The Church Ladies

by Lisa Samson

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Knight. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything to the police about Ed. But I just couldn’t. I know it was stupid. And I know what a big jerk Ed is.”

  “Josh must have known that, too,” Chris said. “He made the decision on his own. And he had taken a drink of his own choosing. The coroner said so.” Chris opened up her purse and pulled out the report. “See? Look at the blood alcohol level.”

  George took it, looked at it, then shook his head. We passed it all around, like some wretched shower gift, each looking at the line she had pointed out.

  And we nodded simultaneously.

  “He wasn’t normally the type to drink, Mrs. Knight. I don’t know why he had a beer that night.”

  “It’s not your fault, Ron,” Chris said.

  “But maybe I could have prevented it.”

  “You couldn’t have known, bud,” George said.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Chris said. “The police report said it wasn’t the fraternity’s fault, but I was hoping to find out otherwise.”

  George reached out and took her hand. “It clearly isn’t anything the fraternity can take legal responsibility for.”

  “What’s happened to Ed?” I asked.

  George cleared his throat. “Nothing that I know of. Nobody even knew he had anything to do with it!”

  Chris started digging in her purse for something.

  I took the lead again. “How influential are you in Zeta Chi?” I asked him.

  “I sponsor one boy every four years. Complete scholarship.”

  “At JHU?”

  “Of course.”

  Go Blue Jays. My mouth went dry.

  Chris pulled out a Kleenex and blew her nose.

  “What about nationally?” I asked. Josh deserved more from me, his blood cousin, than a polite nod at Zeta Chi or an angry feeling at Ed.

  “I’m quite active.”

  “How hard would it be to get rid of this Ed from Zeta Chi?”

  “It wouldn’t be impossible.” But he sounded reticent.

  I asked why.

  “Ed’s mother is my sister. I’m also his sponsor.”

  Chris broke down. It had to have come sooner or later, but what timing! I took her into my arms and looked harshly at George Parkes as Chris wept. “Get rid of him. I don’t care if he’s your nephew.”

  “I think we could come to some other arrangement,” George said. “He’s going to graduate next year.”

  “So he can lead some other freshman up there?”

  “He’s done it before this, Dad,” Ron said, still not looking up. “Not always on hell night either. At least that’s what the guys say.”

  George turned to his son. “Have you climbed up there before?”

  “No. But he did it last year, too. Everyone’s just turned a blind eye because he’s your nephew. He’s just been lucky up ’til now.”

  George Parkes blew out a sigh. “My sister will never forgive me for doing this to her son. I can’t believe Ed would do that kind of thing.”

  “Oh, come on, Dad! He’s a jerk!”

  “If you don’t do something, I’m taking Chris right back down to my father who’s an attorney, I might add. Believe me, we’ll press charges. Ed would get manslaughter or at least reckless endangerment.”

  Right? I hoped George Parkes wasn’t a lawyer!

  I hated to play hardball like this, but I couldn’t bear for this Ed guy, who led people up TV towers and was a bully and a threat, simply to walk away with nothing to face. Ed deserved to pay some sort of consequence. The stiffer the better.

  George shook his head wearily. “I’m sorry,” he said again to Chris. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll do something.”

  “Mr. Parkes, I didn’t mean to stir up this kind of trouble,” Chris said.

  Oh, come on, Chris! Don’t play nice!

  “It’s okay” He stood to his feet. “You know, you try to be a good parent. But you can’t see it all, can you?”

  Chris wiped away her own tears. “No, you can’t.”

  Ron stood up. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Knight.”

  Chris leaned forward and pulled him close to her. “You take good care of yourself, Ron. Please.”

  “We’d better go,” I said. If there was one thing I’d learned as a woman interacting with men, it was knowing when to leave them in order that their dignity might be preserved.

  And I didn’t want to explode, either.

  “Well, that whole thing could be classified as a stink,” I said to Chris as I pulled out of the Parkes’s driveway and onto Route 152. “And rightly so.”

