Robin nodded.
“Does he get to see much of his father?”
“They get together about twice a year,” she answered. “Whenever Ray is stateside, he spends as much of the furlough as possible with Philip.”
“Furlough?” Jesse questioned her. “Is he in the armed forces?”
Robin laughed and shook her head. “Just a habit of speech,” she explained. “I was an army brat growing up. I’ve gotten most of the military jargon out of my system, but every now and then a word slips in.”
Jesse ruminated for a moment. “Can I get personal, Robin?”
A frisson of anxiety rippled through her. Was he going to kiss her? Proposition her? With her son in the next room? As Jesse’s dark, piercing eyes met hers and his mouth curved in an enigmatic smile, she found herself almost wishing that he would make a pass at her. She would have to reject him if he did, but still... How thrilling it would be to have a man like him getting personal with her.
Mustering her courage, she said, “Go right ahead.”
Jesse continued to study her, mulling over his thoughts before he gave voice to them. “Why did you get a divorce?”
Personal, granted—but hardly what Robin had been bracing herself for. She felt the muscles along her spine go slack and her heartbeat slow. She consoled herself with the thought that she wasn’t really ready for him to make a pass at her, anyway. “What do you mean, why?”
His smile widened, growing warmer. “It’s more than just that Philip seems well-adjusted. You seem well-adjusted, too. Most divorced women I know are so bitter and vindictive about it.”
“Do you know many divorced women?” she asked.
He allowed himself a self-effacing grin. “Enough to make stupid generalizations. Seriously, Robin. You seem so sweet and open. You invited me to dinner on the spur of the moment, without making a big deal about it—”
“Around here, eating in the dining room is a big deal,” she joked. Then she grew serious, reflecting on what he’d said about her, what he wanted to know. What he deserved to know. “When I was growing up,” she told him, “we moved around a lot. Every two or three years, my father would be reposted, and we’d ship off to a new base. We never had roots, we never had a real home. And I was always being thrust into a new school where I didn’t know anybody, where I had to start all over again making friends. To make it easier for me, my mother had what she called her ‘Open Door Policy.’ Whenever I met anyone I thought might become a friend, I could bring her home with me for dinner, without any advance notice. My mother often dragged acquaintances home, too—army wives and their kids. You had to work fast making friends in that kind of environment.” She shrugged. “It amazes me that Philip and Jeffrey—you met his mother, Joanna, at the Open School Night—it amazes me that the two of them have known each other practically since their conception. Until I moved to Belleford, I had never lived in any one place for so long.”
“And now your ex-husband travels all over the world,” Jesse said.
Robin grinned. “Bingo. You figured it out.”
“I did?” He appeared perplexed.
“You asked me why I was divorced.” She sipped some coffee, then nestled deeper into the couch’s plush upholstery and folded her legs underneath her. “Ray had traveled a lot as a child, too. He wasn’t an army brat, but his father was an executive with an international corporation, and they were always moving. When we met, I told Ray that my dream in life was to have a real home, to settle down someplace and know that this was my house, my place, my little corner of the world. He understood and he agreed with me, at first. He took a job teaching economics at Yale, and we bought this house, and I planted my roots. And then...” She sighed wistfully. “He began to get restless. Neither of us was used to living in one place for so long, but I loved it. He never got used to it. So he took a job with the Agency for International Development. The next thing I knew, he was being shipped off to Honduras for on-site observation. And...” She sighed again. “I stayed here.”
“Your choice?” Jesse half-asked.
“My choice. Ray knew how I felt about moving. A good wife would have gritted her teeth and packed up and followed her husband wherever he went, but...”
The tiny lines framing Jesse’s eyes deepened as he laughed. “Is that what good wives do?”
Robin smiled reluctantly. “It’s what my mother did. I always assumed that she loved the transfers and the life of an army wife. But then Ray and I were facing this crisis, and I called my mother for advice, and she admitted that she had despised the constant moving, that she’d always resented my father for denying her a home, and that if I denied myself what meant the most to me, I’d wind up resenting Ray, too. I didn’t want that to happen. So, yes, I made my choice.”
