Forever Friends

by Lynne Hinton

  Eight

  THE PILOT NEWS

  *

  * AUNT DOT’S HELPFUL HINTS

  Dear Aunt Dot,

  Candle wax on the carpet. Unsightly stain. Any help will be appreciated.

  Waned and Waxed

  Dear Waned,

  Dear Waned, Try using a warm iron on brown paper over the stain. You may have to use some elbow grease, but this usually works!

  *

  You need to come to the church.” That was all the voice on the other end of the phone said. Charlotte was still asleep when the call came in. She stumbled a bit with her reply. She felt herself being pulled away from a bus.

  “Who is this?” she asked as she sat up in her bed, reaching for the clock. It was 7:15 A.M., Monday, her day off. She remained unclear, the dream of the bus and the strange old woman starting to pass beyond the edges of her mind.

  It had been about her father again; this much she knew. He had been a player in her dreams at least once a week for the past few months. Sometimes his role carried the entire story, and sometimes he was just a bit actor, a face in a crowd, an unobtrusive presence in an otherwise crowded scene. But he had been always present and always a man bigger than life, his large size always noticeable.

  For years she had nothing of him in her nighttime fantasies. Even when there were dreams of her mother and Serena, he was missing, unaccounted for, never represented. And when she woke and remembered the emotions of seeing her dead sister or encountering the blocked memories of her alcoholic mother, the daughter did not even miss her father, barely noticed his familial absence. But now, in the past year, in the months of structured therapy, he had suddenly emerged, a force with which to reckon, a memory to be recalled.

  Marion had encouraged her to record the dreams, claiming that they bore important information about her relationship with her dad and the unfinished business of what they did and did not have. Charlotte agreed that these new dreams held clues of how she really felt, what she honestly remembered, but she had discovered that recording them was a difficult task to perform.

  It was something she had to do just after waking because if she didn’t jot the dream down right away, it quickly slipped out of her memory and was gone, just as if it had never happened. She’d feel a sense of having been visited, having almost remembered things, but if she didn’t wake up and reach for a pad and paper to list the contents of the dream, she could hardly recall its existence. It was as if there was a part of herself that preferred them to stay shrouded in darkness, unleashed only in sleep.

  She turned and saw the journal next to the phone and considered putting the caller on hold just so she could write down the dream she now clearly remembered but that would probably be gone in a few minutes. She was unsure what to do.

  “Is this Charlotte Stewart?”

  She did not reach for the book. “Yes,” she answered, the images already starting to fade.

  The dreams were merely images at first, a string of pictures flashing before her like pearls on a necklace. One by one they emerged, scenes from her childhood frozen and captured, long ago forgotten. The family sitting around the table at mealtime, the birthday cake placed before her sister’s shining eyes, the group posed in song; the two of them, father and daughter, standing in front of an old car, the little girl shielding her eyes from the sun. Images of lost memories that were now beginning to tell stories as she slept.

  Mostly when the dreams stretched into more than just flashbacks, they would be pieces of anticipatory events, slices of a life bent in waiting but squeezed into distraction. Sometimes in her dream she would be expecting news, confirmation of a proposal or arrangement, and other times she was waiting for a person to emerge, someone to meet her, an angel unveiled, or perhaps she herself was preparing to travel. She was, however, never able to receive the thing or the person for whom she waited, never able to leave, because there always seemed to be some task to complete, some activity in which to participate. And apparently, because of the distraction or activity, she had never, in the four or five weeks in which the images had turned into scenes or stories, ultimately found or uncovered or had revealed to her the thing for which she had waited. It had become a pattern of unfulfillment, and she was beginning to sense that her subconscious was simply mirroring for her what she knew all too clearly. The desire of her heart, the immeasurable longing, could never be satisfied.

  In this dream, Charlotte remembered as she held the phone next to her ear, she is at a bus stop. She waits with a duffel bag filled with heavy items. She is not burdened by what she carries, but she is impeded by the weight and the awkwardness of having to balance the bag and its contents upon her back. There are others waiting with her, a couple of men, more women, some with bags and suitcases and some with nothing in their hands.

