by Kim Fu
Eric was special not because he didn’t lust after Kayla, but because he resisted. Kayla knew she was living temptation. She was a daughter of Eve. She accepted this as her trial from God, finally understood Marianne’s warning. But Eric was strong. Sweaty and flushed from the heat trap of the vinyl, they ignored his erection pressing between them, his voice trailing off if she forgot where she was and slipped her thumb in her mouth, teeth to nail and the salt of her own skin.
Her favorite song, not written by Eric, was a modern ballad called “Jesus, Lover of my Soul.” At first, she just liked the melody, which had the tenderness and devotion of a love song, and how well it transposed to solo ukulele. Then, the longer she played it, the more she could feel the lyrics, feel the total surrender to the will of God, the release of her earthly plans and desires, their pettiness and unimportance. What mattered was what He wanted, not what Kayla wanted. It transformed the experience of her life so far. A life inflicted upon her by others. What held her, helpless in its thrall, wasn’t the power of her mother, her mother’s friends, Andee, teachers, and men, men everywhere staring at her, always men—it was the plan of the Lord. She felt absolved of the past and the future. Better things would come if she remained passive and pious, if she believed.
As they lay beside each other on Sally’s pull-out sofa bed, Kayla asked, “Andee? Aren’t you afraid of going to Hell?”
Andee took so long to answer that Kayla had thought she’d fallen asleep. “Whoever made Hell is an asshole,” she said, “and I’m not afraid of assholes.”
The inevitable day came. Sally, screaming: “I am done with you! Never again! I’m going to work, and when I get back, you and your fucking freeloading kids better be out of here, or I’ll call the cops.”
Andee and Kayla didn’t help their mother. They watched as she threw things into her battered, distended suitcase. “We don’t have a car,” Andee said.
“We’ll take the bus.”
Andee asked, “Where are we going?”
“Rosarito. Mexico. I have friends there.” She abruptly turned and grinned with that fierce, alarming fire. “Doesn’t that sound great? Warm and sunny. Margaritas and carnitas on the beach.”
Andee and Kayla exchanged a look. “I don’t want to go,” Kayla said. “I like it here.”
“Well, that’s too bad, honey, because you can’t stay. Sally won’t let you.”
“Maybe she would,” Andee said, “if you weren’t here. Just long enough for us to get our own place.”
Their mother laughed. Just once, sharp and mean. “Right. And how are you going to do that?”
“We’ll get jobs,” Andee said.
The suitcase slammed shut. “You know what? You go ahead and try. You girls have never appreciated how fucking hard it is to—to just live. You’ve always been uptight, ungrateful little bitches, getting us thrown out of every good situation that ever came along. See how you do without me. You see.”
And then she was gone.
Sally let them stay but told them they’d have to start paying rent—a small amount, well below market rate for even their shared sofa bed. Andee missed the last few weeks of her senior year, but she got her diploma anyway; Kayla dropped out, relieved that she’d never have to step into a classroom again.
Andee found a job at a bookstore. Kayla worked as a server for a couple of years until, shortly after she turned eighteen, her church bought the coffee shop next door. She became a barista and technically one of three dozen part-owners, through service. On top of her full-time job at the café, she cleaned the church offices and bathrooms, raked leaves and pulled weeds, counted the collection money, played on the musical devotion team, watched children in the nursery. She liked the cohesiveness this gave her life: everything for the church.
Eric was “called” to their sister parish in Eugene. He came to Sally’s to say goodbye when only Kayla was home. He mashed his face against hers in something like a kiss, his fingers digging into her shoulder and under the strap of her tank top. She fought her way out of his grip. He allowed himself to be shoved back and started to weep, tears running down his pitiful face. “Forgive me,” he cried.
“The Lord will forgive you,” Kayla said.
Sally moved and signed her lease over to Andee and Kayla. Andee took the bedroom and Kayla stayed on the sofa bed, their sleep uncontaminated by the breath of the other for the first time. Andee was promoted to assistant manager, had an amicable group of friends and lovers. Kayla had the church. They paid their bills, were kind to each other, kept the apartment neat enough. Such things were still possible. These years had the quality of peacetime after war. A new appreciation for silence, order, each day’s similarity to the last.
On her rare evenings off, Kayla did what she thought of as another service for the church, unassigned. An evangelical effort.
The café had a nondescript name, nondescript couches and tables, inoffensive local art (fruit still-lifes painted by the woman who played the piano on the musical devotion team), a microphone and a stool in a corner, nothing to indicate its affiliation with the church.
On these evenings, Kayla sat on the stool in the corner and played devotional songs, singing in her high, delicate voice. Even amplified, she was frequently drowned out by the steam-train exhalations of the espresso machine.
As adults, she and Andee had their mother’s thin, dry blond hair, broad forehead, and prominent brow. Andee cut hers into a fashionable, unflattering pixie cut that made her face look hard and square, Neanderthal ridges of bone. Kayla let hers grow uncontrolled, broken at the ends and frizzing at the hairline. She pulled it into a bun when she played, a twist wound tight, a golden halo reflecting the café’s ceiling pot lights as she bobbed her head gently to a song, the face of an ancient Nordic priestess. She embraced the new-old-fashioned style of the moment, dresses from Goodwill that buttoned high, narrow through the body and sleeves with no stretch, flowing below the waist. The cotton was thinned with age and skimmed over her as though substanceless; she was covered neck to shin but somehow naked, eye-catchingly vulnerable.
