“Yes,” Jonathan agreed grimly, “but like I said, at least they’re in the pews.” He sighed. “Do you know, Frannie, I think Caroline and I have made it to church only a couple times since Easter?”
“Oh! But that’s—”
“Twice in seven months. I know. There always seems to be something else going on.”
“I know you’re very busy.”
“You don’t know any such thing. Stop making excuses for me, Frannie.”
“Following God isn’t about things like church attendance,” I persevered, switching tacks. “Plenty of people could go to church twice a day for their entire lives and not know a thing about God. And others could never set foot in a church and still have a rich relationship with Jesus.”
He snorted. “You must sell people all kinds of goods and services at that bank job, Frannie, because I don’t know where you learned to argue like this. Look—I can’t speak for anyone else on earth. I can only speak for me, and all I know is that my relationship with Jesus hasn’t gotten a bit richer from never being in worship this year. Who am I kidding? Even if Caro—even if I still thought I should go to seminary it would be a farce.”
“Don’t say that, Jonathan. Don’t say these things. They’re not true.”
“I tell you they are, Frannie! Lord! You think it’s easy for me to admit these things to you? To you, who’ve always looked up to me?”
“I still look up—”
“Well, don’t. I hate to disappoint you, but I’m really not worth it.”
“You are!” I insisted. I didn’t bother trying to hide my tears now. They were running down my face and dripping off my chin. I didn’t care. I crossed the room in two steps and took hold of the front of his shirt like I would shake this nonsense from his head. “You are worth it, Jonathan Beresford. You’re the best person I know.”
To my horror, I saw his own eyes were glistening. He gave an unsteady laugh. “You need to get out more.”
“Don’t joke. I’m telling you the truth.”
But he would have none of it. Gently, he removed my hands. “I appreciate your vote of confidence, Frannie. I’m sorry I let you down.”
“You haven’t let me down,” I lied too quickly.
“I feel better for telling you all that,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “You don’t know what pressure it is to have a young cousin who idolizes you.” The words would have stung if he hadn’t winked when he said them. “But you’re eighteen now. Maybe my birthday gift to you is to reveal my feet of clay. I’m just a guy, Fran. No better and no worse, hopefully. What you used to think of me—it’s time to let that go now.”
The room was growing dark and the street lights had not yet come on. I heard muffled laughs from downstairs and wondered if Tom and Marcy had finished my bottle of wine yet.
“Caroline’s applied to Hastings.”
“What’s that?”
“Law school.”
“Law! She wants to be a lawyer? What about being a professional musician?”
His shrug was barely discernible. “Looks like I’m not the only one letting go of childhood dreams.”
No, and I supposed Caroline could still play her harp whenever there wasn’t something else going on, just as Jonathan could find time for God in the leftovers of life. I ground my teeth. Snotty. I was being snotty.
“Do you think she’ll get in?” I asked.
“It would surprise me if she didn’t. She crushed the LSAT and her grandfather was on the board and helped endow a chair.”
I didn’t follow all that, but I understood he was confident.
“Is law school expensive?”
“It’s not terrible, but I’ll definitely need to keep working.”
There went the two years’ of savings, then. He may not have seen me bite my lip, but he read my mind. “Caroline and I…we’re figuring out life together. That’s what marriage is. Joint decision-making. Compromise. Give and take.”
Yes, my snotty voice agreed. You give and she takes.
“When you’re married—”
“I’ll understand,” I finished. It was taking all my self-control to keep the beast of Snottiness behind the rattling bars of its cage, and I didn’t think I was strong enough.
I wasn’t.
“So you’ll keep working at Core-Pro, which you hate, to pay for Caroline going to Hastings?”
The street lamp out front blinked on and threw a distorted parallelogram of light across my floor and pillow.
“Frannie!” He sounded dumbfounded. And why not? My earlier sarcasm was nothing compared to the new bite in my tone. “I said this was a joint decision.”
