by Gary Parker
Nelson focused again on the phone. Rem wondered if he’d dressed well enough. Pleated khakis, a burgundy crew-neck shirt, casual brown shoes. He felt presentable but not overly so. Nelson hung up the phone.
“I know Jenna,” Rem said. “Not that well, but we went to high school together. I saw her at the grocery yesterday.”
“She’s a quality lady,” Nelson said. “A good friend to Julie.”
Julie entered and told them to wash up. Within five minutes Rem and Nelson finished in the bathroom and made their way to the dining room table. Just as they took their seats, the doorbell rang and Julie hurried to greet Jenna. Rem’s hands suddenly turned clammy, and his tongue felt thick. A few seconds later Julie returned with Jenna, and Rem’s stomach flipped as he saw her. Although dressed in a simple pair of black slacks and a cream-colored blouse, she looked great. She wore her hair pulled back on one side, revealing a petite ear and hoop earring, and her eyes seemed bluer tonight than he’d ever seen them.
“I believe you two know each other,” Nelson said as Rem stuck out a hand to greet Jenna.
“I tried to call you,” Rem said, ignoring Nelson and Julie.
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“Not easily.”
“You didn’t tell me you were coming here for dinner.”
“No, I didn’t,” Rem said.
“This is the girl you tried to ask?” Nelson asked, his voice disbelieving.
“Yeah,” Rem said, never taking his eyes off Jenna. “Coincidence, huh?”
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Nelson said.
“Come with me to the kitchen,” Julie said, grabbing Nelson by the sleeve. “Let these two say hello.”
Nelson eyed Rem for a second but then followed Julie out.
Rem faced Jenna and pulled out the seat to his right. “Glad you came,” he said, indicating she should take the chair.
“I had nothing better to do,” she said. “And I didn’t know you were here.”
“You wouldn’t have come if you’d known?”
“Like I said, I had nothing better to do.”
Rem slid her chair under her as she sat down. “You look great,” he said.
“I’ve heard flattery before,” she said. “It won’t work with me.”
“Are you always this warm and friendly?”
“I know your reputation,” she said. “Remember high school?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“You saying you’ve changed?”
“Not necessarily.”
Nelson and Julie came back, their hands full of bowls and trays. “Food’s ready,” Nelson said. “You two hungry?”
“Starved,” Rem said.
“Good,” Julie said. “I made enough for a small army.”
They put the food down, and Rem inhaled deeply. The smell of chicken, collard greens, corn bread, and mashed potatoes filled his nostrils. From his right, he smelled another aroma also, the subtle scent of Jenna’s light perfume. Something in him warmed, and he wanted to lean over and take her hand. But since he knew such a bold move would scare her to death, he reached for the mashed potatoes instead.
Even though the food tasted delicious, Jenna didn’t eat much. Her mind kept swirling through the chain of events that had brought her to this table beside Rem. She’d driven straight home after she left her mom, visited with her dad for a few minutes, and then headed to the Stracks’. To her surprise, she’d found nobody there. After a couple of phone calls, she’d learned that the entire Strack family had gone to the hospital and wouldn’t get back for at least an hour. Not wanting to go home to her empty apartment, she’d called Julie to ask her and Nelson out. They’d asked her over for dinner instead, their invitation leaving out the part about Rem’s presence.
Slightly perturbed, Jenna stayed quiet through much of the meal as Rem and Nelson laughed and kidded about their days at State. Story after story rolled out of their mouths, and Jenna saw that Nelson genuinely liked Rem and fondly remembered their college days. Strange, Jenna thought, that a godly man like Nelson had ever had much in common with somebody like Rem. Of course, Nelson hadn’t always been so godly.
As everybody finished eating, Rem asked Nelson about the changes in his life.
“You sure you want to hear that story?” Nelson asked. “It’s a whole lot of religion.”
“Give me the Cliff’s Notes version,” Rem said with a laugh. “Leave out the ‘God spoke to me in the still of the night’ stuff.”
Nelson didn’t seem to take any offense. “You know I left State in 1990,” he said.
