Plain Perfect & Quaker Summer 2 in 1

by Beth Wiseman; Lisa Samson

  “You know, Jace, I think this is one of my two favorite moments of the day.”

  “The first sip of tea, huh? What’s the other?”

  “Sliding in between the sheets at night.”

  “And all the in-between?”

  Mercy, that prickles.

  I lean back to the kitchen desk and grab the handout from yesterday’s service at St. Peter Claver. “Look at this, Jace. Look at all this church does to help people.”

  He sits down and takes the bulletin out of my hand. He holds it way out and his eyes scan the activities: crisis pregnancy clinic, food bank, mentoring, after-school tutoring, to name a few.

  He grabs my hand, his eyes burning.

  “I miss the hospital ship, Hezz. There was something so stimulating about that kind of environment. I felt closer to God there than I ever have anywhere else.”

  “I know.”

  “We were of single purpose, really committed to the suffering and to the gospel. I don’t know if God has that kind of life charted out for everyone, but man, I miss that kind of hard-core commitment.”

  “We tend to fit the gospel into our lives and not our lives into the gospel, Jace.”

  “Right. We sure do.” He lets go of my hand and picks up his toast. “That’s what we’ve done, isn’t it?”

  I nod.

  We eat for a bit and I feel so married. Those moments hit me every so often when I realize that I’d do anything for this man.

  “Jace?”

  “Yes, hon.”

  “Would things be better if we just settled down at a new church? Maybe that’s the reason life feels so confusing.”

  “If the answer was that easy, the church would be saving the world.”

  “What’s going wrong?”

  “We’ve sold our souls by selling our time to the highest bidder.”

  I look around me, copper pots, soapstone counters, high-end furniture, and I know he’s exactly right.

  “This place is a far cry from the Hotel, isn’t it?”

  Jace nods. “This place isn’t real, Heather. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I think I’m starting to figure it out.”

  I decide to give him a chance to talk about Bonnie. “I got a support letter from Bonnie awhile back. How’s she doing?”

  “Well, she and Rob are doing really well.” He looks at the clock above the doorway. “Hey, I’d better get a move on. I’ve got to make early rounds.”

  EIGHT

  Jolly’s wife, Helen, collected dolls. Dolls in flapper dresses, tuxedos, Southern belle gowns, gowns with bustles, gowns with shawls, gowns with matching coats, hats, gloves, and parasols. Dolls looking through painted-on eyes or realistic glass orbs. And some of them are the most mutated-looking bits of porcelain and wax and plastic I’ve ever seen. Horror movie prop people, if they realized what a gold mine sat here on the bonnie banks of Loch Raven, would be knocking down Jolly’s door.

  Oh, but Helen. With her gleaming coffee-bean skin and her tight battleship gray curls, her smiling garnet mouth—well, you never wanted to leave her kitchen table. Especially when she made scalloped potatoes, fried fish, and biscuits. And her lasagna made you almost want to give up on life because it just had to be all downhill from there.

  The walk to Jolly’s house feels like an enchanted step back in time. Years ago, the daughter of the MacFees, the family who built our original house, and Jolly’s grandmother convinced their fathers to lay down a stone path that meanders close to the drop-off down to the waters of Loch Raven so they could easily get to each other’s house, even on rainy days. For some reason, though several families have come and gone since the days of the MacFees at the turn of the century, we’ve all kept up the path, kept the slate pavers clear. We even planted moss in between the stones several years ago. Several telltale signs of romance festoon the walk. I pass maple trees with initials carved into their trunks. A squat concrete bench that’s now crumbling but which no one can find the heart to remove and a line of honeysuckle bushes that perfume the humid air surely supported a marriage proposal or two. A muscled wisteria vine that spills its morning-sky purple over the banks undoubtedly witnessed its share of stolen kisses.

