratitude for the gift he’d been given, and no apparent desire to look back. It must have helped that Jill was dead, Tim thought. Maybe Bill wouldn’t have found it so
easy if he had to see her every week with another man and remember what they’d been to each other.

Bill kissed Gillian on the forehead and set her back down on the floor. Then Ellie handed him the baby, and his face lit up with happiness. Tim didn’t feel jealous so much as guilty; he still insisted on wearing a condom with Carrie, postponing the child he knew she desperately wanted. He told her it was because he wanted to save some money, get them on their feet financially so she could afford to stay at home with the baby, but that was only part of it. Something else was holding him back, a stubborn reluctance to take that final irrevocable step, to create a new family that would forever supersede the old one.

His eyes strayed back to Carrie, who still hadn’t managed to extricate herself from the conversation with Evelyn. It wasn’t much of a conversation, really—Evelyn did all the talking; Carrie just nodded or shook her head, occasionally touching the older woman on the arm. Even so, Tim could see how intently Carrie was focused on her, and how comforted Evelyn was to be enveloped in the cocoon of her sympathetic attention. He felt a surge of respect and affection for his wife; she was a good woman, and he was a fool for letting himself lose sight of it. He made up his mind to join her, to take some of the burden of consoling Evelyn off her shoulders, but he received a hard slap on the back before he’d managed to take the first step in her direction.

“Hey, coach!”

Tim turned to see his friend John Roper, a man of alarming girth, looming over him with a big Sunday morning grin on his face. Tim returned the smile, momentarily startled—he reacted the same way every week—by the sight of his assistant coach in a suit and tie. Until a few months ago, Tim had only ever seen him in sweats.

“How’s Abby?” John inquired.

“Okay. A little woozy last night, but she felt fine this morning.”

“Praise God.” John stepped toward Tim, spreading his arms wide. “Gimme a hug.”

With a reluctance he hoped he managed to conceal, Tim submitted to the larger man’s embrace. It wasn’t that he was squeamish about hugging other guys—it was standard practice at the Tabernacle—but as a smallish man, he found it embarrassing to be crushed in the arms of a big lug like John, a former offensive tackle at Montclair State who had to outweigh him by a hundred pounds. It made him feel childish, like a little boy who needed to drink more milk.

John kept his arms wrapped tightly around Tim well after the two men had exchanged the obligatory three thumps on the back. These extralong hugs were a habit of John’s, his way of saying thanks. It was Tim who’d invited him to the Tabernacle over the summer—he’d seen an opening after a conversation in which John had complained about middle-of-the-night panic attacks, a dizzying sense of peering down into an endless void—and Tim who’d acted as his spiritual guide and sponsor in the subsequent months, much as Bill Spooner had done for him. Pastor Dennis called it the Rescue Chain: I save you, you save the next guy, and he’ll save someone else.

“That was an awesome game yesterday,” John said, giving Tim a final, anaconda-like squeeze before letting go. “I’m still on cloud nine.”

“Well, we’ve got this one to thank.” Tim nodded at John’s daughter, Candace, who was standing next to her father, nervously plucking at the Livestrong bracelet on her left wrist. “That was an amazing goal. I can’t believe how fast you got upfield.”

Candace blushed; she was a lovely girl with the long neck and regal bearing of a ballerina. Tim caught himself gazing at her with a little too much interest—she wasn’t even twelve, for Pete’s sake—and hastily shifted his attention back to her father, who wasn’t nearly so pleasant to look at.

“She almost flubbed it,” John said with an affectionate chuckle. “For a second there, I didn’t think the ball had enough juice to make it across the goal line.”

He reached out to muss his daughter’s hair, but she swatted his hand away.

“Daddy.”

John drew back in mock surrender.

“Sorry.” He rolled his eyes for Tim’s benefit. “I keep forgetting. The hair’s off-limits.”

Tim shook his head in parental solidarity. He wondered if it was weird for John, watching his little girl grow into such a striking young woman, a long-legged blonde who, within a year or two, wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without causing a physical disturbance in every man and teenage boy within a hundred-yard radius. It wasn’t nearly so complicated for Tim, at least not yet. Unlike Candace, Abby still seemed a long way from puberty, even if she was disconcertingly adolescent in some of her behaviors and attitudes.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tim said. “By that point, I didn’t really care if we won or lost. I was just so proud of the girls for not giving up.”

John’s face grew solemn. He dropped a beefy hand on Tim’s shoulder.

“That was a gutsy thing you did after the game.”

“It was no big deal,” Tim muttered.

“Yes, it was,” John insisted. He spoke softly, looking Tim straight in the eye. “It was a very big deal. You stood up for the Lord, and I want to thank you for it.”