Church members recognized her from the devotional team, where she was up on the platform at the start of service each Sunday, and they clapped politely between songs. But she didn’t play for them. She played for the other customers, drinking their lattes and clacking away at their laptops, the ones who wore some visible sadness or loneliness. A hole to be filled by God. They were distracted by the sight and sound of Kayla, stopped to listen in spite of themselves. Even some of those who laughed at first, who rolled their eyes, mockingly covered their ears. They could go silent, succumb. Music could be their way in, as it had been hers.
“Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,” she sang. “Praise him with the harp and lyre. Praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe. Praise him with the clash of cymbals.”
She looked up and saw a man sitting at the table closest to her, his eyes closed and his shoulders relaxed, possibly asleep. His hands were folded neatly on the table in front of him. As she transitioned to the final chords of the song, his eyes opened. They were lighter than hers, blue, fragments of sky in a sunken face. He looked well preserved, a pink flush and an artificial smoothness to his cheeks, the way the very wealthy age. She smiled at him as she sang, radiated Jesus’s love and welcome.
He approached her as she tucked her ukulele into its bag. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, like someone considering a painting. “You have a lovely voice,” he said. “May I buy you a cup of tea?”
Kayla had never been good at rebuffing customers’ advances. She took their business cards, scribbled numbers, made the coffees they ordered for her and then dumped them down the sink. She sat at the man’s table with her ukulele in her lap while he bought her a mug of peppermint tea. He hadn’t asked her what kind she wanted. She hated peppermint tea, thought it tasted like toothpaste. She took a sip and continued to smile agreeably.
“My name is
Walter Groff,” he said. He spoke with the extreme formality and mid-Atlantic accent that Kayla associated with old movies.
“Kayla.”
“Are you part of the church next door?”
“Yes,” she said, eager. “Would you like to know more about us?”
“I should say so. I own both buildings.”
Kayla’s face fell. She looked around the café for a church authority, but she recognized only the Wednesday-night Coping with Divorce group.
“My family has owned this land for a long time. It seems we’re leasing it to you and your church for a song.”
“It’s not my church. I mean, it is my church, only in the sense that it’s the church where I . . . I’m really not the one to talk to about this.”
“My understanding is that the church is collectively owned by all of its members. Doesn’t that make it yours?”
“No—the church isn’t—just the café, and not everyone, and it’s . . . I don’t really know the details. The legal details.”
Walter seemed amused. “Don’t look so nervous, my dear. This is only one part of the giant mess my father left behind. When he passed away, we discovered our money was tied up in whimsical land holdings all over the country, with no apparent pattern or plan. I’ve spent my life trying to make them useful. This area is a particular thorn in my side—why it hasn’t been developed to its full and very valuable potential.”
“Maybe,” Kayla ventured, “your father saw the good that we do.”
“He wasn’t religious.”
“You don’t have to be religious to appreciate our church. Maybe he was . . . sympathetic. And generous.”
Walter laughed. A prim, controlled laugh that would fit inside a teacup. “Unlikely. Drunk and forgetful, more like. He probably forgot he owned it by the time the boom started.”
Kayla felt a small, internal quiver, like a needle wavering on a dial. “So what are you going to do?”
“About your church? I haven’t decided yet. There are a lot of vacant warehouses in this stretch—those are being converted or coming down. I’ll deal with the occupied ones on a case-by-case basis.”
“How could we convince you?”
Walter cleared his throat. He gazed down at the table and fiddled with the paper napkin he’d used to carry her tea. His ramrod-straight posture wilted just slightly. He shifted, all at once, from intimidating to awkward, almost boyish. “Would you have dinner with me?”
She took another sip of her peppermint tea. It tasted even worse now that it had cooled.
They walked together down the industrial road, past the church, to a restaurant Kayla was certain hadn’t been there before. The restaurant had no sign, but was brightly lit from within, a beacon in the dark from a distance. As they got closer, Kayla could see a crowd of people clustered outside its doors.
Walter guided her inside. The restaurant retained the cavernous space and exposed ductwork of a former factory. Like Kayla’s church, but to different effect. Chandeliers hung far above their heads, distant as stars.
Once they were seated, she said, “You own this too.”
She ordered the steak he was having, even though she didn’t like red meat, the tang of blood and the violent way it shredded. What arrived seemed to be something else entirely, like butter in the guise of beef. The wine, the chocolate mousse, even the salads—everything had the same otherworldly, unexpected richness, delicious but somehow wrong, sick-making.