Jesse took a minute to digest what she’d told him. “Your ex-husband’s the bitter one, then?”
“No, he’s not bitter either. He knew that gallivanting about Central and South America wouldn’t necessarily be the healthiest thing for Philip, and that I had a right to live the kind of life I wanted to live. We just grew apart—literally, I guess. His career meant more to him than I did. And my desire to have a home meant more to me than he did.”
“And now you have your home,” Jesse concluded.
“A home, a career, a son...a place where I can plant perennials and get to watch them bloom, year in and year out. And Philip can grow up secure, belonging to a community and knowing that his friends are here where he is. He isn’t going to have to spend his childhood memorizing dozens of different addresses and guessing which drawer the silverware is in, and being a chameleon at school, trying to fit in with a new crowd of kids every couple of years.”
Her gaze journeyed around the cozy living room, which was furnished with pieces she’d selected specifically for this room. Growing up, she’d lived in so many strange houses where the furniture that had been bought three houses earlier never quite fit and the wall colors and carpet never quite suited her family. Those temporary residences had never represented home to Robin. This house did.
“The tree is going to go in that corner,” she murmured, pointing to a nook beside the fireplace. “It always goes there. And we’ll wrap holly and red ribbons around the balustrade, and put red candles in the windows. That’s why having a tree is so important to me,” she explained. “It’s a part of home. Christmas means being with Philip and having our tree in that corner.”
Robin hadn’t consciously intended to introduce the subject of Christmas trees. Yet it was all part of a whole to her. The house, the tree, her son and the spirit of the season. Christmas equaled home in Robin’s mind.
Jesse’s expression changed as soon as she mentioned the holiday. A shadow flickered within his eyes, and he shifted slightly on the couch. Then he smiled crookedly. “I don’t condemn other people for having trees,” he said, apparently sensing the need to reassure Robin.
She had already told Jesse a great deal about herself, and she found talking to him surprisingly easy. Hoping that he would find it as easy to talk to her, she twisted on the cushions to face him fully and inquired, “Why don’t you want to have one?”
He glanced at his coffee cup, which was empty. Robin was about to ask him if he wanted a refill, thoughtfully giving him a chance to avoid answering her blunt question. But before she could speak, he did. “I don’t believe in it.”
“In what? In Christmas trees?”
“In Christmas.”
She stared at him. There was nothing defensive in his statement; he’d stated it as bluntly as she’d stated her question. And since Jesse was already to blame for having directed their conversation into the personal, she felt free to grill him as he’d grilled her. “I know you’re not druid or Buddhist or Jewish.”
“I’m an atheist.”
“An agnostic, you mean?”
“I mean I’m an atheist.”
She’d met a few people who admitted to having their doubts, which made them agnostics.
But she’d never met anyone who declared himself an actual atheist, refusing to hedge his bets on the possibility of God’s existence. “Just like that?” she pressed him, fascinated. “You don’t believe in anything?”
“I believe in some things. I believe that every person has the inherent ability to do good in this world, and that it’s his or her choice whether or not to do good. I believe that strength comes from knowledge, not faith, and that it comes from within, not without. What I don’t believe is that there’s some old geezer in a white beard who lives in the clouds and pulls the strings.”
Surely that was as absurd a definition of God as any Robin had ever heard. “Then you don’t believe in Santa Claus, either, do you,” she said, unable to stifle a laugh.
“Other than the guys who stand on corners in funny costumes and ask for handouts, no, I don’t.”
“Please don’t tell Philip,” she whispered conspiratorially.
Jesse nodded in understanding. “It’ll be our secret.”
She settled against the throw pillows, pondering Jesse’s words. Because of her childhood on army bases, Robin hadn’t had much formalized religious instruction. The chapels on most army bases offered non-denominational Christian services—when they weren’t being used for Jewish, Catholic or other services. She couldn’t quite say that she was a Methodist, as her father had been, or a Lutheran like her mother. But she did believe in God. It seemed much too depressing not to believe.