  I wanted to live right here all of my life. The waters of Loch Raven hold a great deal of mystique for me, a girl who grew up with a chain-link fence separating the concrete patio from the concrete alleyway behind the house. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say the multigabled stone house hardly looks like it belongs to someone like me— someone who walked to school with the other kids wearing clothes from Two Guys, someone who vacationed for a week every summer on the Magothy River in a small sea-green bungalow with a rotting pier and a rowboat even my father couldn’t propel in a straight line.

  The euphoria lasted about two years from the time we moved in.

  Jace is from a “better” family, to use the adjective in the most presumptuous of vernacular. But for some reason, he never seemed to notice that. And certainly they give the chintziest Christmas gifts I’ve ever seen. Give me Dad the Plumber any day, who saved up all year for a rousing buyout of Toys “R” Us. The fact that I laugh with Jace and reach for his hand is, he said, “something I never knew I needed so badly, and something I’d never want to live without again.”

  Jace’s family belongs here on the shores of Loch Raven, but they’re still tucked down in Hampton, a cushy late-’50s neighborhood that was the place for rich city folks moving out to the county. They still do martinis at five.

  I push through Helen’s rose garden and skirt the grape arbor.

  Jolly is the last farming holdout in the area. His house sits back from the cliff. A real beauty—its Palladian windows line the front, and several grand chimneys poke through the slate roof for the many fireplaces inside. But as Jolly says, “It’s just a big old farmhouse, you know.”

  I need people like Jolly speaking into my life with their actions, particularly actions like having the same sofa for the past thirty years or so.

  He planted anyway this year, although he threatened not to when Helen died. We stood by Helen’s grave and he said, “I do believe the life has gone right out of me.” But Jolly not planting is like me not making cakes. It’s simply what we do.

  I open the porch screen door on the side of the house, cross the indoor-outdoor carpet, then rap on the kitchen door Helen painted a parrot green a couple of years ago.

  The door swings open, and there he stands with eyes redder than the potted geranium he placed by the porch. He clears his throat and smoothes a hand over his hair, thinned out and looking as soft as a closely sheared sheep. “Come on in, Heather.”

  “You been crying?”

  “Appears so.”

  I step into the kitchen that’s so Helen. Pink walls and gray countertops complement pictures of rose bowers and gardens. A large square table with a white lace cloth covered by a sheet of clear plastic dominates the center of the room.

  Jolly scratches a bristly, caramel-colored cheek. “Coffee?”

  I pull out a chair. “You got some made?”

  “Nope. But I was planning on making some sometime today.”

  He wasn’t. “That’s fine.” He needs the coffee or at the very least something do to while I take up space in his echoing kitchen.

  He turns on the faucet and half fills an aluminum pot with water. I feel the hollowness in his heart as the water smacks the cavern of the old coffee pot. I can’t imagine losing Jace, something I don’t take for granted, believe me. Doctors die younger, you know, the irony of which never escapes me.

  Everything appears the same as the day Helen left it all to go to the hospital for routine surgery and ended up having a massive stroke on the operating table. Scary the way that happens. But Helen herself breathed life into her crazy possessions and even the very air in this old home. When Helen was alive, it just felt loved and taken for granted, haphazard and clean, a reflection of the lady who was a special education teacher for years and years.
<
br />   They never had children, and I never asked why. With Helen gone, I doubt I’ll ever know.

  “Jolly, did your family build this house?”

  “No. The original family fell on hard times after the war, and so my great-granddaddy bought it real cheap—after he’d been freed a good while. Grandpop Mercer had the Midas touch.”

  I reach for the Field and Stream sitting on the table next to the place he’s already set for his next meal, coffee cup looking down in its saucer. “You getting your fishing license soon?”

  “Yep. Even Helen’s death can’t stop me from doing that.”

  “She’s probably jealous she can’t go with you!”

  He nods. “Yep, you’re right there. She was a mighty fine fly fisherman.”

  “Jace said she was sheer poetry.”

  “Think Jace’ll want to go out on the Gunpowder soon?”

  “Definitely. So what are you going to do today?”