“Yeah, to work on a master’s degree.”
“Well, I finished that degree in about two years, then took a job with Miller and Thompson, a large accounting firm in Raleigh. I stayed there close to four years.”
“Yeah, I saw you a couple of times while you were there. You were a roaring success.”
“Truthfully, yes. I moved up fast. Only one problem.”
“What was that?”
Nelson dropped his head. “I bent a few rules along the way,” he admitted. “We all did. The go-go days, you remember them. Accounting firms all over willing to fudge a few numbers here or there to make their clients happy, to pump up a company portfolio so it would look better to stockholders.”
“You got involved in all that?”
“Not directly. I wasn’t high enough in the company to do too much damage, just enough to show complicity when the trial came.”
Jenna sat up straighter. She’d never heard this story. Nobody in Hilltop had.
“You ended up on trial?” Rem asked.
“I was small potatoes,” Nelson said. “But my firm’s president and six others ended up charged with a variety of offenses.”
“What happened?”
Nelson’s face became grim. “Three guys got some prison time,” he said. “The president ended up with six years, three suspended. The other two guys got three years, suspended to one. I got a year, suspended, plus three years probation and my CPA license revoked for five years.”
“I can’t believe it,” Rem said.
“I dodged a bullet,” Nelson said. “But it got me to thinking, I can tell you that.”
“You come to Jesus during the trial?” Rem asked. “Throw yourself on the mercy of the court, is that it?”
“No,” Nelson said, not smiling. “Nothing like that. But later, about a month after the trial, I saw a former professor at a coffee shop where I’d taken a part-time job. A man named Johnson, retired. He toddled in, bought a cup of coffee, told me he remembered me from his business class, had read about me and the trial in the paper. I told him I was sorry I had disappointed him. He wanted to know what I planned to do next.”
“What did you tell him?” Rem asked.
“I told him I didn’t know. He asked me if I had ten minutes, said he’d like to buy me a cup of coffee. I said, ‘Sure, why not.’ We took a table, and Johnson asked me if I knew that what I had done was wrong. I told him yes, I knew.
“‘Then why did you do it?’ he asked.”
“What’d you tell him?” Rem asked.
“I told him I didn’t have a clue. The money, the excitement—who knows why anybody does stupid things?” Nelson put his coffee on the table. “The next thing Johnson said changed my life.”
“What was that?” Rem asked.
“He told me I had no anchor.”
“What?”
“An anchor. Johnson said I didn’t have one. Said he’d seen it a thousand times. A smart guy comes through the business school. All the talent in the world, but he’s got no grounding, nothing to keep him steady, solid in who he is when the temptations come.”
“Dr. Johnson invited Nelson to church,” Julie said.
“Jesus is the anchor, is that it?” Rem asked, his tone shifting slightly toward sarcasm.
Nelson nodded. “I believe so. Came to that conclusion about three months after Johnson bought me coffee. I did a lot
of investigation during that time, studied Christian teaching, its history, its traditions, its Scriptures. I started it as an intellectual discipline, figured it couldn’t hurt, and I had plenty of time. By the time I finished, my heart had changed. Nothing all of a sudden, no real emotion to it, just a calm assurance that the Jesus I’d studied for the last few months was real, present, ready to accept me, forgive me, change me.”
“I liked you the way you were,” Rem said.
Nelson laughed. “That way almost landed me in prison.”
“He visited California soon after that,” Julie said. “To visit an uncle he hadn’t seen in a long time.”
“He lived near Fuller Seminary in Pasadena,” Nelson said. “I stayed with him that summer after the trial. Heard a Fuller professor, an ethics guy, at his church, a man who talked about how every person, no matter what they did, should make their vocation an offering to God. I planned to go back into accounting someday, had no notion to do anything else. But I wanted to hear this professor some more, signed up for a summer course he taught, an ethics introduction class. By the time the summer ended, I knew I couldn’t leave the place, the classes, the rigor of the study. Whatever the Lord wanted for me, I would follow. I graduated in three years, served a church while there, first as an associate pastor. Then I got the chance to come home to Hilltop. That’s the story.”
