“Betz, you do have a security code for the alarm, right? If the police get called, they send in the dogs first.”
David is wary of dogs because of an unpleasant visitation experience during field education in divinity school. How could he have known the house number in the church directory was a typo and that the reclusive homeowner kept a pack of dogs for running off door-to-door salespeople and pushy evangelists?
“I have a code. Don’t worry.”
We’re both dressed in black. All we need are stocking caps and some coal blacking to smear across our cheeks.
Okay, we’re about as stealthy as the Three Stooges. But I like the feeling of being co-conspirators.
“Ouch!” David bumps into me in the doorway when I stop to punch in the security code. I jump about a mile, and not just from the surprise.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. He’s pressed against my back, and I’m aware of every lanky inch of him.
“It’s okay.” With the alarm system off, we switch on our flashlights and make our way down the darkened hallways. Here and there, security lights help show the way.
The sanctuary at night is a scary place. I find that very ironic. In full daylight it feels holy, a sacred space that provides comfort and inspiration. At night, in the dark, it’s just an empty cavern that could conceal any number of bogeymen. I’m glad David is right on my heels.
We slip through a side door and into the sacristy. It’s a smallish room off the chancel area where the altar is. Mostly it’s used to store sixty two-liter bottles of Welch’s Grape Juice for Communion. An ancient refrigerator grates and whines, struggling like most of the parishioners to do its part for the church. The deacons come in on Saturday mornings to prepare the communion trays for the next day. Then they store them in the refrigerator. By Sunday morning, the grape juice has acquired a metallic bouquet with a saucy hint of Freon.
The offering box is a wooden structure about the size of an end table that sits in the corner. It has a slit in the top for the deacons to drop the bank deposit bag into after they’ve collected the offering. A large silver padlock dangles down its side.
“What’s the best angle?” I ask David.
He runs the flashlight around the room. “We don’t want it to be seen.”
“Up high?”
“Probably. We’re going to need a ladder.”
“Great.” I can picture us wrestling a fifteen-foot piece of rattling aluminum through the darkened church. We’d look like something out of an old episode of I Love Lucy.
“Couldn’t we just stand on a chair?”
“Nope. Not tall enough.”
“But all we have to do is stick it up there, right?”
“That’s what the guy at the store said.”
I run my flashlight around the room. “What if we stand on the counter?” There’s a small cabinet covered with Formica where the deacons fill the trays.
“That might work if you do it,” says David. “I’m way too heavy. It won’t hold me.”
And that’s how I find myself clambering up onto the counter with David’s help. His hands on my waist scorch me, but I pretend not to notice. Once I’m up on the counter, he hands me the camera. “Be careful, Betz. If you drop it, that’s all she wrote.”
Great. No pressure. It’s not the only thing that’s about to crack.
I reach up as high as I can, but even in the dark I see that the camera’s going to be too obvious.
“No good. It’s not going to be high enough.”
I turn to climb down, and my right foot gets tangled with my left. With a yelp, I pitch forward and brace myself for a head-on collision with the tile floor. Instead, two arms and a formidable chest break my fall.
“Whoa!” David scoops me into his arms like a groom about to carry his bride across his threshold. I’m shocked he’s not collapsing under my weight, but he holds steady, unlike my heart rate.
“Thanks,” I say with a breathlessness usually reserved for preteen girls and asthmatics.
It’s dark. I’m in David’s arms. I can feel his breath on my face, and it’s the movie theater all over again.
“Betz…”
Kiss him. No, wait, he should kiss me.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?” His voice is as mysterious as the darkness around us.
No. I’m not okay. Not when I’m this close to what I can’t have. “Right now or in general?”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
It’s so dark. It would be easy to blurt something out. Something approximating the truth. Then I’d know. One way or another, I’d know.
“No. I didn’t hurt myself.” Or maybe I did, but not because of the fall. I hurt myself years ago in divinity school when I pretended I didn’t have feelings for him so I could be his friend.
Slowly, he slides me to the ground. I’m still clinging to him for support. It’s so clichéd, and still so intimate. No wonder it’s a stock device in all my favorite romance novels.
I think I know what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t. No lip-lock whatsoever. Just the opposite. He sets me on my feet, and his arms fall away. “Maybe we should get that ladder after all.”
“Maybe so.” My knees lock, and I think I’m going to keel over. I clutch the Formica counter for support. While we’re fetching the ladder, let’s see if we can find my sanity.
Twenty minutes later we find the ladder, but my sanity is still MIA. Another twenty minutes and two tries later, the Web cam is hidden behind some trimwork above a storage cabinet. You’d never see it unless you were looking for it. But I have a wide-angle view of the offering box on the PC in my office. Now I just have to hide out here next Sunday after worship and see who’s been helping themselves to the first fruits of Church of the Shepherd. And do some mental self-flagellation for not helping myself to a little of David while I had the chance.
Am I getting on your nerves yet with my cowardice about coming clean with David? I know I’m getting on mine. So let’s change the subject.
