Chapter Three
A few hours later, someone knocked on my door. I turned down the CD player, and found Stanley there, wearing an apron and holding tongs in one hand.
“Are you here to grill me?” I asked.
Stanley guffawed, slapping his knee. “You think black folk are cannibals? Well, I never.”
“Er, no, it was…never mind.”
“You’re hilarious, Eli. Get a jacket on and come downstairs.”
“What for?”
“It’s dinner time.”
He really hadn’t answered my question, but I ducked into the room and tugged on my winter coat and sneakers, dashing down the stairs and out the front door.
Right there on the sidewalk, three grills stood, bags of charcoal on the ground next to them, the scent of meat wafting though the clean evening air. Dozens of people stood around talking and laughing, most of whom I hadn’t seen before. More continued to gather, wandering down the sidewalk toward the impromptu party.
Stanley was back at one of the grills, spinning cubes of steak on skewers, so I strolled over to him. “What’s happening here?”
“We’re grilling for the community,” Stanley told me, expertly flicking the meat onto the uncooked side. “It’s something the church tries to do every couple of months.”
“Why?”
Stanley looked down at me quizzically. “What kind of question is that? Cause they like it, that’s why. Cause it’s a great way to make an impact in our community. Cause there are some people around here who don’t have jobs – not just you either, son – and this might be the best meal they get all winter. It’s just the right thing to do.” He flipped a skewer of beef onto a plate and passed it to me. “Eat up. You’re too scrawny.”
“I’m wiry,” I corrected him, biting into one of the cubes. Flavored marinade exploded out of the meat and into my mouth; it had been months since I had anything so tasty. “What is this stuff?”
“Spiedies. It’s a special kind of sauce they only sell in New York. I have to order it online.” Stanley swept the rest of the skewers onto plates, which promptly disappeared into the hands of grateful eaters. Watching the people mill around, and seeing the joy that was brought to them by something as simple as a free meal, I was really moved. I had never done anything like this to help people, and I was almost jealous of the satisfaction Stanley had to be getting from being able to bring happiness to his neighbors’ lives.
“I didn’t know you lived in New York,” I told Stanley.
For a long moment he didn’t answer, almost pretending as if he hadn’t heard the question at all. Finally he opened his mouth to say something, but his answer was cut off by a hand on my shoulder.
“Are you Eli?”
I turned to see a girl, about my same age and height, confident green eyes and an easy smile, holding out a hand. “That’s me,” I told her, shaking her hand. “Pleasure to meet you, whoever you might be.”
She laughed. “I’m Abbie Grant. I live a little ways from here, but Stanley invited me to the cookout tonight. He seemed to think we’d make good friends.”
I shot Stanley an upraised eyebrow. Was he trying to hook me up? He kept his face intently on the meat, although I swore there was an irrepressible smile on his face. He had to have been laughing on the inside.
“Abbie Grant?” I asked. “Weren’t you that singer from the ‘80s? ‘That’s what looooove is for,’ wasn’t that your song?”
Embarrassed, but unable to hold back a giggle, she covered her face. “That was Amy Grant. Not even close to the same person.”
“Don’t lie. I want your autograph.”
“Stanley told me you were funny, but I had no idea. This is too much.”
“Just sing ‘Next Time I Fall’ for me once, please. I’ll sing Peter Cetera’s part.”
To my surprise, she actually did. “Darling I / put my heart up on a shelf / till the moment was right, and I tell myself…”
Her voice was amazing, and I hoped I wouldn’t ruin it when I joined her for the chorus. “The next time I fall in love / the next time I fall in love / it will be with you…”
By this time we had attracted a small crowd, curious about the spontaneous singing, so on a whim I decided to keep going with the song. We had the parts reversed – I was singing the woman’s part, and Abbie was doing Peter the man’s – but our voices blended well. Even more surprisingly than the fact that she sang it was the fact that she did it with passion, the mark of someone who enjoyed singing and took even a joke-challenge seriously.
“The next time I fall in love, it will be with youuuuu…”
The dozen or so people around us applauded vigorously, and I high-fived Abbie. “Your voice is incredible.”
Smiling, she looked down. “Thanks. You’re not too bad yourself. You’re no Peter Cetera, but you’re decent.”
I burst into laughter. “Ouch!”
She shrugged, adding with a smirk, “That’s what you get for calling me Amy Grant.”
“I see how it’s going to be, Amy. That’s fine. You’re modest about your fame, and that’s alright by me.”
She rolled her eyes, but the huge smile on her face told me she wasn’t genuinely offended. “I think this is a new record for me.”
“How’s that?”
“We went from strangers to duet in about twenty seconds.”
“So we did. Anyone who has no problem busting out an impromptu song surrounded by total strangers is a-okay by me.”
“Good to hear it. Are you going to eat that food or just hold on to it all night?”
I looked down, startled to see that I was still holding the plate of meat that Stanley had given me. “Whoa. This is the first time steak has ever almost escaped from me. Normally it doesn’t stand a chance. Want a piece?”