  Jolly spoons some instant crystals into a couple of coffee cups. Ah, well.

  “Jolly, you got a tea bag?”

  “Yep, sure do. Want that instead?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “’Course not. Anyways, I’m going to work my garden and do a lot of mowing.”

  “Will can come over and help if you’d like. It’s summer now, and he needs something more to do than play video games and swim.”

  “Like that boy. Sure. Send him on over.”

  He pours the hot water over the tea bag and the coffee crystals. Then he looks up at me. “I’m trying to keep on going, Heather.”

  “I know.”

  I take a picture of his face, storing in my mind that look of pain mixed with a somewhat hopeless determination. I love the lines of his face, the vertical folds of his whiskery skin, the droopy hazel eyes so different these days. I wish he wasn’t sad. But with the life of love he lived, how could he be anything else? And I surely wouldn’t want that taken away from him.

  He blinks, then taps the tabletop. “But some days . . . well, you of all people know that Helen and I were a real pair.”

  “I do.” Rarely did just one of them show up on our doorstep. If Helen canned some beans, Jolly helped deliver. If Jolly thought some corn shocks might be nice to decorate for autumn, Helen carried over a pumpkin as well.

  “Sure. Send the boy on over. Life has gotten a tad dull.”

  He sits down catty-corner from me. “On a good note, though, I’ve been selected to go to art school.”

  “Really?”

  He pulls out a folded-up newspaper. “Look here. If I can draw this, I can go to this art school, they said.” He winks. “I sent it in and they accepted me, surprise, surprise.”

  I take the paper. “Hmm. Looks like it could be fun.”

  “Why not? What else have I got to do?”

  “Let me know how it goes. Will can help you, you know. He loves to draw.”

  Jolly winks again and points to the wall surrounding the nowdefunct kitchen fireplace. Pictures Will taped up in a slapdash manner surround the chimney. “I gathered that a good bit ago.”

  We slurp our beverages in mostly silence—a little talk here, a little talk there, and despite the freakish dolls in the other room, the peace that Helen always brought to any situation still remains here in the old house.

  “I sure did like the way she canned peaches, Jolly.”

  “She did a good job of it, didn’t she? Helen never did much halfway, though.”

  “No, she sure didn’t.” My gaze slips over to the dolls in the other room.

  “You know she bought the dolls she felt sorry for.”

  “I never knew that, Jolly.”

  “No, most folks didn’t.”

  I want to hug him to me, but I can’t make Jolly a project. Like I need one more thing to do. But I do enjoy sitting with him. How could a person not? Jolly is like your favorite chair. His 1930s existence makes my soul yearn: tending his garden, talking to the boys down at the old store on Jarrettsville Pike, the last vestige of Loch Raven in the old days before people like us began buying up the place. It seems like people in my parents’ generation knew how to keep from overloading themselves. Or maybe they just didn’t complain about it like we do. Haven’t figured out which.

  * * *

  Jace calls me on my cell during my walk back home. “I was just on our bank account on the Internet. Five hundred dollars at T.J.Maxx, Hezz? Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Right. And here I thought our talk was a breakthrough. Man, Heather!”

  “I said I was sorry, Jace.”

  “Maybe you should have thought Sorry before you walked into that store. Shoot, I’m being paged. I won’t be home until late.”

  * * *

  I slide some ground beef out of the freezer and lay it to thaw on a paper towel on the counter. My hands shake. Jace never gets mad like that. I hope it will all be blown over by the time he gets home.

  Laney had her baby a few weeks early, and Will and I are going to deliver a meal. If her kids grow up to be just as nice as their mother, well, the world will be that much closer to what it should be. And isn’t that important, God? To be around and raise decent children in a safe and loving environment?

  * * *

  Okay, so I’m crying and crying. I shouldn’t turn on the TV this late at night, but I just couldn’t sleep, and now an infomercial about what I can do to fight starvation in Africa is about to claw my heart right out of my chest.