“And when she finishes law school, then it’s your turn, and you can go into ministry?”
“Get it through your thick head, Frannie,” he said rigidly, “I’m not going into ministry. I’m not going to be a pastor.”
“Because of her? Because she doesn’t want you to?”
He grabbed me then. By the elbow and not very gently. “What’s gotten into you? I just said it was a joint decision. Because Caroline is my wife. We’re in this together, and we’re figuring it out as we go.”
“Then how do you know you never ever want to be a pastor?” I demanded.
He shook me. “Because I know it, Frannie. For God’s sake—if you’re trying to punish me, it’s working. How many times will you make me say it?”
“Until you tell me that it’s because of her!” I cried, beside myself, snottiness in the ascendant. I ripped my arm free. “All this compromise talk! What about what God wants for you, Jonathan? Or is that not even a question you ask anymore? Because she doesn’t ever ask it?” My breath came in pants.
Oh my God, I was crazy! Did I just attack his wife? The person he loved most in the world?
“Who are you?” my cousin said in astonishment. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. Look, Frannie—Caroline is my wife. My loyalty is to her. I won’t let you talk about her like that. And I don’t have to defend our choices to you or to anyone else.”
Of course he didn’t. I was out of my mind. He would never forgive me—ever! He would hate me to the end of his days and start avoiding me and—
In the non-panicking part of my consciousness I registered a sigh of brakes and the grip of tires turning in the driveway. My aunt and uncle, it must be. Tom was already here and Caroline or her brother Eric would park in the street.
Jonathan half-turned toward the door, but then he stopped again. When he spoke, he had a new voice to match my terrible one of the last few minutes. But his was cool and hard, and it sliced through my fading aggression, leaving it tattered at my feet. “You are a child,” he said. “You’re thinking like a child, and it’s time to stop. Listen to me. I’ve grown up. My plans have changed. I’m not going to be a pastor. It was something I wanted once but not anymore. It’s not Caroline. It’s me. I don’t want it. And you—you’ve got to let go of this ridiculous idealism of me. What are you thinking? What’s going on in that head of yours? I’m not kidding, Frannie. I’m not perfect. I never have been and never will be, not even for you. I’m flesh and blood. Don’t put the world on my shoulders. My God—do you know who you sound like? Just tell me I’m hiding my lamp under a bushel and I would swear I was having this fight with Tammy.”
He couldn’t reproach me more harshly than I did myself. What was I thinking, indeed? Maligning Jonathan’s wife to him and forcing him to defend her? Had he done otherwise he would not have been Jonathan. All I managed to do was cause a breach between us. I was a child, like he said. A child and a fool. He would never confide in me again, knowing I tried to divide him from the woman he promised to love till death did them part. The confidences would all be for Caroline. As they should be. Undoubtedly. But the loss of his trust hurt, fool that I was. Fool!
How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire, the apostle James writes, as he thinks about the power of words. My cousin Jonathan and I found ourselves, all i
n an instant, in the midst of an inferno. Anger, hurt, accusation, disillusionment, reproach. Yes, James, I wanted to say. Yes, you were right. The tongue is untameable. Full of deadly poison, setting on fire the entire course of life.
And yet. —Yet. A stubborn part of me rebelled against Jonathan’s words. Of course he was flesh and blood and I’d been an idiot to expect perfection or—worse—to make him think that I couldn’t accept him less than perfect. But my childhood vision wasn’t wholly untrue, no matter what he said. Jonathan was, somewhere in all that vaunted flesh and blood, still that boy with light in his eyes who told me God called his name. The one who treated me all my life as a person, worthy of care and dignity. If the light was flickering, who knew but that I had a part in snuffing it out, with my rosy vision and heavy, heavy expectations.
“F-forgive me,” I stumbled. “It wasn’t my place to speak about your w—about Caroline like that. Of course you would be mad. You should be. I would be mad at me too. I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”
“It’s okay.” His anger had drained away as well. Leaving only—what? “I know you love her. You just… needed somewhere to pin all this, if it wasn’t going to be on me. But Frannie, I’m afraid it’s got to be on me. I’m sorry I couldn’t be all you hoped I was.”
