Can I Get An Amen?

by Sarah Healy

  “Parker, you look like you’re ready to put your feet up.”

  Philip glanced toward his wife. “Yeah, you look bushed, Park,” he said reluctantly. “I guess I ought to be getting you home.”

  “We can bring her home,” offered Edward. “No need to leave your party.”

  Parker straightened up and immediately began to attempt to assuage their concerns. “Oh, I’m fine, really. I just needed to sit for a minute.”

  “Honey,” said Philip, resting his hand on her belly, “you really should get some rest. Why don’t you let Lynn and Edward get you home, hmm?” Something about his affection seemed opportunistic.

  Parker looked nervously over her shoulder, searching the room. I didn’t know what she was looking for until her eyes found me. “No, Philip,” she said, turning back to her husband, steel beginning to form in her voice. “I really am fine.”

  Lynn rested her hand on Parker’s shoulder. “Your husband thinks you should get some rest, Parker. For the baby’s sake.” And that was all Lynn had to say. Lynn, from whom Parker was supposed to be learning how to be an obedient Christian wife. She wouldn’t dare defy Lynn.

  Gathering up her things, Parker said a few good-byes, then walked over to the corner in which I was standing. She looked at me with an expression I didn’t recognize. “You really don’t need to stay any longer, Ellen.” There was an edge to her voice.

  “Okay. I’ll check with the manager that everything is all set. Then I’ll head out.”

  . . .

  After tracking down the manager, I returned to find the room nearly empty. Philip was still at the bar, his tie now loosened, his hand curled around a crystal tumbler. I heard him give an unrestrained barroom laugh as he sat turned toward the man to his right.

  “Pardon me, Philip?” I said from a few feet away.

  He swiveled on his stool. “Ellen!” he exclaimed, seeming pleasantly surprised. “I’d like you to meet a few of my friends.”

  He gave the man closest to him a slap on the back, a get-a-load-of-this backhand, and I instantly had three sets of male eyes on me, looking me up and down.

  “This is Ellen… my assistant.” There was an uncomfortable subtext to the way in which he said my title.

  One of his companions whispered something to the other before both began snickering.

  “I just wanted to let you know that I was heading home. Everything is all set.”

  He turned to his friends. “See how competent she is?” He set his drink down and stood up. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk you to your car.” Pointing to his friends, he added, “I’ve seen some unsavory types hanging around here.”

  “No, really, that’s not necessary, Philip.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, resting his hand on my back. “Where’s your coat?”

  I glanced at the two men, one of whom nudged the other, both looking expectant and entertained.

  “Really, Philip,” I said, trying to outpace him. “Stay with your friends.”

  He ignored me and guided me toward the coat check, where I pulled on my black overcoat. He awkwardly, drunkenly tried to help me with it. “It’s okay,” I said. “I got it.”

  I tried to leave him at the front door, to say good night, but he insisted on seeing me outside. “Don’t be so stubborn, Ellen. I’m just being a gentleman.”

  Is that what you’re being? He held the door open and I walked out.

  “So,” he said, his breath turning to crystalline frost under the lights of the parking lot, “you’re going right home?”

  It was ten o’clock at night. “Yup,” I said, hitting the unlock button on my keys.

  “Maybe we could go get a drink somewhere,” he said, his hand once again on my back.

  I looked at him sharply. “Philip…,” I warned.

  We were at my car and I reached for the handle. Philip’s hand pushed the door shut. My heart jumped into my throat. Here I was again, in a dark parking lot. But this time there was no Mark.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Philip tugged playfully on the belt of my coat, letting it slide through his hand. I swatted him away. “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  He laughed and leaned against the door to my car, cocking his head to the side with a suggestive smile. “Come on,” he said, nodding toward his Land Rover. “Let’s go get a drink.” At that moment I realized that the look I had seen on Parker’s face was fear. She knew what her husband was. She knew everything. She had watched it, helplessly, time and time again. Every barb she had sent in my direction, every deliberate reminder of my servitude, was a preemptive retaliation for this, for this inevitable night. She kept me on a short leash to keep an eye on me. Dana Sacco’s voice echoed in my head: I thought you might be right up Kent’s alley. She said it like a shrewd, ruthless madam.

  “I’m going home, Philip. You should, too.” His eyes struggled slightly to focus. “Actually, you should call a cab.”

  “You’re so serious, Ellen.” He inched closer, taking my chin in his hand. “How can we get you to loosen up?”

  With that I pulled hard on the door, causing him to take a step back to balance himself. Getting in, I slammed the door shut, locked it, and cracked the window. “Don’t drive, Philip. I’m calling you a taxi.” I didn’t bother trying to hide my disgust.

  With his fists on his hips, he breathed a superior, haughty-sounding laugh, then looked off toward the restaurant. I put the car into reverse and backed out, watching him in the rearview mirror as he walked back inside. His friends would be surprised to see him, but he would appease them with a disparaging comment or two about me. Good thing she files better than she fucks. Then they would have another drink before moving on. Maybe he would go home, taking the cab that I was now instructing to head to the restaurant. Or maybe he would head to another venue, arriving at his house close to dawn and crawling into bed without explanation, not bothering to hide the receipt for the bottles of champagne, not bothering to shower, to rinse the women from his body. For Philip, to whom everything came so easily, our little exchange wouldn’t even really be remembered in the morning. He simply didn’t care enough about me, or about Parker for that matter, to be affected.

