Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

  AMY INSPIRED

  Amy Inspired

  Copyright © 2010

  Bethany Pierce

  Cover design by Andrea Gjeldum

  Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pierce, Bethany, 1983–

  Amy inspired / Bethany Pierce.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-7642-0850-8 (pbk.)

  1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Authorship—Fiction. 3. Women college teachers—Fiction. 4. Adultery—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.I346A83 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2010016347

  * * *

  For my grandmother,

  who taught me the art of optimistic thinking.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part 2

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Part 3

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  “Find something you love to do,” my father told me, “and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Optimistic advice from a man who spent fifteen years selling insurance, a job he detested for fourteen. Eventually, my father did follow his passions, out of insurance and into the arms of a local attorney who loved him, presumably better than my mother, and made six figures.

  If my parents had anything in common, it was the shared belief that life was good. When Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl left me in a rage, my mother recommended that I read something nice; it was best not to think about things I couldn’t change. She believed in marriage, despite her divorce. She had no pain in childbirth.

  In our home, glasses were half full; when God shut doors He opened windows; and you could be anything you wanted to be when you grew up, even—and especially—the president of the United States.

  Mostly I wanted to be an astronaut. I studied constellations and memorized planet names and orbits. I hung upside down from the school monkey bars to practice zero gravity and studded my ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars. Grandma’s new refrigerator, a black shiny monolith with blinking green and red lights, functioned as Ship’s Main Computer. Alone in the kitchen, I’d push the flat plastic buttons, whispering, “Red alert!” and “Fire torpedoes when ready!”

  “You all right, Sugarpie?” Grandma would ask when she spied me in conversation with the ice dispenser. She later voiced her concerns to my mother: “You’d better get that girl’s teeth checked. All she wants to do is eat ice.”

  Mom had heard worse. Only a week before I’d subsisted five days on little more than freezer pops and baby food to train my stomach for an all-liquid diet. “Moon food,” Mom called it, pureeing peas into paste for my dinner. “Moon?” I asked. I had my sights on Mars.

  When I was informed we couldn’t afford Space Camp, I realized it was best to have a few backups. A girl has to keep her options open.

  My top ten careers in descending order of importance, as outlined at age ten:

  1. Astronaut

  2. Pilot

  3. Stewardess

  4. Showboat singer

  5. Prima donna in manner of Mariah Carey

  6. Forensic scientist

  7. Olympic gold-medalist figure skater

  8. Wedding cake baker

  9. Bank teller

  10. Famous novelist

  I spent my childhood rehearsing to be an adult, tripping over legs that grew faster than my ambition, testing my abilities with scientific objectivity.

  I got motion sick on the merry-go-round, which eliminated astronaut for good, taking pilot, stewardess, and Olympic figure skater (all that twirling) with it.

  I had a nice voice but was never properly recognized as a budding talent. Though I campaigned diligently for the part of the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant, Mrs. Blythe, the children’s church director, favored piety over talent and lacked the imagination to accept a redhead as Mary. She refused to give me the solo three years running, discouraging my chances of parochial celebrity and, by extension, obliterating any hopes of international acclaim.

  I got a C in chemistry, the only letter other than A I’d ever received on a report card. I decided I hated science.

  What talent I had in reading recipes could not surpass my pleasure in reading fiction. Lost in a Baby-Sitters Super-Special when I should have been watching the butter I was warming in the microwave, I melted my mother’s favorite Tupperware bowl instead. The microwave was replaced, my kitchen privileges were suspended, and I never earned that coveted Girl Scout cooking badge.

  At fourteen I received my first checkbook. Consequently, banking lost its appeal.

  By the age of fifteen I had eliminated every career possibility but one.

  For better or for worse, the love of writing stuck.

  1

  That he showed up to our first date wearing a pink-collared shirt and that he looked prettier in pink than I did should have told me everything I needed to know about Adam Palmer had I been paying attention.

  “I just think if you consider all the factors at play here, it seems time we consider where exactly we’re going with this relationship,” he said now, less than three months later.

  Outside the window to our left, students spilled onto campus, flooding the sidewalks. It was the turn of the hour: Adam had a class to teach in ten minutes. I realized he’d timed our break-up to allow himself quick escape.

  “It’s just that I need more time for my work right now, and I can’t give you the time you deserve. I can’t give you what you want.”

  Adam always bought me lunch at the cafeteria, where we both had faculty discounts. I flattened my meatloaf with the butt of my spork. The sporks were new on campus, part of the ongoing save-theearth incentive: SPOONS + FORKS = HALF THE WASTE!!! The Committee for Earth Health used twelve thousand fliers to educate the student body on the importance of hybrid flatware.

