by Ed Hurst
tell him anything else.
She looked up and locked eyes with him. “Greg, I have just been released from the half-way house. That was following three years in the women’s prison. I was staying with my aunt, but she was making rules like I was still in junior high. She hates religion and wouldn’t even let me go to church.” She paused a moment.
He interjected, “I’m glad to hear you’re a Christian, too. I do a lot of volunteer work at my church.”
She almost smiled. “I grew up a good Christian girl, was a cheerleader and athlete, but my old home church turned out to be run by slimy hypocrites. The youth leader introduced me to drugs and sex. I escaped his clutches soon enough, only to run deeper into that crazy lifestyle. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I was just two steps away from crack whore when I got arrested. My connection was angry because my performance while jonesing wasn’t quite up to par, and slashed me with a knife.” She pointed to the faint scar across one cheek, which he hadn’t really noticed before now.
He mumbled, “I know what you mean about corrupt churches...”
She continued. “When I went to the emergency room, they reported the drug metabolites in my system and I was arrested. I gladly turned evidence to get a lighter sentence. He already had a mile-long rap sheet, so he won’t be back out before he dies. While in prison I realized what happened in my church back home wasn’t Jesus’ fault, and renewed my faith, even started working out again. At the half-way house I thought I had found some sisters in the Lord. So we all got released at the same time, and they called me from some part of town I’ve never seen, and invited me to join them for a pool party where they were staying. They said I should bring my Bible, so I figured it was okay.”
She stared out the window for a few moments. Her hands were twitching. “After all the Hell I raised, I was ready to turn it all over and do it right. My aunt yelled and screamed, but I left anyway. Caught a cab, and when I got there, these two guys came out and paid. Real gentlemen, they escorted me to the back yard and there were my two friends and some other people I’d never met. The girls simply said, ‘Hi Melissa.’ I was waiting for someone to introduce me when those two guys came up behind me. One grabbed my left arm and took my Bible. The other grabbed my face and turned my head where he had a gun pointed at me. They marched me to their car, took my purse and made me get in the back. I could hear them laughing in the back yard as the door was closed.”
There were tears in her eyes. “I had been clean and sober for a long time. They knew all about me, what I had done. They told me I could go along and get back to my ‘old work’ or they would simply inject that crap and make me do it anyway. They were going to drive me over the state line, but the storm hit. When the driver couldn’t see well enough to keep going, he pulled off on that side rode, turned around and faced the car out of the wind. He had just shut the motor off when the tree fell.”
Her hands were shaking, as she clasped them together on the table, looking at them. “I was stuck in there for hours. I was pretty sure God had abandoned me. Up to that moment I was considering how I could kill myself to keep them from using me that way, but when they were killed, I was just afraid. I don’t remember when I passed out crying, but it was still dark.”
The image in his mind was almost too painful to contemplate. He reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. “Sometimes there’s no accounting for God’s sense of humor about things. But He got the last laugh on those two, and He’s not through with you yet. I’m just sorry I couldn’t get there any sooner.”
He stood up. “I won’t make any rules for you. I’ll ask you to help carry your share of the load for living here. Otherwise, take some time to put your self back together. No one can get to you easily here, because all the neighbors are pretty tight. We take care of each other. Dogs will bark and shotguns come out if any tries to sneak around. We can’t prevent you being rearrested if the police take a notion, but at least they’ll be busy awhile with other things. Unfortunately, I still have to work for a living. I need to run by at least two locations. You can ride along or stay here and freshen up.”
She turned her face up at him. “I don’t want to be alone right now. Can I go with you?”
5
Having shared as much as was likely of her story, Greg told her some of his.
Right out of high school he began working where he was now. It was a way to pay the bills while he studied for the ministry. Any hope of going that direction was killed by the internal politics in the first two churches where he served an internship. That put him off church for awhile, but not his faith. After a decade or so of worshiping at home, he and his family found a church where politics didn’t seem to interfere with important stuff. His kids got married and moved away, and he had more time to devote to volunteer work at church.
His wife was killed by a drunk driver just a few months ago. Son of some politician, the other driver simply disappeared and the case was never brought to court. He didn’t blame the police, and his relations with them remained cordial enough, but he had always seen them as part of a badly broken system. The company he worked for had quite a few contracts with local government agencies, so he dealt with police, fire and other officials quite often.
Destructive as drugs may be, he would much rather people have the choice to ruin their lives. It only needed the hand of enforcement when their stupid choices splashed over into the lives of others. Why they made messes wasn’t important, only that they should be punished and made to clean up those messes. He figured a lot of so-called crimes were handled better when folks minded their own business. He had little use for governments, but didn’t see a need to provoke them needlessly.
Then he described his church volunteer work. Mostly it was teaching how to keep marriage working. Melissa perked up on that and began asking questions. It was plain from the conversation his first guess about her was correct, that she had always been strong-willed and difficult. She had drifted from one relationship to another, always in turmoil.
She was a long way from reality, he knew. So he started at the very most basic explanations and told her about the vast difference between common assumptions and the way people actually behaved. Indeed, she was full of questions and often reacted sharply to things he said. He always kept an even temper, letting her rant and rage. It never got to him simply because he had heard it all before, a hundred times at least, every time he introduced the topic to yet another crop of counselees.
He kept a mental catalog of her objections, and then pointed them out again when something she said or did simply proved his point. He guessed she could have been just a bit violent at times, but they weren’t that close emotionally. He carefully avoided any suggestion his relationship with her was anything but avuncular.
She rode with him often, as there was no harm in her coming along on his work trips. His wife had done so quite often over the years before her death, so it wasn’t anything new. It was just over a week of this, and on that day she had been strangely quiet on the long ride to one site. The place was utterly isolated.
When he finished his work and got back into the truck, they shared a snack and drinks. She stared at him for a moment. “I’ve dealt with older men before. How come I’ve never met anyone like you?”
“Depends on where you spent most of your time. Guys like me are pretty boring. We obviously wouldn’t be interested in drugs or wild women, so unless you worked with the public in more mundane settings, we might be hard to find.”
He had said in such a way she had to laugh. “Yet you handle me like a pro,” she replied.
He snorted, then with a grin: “Professional what? I happen to believe I understand women, and you keep not surprising me at all.”
She turned more serious. “Why do you keep your distance? Am I too young for you? Or is it my dirty past? Do you know you could have had me already?”
He looked directly at her. “First, let’s dispatch the business of your past. The consequences o
f bad choices will follow you as long as you live in this world. In the other realm, all your sins are wiped away. You have scars, both literal and even more of them figuratively, but I’m quite willing to accept your past as is, sight unseen. And if you were badly damaged in some way, I’m pretty sure I’d know by now.”
He shifted in his seat and leaned back against the door. “The real issue is, you aren’t ready. You suffer from a powerful misplaced sense of entitlement. The world is a crappy place and fairness would mean most of us suffering considerably more than we do. You’ll have to make peace with the fundamental nastiness of this world, and accept more of what you can’t and shouldn’t want to change.”
He folded his hands together in front of is chest, fingers interlaced. “You want more of my affection. I can’t offer it on your terms. What I need from a woman requires something you don’t have yet, and it’s the reason you’ve never stayed with anyone else. Aside from the fact you keep choosing men who excite you but don’t have a clue why they’re here on earth, you keep trying to run the show, or too much of it. That might be partially justified with some guys, but I’d rather do without at that price. I know what my life is for, and I won’t let anything get in