  “I know! And I feel worse. How was I supposed to know they were related?”

  “You didn’t even know there was an Ed to worry about!”

  “Oh, man. What’s that boy’s mother going to think?”

  “Well, I’m the one who called for Ed’s head anyway!”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t tell you to stop.”

  “Well, I wasn’t about to back down!” I said.

  “Do you think we did the right thing in sticking to our guns about Ed?”

  “Yeah. He should really be kicked out of Hopkins, if you want my opinion. And Hopkins is a good school, Chrissy. They don’t want their students in danger.”

  “I feel so nauseous.” Chris opened the glove box. “You got any crackers in here?”

  “They’re in there somewhere. Look under the manual.”

  “That Ron was a nice boy, Poppy.”

  “Yeah. Poor guy.”

  “I know. Do you think they’ll kick Ed out?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I knew I was going to give the school a big tip-off. “He would deserve it.”

  We traveled west planning to have lunch at the Manor Tavern. I pulled into the Wawa convenience store. “Are you thirsty?”

  “Yeah.”

  Two minutes later I was back with a couple of Cokes. I loosened both caps and placed them in the drink holders. “You okay, Chrissy?”

  “Not really, Popp. I keep asking myself how he could do something so stupid? So utterly stupid?”

  “He was only eighteen years old.”

  “I don’t care! It was TV Hill, Popp. TV Hill! We’ve all heard about the bodies in pieces. We grew up with that. Josh did, too. He was old enough to know better.”

  “But he was drinking, Chrissy, and I know it’s hard to understand.”

  “What’s hard to understand, what is shaking my faith to the core, Poppy, is that I prayed for his safety his entire life! There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t pray for God to protect him. What’s hard to understand is that the prayers in heaven for the safety of my child are countless. I know, I know, we pray for safety, still knowing that life is dangerous, still knowing that there are creeps like Ed out there lying in wait, but I expected God would come through in a situation like this. Why would prayers like that go unanswered? If a child asks for a piece of bread, is he handed a rock? I feel like I’ve been given rocks and scorpions.”

  She twisted her wedding rings on her finger as I tried to grasp for something right to say, something that would mean anything.

  Chrissy grabbed my hand. “I wish that God would have left all my other prayers unanswered and given me just this one. It was the most important to me, Poppy. Didn’t He see that?”

  Chris turned to look back out of her window and I waited. But nothing more came, so I started up the car and pulled onto the road.

  I had no answers just then.

  “Really, Mrs. Knight, hazing is pretty much out of the picture now. At least hazing like you’ve probably heard about.”

  I grabbed Chris’s hand as we sat in plain, wooden chairs before the vice president of student affairs. “So, what you’re saying is that we’re a little late in the game?”

  Richard Fellows nodded his very shiny baldhead that reflected the square of the fluorescent light above him perfectly, sharp edges and all. “Of course, there are colleges that allow initiations that p
ut the pledge in an embarrassing position. But it should never be painful. But that isn’t the case here, I assure you.”

  “What went wrong that night?” Chris asked. “What could have been done to prevent it?”

  He shook his head, his very round, deep brown eyes compassionate. “Nothing. And that, I’m afraid, is the truth.”

  “What about the drinking?”

  “Well, clearly the boys who climbed the tower were underage.”

  I sat up. “But to try and stop that—”

  “Exactly,” he said. “It’s impossible.” He turned to Chris. “Mrs. Knight, you must know how horrible we feel about what happened to Josh. He was a promising young man.”

  Chris took a fresh Kleenex out of her purse, and Richard Fellows opened a desk drawer.

  “I had our campus newspaper look through the lacrosse archives, and they gave me this shot from spring training. I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of framing it for you yesterday after you made the appointment.”

  In a very smooth, desk-job hand, he held out an eight-by-ten, black-and-white picture, matted in Blue Jay blue with a tubular white frame.