  “And I know you have your convictions: I respect that. You have to see that I respect that,” he was saying. “I’ve tried to see the world through your eyes.” Here, I assumed he referenced the Saturday afternoon he’d agreed to volunteer with me at the church soup kitchen, from which he walked away eager to transcribe a conversation he’d had with a homeless veteran. “You can’t make this stuff up!” he’d declared, eyes bright with fresh inspiration.

  “I’ve tried to walk in your shoes,” he said. “But you haven’t done the same for me. I need to be with a woman who can look up to me for my convictions, my bel
iefs.”

  I frowned. “You don’t have beliefs. You’re an atheist.”

  “I believe in nothing. I need you to respect that.”

  I set the spork spinning on the table. “I respect you for that.”

  “You resent me for it.”

  “So what is it I want exactly?”

  He watched my little operation with annoyance. “What do you mean?”

  “You just said you couldn’t give me what I wanted. I’m curious: What is it that you think I so desperately want?”

  He thought a moment. “I’m not ready to settle, Amy.”

  Had he meant settle or settle down? He could have left the down out on accident. But he was a writer. He chose his words carefully.

  “I’m not ready to settle down either,” I protested.

  He gave me a patronizing smile. “You were born settled.”

  I stared at him, surprised: I hadn’t thought him capable of hurting me.

  “It’s no specific desire,” he went on uncharacteristically flustered, trying to revise or at least mitigate the severity of his last statement. “It’s all desires. Cumulatively. The things you want and the things I want for our work, our future. They don’t add up.” He snatched the spork from my hand. “Will you stop that.”

  The people at the table behind us turned to see what was going on. I blushed to my scalp. It wasn’t a good look for me.

  “I’ve been feeling it, too,” I said with resignation.

  In fact, I’d meant to initiate this conversation a month ago, but vanity had fueled my procrastination. The novelty of dating Adam had worn off within the first three weeks, but for the two months that followed he’d been a nice accessory, something to wear on my arm at faculty mixers and gallery receptions. A first-time novelist still riding the critical praise of his debut work, Home Is Where the Heart Lies, he had a magnetism at social gatherings, an air of importance that transferred to me when we were in public.

  He cupped my hand in his. “I hope we’ll remain amicable? There’s a poetry reading tomorrow. Maybe we could go together?”

  I pulled my hands away and clasped them between my legs, drawing my knees together as if to keep my fingers warm. “Actually, no. Everett asked me to go.”

  “If you ever want to talk—if you ever need a second opinion for one of your stories. I still think ‘The Other Day’ has a lot of potential. It’s just that one scene that needs trimmed … Well. Just call me.”

  “You know,” I said as he gathered his things. “For a novelist that was a rather clichéd break-up.”

  “I have to go.”

  I nodded. He squeezed my hand, a last apologetic gesture, and rushed for the door.

  We’d met in the English Department library. I had been trying to noiselessly rip scraps of notebook paper to mark noteworthy pages in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. He’d walked over and handed me a small stack of bookmarks he had pulled from his briefcase. “Thought you might need these,” he’d whispered. The bookmarks were for his novel. Each featured a photograph of his smiling face.

  At age twenty-nine, my own idealism beginning to fray around the edges, I kept faith in my mother’s sanguine outlook on life: It was still reflex to call home when I toed the edge of failure.

  “Hi honey, how are you?” Her voice came tinny and distant through my old office phone. “I can’t talk long. The Baldwins are on their way over, and my curlers are going cold. We’re going to Applebee’s to spend those gift cards Uncle Lynn gave us for Easter.”

  I had called with the intention of announcing the break-up with Adam, but at near-thirty you can’t just come out with that kind of news without warning. As preface I complained about grading. Scoring seventy-four college essays four times a semester had begun to seem impossible—and this was only paper two of the term.

  “I’m so exhausted.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s too much.”

  I stared out the window at the overcast November day. Behind me, my office mate Everett typed furiously, reaching blindly every five minutes for the mug of twenty-five-cent office coffee he kept at his elbow. The coffee cup sat next to a second nearly identical mug filled with tacks and paper clips. I was waiting for him to grab the wrong cup.

  The English Department offices occupied the fourth floor of the Humanities Building, a gray stone structure that commanded the highest hill on campus. Our window overlooked a courtyard lined in summer with tulips that leaned toward the sun. The tulips had long since died, and overnight the ivy that grew along the building’s facade had shriveled around the windows, clinging in gnarled ropes. Central campus sprawled to the left, and across the lawn sidewalks clustered in crisscrossing pentagons made their way downhill toward the Fray and Fuhler Art Buildings, twin cement complexes as modern as the Humanities Building was old.