“All except how you met Julie,” Jenna said.
Nelson laughed as he gazed at his wife. “That’s another miracle,” he said. “Maybe we should save that one for another night.”
Rem leaned back, and Jenna watched to see how he’d respond to Nelson’s tale.
“It’s hard to believe you’re on the God squad now,” Rem said.
“I know it seems weird to you,” Nelson said. “But have you got a better explanation for the way the world is, the design, the beauty?”
“How do you explain what’s not so beautiful?” Rem asked. “Like the little boy Jenna’s trying to help. What’s his name?” He turned to her.
Jenna tensed as she felt the edge in the question. “Mickey,” she said. “Mickey Strack.”
“What about him?” Rem asked. “Others like him? What’s beautiful about that?”
Nelson glanced at Julie. “I know there’s suffering in the world,” he said. “And I can’t explain it all. But it seems that freedom demands some pain, heartache, some death. Otherwise we’re computers with no mind, no heart of our own.”
Rem didn’t seem convinced.
Nelson tried another approach. “What’s the purpose of living if there’s not something beyond this life?” he asked.
“Who said there’s got to be a purpose?”
“So you think it’s all pointless,” Nelson said. “All of us, everything that exists. All of it is just pure circumstance, no direction, no meaning?”
“Why not?”
Nelson leaned toward Rem, his hands on his knees. “I could give you a long theological answer,” he said, “but I’m not sure this is the time for it. Am I right?”
Rem stared at his shoes. Silence fell for several seconds. Jenna suddenly felt cold. Was Rem correct? Was everything empty? Her life? The life of everyone in the room? If so, it didn’t matter much if Mickey Strack lived or died. His life and the lives of all those who loved him were in vain.
“Who wants dessert?” Julie asked, obviously seeking to lighten the mood. “We’ve got bread pudding.”
“I’ll help you get it,” Jenna said.
In the kitchen, Julie picked up a tray, poured four cups of coffee, sat the cups on the tray, and faced Jenna. “Rem is fun,” she said.
“You think so?”
“Don’t you?”
“He seems like trouble to me.”
“Is that why you’ve been so quiet?”
“I wanted to let him and Nelson talk,” Jenna said.
“Rem’s searching right now; you can see it written all over him.”
“That’s why I tried to leave it between him and Nelson,” Jenna said. “I didn’t want to mess things up.”
“He likes you,” Julie said. “Might not hurt you to loosen up a little, make him feel a bit more welcome.”
“So you’re Ann Landers now?”
Julie shrugged, sat a cup of cream and a sugar bowl on her tray, and led Jenna back into the den where Nelson and Rem stood by the fireplace, Rem with a piece of wood in hand, Nelson with a metal prod stoking up the embers.
“Men make fire,” Julie teased.
“Women bring dessert and coffee,” Nelson countered.
Julie sat the tray on a flat table and pointed Jenna to the sofa in front of it as Nelson and Rem finished getting the fire going. A couple of minutes later, the two men took chairs across from Jenna. Julie joined Jenna on the sofa. Nelson picked up a cup of coffee and sipped from it. The room suddenly felt cozy, and Jenna decided maybe Julie was right. She needed to loosen up. She glanced at Rem and saw him staring at her, and she blushed. He grinned and she smiled back, a warm sense of pleasure seeping into her bones. Apparently the serious conversation had ended, and Jenna felt better. For the first time in far longer than she wanted to admit, a handsome, successful, single man seemed interested in her. Maybe this Christmas would turn out okay after all.
For close to an hour, Rem stayed with Nelson, Julie, and Jenna, his nerves relaxing as the conversation moved away from matters of religion. After everyone had finished their bread pudding, Julie and Jenna disappeared into the kitchen with the dishes, and Nelson and Rem remained alone. The fire crackled. Rem relaxed into the sofa.
“What do you think of Jenna?” Nelson asked.
“You’re a matchmaker now?”
