“Why what?” His voice was husky and deep.
“Why are you staying with me?”
“Because ever since I met you I wanted to see you again. But I thought that you would just smile maybe or say hi. I was hoping that if you came in, you wouldn’t walk out after seeing me, and I hoped you’d let me sit at your table.”
I hummed and hugged his hand to my cheek.
“Why do you want me to stay with you?” he asked.
“I told you already … because I want a man to hold me and to hold back at the same time,” I said.
“And you expect this man to hold back for nine months?”
“At least.”
He let go of me then and got out of bed.
“Are you leaving?” the girl inside me asked.
“Just goin’ across the hall for a bit.”
He made two more trips to the guest bedroom in the night. I woke up each time he left but fell back to sleep almost immediately. Each time he returned he held me tighter, with more conviction. And each time I felt more and more centered in myself.
When I awoke in the morning we were sleeping across the bed from each other. I leaned over him and tickled the tip of his nose until he opened his eyes.
I felt fresh and happy; he looked like he hadn’t slept at all.
“This friendship really is gonna be too hard on you, huh, Rash Vineland?” I opined.
“No.”
That was the first moment of real fear that I’d felt in what seemed like years. It was as if Rash had reached into my chest and grabbed hold of my insides.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. I have to go somewhere.”
“Can I come?”
“No. I have to put on some clothes.”
“Can I watch?”
“No,” I said playfully. “Go out to the kitchen and make us some breakfast.”
Rash could cook. He made cheese omelets and bacon with home fries seasoned with onions, bell peppers, and jalapeños. He even made coffee and served me banana-orange-strawberry juice.
“What would Annabella say about all this?” I asked after he served the meal.
Almost immediately I regretted the question. Rash’s face scrunched up and his mouth twisted as if he’d eaten something bitter.
“I can’t worry about that,” he said. “I mean, the way I think about it is, how’d I feel if she did that? But it’s not just the doing.”
“No?”
“Uh-uh. The problem is if some guy made her feel the way you do me.”
“How do I make you feel?” I asked, thinking, Shut up, girl.
“Like I was floating out in the middle of the ocean,” he said. “Like I could rise up in the sky like evaporation. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense but there it is.”
“It’s Sunday,” I said. “People have those feelings on Sundays.”
Rash grinned and nodded.
I knew that I had gone too far with him even without having sex.
“Should we stop this now?” I asked.
He got that look again, the one he had the first time in the restaurant when I told him I had to leave.
“I don’t want to stop,” he said.
“It might cost you.”
“What am I saving for if not for this?”
“I have your number in my purse,” I said, thinking that there was also a loaded gun in there. “I’ll call tonight.”
“Can I have your number too?”
I scribbled it down for him and tore the leaf out of my journal.
He got up and walked to the doorway, then stopped and walked all the way back to kiss my cheek. I didn’t kiss him. I knew better.
Rock of Ages House of Worship had grown since I was a little girl. When I was small the church was too: a little mauve-colored bungalow on a big lot at the dead end of a small downtown block. Now it was a stone fortress standing as high as a five-story building, with three thousand seats and twice that many active members. The parking lot was protected by high fences. The driveway had three uniformed guards.
They let my Jaguar into the lot. The chief security man pointed me to one of the few open parking spaces.
I made my way down a flagstone path to the side door of the church. Music was already playing, a huge choir was singing “Jericho,” and the assembled worshipers were on their feet singing along. There were huge stained-glass windows installed side by side down both walls, and a high platform where the choir sang, and an even higher dais where the preacher would give his sermon.
I was wearing a dark blue dress that came down to my calves and slightly lighter blue medium-heeled shoes. My wide-brimmed straw hat was of a fine weave and white in color. I carried a maroon handbag and wore aqua calfskin gloves that I had taken home from a movie I’d made.
I stood in the back looking around the assembled congregation, listening to the music, trying to feel like I belonged.
On the right side of the auditorium I first recognized Newland, my younger brother. He was standing next to my mom. On her other side was Cornell and past him a woman I didn’t recognize. Behind them was my father’s adopted daughter by an earlier marriage—Delilah—and next to her, singing his heart out, was Edison, my son.
I would have known Eddie if he was a full-grown man, but I only ever saw him on holidays, when I wasn’t working.
I made my way over to the Peel clan. I reached past an Asian woman standing on the aisle and touched Newland’s shoulder while the room cried out in praise-song. Looking at me, uncomprehending at first, Newland’s smile of recognition was a memory that I’d hold dear for the rest of my life.
He whispered something to the small Asian woman and she came out in the aisle, signaling with her hands for me to take her place.
I moved next to Newland and he gave me a one-armed hug.
“Sandy,” he said in my ear. “Mom’ll be so happy you’re here.”
I glanced at the profile of my mother, who hadn’t seen me yet, and saw over her shoulder Cornell’s face. He was lighter skinned than Newland and I and of a heavy build. There was some hair on his chin, but not quite a beard, and a scowl for me that had not changed since the first time the police brought me home and my mother spent the night crying.
