by Laura McNeal
After staring at Brother Keesler for a long second, her father broke into a grin.
“I could quibble over the belatedness of what you call the Church’s course correction, Mr. Keesler, but I’d rather not. In any case, your defense was as cogent as it was spirited.” His smile seemed to be one of genuine pleasure. “When you leave your missionary work behind, you might look into politics or the law.”
Elder Keesler lowered his eyes.
“So how many notches do you have on your belt?” Lisa’s father said.
Elder Keesler looked up in confusion. “Sir?”
“How many converts?”
“Oh.” For once, Elder Keesler seemed at a loss for words.
“Slews,” Elder Pfingst piped up. “Brother Keesler just has a way of bringing people into his words, letting his testimony wrap around them, and making them feel safe and happy for maybe the first time in their lives.” He grinned pinkly. “It’s something to see.”
Lisa had to keep herself from staring at Elder Keesler. She bet it was something to see, and to feel. In fact, she almost wished she hadn’t been born into the Church so she could’ve been converted by Elder Keesler.
Everyone ate in polite silence for a few seconds, and then Elder Pfingst said, “Where did this milk come from?”
“Cows are the usual suspects,” Lisa’s father said with a smile.
“A local dairy,” her mother said, and she smiled, too, at Elder Pinkest, as Lisa now thought of him, because his nose, forehead, and fingertips shone like the curves of a pink piggy bank. “Why?”
“I know good milk,” he said. “I come from a dairy farm.”
This led to a theology-free discussion of the Pinkest family farm, which led to the Ebenezers, who, Lisa said as she served slices of banana cake, lived communally and were assigned their trades—blacksmith, dairy farmer, butcher, carpenter.
“They surrendered a lot of autonomy, but there were sensible aspects to it, too,” her father said, and took another big bite of cake. “For example, if the Church Elders gave permission to couples who wanted to marry, the man had to go away for a year. Sort of a maximum-security waiting period—no communication whatsoever for three hundred and sixty-five days. Then, if the man came back and still loved the woman, and she still loved him, they got married.”
“Sort of like missionaries,” Elder Keesler said. After he’d finished his cake, he’d taken his full glass of milk and, in six or seven slow swallows, drained it completely. It was what he’d been waiting for, but Lisa wondered how he could have known there would be a milk-worthy dessert. And then she didn’t wonder, because it suddenly seemed to her that Elder Keesler might just know everything.
“Do you have a girl waiting for you at home, then?” her mother asked.
“No,” he said, “but Holy Helper Pfingst does. Her name is Marie and to help Brother Pfingst remember her, she regularly sends him cookies.” Elder Keesler smiled his soft, gray-eyed smile. “Of which I am the happy collateral recipient.”
“Oh, how nice,” her mother said.
Yes, Lisa thought, relieved that Elder Keesler wasn’t taken. How nice.
Elder Pfingst continued beaming over his girlfriend’s gifts. “Oatmeal gumdrop are my personal faves,” he said. “Those and snickerdoodles.”
Lisa turned her eyes on Elder Keesler. Her heart pounded wildly. She could hardly believe herself. She stared brazenly into his eyes. “How about you, Brother Keesler? What’re your personal favorites?”
It was as if his gray-blue gaze narrowed somehow and found a way to slip inside her and look around. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, smiling. “I never met a cookie I didn’t like.”
Before taking up other conversation, he kept his eyes on her for just an extra half second, but it was an important half second, during which Lisa felt a strange tingling in every single part of her body.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
Mick and his father had spent Sunday morning digging up a garden plot for Nora. They folded in chicken manure followed by a worm-rich batch of kitchen compost. Then they began rebuilding the wood-and-chicken-wire frame that was supposed to keep the red squirrels out, but never did.
The garden was Nora’s summer pastime. Every year Mick’s father said he’d do the preplanting grunt work, but after that his only job was to consume the fruits of her labor. Mick wasn’t so cavalier. Past summers he’d enjoyed working with Nora in the garden, especially when it was hot and she would work in shorts and a halter top. On those days he’d liked working right along with her. But that seemed now like somebody else’s former life, and he was glad Nora wasn’t here today.