  “Am I insane to be doing this?” I asked.

  “Maybe you should get some help,” Mom replied without answering my question. “Why don’t you have Zoë grade some?”

  “Zoë’s never graded an essay in her life. Besides, this is college composition, not algebra—everything’s subjective. I can’t just outsource grading.”

  “I don’t think it’s such a terrible idea. You need to delegate. No one would know.”

  I remembered how in the seventh grade when I couldn’t seem to stretch my report on President Lincoln from five pages to the required seven, she advised I enlarge the font and narrow the margins.

  “Those kids don’t read your comments anyway,” she was saying. “You know they just throw the papers in the garbage as soon as they see their grade.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence, Mom.”

  Everett was gathering his things. With his arms full of loose-leaf papers, he waved briefly at me. I nodded my good-bye.

  “Did you take a look at that guest list?” Mom asked, transitioning without warning into her latest favorite topic of discussion: my younger brother’s impending nuptials. Nuptials. The word sounded overtly sensual. Too similar to nude. Navel. Nubile.

  “Marie didn’t put the McCormicks on there.”

  I tapped the string of the window blind against the glass. “Alice and Jenny? They were my friends, not Brian’s. Why would he want them at his wedding?”

  “Alice was over all the time when you kids were little. She was such a nice girl. I used to hope Brian and her would get together.”

  “They were ten,” I replied. “Who’s officiating?”

  “Pastor Patrick. Brian and Marie meet him once a month for premarital counseling. They have to meet on weekdays, which are so hard for Brian with his schedule, but weekends just won’t work for Pastor Patrick. He has his sermon to prepare and then Saturdays he bowls with some guys from town. They’re a real rough bunch— smoke like chimneys, but the pastor says it’s his ministry—something about ‘in the world but not of it.’ ”

  Mom was a devoted member of the First Fundamentalist Church of God. She considered ties on Sunday tantamount to Scripture reading. At thirty-two, their new minister, Patrick Peterson, was the third youngest member of the congregation, and he’d been creating no end of turmoil since arriving. (“You should hear the songs we’re singing in church now,” Mom reported. “We have a guitar player and a drummist. It’s all very modern.”)

  “So they’re sticking with Mr. Peterson?”

  “Call him Pastor Patrick, honey. He prefers it.”

  With a sigh I turned back to the window. Waves of cold emanated from the glass. On the benches below, a young girl in a red coat slapped her male companion on the arm, laughing. He pretended to be hurt before sweeping her up in his arms.

  “I’m just glad they’re sticking to an all-American wedding. I was worried a while there that they would want some weird Indian religion, but really her parents are very normal.”

  The couple in the courtyard began to kiss.

  “I have to go, Mom.”

  “Don’t worry about the papers. You’ll get them do
ne. You always do. Tell Zoë hi for me.”

  I promised I would and sent love to my brother. Hanging up, I pressed my forehead against the windowpane and closed my eyes, letting the cold numb my thoughts. I started back when the windowpane shuddered. A moment later a second rock pelted the glass. Peering down cautiously, I saw Everett standing on the sidewalk below, waving his arms frantically.

  I unhinged the lock and shoved the ancient window up. “What?” I called.

  A dozen students crossing the sidewalks below looked up in surprise.

  “My briefcase—I left it!” he shouted.

  I found the briefcase on the floor, leaning on the trash can. It was stained and studded with pins: No Blood for Oil and Too Many Freaks Not Enough Circuses.

  “I’ll bring it down,” I called.

  “No time!” He waved wildly, indicating I should throw it. His hands looked jittery even from four flights up. This was not unusual; Everett lived in a perpetual state of panic.

  I gave the bag my best pitch. Midway through the air, the top latch sprang open. A dozen papers flew into the air and snapped in the wind like parachutes. They made their way floating to the ground.

  I leaned out the window. “Sorry!”

  Everett scrambled to gather the papers one by one, wiping them clean on his pant leg. Without a second glance up, he ran down the sidewalk. He had the awkward gait of a man not used to sitting in office chairs all day, more caffeine than blood in his veins: the run of kids who don’t get picked for softball teams.

  I slouched in my chair, tapped the bobblehead Garfield with my pencil, and watched its mute smile nod up and down. A form letter lay on the scattered essays cluttering my desk. I picked it up, reread:

  Dear Author,

  Thank you for sending us your manuscript. After careful consideration we have decided that we will not be able to publish it.

  Although we would like to send an individual response to everything, and particularly to those who request comment, the small size of our staff prevents us from doing so.

  Sincerely,