The song was nearing its high point. I could hear Edison’s singing in my ears. I closed my eyes and girded myself for the fights and recriminations, for the forgiveness and the loss that would not be dispelled by my brief return.
The singing was over and we all sat looking up at the seated choir hovered over by the empty sky-blue pulpit.
The gospel group’s robes were dark red with cream lapels that went all the way down the front. They sat with military precision, waiting for the next movement in the Lord’s day.
Cornell was staring at me.
My mother realized this and looked my way. Her smile was immediate and she gave me a little wave. She inhaled through her nostrils and held that breath for three or four beats.
I looked away and toward the front of the church. A small woman in ministerial black was making her way, rather inelegantly, up to the platform.
She reminded me of a bug trying to negotiate an unfamiliar vertical climb.
Finally she made it to the podium.
“Good Sunday, brothers and sisters,” she said in a voice that was multitoned, like a jazz trumpet in the hands of a master.
“Good Sunday,” two thousand or more throats murmured and declared.
“I want to thank Brother Elbert and his lovely choir for their singing and Sister Eloise for her organ and this congregation for your voices raised in song and devotion.”
A tremor seemed to go through the audience, a kind of collective hum of satisfaction.
“I know there are many of you out there who come to church each week because you know I don’t mess around.…”
Laughter.
“I don’t love the sound of my own voice and I don’t waste time telling you what you already know. I don’t nee
d to tell ya that if you lied this week, or if you cheated someone, that you sinned. You know if you sinned. You know if you did wrong. You don’t need a minister for that.”
“Teach,” someone cried out.
“You don’t need a minister to follow you to the den of iniquity and tell you that you shouldn’t be there. You don’t need me to see you beat your children or your spouse in order for you to know that you did wrong. When you use the Lord’s name in vain you got ears to hear it. And when you turn your back to suffering it’s not my job to point and say, ‘Look there.’ ”
The minister opened her eyes so wide that I could appreciate it from my seat.
“No. That’s not my job,” she continued. “You’ve all been to church before. You’ve heard all, or nearly all, the stories in the Bible. You know about Sodom and Gomorrah, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Babylon, the pharaohs, Moses, Abraham, and our savior on the cross. You know. I don’t have to tell ya about Noah’s ark navigating the great flood, or John the Baptist. I don’t have to talk about Judas’s role at the Last Supper or quote some verse you might not yet have heard. There’s a Bible you can read for yourself in a forgotten drawer in your house.…”
More laughter. Even I smiled. I still had my childhood white leather-bound testaments in a drawer at home.
“You can turn the page just as easily as I can. You can get down on your knees without me askin’ it. I’m not here to tell you stories of long ago and far away. I’m not here to point out sin and throw stones. I got my own sins to atone for. I got my own glass house.”
“Amen,” a woman cried.
“Preach,” a fellow parishioner replied.
“I’m tellin’ you,” the minister said. “I’m tellin’ you here and now that this pulpit does not raise me up above you. It doesn’t make me smarter or better, not one whit closer to God. We are all in the same soup down here. And every day we have to reach out”—she raised her arms above her head—“and try to touch Him and feel Him and love Him and most of all we have to do His work.”
The lady minister looked around the silent room. She had us all at that moment.
She was an older woman. Her skin was the brown of an overripe melon. Her face was clear of worry.
“I’m not gonna preach old stories that you’ve heard a thousand times,” she said. “That kind of preachin’ is for the children who are just now learnin’ the path up … and the road down.
“What I’m talkin’ about is you and me and what we might do to make this world something that reflects the teachings of all the great prophets.”
She stopped again and rubbed her nose with the fingers of her left hand.
“Ruby Jenkins,” she said. “Does anybody out there know Ruby?”
She looked around but no one replied.
“Ruby Jenkins,” the preacher intoned. “She lives six and a half blocks from this church. Ruby has an illegal room at the back of a commercial property. She also has a fever and infected sores on her feet and back. I hear that she’s from Tennessee and her family has moved on from these parts. She’s an old woman but she looks older and she feels pain every day. She don’t sleep and she cain’t walk because of her fever and her feet. She cain’t come to God and I believe that God is wondering why no one goes to her. Because you know God does not reside in this house. The omnipotent spirit is not prisoner on Sundays to us in our best clothes and on our best behavior.”
The minister—I never learned her name—looked around the room telling us with her silence to consider her words.
“No,” she continued after that exquisite quietude, “God is not ours. We belong to Him. We are here to do His work. His home is in that back room with Ruby and in the jail cell with some’a your sons and daughters and their friends. He might not even be here today. Your prayers might be on the back burners, in a saved file like in some giant computer. God might not get to readin’ your prayers for a thousand years because He is worried about suffering and the pain that we ignore in this fine house we’ve built.