“Don’t say that. I’m so sorry I ever made you feel like you had to live up to something. I…I hate that picture of myself. I would never want to do that to you.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”
He would tell her everything, I feared. Husbands and wives told each other everything. Maybe even this moment he was imagining how he would say, “I finally told Frannie to quit making an idol of me,” and she would reply, “About time! But won’t you miss having your own fan club?” And he would put his arms around her and say, “Well, I know one person she’s not a fan of…”
I was wrong. His thoughts had gone down an entirely different path. “I need to ask your forgiveness, too, Frannie. It was…unacceptable for me to harangue you the way I just did. I don’t know what got into me. And on your birthday, too! ‘Like a city without walls is a man without self-control.’”
“I think,” I gulped, “that I could teach Solomon a thing or two about lack of self-control.”
Downstairs the front door opened and I heard Aunt Marie: “Frannie? Come look!”
We didn’t move.
Jonathan took a deep breath. But now I could hear a smile in his voice and nothing ever sounded sweeter. “We can move on from this, right, Frannie? We’ve been too good of friends not to. You might love me less if you have to take me warts and all, but you’ll love me, won’t you?”
My heart felt like a giant held it in his fist and was squeezing, squeezing, till it leaked between his fingers or burst altogether. I could say nothing. I could do no more than nod, but my cousin saw it.
In answer he pressed my shoulder briefly. We waited. Maybe he wanted me to say something more; maybe I wanted him to. Neither of us did.
Jonathan’s hand moved to my head where he laid it on the crown of my hair. Those silly curls. I was embarrassed. I was grief-stricken. But I didn’t shake him off.
He was blessing me.
More steps and voices downstairs. And then Caroline calling, “Jon? Where are you, Jon? Look who pulled up the same time as I did!”
His hand fell away.
“Be right there,” Jonathan called back, the smile becoming even more audible.
Turning on his heel, he left me.
Chapter 20
I came downstairs having formed a new resolution. I would stop hating Caroline. I would even try to love her. Not in the gushing, girlfriend sense, but rather I would try to see her as God saw her. I would not refuse to see the good in her. I would pray for her. I would wish her well.
This resolution was immediately tested when I found her with her forehead pressed to Jonathan’s, his arm around her shoulders and her hand on his chest. They were making up.
“Look, Frannie!” With uncharacteristic eagerness, my aunt Marie presented me with an enormous bouquet of Mylar balloons, like the party supply store suffered an explosion. “There are eighteen of them,” she declared, “and your uncle and I took turns picking them out.”
I thanked them both, kissing my aunt on the cheek and giving Uncle Paul an awkward side hug. After the incident upstairs, receiving kindness felt painful, and I didn’t trust myself to speak. Fortunately, before I would have to, a figure detached itself from the entry way, where Tom and Marcy had blocked it from view. It was Eric Grant, the sight of whom was a perfect cure for any lingering catch in the throat.
He strolled forward, hands in the pockets of his chinos, the same lazy grin on his face that he wore that first afternoon by the pool, so many years ago. We were exactly the same height—always had been—but I realized I might never have gotten such a good look at him before. Maybe because the two of us had probably not spoken twenty words directly to each other, ever. I remembered the dark, laughing eyes but not the faint lines at their corners; the thin mouth that curved in a perpetual joke, but not the shadow of stubble or the slight cleft in his chin.
“Well, well, well,” drawled Eric Grant. “Would you look at you. What’s it been, Frannie—a couple years? You’re all grown up.”
Something was very odd about his voice. I frowned, trying to figure it out.
“What? Don’t tell me you don’t remember me.”
“I remember you,” I muttered. Only too well.