She peered curiously at the man beside her: an atheist, without any sense of a guiding power larger than himself, without any faith, without any belief in a greater Being he could turn to in times of stress or despair. Jesse appeared unconcerned about what he’d just confessed, although he looked as if he was willing to answer more questions from Robin. “Don’t you believe in heaven?” she asked.
“As a place where people go after they’ve died? No.”
“Then what do you think happens when they die?”
She noticed another shadow hovering over his sharply chiseled features, a pensiveness tugging at the corners of his mouth. Then he shrugged resolutely. “I think that when people die, they get buried—or cremated—and their remains are absorbed by the earth.”
“What about their souls?”
That shadow again, that brooding sadness darkening his eyes. He turned to gaze out the window, staring into the darkness beyond the glass. “I don’t think of the soul as something separate from the body,” he explained haltingly, addressing the cold night outdoors. “I think of it as a person’s mind, his personality, the capacity for goodness inside him. When he dies, it’s gone.”
That was such a bleak thought, Robin felt compelled to refute it. “If there’s nothing beyond that, then why do people bother to be good at all?”
He turned back to her and snorted. “Most people bother because they do believe in heaven. It’s a bargain they’re cutting: ‘I’ll be a decent human being now, and I’ll get my payback later.’ I do my best to live a decent life, too, but not because I’m expecting a payback, or some reward after I die. I just do it because it’s nicer and fairer to live my life that way.” He stood and moved to the window, gazing past the curtains into the moonlit front yard. Rotating, he leaned against the window sill and shoved his hands into his pockets. “When I was thirteen years old, my sister died of leukemia.”
“Oh, God,” Robin groaned, not even thinking that, in the context of atheism, such a statement was meaningless. “That’s terrible, Jesse. I’m sorry.”
“It was terrible,” he confirmed. “But...” He grappled with his thoughts. “When I tried to comprehend Marybeth’s death, everybody said, ‘God loved Marybeth so much, he wanted her in heaven with him.’ That was the answer religion provided. And all I could think was, if there was a God, how could he be so selfish? If he really loved Marybeth, he would have let her live a full, happy life. He could have waited sixty or seventy years before snatching her away and flying her up to heaven. What’s sixty years to God, right? But no, he was selfish. He must have hated the rest of us, to have taken her away from us. And he must have hated her, too, to make her suffer so much before she died. If God did exist, he seemed much too thoughtless and selfish to believe in.”
“But that was one thing, Jesse, one incident. I could see where it might shake your faith. If anything ever happened to Philip—” Robin cut herself off, unwilling to imagine such a horrible possibility. “Yes, it might shake my faith, too. But—”
“And take war,” Jesse posited. “Or famine, or earthquakes. Would a loving God let such things occur? If he’s truly in control of the world, why has he screwed it up so much?”
“But then other things happen,” Robin argued. “Wonderful things. Miracles. And when the bad things occur, many people turn to God to help them through.”
“Sure. Religion offers easy answers. It’s a lot easier to say ‘God works in mysterious ways’ than to say Marybeth got unlucky, her blood cells became diseased and she died.”
“Did losing your sister turn your parents away from God, too?” Robin asked.
He issued a short, dry laugh. “Hardly. They’re super-religious. I tried it their way, Robin. I honestly tried. But it never really made sense to me.”
“And not believing does make sense to you?”
“It allows me to be who I am and to do what I want,” he explained. “It enables me to help someone simply because I want to see them smile, without worrying about whether I’m scoring points for the Hereafter.”
Robin lapsed into a bewildered silence. She hadn’t expected that she would wind up describing the circumstances of her divorce to Jesse this evening—she discussed that part of her life only with people she had known close to forever. She suspected that Jesse didn’t explain his atheism to near-strangers, either.