Walter complained about his life. Walter’s father had squandered his own father’s money on decades of bad guesses in real estate speculation, selling too soon or holding on too long. Whole developments had been left unfinished and unconnected out in the desert, modern-day ghost towns. Their family had gone from exceedingly wealthy to merely wealthy to the sham appearance of wealth, and were only now recovering, now that Walter had dug out a few gems from the wreckage. On top of that, his mother’s end-of-life care was bleeding him dry. At the age of seventy-nine, she had prepaid for five years in an expensive retirement community in southern California, predicting she would live to the same age her mother had. She was now ninety-four and still refusing to move. She wanted to die watching deer skitter across the golf course, skirt the koi ponds.
Kayla tried to be sympathetic.
At the end of the meal, out on the sidewalk, Walter asked if he could give her a ride home. A town car appeared from even farther down the road, where shuttered, unconverted warehouses still held the memory of industry.
In the car, he said, “I hope you’ll consider me a friend, and that I can see you next time I’m in town.” He gazed at her fondly, as though she were a photograph of a place he’d once visited. He hadn’t touched her.
He didn’t mention the future of the church, so she didn’t either. The evening had not been unpleasant, and it wouldn’t be unpleasant to repeat it.
3
“I can’t remember the last time we were both home for dinner,” Andee said. They were opening cans of beans and tomatoes and dumping them into a pot for chili. “Usually at least one of us is at work.”
Kayla made a noncommittal noise. She hadn’t told Andee about her friendship with Walter, the dinners—sometimes weeks apart—that had been happening for almost a year. There wasn’t anything to tell, she reasoned. He still hadn’t done anything untoward. It was just dinner. He’d tried to give her presents, jewelry and clothes in branded boxes, but she’d gently rebuffed them and he’d stopped. And no one at the church had mentioned any changes to their lease. “This is nice,” Kayla said.
Kayla was afraid that Andee would accuse her of being a hypocrite, even though she hadn’t said a word about Andee’s ungodly habits, the men and women who passed through her bedroom. She knew she should be more concerned with her sister’s eternal soul. The first priority of every member of her church was to get their friends and family to join, and Kayla had no friends outside the church and no family other than Andee. Andee could get hit by a truck tomorrow and they would never get to meet in the Kingdom of God. But Kayla also knew she should lead by example, rather than pass judgment. Let her light shine upon others so that they may see her deeds. And Kayla felt—this thought seemed blasphemous, prideful, yet true all the same—that Andee was, in her way, indestructible. If she were hit by a truck, she’d survive. She’d survive anything. There was plenty of time yet to bring Andee into the fold.
As the chili simmered, Andee read at the table and Kayla practiced the songs for that week on her ukulele. A light summer rain pattered softly at the window. Perhaps unconsciously, Andee started humming along.
The door buzzer went off. They both jumped. “Expecting someone?” Kayla said.
“No.”
Neither stood. They peered past the connected living room, as if someone were going to bust through the apartment door. “Should we just wait for them to go away?” Kayla asked.
Andee started to answer when the buzzer rang again, longer and more insistent. Andee went over and pushed the intercom button. “Hello? Who is it?”
“Girls! It’s Mom!”
Kayla had never thought she and her sister looked that much alike before this moment, when she saw her own horror mirrored back.
The door buzzed aggressively a third time.
Andee reached for the door-release button and then withdrew her hand. “Fuck. What should we do?”
Kayla thought: We should’ve moved, so she couldn’t find us. She thought: Honor thy mother and thy father, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
“Let her in,” Kayla whispered, still hoping Andee wouldn’t.
Andee pressed the door release.
They listened to her climb the stairs. Andee opened the door before she could knock. She was here. In their apartment.
“Hello, girls! Miss me?” She kissed them each on both cheeks, something Kayla could not recall her doing before. They received the kisses and made no gesture in return. Their mother wore a strapless dress, blue
with orange flowers, despite the rain, and sneakers without socks. “Is Sally around?”
“Sally doesn’t live here anymore,” Andee said. She’d left the door hanging open.
“It’s just us,” Kayla said.
Their mother sat on the couch and put her sneakers up on the coffee table. She rested her hands on her flower-patterned belly and looked up at them expectantly. “Nice setup you have here. What’s that delicious smell?”
Andee shut the door slowly, glancing out into the hallway as if something there could save them. Kayla said, “Dinner.”
“What are we having?”
Andee stepped toward the couch and stood over their mother. “How long are you staying?”
“I just got here.” She dropped her feet from the coffee table with a thud that made them both wince. “If you recall, I kept you clothed and fed and safe with a roof over your heads for most of your goddamn lives. I’d think you could spare me some dinner.”
Andee swallowed. “Just dinner. And then you—you go on your way.”
“You’re going to kick me out in the middle of the night? With nowhere to sleep? Your own mother?”
They had seen this happen so many times. Their mother had friends all over the country.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Walter said. They waited on the sidewalk for his town car to arrive.
Kayla was underdressed, a thin sweater over her dress on a night that called for a jacket, the first turn of autumn. “Have you ever been married?” Kayla asked.
“Yes. Twice.” Walter glanced at Kayla before adding, “Both happy.”
“You were a widower twice?”
“No. Twice divorced. We were happy for many years, the marriage ran its course, we ended it on friendly terms. Twice. It’s the best anyone can hope for, really.”