  . . .

  I almost didn’t go to work the next day. I wanted to call in sick, knew that I would be justified in doing so, but for some reason I couldn’t. In some perverse way I was curious about how Philip would behave in front of me. And since I knew I would have to either face Philip again or quit, I decided that ripping the Band-Aid off might be the best tactic.

  Philip arrived only fifteen minutes or so later than usual and greeted me with the same rote politeness that he always had.

  “Good morning, Ellen,” he said, his tone professional and courteous.

  “Good morning. I see you made it home safely last night.”

  I was being deliberately pointed, but Philip looked perplexed. “Yes, thank you.” It was as if nothing had happened.

  It wasn’t until later in the day, when he called me into his office, that there was any indication that he remembered the previous night.

  “Ellen,” he said, sticking his head out of his office, “can I see you for a moment?”

  My stomach churned as all my false bravado dissolved. “Sure,” I said nervously. “I’ll be right in.” The fact was that I didn’t want to verbally acknowledge anything about our exchange. I was happier pretending that Philip now feared me for what I knew.

  He was sitting at his desk, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed. He regarded me for a few seconds before he spoke. “How do you think the party went?”

  “I think it went well,” I said, a little too enthusiastically. “Everyone seemed to have a good time.”

  He nodded. “Parker seemed happy, which is all I really care about.”

  Sure you do. “That’s great.”

  He opened his desk drawer abruptly and pulled out a crisp white envelope. “This is for you,” he said, holding it out in my direction. I
took a few tentative steps toward him and reached for it slowly, as if afraid to make any sudden moves. “I know that your help in planning last night went a bit above and beyond your duties at the firm. So consider this a gesture of gratitude, for your hard work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank Parker. It was her idea,” he said, turning back to his computer.

  . . .

  I didn’t open the envelope until I got home that evening. It was their family Christmas card, a trifold on heavy card stock with multiple photos on each panel. All the shots were professionally taken, beautiful pictures of the kids, of Philip and Parker. There were photos of the family together, pictures of just the boys, of just the girls. But as a collection it seemed to shout, to plead, Look at us! Aren’t we happy? Isn’t everything perfect? It struck me as desperate and sad, though I wondered if it would have had the same impact just a few days ago. Inside it read: Happy Holidays, with Love, the Kent Family, Philip, Parker, Austin, Avery, Alden, and Number Four. Though what I noticed before the message, before the members of their family were listed for emphasis, were five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. It wasn’t much, by Parker’s standards, just the value of a few of the dozens of bottles of wine that they had ripped through last night, but it was five hundred dollars more than I had expected. I stuffed the money back into the card and stowed it deep within my purse.

  . . .

  “I can’t believe he came on to you,” said Jill. Pulling my cell phone from my ear, I turned down the volume.

  “I don’t know if I would say he came on to me.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Some people might define it as inappropriate flirting.” I wasn’t trying to defend Philip; I just couldn’t take the pleasure in his behavior that Jill did. Not anymore.

  “Okay, fine,” said Jill, rolling her eyes, I’m sure, at my hairsplitting. “I can’t believe he flirted inappropriately with you.”

  “Jill, let’s not talk about it anymore.” I almost wished I hadn’t told her.

  But Jill went on, unable to tear herself away from what she saw as irrefutable evidence of karma. “So Philip Kent is a slut,” she mused.

  “You have to promise that you won’t tell anyone.”

  “Who am I going to tell? Parker?”

  “I know, I know. I just don’t want this to get back to her.”

  “Believe me, if she gave you five hundred dollars, she already knows.”

  “No…,” I said, praying that Jill wasn’t right. “That was just because I helped out with the party.”

  “So you think Parker did that out of the kindness of her heart?” asked Jill sarcastically. Jill and I both knew that Parker’s generosity always, always had strings attached.

  “I’m just dreading seeing them at the Arnolds’.” I envisioned myself with a stiff, fake smile, an unwanted guest trying to fade into the background. “I’m dreading the Arnolds’, period.”

  . . .

  After work that evening I headed to the UPS Store and waited in line with the rest of the procrastinators. Christmas was three days away and I hadn’t sent Gary and his family their gifts. They were simple, small things, but I had put thought into each one, hoping to inject a sense of melancholy into their celebrations. I suppose my generosity came with strings, too. For his mother, I had bought a set of tea towels with depictions of Florentine monuments, to remind her, I hoped, of the trip to Italy we had given her for her sixtieth birthday. I bought Daniel a fleece-lined cable-knit wool hat because I knew how he hated the way hats scratched his ears. For Gary, I had intended to give him just a cookbook, as I had always done the cooking when we were together. But at the last minute I added the bookmark that had been intended for Mark. It was hammered sterling silver with a suede tassel, made by hand in Mexico. I felt a pang as I passed the box over the counter, thinking more of Mark than of Gary or anyone else.

