The Abstinence Teacher (25 page)

It must have been his background that set him apart, the hard living he’d done before he found Jesus. She had known a couple of other recovering addicts and AA types over the years, and to one degree or another, they’d all displayed the same vulnerability and melancholy self-awareness as he had, the same refusal to judge other people or condemn them for their shortcomings. It made perfect sense to her that people who’d hit bottom would be attracted to Christianity and find solace in its message of forgiveness, the idea that it didn’t matter how badly you’d screwed up your life, there was always another chance to start over and get things right. Where she always came up short was in figuring out how that part of the religion coexisted with the sanctimonious and intolerant part, the angry, Goody Two-Shoes Christianity that was always gleefully damning people to hell and turning its believers into hypocrites. All she could figure was that Coach Tim just ignored that stuff and took what he needed to keep himself going.

She fell into bed feeling happier than she’d been in a long time. It
was just such a relief to know that she wasn’t going to have to gird herself for a bitter public fight, expose herself once again to the anger and ridicule of her neighbors, or get maneuvered into a corner where she had no choice except to betray her principles or break her daughter’s heart. She hadn’t fully understood how heavily the burden had been weighing on her until it had been removed.

On top of the relief, though, she felt a sense of giddy possibility that had nothing to do with Coach Tim or her kids or the normal parameters of her life, and everything to do with the strange thing that had happened just a few minutes after he’d left. She was in her study, ripping up the letter she’d written to the Soccer Association, when the phone rang. Her first thought was that it must be Tim, calling from his car with something he’d forgotten to tell her—the image was startlingly clear in her mind, for some reason—but the voice on the other end belonged to a different man.

“Ruth?” he said. “Is that Ruth?”

“This is Ruth,” she said. “Who’s that?”

“Don’t I sound familiar?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You do. Your voice is exactly the same.”

“Is this some kind of joke?” she said. “Because if it is, I really don’t have the time.”

“It’s Paul,” he said. “Paul Caruso. Your old next-door neighbor.”

“Paul? Oh my God.”

“So Ruth,” he said. “I heard you were looking for me.”

SHE WOKE
the next morning with her high spirits intact, amazed by the sudden change in her fortunes. It was weird to remember how bad she’d felt just twelve hours ago—besieged and heavyhearted and alone—and how little it had taken to turn things around.

She and Paul hadn’t talked for long. He explained that an old buddy of his, Artie Lembach, a trombone player in the marching band, had
seen Ruth’s posting on the Classmates.com bulletin board and passed along the information.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s gotta be what, twenty-something years?”

Embarrassed, Ruth started muttering untruthfully about how she’d decided to reconnect with lots of different people from her past, as if to suggest that he was no one special, just a small part of a much bigger group.

“I was so excited to get Artie’s e-mail,” he said, lowering his voice to an intimate register. “Because, Ruth, I think about you a lot.”

“Really?” She felt a warm surge of blood moving into her face and was glad he wasn’t there to see it.

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, sometimes you don’t realize it when things are happening, but then when you look back …”

He let the statement hang there, and she didn’t ask him to complete it. Instead she changed the subject to him, asking where he lived, and what he did for work, and whether he was married. He said he’d been in Connecticut for the past ten years, working in the hightech field. As for his marriage, it was a long, complicated story, one he’d be happy to tell her if she was free for dinner over the coming weekend.

“This weekend?” she said. “You mean three days from now?”

“I’m in the city on business,” he said. “I can easily make it out to where you live. How about Friday night?”

“Okay,” she said. “Sure. I don’t have any plans I can’t change.”

“Excellent,” he said. “It’ll be great to catch up with you.”

And just like that she had a date, her first in a long, long time. And not a blind date, either, but something better, a date with a man she already knew, a boy she’d grown up with, and, more to the point, her first lover. She’d read a couple of articles recently about couples reconnecting at high-school reunions, rekindling romances from their youth. The thing everybody mentioned was how strong those old bonds remained despite the passage of time, how meaningful a shared history could be. Over and
over, people talked about picking up right where they’d left off, not missing a beat, as if the intervening decades had never happened.