“But you have to understand, brothers and sisters, that this building looks beautiful in your eyes but it’s no more than Ruby Jenkins’s room in the eyes of the Lord. You come here to plan your baptisms and say your prayers, to hear stale Bible stories and compare hats. But out there”—the minister pointed to her left—“out there is the real cathedral. This earth is God’s palace and real prayer is the succor of sufferin’ in His name.
“Ruby Jenkins is one in ten thousand lost and ailing, ten million. There are hungry children and drunken men, women sellin’ their bodies and wise men plannin’ the murders of millions callin’ themselves God-fearing and thinkin’ about sainthood.
“Prayer for us, brothers and sisters, is not the childhood, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’ That kind of psalm is for children learning to respect and to give thanks. We’re here, in this room, to give a helpin’ hand, to reach out to the sinner and the lost and the suffering. Don’t you think that I or any other pretender to holiness can forgive you. As long as there’s a Ruby Jenkins hidden from your view you know that your work is not done, that your prayers are unspoken, that the Lord’s plan is unfinished.…”
The minister stopped there, seemingly in midsentence. She turned her back and walked away, through an unseen exit, leaving us in the middle of her sermon like survivors of a boat wreck in the center of a vast lake.
It was the shortest sermon I’d ever heard and also the only one to ever touch me.
After a moment of confusion organ music began to play. The sunlight through the abstract designs in the stained-glass windows seemed to brighten. I felt for Theon and his flight from unhappiness; for Jolie who was on the same reckless journey. And I knew that I was, even at that moment, on the same road but that didn’t bother me.
“Let’s go,” Newland whispered in my ear.
The sound of his voice made me gasp and giggle. I stood up like a drunken woman and made my way to the parking lot.
Outside I was reunited with my family, known and unknown. Cornell, who was a few years older than I, glowered, and Delilah (to my surprise) smiled brilliantly. Newland had his arm around the lovely Asian woman’s waist, and my mother, Asha Peel, came crying into my arms.
“Sandra, baby,” she said.
I held on to her as if for safety in those complex emotional waters.
“Mom,” I whispered.
“This is Mi Lin,” Newland said as they approached the embrace. “She’s my wife.”
I smiled and freed a hand to shake.
She grinned with abandon and then laughed.
My mother moved back, holding me only by the wrists now.
“You look so beautiful,” she said.
Cornell’s glower became a full-out scowl.
Delilah lifted Edison in her arms and came forward.
“You remember your mother, don’t you, Edison,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Is it Christmas?”
“No,” my stepsister said. “She’s finally come home.”
There was a look of shocked delight on the boy’s face. He stretched out his arms and suddenly I was holding him. His weight was nothing, but my own body felt as dense as stone. Edison squeezed my neck and I had to concentrate not to crush his skinny little body in my arms.
A beautiful and unforgiving black woman came up to Cornell’s side.
The world around me seemed to be spinning. I felt like a youngster drunk for the first time. I had moved so quickly from one world into others. This action seemed to resonate with the minister’s sermon somehow.
“We’re all going to my house for supper,” my mother said. “You’re gonna come, aren’t you, Sandra?”
I wanted to say yes. I intended to go. But the overwhelming nature of that day, of the past days, slowed my ability to speak.
“You can bring Theon,” she said.
“Theon died, Mom,” I said, “but I’ll be happy to come to dinner.”
“I’m so sorry,” Asha said. “No
t that you can come but about Theon.”
“I’ll drive you and the little man,” Cornell said to Delilah.
“No, baby,” my stepsister said. “We’re going to ride with Eddie’s mother.”
“Yaaaay,” my son yelled.
“Uncle Cornell says that you couldn’t be my mama no more because you did bad things,” Edison said in the car.
He was sitting next to me strapped down by the adult-size safety belt. Delilah was in the back.
“Is that true?” he asked when I didn’t respond immediately.
“Eddie,” Delilah said.
“No, baby,” I said. “What Cornell meant was that the kind of life I was living would have been a bad thing for a child like you. I was protecting you from things that could have made you scared and upset.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“You’ll find out one day, honey.”
“Do you still do things that scare a little kid?”
“Not anymore. No. All that is over as of next Saturday.”
“What happen then?”
“I have to go to a funeral and then … and then I’m gonna start a whole new life.”
“Can I come stay with you?”
I looked up in the rearview mirror.
Delilah had long curly hair that was pulled back and tied with a yellow bow. She had a cherub’s face and bright brown skin. One might have called her plain if not for the happiness she exuded. Her eyes were kind and hopeful.
She nodded at me.
“I want you to,” I said.
“Then can I?” Edison asked.
“Today is the first day I been back around your grandmother and Delilah and your uncles and aunts,” I said. “And so we have to take a few days to figure out what will happen then. I have to find a job somewhere and a new place to live before I can take you with me.”
“Is this your car?” my son asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“It’s nice.”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe we could live in here.”
Delilah laughed and tickled Edison from over the seat.
He laughed too and pretty soon we were all laughing. Before we got to my mother’s house Eddie taught me a song about where the little lost donkey goes to get found.
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