  . . .

  “Where were you?” asked my mother when I got home. She was cleaning up some dishes, just two bowls. She and my father had had leftover spaghetti for dinner.

  “I had to get some gifts sent out.”

  My mother nodded, the warm water running over her hands. “Gary?” she asked.

  “Yeah. And Daniel and Beverly.”

  She set the bowls on the dish rack. “How are things with Mark?”

  “Things… didn’t really… work out between us.”

  She had turned off the water, but her eyes did not leave the sink. She stared into it like it was a dried-up well. “Because he’s a minister?”

  “No,” I said defensively, not wanting to have to admit the truth to my mother. “That’s not the only reason.”

  “So, you’ve just decided that you don’t want to see him anymore?”

  I was supposed to correct her, but I couldn’t.

  “Well,” she said sadly, “to leave a good man because he’s a minister seems almost more foolish than leaving a woman you love because she can’t give you a child.” Without looking at me, she dried her hands on a dishrag and began to walk out of the room. “There’s some leftover spaghetti in the fridge,” she said as she disappeared into the dark family room.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  As the arrival of Christmas began to be measurable in hours instead of days, I felt as though I was being pulled forward against my will by some insistent gravitational force. With every day that passed, my panic built. Though I didn’t quite understand why, the thought of being alone with my parents for even a moment during that holiday seemed excruciating, so I began a campaign to get Luke and Kat to come on Christmas Eve instead of arriving sometime in the late morning on Christmas Day.

  “Please just spend the night, Kat. Please.”

  “I don’t get why all of a sudden you want to have a slumber party. Why can’t I sleep at my own house? I’ll be there for presents and all that.”

  The fact that Kat was coming for Christmas at all was a major, epic step. A sign that while she and my mother had a long way to go, they had established a newfound understanding on which to build.

  “I just really think we all need to be together,” I said. The truth was that I hoped that if we could reassemble our family, we might be able to harness some small amount of joy to help soften the blow of the announcement that I was sure was imminent.

  “Is Luke coming?”

  “I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m sure he will.”

  “If Luke comes, then maybe.”

  . . .

  In the end, I couldn’t convince Kat or Luke to come out a day early. Christmas Eve was much as I had imagined, with my parents and me on autopilot, going through the motions as we tried to replicate holidays past. My father read from the Bible and we held hands during grace and thanked the Lord for our blessings. My mother put out stockings, and the tree I had bought was decorated, though my mother hadn’t bothered to twine lights through the branches. “They’re such a hassle to get off.” My mother began to open the Christmas cards that had accumulated in a basket on the counter. One at a time, she ripped them open without pleasure, as if they were bills, snorting quietly at each card that had a generic “Seasons Greetings” message rather than a specific reference to Christmas. “People love to pretend that Christmas is about something other than Jesus.” Every so often she would pass one to my father, who would briefly acknowledge it before passing it back. Christmas music played loudly through the house until my father turned it down. “I’m sorry, girls. I have a terrible headache,” he explained.

  Come seven o’clock, we were all in front of the television, watching a Christmas special we’d seen dozens of times, the lines of which we could recite from memory. My father quietly nursed a drink, and my mother stared off into space until she announced at eight that she was tired and going to bed.

  . . .

  Kat and Luke both showed up early on Christmas Day. They came together, Luke having taken the train and Kat having picked him up at the station.

  “Merry Christmas,” said
Luke as he opened the front door and peeked his head inside.

  “Merry Christmas!” called my mother, rushing to greet him. She was doing her very best to be enthusiastic.

  Kat followed him in, then shut the door behind her. “Hey, you guys,” she said, setting down a shopping bag full of wrapped gifts. “Merry Christmas.”

  I heard my father click off the TV in the family room and walk into the foyer. “How was the train ride, Luke?” he asked. He and Kat had yet to reconcile on any level and they both stiffened slightly in each other’s presence.

  “Oh, fine,” answered Luke. “Very festive. The conductor was wearing a Santa hat.”

  “It definitely doesn’t feel like Christmas out there,” said Kat, taking off her light jacket. It was unseasonably warm, forecast to be in the low sixties.

  “Isn’t it awful?” asked my mother with a worried expression. I knew that she was considering the possibility that the warm day was some sort of sign, a portent of doom. “And on Christmas of all days.”

  “I don’t mind it.” Luke shrugged. My mother eyed him skeptically, as if his tolerance of this springlike Christmas was yet another indication of his compromised morality.

  “Well, your mother made a delicious-looking quiche,” said Dad, the cue for us to begin to make our way into the kitchen for breakfast.

  As we passed through the family room, I saw Kat eye the tree and the modest display of gifts underneath. She knew the very least about my parents’ situation. “Is there coffee ready?” she asked.

  Gathering around the table, Luke began to instinctively fill the palpable void with chatter, talking incessantly and nonlinearly. Every so often, one of us would throw him a conversational bone.