She shook her head. “Stanley packed me full when I first got here. You know that man; he tries to fatten everybody up.”
Stanley, still only a few feet away from us, nodded approvingly. “Except myself,” he added, patting his flat stomach.
“So how do you know Stanley?” I asked Abbie, strolling away from the grill so the people who hadn’t eaten didn’t have to push past me on the way to get food.
“My parents and I lived in this building a couple years ago. Stanley really drew us in and made us feel wanted, you know? So we started going to the church that meets upstairs, and that was really good. My parents moved out a couple of years ago, dad took a promotion and headed to Chicago, but I wanted to stay here with the people I knew. A couple of friends and I got a house near here, and I stay in touch with Stanley pretty regularly.”
“Chicago, huh? I came here a couple weeks ago from Indiana. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to the Midwest.”
“That bad?”
“It’s wonderful if you enjoy six months of winter.”
Abbie made a face. “Gross. I’ll keep Texas, thank you very much.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a teacher, actually; I teach English in a Christian school about ten miles from here.”
“No kidding. English was my major in college.”
“Marketing was mine. I have no clue how I ended up in teaching, except for God’s providence.”
“Heh. Well, life is funny sometimes.”
“It is definitely that.”
There was a pause as I made short work of the Spiedies that Stanley had given me, and when I looked up, Elizabeth Tucker was coming toward us. “Hey, you two,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“Eli serenaded me,” Abbie bragged.
Elizabeth looked at me, confused, and I shrugged. “The serenading was mutual, actually.”
This just perplexed Elizabeth even more, and she shook her head, as if to say she didn’t want to know. “Abbie, can I borrow you for a while?”
“You got it.”
Abbie extended a hand to me. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Eli.”
I took the hand and gave it a firm but gentle shake. “Likewise, Ms. Grant. Hopefully we’ll talk again sometime soon.”
“I’d like that.” With a parting smile, Abbie followed Elizabeth off into the crowd.
I wandered back toward where Stanley was, threading my way through what were by now several hundred strangers. I wondered where the church came up with the money to feed them all.
I found Stanley, but he was deep in conversation with a crowd of perhaps ten people. Jarrius was one of them, but I didn’t recognize the others. Rather than butt in, I backed off a few paces and sat down on the sidewalk, watching the people, half-listening to snippets of conversation that drifted to me on the evening’s breeze. It was about 6:30 by now, and the sun had almost disappeared behind those giant trees to the west, streetlights doing their best to chase away the navy blue of twilight.
I wanted to freeze the moment, take a snapshot of it and hang it on the wall of my memory so that I would always remember how it felt to be here with my friends on a beautiful evening, enjoying good food. Right now it seemed like there wasn’t a care in the world – although the second I had the thought, all those cares came back to me, crashing into my mind like a city bus. I could never get away, for too long, from the fact that my bank balance was ever dwindling, my resume might as well have had “don’t hire me” in capital letters across the top, and I still had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was making friends – more accurately, friends were making me, as Danny had pointed out this morning – but even that was merely a band-aid over a gunshot wound. I felt a little better for a little while when I was hanging out with Stanley or Danny, but that was no remedy for all the things about my life that still just plain sucked.
I saw movement off to the side, and looked up to see Abbie standing over me. “Hey again,” she said. “I’m about to head out, but I wanted to say bye.” She looked over her shoulder, to where everyone else was still talking and eating. “It sure didn’t take you long to get by yourself.”
“Welcome to my life,” I smiled. “I’m more of a watcher and listener most of the time.”
“I’ll leave you to your watching, then, but I wanted to say that it was great to meet you. What floor do you live on?”
“Third. Room three-oh-five.”
“Maybe I’ll drop by sometime.”
“Better bring a lawn chair. I’m afraid I don’t have any furniture.”
She laughed, but stopped when she saw I was serious. “I’m sorry.”
I waved off her apology. “It was good to meet you, Abbie. Take it easy.”
“You too, Eli. God bless you.”
I watched her vanish into the dark, then pushed to my feet and headed over to where Stanley stood, still grilling and chatting.
“Hey hey, Eli. You came back for more food?”
“Nah, I think I’m going to head upstairs. I might take another skewer for the road.”
“Stick around, son. Meet some people.”
“Some other time. I’m going to go practice the guitar a little.”
“Are you playing again this week?”
“People keep asking me to, so maybe. I’ll find out tomorrow night, I guess. That’s when practice is.”
“Well, good. You know what they say, if you fall off the horse, you gotta get right back on it.”
“So they say.”
But I didn’t go up to the meeting room, only as far as my own room, where I sat on my bed, numbly looking out my window into the parking lot where hundreds of friends mingled and laughed. I felt like I had slipped through the cracks, like if there really was a God who was supposed to love and take care of everyone, he had somehow forgotten I was down here.
An empty ache filled my heart, and even though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, I pulled my sleeping bag over my head and sought the only place where the pain wouldn’t follow me.
New Heart Church Page 10