Sensing that she was getting carried away, she did her best to put the brakes on. After all, she hadn’t seen Paul Caruso in a long time. For all she knew, he was bald and weighed 350 pounds. Plus, she realized, he had never really answered her simple question about whether he was married, which struck her as a bit worrisome. On the other hand, people who were happily married didn’t tell you it was “a long, complicated story,” so she felt fairly optimistic on that count.

Ruth, I think about you a lot
.

The whole thing was just so sappy and romantic and out of the blue, she couldn’t wait to tell Randall all about it. She got to school a few minutes early, and was rushing down the hall with a latte in each hand, whistling the chorus of “Peace Train”—the song had been stuck in her head all morning—when Joe Venuti popped out of his office and planted himself directly in her path. He looked the way he always did in the morning, like he’d been up half the night sweating on the toilet.

“Excuse me,” she said, trying to veer past him on the right.

“Ruth,” he said, blocking her way with an outstretched arm, “I need to talk to you.”

“Can it wait?” she said, gesturing at him with the coffee cups. “My hands are full.”

“Not really,” he said.

On a normal day, Ruth would’ve told him that she was busy just then and would be happy to talk to him during one of her free periods, but she was feeling a little too cheerful to make a fuss, so she sighed and followed him into his office. If she’d been thinking a little more clearly, she wouldn’t have been so surprised to find JoAnn Marlow and Superintendent Farmer inside, scowling at her and shaking their heads, and she certainly wouldn’t have blurted out, “Hey, guys!” in such an excited, high-pitched tone of voice, as if she were thrilled to death to have been invited to this particular party.

God’s Warrior

TIM KNEW IT WAS A BAD IDEA TO STOP AT THE BAR ON THE WAY
back from Ruth Ramsey’s. It just seemed like a better idea than going home to Carrie just then, and not much worse than what he’d been doing for the past half hour anyway, which was driving aimlessly around Stonewood Heights listening to
Workingman’s Dead
, thinking about how much better it would be to kill an hour or two in a bar than it would be to go home to Carrie.

He must have orbited the Homestead Lounge four or five times—this was after casing and rejecting the Evergreen Tavern and the Brew-Ha-Ha, both of which were much too conspicuously situated on Central Avenue in the heart of downtown—before working up the nerve to pull into the parking lot, conveniently tucked away in the rear of the building, which meant that he at least wouldn’t have to worry about Pastor Dennis or anyone else from the Tabernacle driving by at exactly the wrong moment and wondering if that was Tim Mason they just saw going into that gin mill, ’cause it sure looked like him.

Even so, he felt shaky and exposed—but also oddly joyful, like a convict tiptoeing away from prison—as he crossed the patch of cracked blacktop that separated his car from the back entrance, his heart hammering against his rib cage the way it always did at moments
like this, the blood roaring so loudly in his ears that it drowned out the panicky whimpers of his conscience. It was one of those things that hadn’t changed with age: he’d felt just like this at sixteen, buying a bag of pot in the high-school bathroom, and at twenty-one, ducking into XXX World, the sleazy “Adults Only Boutique” out on Route 27. The same heady mixture of exhilaration and dread had raced through his veins at thirty-two, the first time he’d cheated on Allison, and again two and a half years ago, when he shook off a host of doubts, and stepped through the doors of the Tabernacle, a sinner hoping to be cleansed. It was impressive in its way, this lifelong ability to forge ahead in spite of his better judgment, to wade into one sticky situation after another with his eyes wide open.

Inside the Homestead, he hesitated for a few seconds at the end of a short entranceway, grappling with a sharp sense of disappointment. When he’d seen the old-fashioned neon-martini-glass-sign from Lorimer Road, he’d imagined a dim, smoky bar, the kind of place where a man could skulk anonymously in a corner, nursing his shame to a sound track of Sinatra and George Jones. But that, he realized, was the movies; this was Stonewood Heights on a Tuesday night. The place was bizarrely well lit, the air disconcertingly fresh—the statewide smoking ban had been in place for over a year—and there wasn’t a jukebox in sight, just a half dozen TVs strategically deployed throughout the room, all of them playing ESPN with the sound off. A handful of patrons were stationed at the bar—one youngish guy in a suit was tapping away at his laptop—and a few others were shooting pool, and damn if every last one of them didn’t swivel their heads more or less in unison and stare at Tim with the same look of hungry welcome in their eyes, as if maybe he was gonna be the one to finally liven things up a bit around here.