  When the bus arrives and the door opens, everyone moves toward the front. Charlotte, as she peers through the windows of the bus, notices that it is her father driving. He is young and big, tall, the way she remembers him from early photographs and first recollections. He sits, filling up the entire driver’s seat, his right hand on the door lever, his left on the large black steering wheel. They are big hands, hands of a working man, tan and callused. He never looks at the passengers, never sees his daughter. He doesn’t seem perturbed or unhappy, just focused on the task at hand.

  Charlotte feels nothing for her father, not surprise or anger or pleasure, and as the other people begin to get on board, Charlotte turns to see a lady sitting in front of the bus, on the bench. She is an old white woman with gnarled hands, small and bony, hardly the size of an adult. She wears a blue scarf on her head, and her clothes are wrinkled and unkempt. She seems, however, unbothered by how she appears and is polishing a silver candlestick like the kind at church, the tall ones that stand on the altar in the center of the chancel.

  Charlotte is struck by the gleaming silver, the tarnish lifted and the shine reflecting in the light of the sun. And as in all the other dreams where she is pulled away from the task at hand, she is torn between staying at the bus stop and asking the woman to polish the items in her duffel bag and doing what is apparently intended and getting on board. Her father patiently waits as the other people hurry by her and step onto the bus. The young pastor is just opening her bag, the bus door still ajar, when the phone call interrupted her sleep and her dream.

  “It’s Grady, Charlotte,” the voice not at all apologetic for waking the minister.

  Charlotte cleared her throat, trying to pay attention to the conversation someone was seeking to have with her and trying to push the dream aside without forgetting it. She watched powerlessly as the pictures fled her mind. Grady Marks, she remembered, the deacon chairman, the lay leader of the church.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I think somebody broke into your office. The door was standing open. I came by to check on the heat because I wasn’t sure it got turned off yesterday, and I noticed that it wasn’t shut and locked.” He waited to see if Charlotte was still listening.

  “Did you call the police?” She got out of bed.

  “No,” he answered. “I thought I’d talk to you first.”

  Charlotte was surprised that he had not taken matters into his own hands, something the church leader was known to do, and called his buddies at the sheriff’s office before he had contacted her. She knew that it was unlike him, and she wasn’t sure whether this was a good sign or a bad one.

  “I’ll be right there.” She hung up the phone and threw on some clothes and walked over to the church.

  It took only a few minutes since the parsonage was next door. When she came in, Grady was sitting in the choir room, just across the hall from the pastor’s office. When the door shut behind her, she heard his chair slide across the floor and he met her in the entryway.

  “Did you go in?” she asked as she pushed the office door open.

  He nodded his head and followed her as she walked in. “I didn’t touch anything, though, a
nd I called you because you’d know better than anyone what was missing out of here.”

  She turned on the lights and looked around.

  At first sight, nothing appeared to be out of place. Her desk was just like it was when she left yesterday after the worship service. The remaining bulletins were on the shelf by the door going into the outer office, and the communion set was exactly where she had placed it, on the corner of the small table positioned next to the window. The drawers of her desk were not open, and the phone and answering machine were in their usual places.

  She moved her eyes slowly and attentively across the room. The plants were there; the curtains were still hanging; the bookends and the books had not been taken.

  Grady walked into the other office. He switched on the light and checked the other door.

  Charlotte continued taking inventory of the things in her office, noting that her pictures remained on the wall, supplies were on the desk, the clock was keeping the right time. She slowly paid attention to everything in the room, examining from side to side, up to down; and as she stopped to focus on the area around her chair she noticed that the CD player was missing.

  She walked around the desk and scanned the area near the trash can. Grady came back to where Charlotte was. He stood just in the doorway that separated the pastor’s office from the other room.

  He watched her for a minute and then asked, “Anything gone?”

  Charlotte didn’t want to report the missing item just yet. She wasn’t sure it was in fact missing and decided instead to hear what else the church member obviously wanted to say.