  Chris gulped back a sob.

  There was Josh. Just Josh.

  His stick was high, the hard white ball snuggled in the netting. The ground had released his feet by a good three feet, and he was flying sideways through the air, stick back, ready to throw.

  Forever and ever.

  It was difficult to see his face behind the face mask, but my brain filled in the details. The expression spread across his features was happy, yet aggressive. And clearly he was yelling, “Ball!”

  “Josh could be tough when he wanted to be,” I said.

  “Yeah, he could.” Chris ran two light, shaking fingers over the image of her son. “Thank you, Mr. Fellows.”

  He smiled, and I wondered if he knew God. He seemed like someone who knew God. “I wish I could do more for you, Mrs. Knight.”

  Chris stood to her feet and put out her hand. They shook. “Me, too.”

  Out in the parking lot, I took Chris’s hand, and we walked to the car, neither of us caring who saw or what they thought.

  Twenty-six

  Paisley actually looked nice. She came home from her tutoring job that afternoon with four cups of Starbuck’s. “Aperitifs for the fashionably insane woman,” she said cheerfully.

  I definitely approved of the slim, yet long linen jumper, beige colored with tiny embroidered green leaves trailing diagonally from Paisley’s right shoulder to her left hip. And the way my daughter had pulled her long black hair back into a simple ponytail at the nape of her neck looked elegant. The hippie sandals and at least eight pounds of silver jewelry kept it from being old school. Not to mention that fresh tattoo.

  I was wise enough to know that the last thing I should do was send out a compliment on the getup. It would smack too much of an “I told you so.” Unless, of course, one said it just right. And always on the backstage crew of the school plays, I knew I didn’t possess that kind of acting skill.

  Instead, I took the coffee with, “You’re just what the doctor ordered,” and we sat at the kitchen table and heard about Paisley’s day.

  “I think I enjoy the middle schoolers the most,” she said, taking off all of her silver rings, sliding five different hoops out of her earlobes, removing any bracelet that wasn’t tied on, and stretching her fingers.

  “It’s a good age.” Chris took the top off of her plain-Jane decaf to let the coffee cool. “They’re old enough to sit still, but young enough not to think they know everything.”

  “Exactly,” Paisley said. “You know, it’s so spooky how life can change on you so fast.”

  I just nodded. Chris said she knew that first hand now, and Paisley rubbed her arm.

  Mother stood to her feet and said, “I made some sausage Bisquick cheese balls for your father, but it’s six o’clock, and he’s not back from golf, so I say they’re ours.”

  I couldn’t agree more.

  Coffee and cheese balls in the Heubner kitchen at six in the evening. Now how weird could life be? Mother had become spontaneous, and Paisley wore a darling linen sheath. Hopefully, I could keep my mouth shut and not say the wrong thing to set my daughter off, and well, that might make it a day to mark on the calendar each year. A day to celebrate. I could call it Zip It Up Day or Mum’s the Word Day or something.

  And, really, Mother was getting more groovy by the minute now that I had decided to take off my “Castle Glasses,” those big defensive stone things I’d been wearing for decades. She actually wore jeans on her slender hips and had one of those new, feathery razor cuts she tucked behind her ears. And she even belonged to a reading group for mystery lovers. They called themselves Aggie’s Gals. Was that cute or what?

  Mother set five or so sausage balls aside. “Just so John won’t feel completely forsaken.”

  Of course, Angus would have nothing to do with them, and Paisley sliced up a cucumber for herself. But there were no snide remarks about devouring someone else’s flesh.

  That night we three Heubner women sat outside on the small porch. Angus and Chris had fallen asleep in front of a DVD of The Prince of Egypt.

  Mother and Daddy owned a DVD player. Had they always been this cool and I didn’t realize it? If so, that was a classified bummer because they could have been taking us all on great family vacations, renting cabins and beach condos, eating at fancy restaurants, and going to the movies together. The term “extended family” might have applied.