  I pull out my laptop, hop on the organization’s website, and fill out a monthly pledge to help one child get enough food, clothing, and even schooling to hopefully grow up.

  I’m feeling rather burdened, to use the church vernacular.

  I bought the cutest outfit for a black-tie fund-raiser we attended tonight for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. All black with a touch of sparkle, it shaved off at least ten of my extra pounds. I’d just had my hair colored and styled it to look tasteful yet fancy. I try not to be overly concerned about my outward appearance to the point of obsessing, but you know when you’ve raised your personal bar. And believe me, church women can be so utterly obsessed by outward appearance it makes me want to just get old and be done with it. Maybe I should let all the gray hang out. My earlier years still haunt me, reminding me of how I never really fit in no matter how much I did, and following me to the clothing store all the time.

  As a stylist, I could have worn all black, all the time.

  My favorite rationale for excess Sunday fussiness is, “Well, I get dressed up and try to look my best on Sundays to give my best to God.”

  Jace, who was back to his old self when he came home last night, tied the bow tie for his tuxedo. “You look distressed.”

  “Ah, my. God was so impressed I had matching pumps and purse to worship Him, I’m sure. And when I sang “Shout to the Lord,” He listened to my praise more than the poor schmoe up in the balcony with secondhand shoes, mismatched socks, and heaven help us all, faded blue jeans.”

  “You look beautiful, hon. A new outfit?”

  “Yeah. It’s new.” I couldn’t lie, now, could I?

  “Pretty.”

  It’s the guilt talking. I know he feels bad for yelling at me.

  So I traipsed down the steps in my pristine high heels, smelling so fresh after a midafternoon shower, a very rare happening unless we’re going out on the town.

  “Whoa, Mom!” said Will. “Lookin’ pretty good in that new dress!”

  “Thanks, bud.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Nordstrom. And not the Rack either.”

  “Whoa.”

  Jace came down looking his typical dashing, easy self, the creep. He kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry.” I tucked my arm through his and pulled him into the formal living room. “I dropped six hundred bucks between the dress, the shoes, the purse, the special bra, and the trip to the hair salon.”

  “Oh, Hezzie.”

  “At the time I
rationalized it in a most stunning fashion. Ready for this? Well, we don’t have car payments. This is about the same amount as a car payment. I’m sorry, Jace. I feel so out of control.”

  Jace, as usual, put his arm around me and didn’t say a word. I knew what he was thinking, how he felt, how he feels. Can he not trust me with the truth?

  “Aren’t you mad?”

  “Let’s not talk about it. Let’s just go and have a good time.”

  Which being interpreted means: I can’t believe you did that, Heather. When will enough ever be enough? Do you even possess an enough?

  And now here I sit in front of the TV in the family room at 3:00 a.m., eating New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream, and if I figure it up right, everything I spent so I could look good and go give money to support a charity could, by my calculations, feed, clothe, and educate a child in Africa for almost two years.

  Argh! Who wants to think stuff like this? I’m too busy. And we do enough, don’t we? If I added up all the hours I worked for the church all those years, and that means working for God, I’m more than covered.

  Absolutely more than covered.

  I pick up the remote and click off the TV. Yes, enough is enough.

  I’m only one woman. I’ll send off a check tomorrow. It’s more than a lot of people would do.

  “It’s not your money we need. We need you. A ministry of presence is what we do here.”

  Oh, shut up, Sister Jerusha.

  NINE

  So I thought we’d try some smells and bells, as they say. We went to the early service at a little Episcopal chapel, stone with red doors and wrought iron hinges, and I swear, there must have been a memorandum sent out by the Archbishop of Canterbury around the turn of the century that made this a “must do.” Prayers and Communion, no music, a tidy message of five minutes . . . and old people: men in jackets and ties, women in dresses and pantyhose. No smells. No bells. I guess they reserve those for the later service.

  Or maybe they don’t do that sort of thing anymore? I don’t know much about Episcopalians.