But then she was.
“Guess who just called?” she said as she arrived with two cold Cokes in hand.
Mick’s father wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Well, if it was Kim Basinger, I hope you told her to stop pestering me.”
Nora chuckled politely. “It was Clyde D.,” she said.
Clyde D. Duzinski was an old high-school friend of Mick’s father’s, and in addition to running an auto body shop, he ran a small car lot on the side that specialized in custom muscle cars. The problem was, Clyde D. couldn’t fix engines and didn’t know anyone who could, except Mick’s father.
Mick’s father smiled. “Clyde D. got problems?”
“All over the place. He’s supposed to deliver a classic B.T.O. to somebody tonight who’s willing to pay very big bucks for the classic B.T.O., only the classic B.T.O. won’t go.”
“G.T.O.,” his father said mildly. “It stands for Gran Turismo Omologato.”
Nora shrugged. “Anyhow, I took pity on him and you, and said you’d be over there as fast as your cute little legs would carry you.”
This surprised Mick—Nora usually hated seeing his father go off to Clyde D.’s because it meant he’d be there at least four or five hours. It must’ve surprised his father, too, because he said, “Really?”
Nora smiled and shrugged. “You can finish the squirrel frame next weekend. No big deal.”
Everyone dispersed. Nora went back into the house, Mick started putting the tools away, and his father drove off to Clyde D.’s. When Mick went back into the house, the shower was running upstairs. So, he thought. The stepmom’s stepping out.
A plan took shape in Mick’s mind. He’d thought of it before, but only in the abstract. Now he was going to do it. He changed clothes, grabbed his jacket and book bag, then yelled through the bathroom door to Nora, “I’m going to the library!”
He waited for her to yell back, but suddenly the door opened and she was yelling, “What?” and then, seeing him, said, “Oh.”
Nora was naked. Also embarrassed.
So was Mick.
She quickly stepped back and peered modestly around the door. “Thought you were downstairs yelling up,” she said.
Mick wasn’t exactly sure what he’d just seen or what he’d just felt. He did know he was still blushing. “I just said I was going to the library.”
She nodded.
Although she’d stepped back, the rich smell of her perfume still hung in the air. He’d seen the perfume in her medicine cabinet. It came in a red box and was called Ambush. “Where’re you going?” he said, even though he was pretty sure he knew where she was going.
This time he could read her expression. It turned purposefully vague. “To the mall,” she said, “and then I have a spinning lesson.”
“A spinning lesson?”
“On a real-life colonial spinning wheel. For that enrichment class. There’s a woman in Mattydale who teaches spinning.”
Mick nodded and started to leave, but turned back. “Sorry about—” He pointed to the doorway, where her naked body had been.
Nora’s face eased. “Don’t be. It was my fault, not yours.” She smiled. “Worse things have happened. What do you say we just forget about it?”
Mick nodded again, but the one thing in the whole w
ide world he was pretty sure he wouldn’t do was forget about seeing Nora naked.
Mick took his books and left by the front door as if leaving for the library, but then he circled back into the garage by the side door. The garage was pitch black inside. He felt his way to Nora’s 320i and didn’t hesitate. He opened the back door, slid in, and hid himself under a blanket behind her seat.
Ten minutes later, the garage light suddenly went on. Nora’s heels clicked on the garage floor. Mick’s heart pounded wildly. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to leap from the car, say, “Oh, excuse me,” and beat it out of there. But he clamped shut his eyes and lay perfectly still.
Nora got in and the car filled with her perfume. She started the engine, remoted open the garage door, and began backing out. He knew how she backed out. She always used her sideview mirrors. She never turned around.