The next morning I head for the monthly meeting of the Greater Downtown Ministers’ Association. I make this pilgrimage out of a desperate need for camaraderie. We gather at one of the downtown hotels for a rubber-chicken lunch, complete with guest speaker and senior-minister preening. The quality of the food never varies. Neither does the preening. The speaker’s the only thing that might hit or miss. But we attend anyway, out of some strange compulsion to flock with birds of a feather.
The group usually numbers forty or so. We come from all different denominations. We’re white, African American, Hispanic, Asian. A handful of us are women. About seven or eight of us are associate ministers.
David’s there. He’s huddled with the second-string group of senior pastors. Their steeples aren’t quite as big as the first-string pastors’; neither are their congregations. At this meeting, size does matter.
Most of the associates are women. They’re standing off by themselves. The whole thing reminds me of a junior-high dance. I head for the girls, cup of coffee in hand, with a feeling of relief. There’s a delicious feeling of understanding among women in ministry that sustains us through our darkest hours.
But as I approach, I notice a thread of tension in the air. Barely perceptible, but it’s still there.
“Hello, Betsy.” Frieda Groos is the Christian-education associate from the Reformed church. Her smile is about as welcoming as the dogs that attacked David in divinity school.
“Hi.” I’m suddenly nervous. Surreptitiously, I run my tongue over my teeth to check for anything unsightly wedged there. A quick glance at my shoes shows I’m not trailing toilet paper from the ladies’ room. No run in my hose. I’m pretty sure my blouse is buttoned properly, but I’m not going to look now. I wonder what this is about. Probably the makeover. That seems to be causing me problems everywhere else.
“So, you’re the new senior minister at Shepherd.” Frieda says it like I’ve contracted a highly communicable and particularly distas
teful disease.
“Interim only. And under duress.”
So that’s it. They think I’ve betrayed them. I look around the circle, past Frieda, to Nan from the Presbyterian church. She won’t meet my gaze. Kelly, the Lutheran, smiles awkwardly. Kevin, the lone male who’s a new associate at the Missionary Baptist Church, shifts from one foot to the other. The women’s foreheads are virtually flat from bumping up against the stained-glass ceiling. Kevin’s only doing his time until he gets offered a senior job. For men, being an associate pastor is a launching point. For women, it’s pretty much the end of the line.
I want to tell them the truth. That I’m not finagling for the top spot. I don’t want the job! I’m going to law school! I want to scream, but I cant. Because I know in my heart it’s not true. So I paste a smile on my face.
“Who’s speaking today?” With my luck, it will be a scintillating lecture on how to properly transliterate the Hebrew alphabet. The last interesting program we had was when LaRonda did a slide show on the school her church is building in South Africa.
“It’s Fred Farnsworth today,” Frieda says with grim resignation. “He’s going to tell us how to plan for adequate parking.”
I see LaRonda across the room. God bless her, she’s standing in the middle of all the Big Daddy Rabbit preachers, and she’s holding her own, though I do notice the laugh lines around her smile seem to come more from stress than amusement. Her church is as big as any of theirs, if not bigger, and her four-inch heels put her on par when it comes to personal height, but she still has to work twice as hard. I envy her ability to mark her territory and occupy it in the midst of the jungle, but I’m beginning to see signs of the toll it’s taking on her.
The president of the association bangs the gavel on the podium up front, which relieves me of trying to justify my current predicament to my fellow associates. We move toward the rows of chairs and settle in the back row. Usually we continue our junior-high behavior by passing notes and rolling our eyes if the speaker says something particularly inane. Hey, everybody has to be bad sometimes.
Fred Farnsworth is on a roll, detailing the relative merits of parallel versus angled parking, when my cell phone rings. It’s the call I’ve been dreading.
“This is Vanderbilt Hospital. May I speak to Betsy Blessing?”
“Just a moment,” I whisper into the phone and start climbing over people to escape the meeting room. By the time I make it out the door and into the hallway, the nurse has already told me everything. Velva’s no longer overbreathing the respirator, and she has an advance directive that specifies her wish not to be kept alive by artificial means. The same document gives me the power to authorize the removal of life support.
“I’ll be right there.”
After a week and a half, I’m on a first-name basis with the ICU nurses. Julie stops me when I come through the double doors into the unit.
“She doesn’t look good, Betsy. Just be prepared.”
I myself have said that line to families when I’ve been with them and their loved one in the last hours. Somehow it sounds far more patronizing when you’re on the receiving end of it.
Velva seems to have shriveled overnight, as if her spirits been extracted from her body. When I step across the threshold into her room, I can’t sense her presence anymore. It’s clear that whatever it is that animates us—call it a soul, a spirit, what have you—isn’t inside her anymore. There’s an absence that speaks volumes.
“Can I have a few minutes?”
Julie pats my back. “Sure. Let us know when you’re ready. We’ve contacted her niece in New Jersey. She said she trusted you to do the right thing.”
And there is a right thing to be done here. Velva had ninety-four wonderful, grace-filled years. She made her wishes clear. I take her hand, and the tears start to fall. Not for her, but, selfishly, for me. What will I do without her?
I lean down and kiss her cheek, as papery as always. “See ya soon,” I whisper in her ear, and maybe I’m imagining it, but I feel the slightest pressure from her fingers in mine. The heavy rasping of the respirator punctuates the quiet.