  The stars shone dimly through the lights of the city, and we watched the stripes of car lights, one red and one white, make their way up or down Charles Street.

  “I love springtime,” Mother said. “Even in the city”.

  “What really made you sell your house in the country and move down here, Grammie?” Paisley had changed into boys’ athletic shorts from some all male, New England prep school and a large T-shirt from another prep school. This one had its own saint.

  I willed myself not to ask how my daughter had come by them.

  “The quiet was why I left.” Mother polished her toenails a light frosty golden color. “Couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  “What about all of your friends?” I asked.

  “We still get together. But the group’s slowly dwindling from cancer and heart attacks, which is hard. We probably still see each other just as much, but now I don’t have to go rambling around in that house that I never liked much anyway.”

  “You didn’t?” Paisley and I said it together, then looked at each other with our mouths open.

  “I loved that house growing up!” I said.

  “Me, too!” Paisley nodded.

  “Well, I never did. Don’t ask me why. I was perfectly content with our big rancher in Hampton.”

  I had always been under the impression that it was Mother who’d engineered the move out to Worthington Valley.

  Mother sighed. “I thought Hampton was the be-all and end-all when we moved out there. I thought we had arrived, and I didn’t ever want to move.”

  I remembered the stone rancher. I could see the roof of The Hampton Mansion if I swung high enough on my swing set, the glass panes of the cupola windows flashing sun-filled flares upon my eyes. But we’d moved when I was twelve, before I’d lost my identity as a seventh grade prep school girl. I often wonder how I would have turned out had I been born and raised in Dundalk or Essex. Probably a lot healthier emotionally.

  So Mother hadn’t been the social climber. It was Daddy. “Wow,” I said.

  “So it was your idea to move down here into town?” Paisley asked.

  “Yes, Paise. We’ve got a nice life down here. We walk a lot. And there are lots of good coffee places around. The students are fun to watch, too. We spend hours down at the campus sitting on the bench and watching them.”

  I sat back and watched as my mother chatted with Paisley. I watched my daughter as I did when she had been a child, enjoying the
sight of her, the different angles, the expressions. And I felt proud. Mother should be proud, too.

  I heard the small, mahogany wall clock by the entryway chime once. Daddy must have set it on the lower chimes for the night.

  Mother had long since gone to bed, but I sat with Paisley, drinking coffee and watching the almost deserted street. The girl could make a decent pot of coffee.

  “You know you’re welcome to come back with us, Paisley.” It had been risky to say it, but I didn’t know how else to word it.

  “I know.”

  “But you don’t want to right now?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “I understand.”

  “Grammie and Gramp said I can stay here as long as I need to.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m just going to do what we had talked about before, apply for a teaching position for the fall, and then keep on at Sylvan this summer.”

  “I think that’s wise. You know there’s always a place for you with us, though. I could even have the studio made over into a little one-room apartment if you’d like.”

  Paisley smiled, turned to me, and took my hand. “Thanks, but—”

  “And it’s not like I’m even painting that much anymore.”

  “I know. Dad’s told me that much.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He likes it when you paint. Did you know that?”

  I felt more breeze on my eyes. “No. I always thought it was a pain to him.”

  Paisley shook her head. “No way. He thinks it’s quite sexy, actually.”

  I let out a weak chuckle. “He told you that?”

  “Oh yeah. Daddy and I have very candid conversations.”

  Obviously.

  Keep it zipped, Poppy. Don’t be the bug. Paisley’s finally saying a few things “the way it is.” Don’t spoil it. But what would The Proper Christian Ladies’ Handbook say about such a situation in chapter 14, “Motherhood”? Probably something about propriety and using every opportunity to get a lesson across.

  Well, forget The Handbook tonight.

  “You’ve always been close, you two,” I said. “We never really clicked, did we?” I winced against the response.

  Paisley cleared her throat. “No. I guess not.”