“Come on in,” the bartender called out. He was a chunky, friendly-looking guy with a goatee and a green-and-white-striped apron tied around his waist. “We don’t bite.”

Tim returned the smile and took a couple of steps forward, into the light and back in time, before suddenly remembering who he was, whirling around, and fleeing for his life.

CARRIE WAS
in bed when he got home, watching Nancy Grace on the little TV on top of her dresser, a guilty pleasure she only indulged in when he was out of the house. Tim couldn’t figure it: wars, elections, and natural disasters barely made a blip on his wife’s radar screen, but if someone killed a family member, or a pretty teenager went missing on a tropical island, she was all over the case like Encyclopedia Brown, spending hours listening to windbag legal experts split hairs about a defense motion to limit discovery, or the significance of the fact that authorities were still calling the husband a “person of interest” rather than a “suspect.”

Tim didn’t say a word or even raise an eyebrow, but Carrie grabbed the remote and turned off the TV the moment he entered the bedroom, before Nancy could finish explaining just how sickened and offended she was by this latest outrage against common sense and human decency.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“That’s okay. I know you don’t like her.”

“Really, Carrie. Watch whatever you want.”

She shook her head dismissively.

“I wasn’t even paying attention.”

“Whatever,” he muttered, unbuttoning his shirt. “Just don’t feel like you have to do it on my account.”

“I’d rather talk to you anyway,” she said. “We’ve hardly seen each other all day.”

This was true, though not unusual. Carrie started work an hour earlier than he did, so they rarely spent more than a few minutes with each other at the breakfast table, and dinner was equally dicey; they only managed a real sit-down-and-talk meal a couple times a week, on
those evenings when Tim wasn’t working late, and neither of them had to rush off to Bible Study, soccer practice, band rehearsal, or a small group meeting.

He pulled the change out of his pocket and dumped it into a glass jar on his dresser. When the jar got full, he gave it to Abby; there was usually close to thirty dollars in there by that point, a windfall that used to be a lot more exciting to her when she was younger, before her mother married a rich lawyer. Now it was just a habit, more money she took for granted. He turned to Carrie.

“Did you see the sandwich I left you in the fridge?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Sorry about the onions. I told the guy twice not to put them on.”

“That’s all right,” she assured him. “I just picked ’em off.”

She kept her eyes on him as he undressed, but as far as he could tell, it wasn’t for the purpose of admiring the relative flatness of his belly, or marveling at the way his middle-aged butt continued to resist the relentless claims that gravity made on flesh. Nor was she gazing at him with the kind of critical eye he sometimes turned on her, issuing mental demerits for the stubble on her legs, or the ominous plumpness of her upper arms, which were going to be a problem down the road if she wasn’t careful. It seemed to Tim that she barely noticed his body at all; she was just trying to get a reading on his mood, so she could adjust her own behavior accordingly. What she didn’t seem to understand was that her constant scrutiny
affected
his mood, made him annoyed with her and vaguely ashamed of himself, implying as it did that he was a sullen, difficult guy who needed to be humored and coddled for the sake of domestic tranquility.

“So how was the group,” he asked. “Good turnout?”

“The usual. We barely got to discuss the reading, though. We spent most of the night trying to cheer up Patty DiMarco.”

“Her mother?”

“The doctors thought she was responding to the medication, but she’s right back where she started.”

“Poor Patty.” He tossed his dirty clothes in the hamper. “As if she didn’t have enough troubles.”

“What about you?” Carrie asked. “Everything go okay?”

“I think so,” he said, stepping into a pair of plaid pajama bottoms. “I had to eat a little crow, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought.”