I nod to Julie through the window that faces the nurses station, and the medical personnel assemble to do what must be a routine but sad task. Their brisk movements are efficient, impersonal. They remind me of women in Bible times who prepared the bodies for burial.
“Into your hands, O Lord…” My words falter at first and then pick up strength. “We commit our sister Velva. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. In sure and certain hope of the resurrection in our Lord, Jesus Christ.”
Without the tube, she strains for each breath. It goes on for several torturous minutes. And then, with one last exhale, her body comes to a stop.
Julie hands me a tissue, and I wipe my nose and eyes.
“She’s gone,” I say, as if everyone in the room couldn’t tell.
Julie puts her arm around my shoulders and squeezes. “Yes, but she’s okay. And you will be too. Do you need some more time with her?”
I give the nurse a watery smile. “Yes, but not like you mean.”
Velva looks so fragile, her frail limbs covered by a hospital gown and a thin sheet.
“I’ll contact the funeral home.”
Velva has planned her service down to the smallest detail. We spent a lot of hours and many cups of tea picking hymns and scriptures. She doesn’t want any flowers but zinnias. Or she didn’t want anything but zinnias. The awful reality of the past tense hits me. I hate that part of loss, that moment when you realize you have to change the very language you’ve always used to speak about the person you love.
Julie is tidying up the room. “Julie?”
“Yes?”
“Will they take her like that? In a hospital gown?”
“Probably.”
“She’d hate that. Could we put her nightgown and robe on her?”
Julie stops what she’s doing and looks at me. I see a trace of tears in her eyes. “Sure.”
It takes both of us to remove the hospital gown and replace it with Velva’s pink cotton nightgown and robe. Maybe this should feel icky or wrong, but it just feels like love. I pick up a comb and fluff her hair a little in the front. Just as Velva always did for Dottie at the nursing home.
Just like that, it’s over. No more stealthy hand-offs of contraband herbal supplements. No more birds outside the window or pots of strong tea. No more wisdom. No more courage.
I cry now because I can’t later. Later, I’ll have to be a professional. The service will be a comfort to all of us at Church of the Shepherd who adored her. I will put everything I have into her eulogy.
For now, I put what’s left into grieving for my own loss.
I can’t write about Velva’s funeral. LaRonda and David were both there, in the back of the sanctuary. They knew that if they sat too close to the front, I’d take one look at them and fall apart.
Even Edna Tompkins complimented me on the eulogy. The Judge shook my hand rather than slipping out the side door, so I must have done well. I hope I did Velva justice. That’s what you worry about when the funeral is for someone you loved so much. Did your personal feelings get in the way of your professional competence?
Later, after the graveside service, David and LaRonda take me to La Paz for shrimp enchiladas and a margarita. They’re both treating me as if I might shatter in the act of dipping tortilla chips into the salsa verde.
“We could go to the movies,” David offers after I’ve ordered my enchiladas. With a side of guacamole. The guacamole here is a sacrament.
“No, thanks. I’m not in the mood to see anyone get blown up.” I’m also not up to sitting in a darkened theater with David again. Not while he’s still Cali-fied.
“Why don’t you come home with me?” LaRonda asks. “We’ll deep-condition our hair and watch Meg Ryan movies.”
“Y’all are sweet, but I need to be alone for a while.”
After we leave the restaurant, I head home. The minute
I step through my front door, the tears start to fall. I curl up in a ball on the couch and let the hurt work its way from my heart to my stomach, along the length of my limbs, up my neck, and over my scalp. Why does God make us love? I was right to hold back, to keep people at arm’s length. Look where vulnerability has gotten me. Alone. On a Salvation Army couch. With nothing to dull the raw aching except a stomach full of enchiladas and guacamole.
The phone rings. I hiccup and sniffle, wipe my nose on my sleeve, and answer it. It could be a parishioner in worse shape than I’m in.
“Betz?” The familiar rumble of David’s voice is like Gilead’s balm.
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t tell me what time to pick you up on Saturday.”
The fund-raiser. I’d forgotten.
“Forget it. I’m not going.”
There’s a long silence, as if he’s thinking through what he’s going to say before he says it.
“I think you should go. I think you need to go. Life goes on, Betz.”
“I’m fine with life going on. It just needs to go on without me for a while.”
“No, it doesn’t. LaRonda will be at your house at four on Saturday to help you get ready.”
“David!” I don’t know whether to feel comforted or outraged at his high-handedness.
“Wear something cute.”
“You wouldn’t know the difference if I wore a potato sack.”
“Sure I would. You’d be the one who had Idaho written across your chest.”
I can’t believe David just referred to my chest.
“Okay, okay. Pick me up at seven.”
“I’m expecting a great dinner.”
“David, your idea of a great dinner is chili dogs.”
“Shall I make reservations at the bowling alley?”
I’m smiling when I didn’t think I could. Maybe love isn’t a complete loss after all.
“I’m only doing this because I want to see you in that tux.”
He laughs. “Should I have my mother fly in from New York and take pictures, like for prom?”
Heavens to Betsy Page 13