Once on the street, it was as if she were breaking free. The windows went down, the oldies station went on loud, and the rpm’s climbed to a whine before she shifted gears. On the corners, Mick had to brace himself to keep from sliding from his little space behind her seat. The floor of the car wasn’t clean and Mick suddenly had the feeling he’d just inhaled sheep wool. He felt a faint pre-sneeze tingle in his nose. Once he actually did begin to sneeze, but swallowed it back down just as Billy Joel blasted into “Piano Man” with Nora singing along.
On one smooth straightaway Nora suddenly made a gasping sound and, braking hard, the wheels locked, rubber squealed, and the rear of the car slid slightly sideways. There was something else, too—a quick thipping sound followed by the tinkle of glass. Mick waited for more damage, but none came. Still, he wouldn’t have been able to fight the impulse to jump up and see what was going on if Nora hadn’t said in an exhaling voice, “Okay, pal, you are one lucky pooch.” Then she said, “But your doggy life just cost Beelzebub his horn.”
So a dog had run in front of her, and she’d missed it, but her devil had smacked against the windshield? That, anyhow, was what Mick guessed. Whatever it was, it seemed to change Nora’s mood slightly. She lowered the radio and stopped singing along. She also began driving slower, and at one point she stopped at a light so long that someone behind her tapped his horn to get her going again.
Finally the BMW came to a stop, but Mick had no idea where. It was covered parking, he could tell that, and there were sounds. A car door slamming. An engine starting. People’s voices. Nora was quietly doing something up front, maybe putting on lipstick. Then the familiar rattle of a Tic Tac tapped from its plastic case. The windows powered up, her door slammed, the other doors auto-locked, and the clicking of her heels dimmed as she walked away.
Mick slowly raised his head. He was in the mall parking lot, all right, and the red devil on the dashboard, less the tip of one horn, stared back at him with black, curious eyes. Mick turned and, there, perhaps a hundred yards away, was Nora, in a lemon yellow sweater heading toward Kauffman’s, and then pausing a full second or two before passing through the automatic doors that spread open before her.
Mick jumped from the car, ran through the parking lot, and entered Kauffman’s carefully, scanning the aisles of mens’ and boys’ wares before working his way through not just that floor but the two floors above. Nora wasn’t there. He moved down the promenade toward the food court, looking for lemon yellow sweaters. There were none. He nodded at a couple of kids from school, but kept moving, steadily scanning the sea of faces. With a small and sudden shock of recognition, he spotted Mr. Cruso, his ever-friendly history teacher and just about the last person Mick wanted to talk to, so he sidestepped into Borders until Mr. Cruso passed by. Then he checked the food court, all the women’s stores, and went back to the parking lot. Nora’s car was still there, but Nora wasn’t.
On the dashboard, the red ceramic devil peered back.
He’d lost her.
Mick sighed, pulled the bus guide from his book bag, and twenty minutes later took a bus that dropped him at the steps of the downtown library, where for the next three hours he did his geometry and history homework and read all of The Metamorphosis for world lit, even though only ten pages had been assigned. It was about a man named Gregor Samsa who went to bed as a human and woke up as a cockroach.
When Mick closed the book, it was almost five, but he didn’t feel like going home yet. In his notebook, he began idly to draw a cockroach. The thought of Gregor Samsa, helpless on his back, left behind in his own house, made him think of his father. Someone had left a dictionary on the library table. Mick opened it to “helpless.” “Destitute of help or strength.” But that didn’t really fit his father. What fit his father was “clueless.” Maybe what his father needed was information, and maybe he, Mick, needed to provide it. He tried to imagine it. “Dad, there’s this guy named Alexander Selkirk.” First his father wouldn’t believe it, and then, when he did, it would just turn him quiet and miserable, like when his mother left, and what good would that do?
Mick remembered his father’s joking about Nora’s ulterior motives, and now he idly flipped the pages until he found “ulterior.” “Situated beyond or on the farther side.” Well, that’s where Nora was all right. Situated beyond. The question—the real question—was how to get her back.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dough
Sunday, 3:25. Elders Keesler and Pfingst had climbed into their hatchback and driven away. For the next hour or so, while her mother minutely cleaned the kitchen, Lisa sat nearby addressing invitations to a Doyle family reunion at Green Lakes in June. “Hope they don’t come,” Lisa said under her breath after almost every address, until finally her mother said, “God frowns on murmurings and so do I.”