“You seem to need some help.”
“She’s a little quiet,” Rem said. “But I won’t hold that against her.”
“She’s a sensitive woman,” Nelson said, serious again. “Please don’t trifle with her.”
“I’m just home for Christmas,” Rem said. “That’s not enough time to trifle with anyone.”
“My point exactly.”
Julie and Jenna returned, Julie moving to Nelson, Jenna to the seat across from Rem. Rem’s cell phone rang. For a second he thought about ignoring it but then realized he couldn’t take the chance. Pulling out the phone, he turned his back to the group and cupped the phone to his ear.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Rem, you got a minute?”
He recognized the voice of Lisa Toller, his business partner. “What’s up?” he asked.
Lisa hurriedly outlined the situation. Rem stood and moved to a window across from the fireplace.
“You need to get back here,” Lisa concluded. “If this is going to happen, it’s got to go down before Christmas.”
“I’m with my dad,” Rem said. “You sure we can’t wait? Take a little more time to make a decision?”
“You know we can’t. Everybody scatters for Christmas, and we won’t get them together again until after New Year’s. One way or the other, you’ve got to decide before then. They want it closed this year for tax purposes.”
Rem rubbed his forehead. He didn’t like feeling under the gun like this, the squeeze of having to make a decision. Yet that’s one reason he’d come home this year, to get some distance from his problem, some objectivity. He’d hoped coming to Hilltop would provide that but now wondered if he’d done the right thing. Maybe he should have stayed in Atlanta, kept his hand on the pulse of things.
“What’s your gut telling you?” he asked Lisa.
“Not for me to say,” she said. “You’re the boss.”
He rubbed his head again. “Okay,” he finally said. “Get the papers ready. I’ll catch an 8 a.m. flight from Asheville; meet me at the airport. We’ll take one more look at things, then see if we can get this settled.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“See you then.”
He hung up and turned back to the group. “Sorry,” he said. “Business.”
“You can’
t even get off for Christmas?” Jenna asked.
“Pressing matters,” he said.
“He’s a software tycoon,” Nelson said. “Haven’t you heard? A big shot in computer circles. Have you seen his car? That watch he wears? The man’s got money, I tell you.”
“I need to go,” Rem said. “I’ve had a great time.”
Jenna’s face fell, and Rem thought he saw disappointment in it. Although he liked that, it bothered him too. Why should his leaving bother her? They barely knew each other.
“It’s still early,” Julie said. “Only ten.”
“I have to leave by six or so tomorrow to get a flight to Atlanta,” he explained. “A meeting at noon.”
“I guess you are a tycoon,” Jenna said.
“Sorry,” he said again. “But nobody can schedule a crisis.”
“You think you’ll get back before Christmas?” Nelson asked.
“Hope so, but I’m not sure.”
“I want you to come to Christmas Eve services.”
“I don’t know about that,” Rem said.
“Why not?”
Rem stared at the floor. How could he explain without hurting Nelson’s feelings? “Look,” he said, looking back up. “I’ve had a great time tonight. But . . . well . . . let me say this honestly . . . preachers aren’t my favorite people. I told you that at the cemetery.”
“I’d like to hear about that.”
“Maybe you will someday, but not now. Not enough time.”
“It sounds serious.”
“I guess it is.”
Nelson didn’t press him. “Hope to see you before Christmas anyway.”
Rem smiled. “I plan to come back; need to spend Christmas with my dad. He’s not that well.”
“If you change your mind, services are at 11 p.m. Christmas Eve.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“You better.”
Rem turned to Jenna. “I’ll follow you home,” he said.
“It’s not necessary.”
“I know, but I’d like to do it.”
Jenna shook her head. “I think I’ll stay here a little longer. You go on.”
“I had a nice time,” Rem said.
“Take care,” she said.
“Okay.” Rem stared at her for several seconds, lost in her eyes. How blue they were. How kind too, although a little haunted these days, far more so than the first time he’d seen them so long ago. He wanted to remind her of that day, wanted to ask her if she remembered, wanted to . . .