Yet she hadn’t expected that he would enter her store several hours ago, and ask to meet her son, and she hadn’t expected that she would impetuously invite him to join them for dinner. Nothing that had happened since she’d noticed Jesse standing beneath the mistletoe at Woodleigh’s could have been predicted.
Even so, it seemed natural that she should be having this conversation with him. Debating the existence of God with Jesse seemed as reasonable as talking about her childhood as the daughter of an army colonel, and her decision to remain true to her ideal of home rather than trying futilely to salvage a shaky marriage. Jesse Lawson might indeed be a near-stranger, but she felt close to him.
She wasn’t going to persuade him to rethink his view of religion. She saw no need to. He was entitled to his beliefs—or his non-beliefs—and he was a decent human being. In his profession, he could be raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees, but instead he made house calls to indigent clients as a legal aid lawyer. Whether the goodness came from within or without didn’t matter. Jesse was a good man.
“Maybe,” she said, grinning whimsically, “the reason you don’t like Christmas is because you haven’t experienced one of Philip’s and mine. Some pine wreaths, a bit of tinsel, the smell of evergreens and wood smoke and baking cookies, and you’d be a believer, too.”
“Or maybe I’d turn into a snake,” he quipped. “Depending on what kind of cookies they were, of course.”
His allusion to Philip’s dinnertime discourse on Cookie Monster prompted Robin to check her wristwatch. A quarter to nine. “Yikes,” she groaned. “It’s past Philip’s bedtime. God knows what he’s been watching on TV all this time.”
“No,” Jesse said with a laugh. “God doesn’t know. Only Philip knows.”
Robin joined his laughter. “Well, his mother is about to find out.” She sauntered into the den and found Philip seated on the floor, barely ten inches from the television, watching a shoot-’em-up scene of mayhem on the screen. “Bedtime, pal,” Robin announced, lifting the empty cookie plate and milk glass from the coffee table.
“Awww!” Philip automatically whined, although he obediently stood and turned off the set. “Is Jesse st
ill here?”
“Yes. Now how about some pj’s, pronto?”
“Can I say goodnight to him first?”
“As long as you don’t make a two-hour production out of it,” Robin warned, carrying the dishes to the kitchen. Reentering the living room, she found Philip swinging on the newel post at the bottom of the staircase and squawking to Jesse about how he wanted to buy a remote-control Jeep for Mrs. O’Leary for Christmas. “They’re really neat, Jesse,” he enthused. “They just showed an advertisement for them on television. They’re four-wheel-drive, with big fat tires, so you can drive them on gravel and everything.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what your babysitter’s been dreaming of owning,” Jesse muttered wryly, though his eyes sparkled with humor. “Are you sure that’s not what you want for yourself?”
“Uh-uh,” Philip swore. “I want some new Legos, and a Transformer like in the movies, and maybe a rocket ship. And I don’t want anything with Smurfs on it. I’m too big for that,” he added pointedly, glowering at Robin. He still hadn’t forgiven her for insisting that the Smurfs lunchbox he’d begged her to buy him when he’d started first grade was in excellent shape and she wasn’t about to waste money on a replacement. According to Philip, he was the only boy in the entire second grade who had to use a Smurfs lunchbox. Smurfs were strictly for girls and wimps.
“You know what I want for Christmas?” Robin declared sternly. “I want a certain seven-year-old boy in pj’s and brushing his teeth by the time I count to twenty.”
Philip pretended to be annoyed, but when he swung back to Jesse he was smiling. “Was your mother this mean, Jesse?”
“She was much, much meaner,” Jesse said soberly. “If I were you, I’d count my blessings and put on my pajamas.”
“All right,” Philip relented, issuing an exaggerated sigh. “’Bye, Jesse.”
“Goodnight, Philip.”
Philip plodded up a few steps, then leaned over the railing and, in a stage whisper that was undoubtedly audible three houses away, commented, “Jesse’s pretty nice for a grown-up, Mom.”
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