“Glad to hear it. I confess that, if I didn’t know I was crashing Frannie Price’s birthday dinner, I would have asked Tom who the good-looking blonde was.”
That was it. Eric Grant sounded strange to me because he was flirting. He was using his Rachel-and-Julie voice. The one he used that long-ago summer to play them off against each other. The one he used to seduce Rachel at the All-Star Carnival. The one he used to string Julie along in Tahoe. The one he used at Jonathan and Caroline’s wedding to tell Rachel she didn’t love her husband. I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t see the recognition in them.
Somehow he ended up across from me at dinner. In honor of the occasion, Paola had set my placecard at the farthest possible distance from my Aunt Terri, but after that she arranged the first member of each couple opposite the other down the sides. And as the only two unpaired guests, Eric Grant must be my conversation partner for the evening. With ten at table and the pre-liquored Tom and Marcy commanding the middle, the two of us were effectively cut off from the others. Jonathan, who sat to my right, fed me reassuring smiles from time to time, but we were both too sensitive from our run-in upstairs to grind out small talk with each other. Aunt Marie, at the foot of the table to my left, smiled as warmly as my cousin and had as little to say. So it was all Eric Grant, all the time.
To be fair, if I knew nothing of him, I would have found him fine company for a while. He asked me all about what I was up to, and before the salads were cleared away I had told him about school and working at the savings and loan and, no, I didn’t think I’d apply for college right away (if at all), and, yes, I still talked to Rachel and Julie sometimes.
“I wish I did,” he sighed. “Great gals, your cousins. Too bad they both moved so far away. You must miss them a lot.” This last he addressed to Aunt Marie between us.
“Of course.”
He waited for her to say more, but when she subsided into smiling silence, he went on. “That summer was one of the best of my life, when I met all you Beresfords—and you too, Frannie. I know you’re a Price, but for all intents and purposes, you’re an honorary Beresford—I still think about that summer. In my memory it was sunny every day and we were always together.”
As I, on the other hand, dated most woes in my life from that very summer, I had no ready answer.
“If you don’t go to college, you’ll never know, Frannie,” said Eric Grant. “There’s nothing like being in college and feeling like you’ve got it all before you. I sure felt that way. And your cousin
s! What fun we had together.”
Paola set down the tray of fried chicken before me and served me a breast and drumstick. “Your favorite, Frannie.”
“Thank you so much, Paola.”
“The afternoons by the pool…ha! You remember that time everyone got so worked up about the volleyball game? Poor Perkins. I played a little prank on him, Mrs. Beresford,” he added to my aunt. “On Greg. Because he was being so competitive.” He waited for Aunt Marie to ask him about the prank, but when she only smiled he gave up and turned back to me. “But Greg got his chance to shine at that All-Star Carnival. He took it like a man in the dunk tank while the rest of us looked on admiringly.”
I felt my face grow hot. My own memories of the afternoon hardly tallied with his.
“And Tahoe!” he exclaimed. “To this day, I regret Tahoe!”
“You mean Aunt Terri getting hurt?” I suggested.
A hint of an expression flitted across his face, but not so quickly that I didn’t catch it. He was amused. “Yes, definitely,” said Eric Grant, recovering. “It was terrible, your aunt’s accident. I’m so glad it turned out to be nothing serious. But even more of a bummer was having the weekend cut short. Just the one trip to the casinos before your dear uncle showed up! Not even a single drag boat race under my belt—”
“I’m not sorry Uncle Paul came when he did,” I spoke up at last. My fork rattled against my dish and I lay it down quickly. “He was disappointed in us as it was, without adding more fuel to the fire.”
For the first time that evening, Eric Grant appeared to recall who he was talking to. Maybe it was the good-bye-to-Sandra-Dee hair that fooled him into thinking that I, like the Olivia Newton-John character, had shed my scruples along with my former appearance. After the barest pause he straightened up and resumed more seriously, “You’re right. It was more wild than wise. Things might have gotten out of hand.”
The Beresfords Page 18