When the kitchen work was done, her parents went upstairs to nap. At this time on Sunday afternoons, Lisa usually took a nap herself, but she was too keyed up today. She waited until her parents were settled upstairs and then called Janice.
“Didja kiss the Keesler?” Janice asked.
Lisa laughed. “Oh, yeah, right there in front of his companion, my dad, and the Lord.”
“The Lord came?”
Lisa laughed again but started to worry that they were taking God’s name in vain. “Wanna make cookies?” she asked. “I feel like taking a bike ride, and I could bring chocolate chips.”
“You’d have to bring butter, too. The Momster’s boycotting butter right now on the principle that it comes from incarcerated cows.”
“Are you a vegan now?”
“Me? No. Mom? Yes.”
“Does that mean I have to bring my own eggs?”
“Lemme check.” There was a door-opening sound and a pause. “No. We still have some pre-vegan eggs in here. Wow. There’s even some bacon.”
“Okay. Save the eggs till I get there,” Lisa said, and went to put on her shorts, wondering about the moral distinction between mailing cookies to an elder and delivering them in person. Either way, they were just cookies, no?
Lisa’s calf muscles were tight from pumping uphill, but before she carried her bicycle up the steps of Janice’s building, she cruised along the street to check for Elder Keesler’s hatchback. There were eighteen cinderblock buildings in Home Park Gardens, which, as Janice’s mom liked to point out, contained no homes, no parks, and no gardens. Just three rows of putty-colored buildings, three strips of patchy grass, and three smooth interlocking streets. Lisa noted that Elder Keesler’s back window looked out on a spidery jungle gym, an empty clothesline, and a fire escape. The curtains of Elder Keesler’s second-story apartment were open, revealing nothing but the back of a couch and a hanging light fixture. Elder Keesler’s car was nowhere to be seen. A little girl was swinging, and she watched Lisa without expression. She stopped swinging and watched Lisa get off her bicycle. Perhaps she was still staring as Lisa climbed three flights of stairs with her bicycle.
“Janice?” Lisa called. She was breathing heavily. “Can I bring in the dairy product?”
Janice came to the door and said the vegan-mothe
r was out. “She’s off interviewing a Buddha or something for the spirituality article,” Janice said.
Lisa took a deep breath and said, “That would be Buddhist, I’m guessing.” She propped her bike against the outside wall and lay down on the worn Persian rug that covered the living room floor. “Very far,” she said. “Your dwelling is very far.”
They melted butter, poured sugar, cracked eggs, splashed vanilla, dumped the chips in, and began eating the dough, just like always. But while Janice was sampling a big hunk from the end of a wooden spoon, two quick knocks came on the door. Lisa thought, illogically, of Elder Keesler (whose status she’d been checking on repeatedly via the living room window, whereupon Janice would say, “He’s not home yet, Agent Doyle”).
Another two raps, softer now, and Janice’s eyes widened. “Sounds Maurician,” she said, and grinned.
She was right. Maurician shorts, T-shirt, and muscles were suddenly in the room. Maurice smiled and removed his sunglasses. “Hello, Ms. Doyle,” he said. “Hello, Janissimo.” His eyes were drawn then to the wooden spoon. “Batter?” His tone made it seem distasteful.
“We call it dough,” Janice said. “Yummy, yummy dough. Want some?”
Maurice seemed actually to recoil from the thought. “Uncooked eggs? You ladies ever heard of salmonella?”
Janice rolled her eyes and picked up another small hunk of dough with her fingers, which she applied to the end of her spoon and consumed. “Yum,” she said again, but with less enthusiasm than before.
Maurice crossed his arms and looked out the window. “You going to bake those now, or do you want to enjoy the afternoon in mi carro?”
“Where’re we going?” Janice asked, grinning and dropping her spoon into the sink. She looked happy, Lisa noticed. Very happy.