  He seemed convinced there had been a breakin.

  He waited, and when his pastor didn’t respond, he glanced into the office behind him and then out the window next to Charlotte’s desk and then without hesitation said, “I see that Vastine and Peggy’s grandson is staying with them.”

  Charlotte faced the deacon. Suddenly she understood the reason for his concern and the early-morning call. She figured she’d play along. “He’s been home two weeks. He was at church yesterday.”

  She waited to hear more of the older man’s implications.

  “Yeah, I saw him standing around here before service.” Grady leaned against the frame of the door. He was wearing navy pants with a jacket that matched, a uniform for work, his name stitched in red and white just over a left breast pocket. A ball cap covered most of his forehead, and he lifted the brim a bit so that he could stare at his pastor eye-to-eye.

  Charlotte didn’t respond.

  Grady threw his left leg across his right one. “He was in jail, is what I heard.”

  Charlotte was still quiet. She knew that the teenager’s story would be shared among the church members, and she hadn’t been sure how they would react. With such a lack of subtlety in Grady’s conversation, she felt a sinking in her stomach at what had apparently already been discussed.

  He folded his arms across his chest, heavy and dramatic, like he was lodging a complaint. “We have a history with that boy,” is how he said it.

  “A history?” Charlotte asked. She pushed her chair away from the desk a bit without losing eye contact with her parishioner.

  “He stole some things from us the last time he stayed with Vastine and Peggy.”

  Charlotte rested her hands on the arms of her chair; she tried not to take a defensive position. She looked around some more, still trying to locate the CD player. She raised her eyebrows, waiting for more of the story that he seemed willing to tell.

  “And he was how old then?” she asked innocently.

  “Eight or nine, I don’t remember,” he replied.

  “I heard he was more like six or seven.” Charlotte remembered what Peggy had told her and corrected Grady in hopes that, once he was reminded of Lamont’s young age when he was in Hope Springs before, reason might cast aside his unproved ideas of blame.

  “Well, I don’t recall how old he was; I just know that we had trouble then and now he’s back and—”

  Charlotte didn’t let him finish. “And we have trouble now?” She phrased it in a question. “Grady, I don’t see that anything is missing. I probably just didn’t lock the door.”

  The deacon had a toothpick in his teeth, and he pushed it from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “Does everything appear all right in the other office?” Charlotte remained at her desk.

  Grady nodded, the toothpick still twirling between his teeth.

  “Then I don’t think we’ve got a problem.” She paused. “Do we?”

  The older man shook his head and studied his pastor. Charlotte could tell that he was contemplating saying more. She braced herself for what was coming.

  “Well, the other men and I talked about it, and we agreed that somebody should keep an eye on him.” He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jacket. His name lifted off his chest.

  Charlotte felt herself turn red. Not only had there been discussion about Lamont’s return to the community; a decision had been made about how he would be treated.

  As his words settled upon the young minister, Charlotte realized that once again she had underestimated the malice and the harm that can be done in a church. She understood that Peggy’s embarrassment and shame had as much to do with the reactions of her community to her grandson’s criminal activities as they did with her serious considerations that she had been at fault. The DuVaughns had never spoken of their burden or concerns about Lamont because the Hope Springs church members had already made it clear that they would never welcome the boy back into their midst.

  Charlotte felt a tightening in the back of her throat.

  “Grady,” she said as calmly as she could, “the DuVaughns have their grandson staying with them because Peggy needs some help taking care of Vastine. Lamont was kind enough to move in with them and look after his grandfather.” She sat straight up, rigid and undeterred. “You and I have been through a lot together,” she added.

  The older man narrowed his eyes at her.

  “I have a great deal of respect for you and the work you do in this church.” She did not falter. “But, Grady, that young man is a member of this community, a member of one of our families, and as long as I’m the pastor here, he will be treated with the utmost respect and hospitality.” Charlotte surprised even herself with her confidence.

  Grady was not changed. He reached up and effortlessly pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and pushed his tongue along the front of his teeth. He rocked a bit from side to side. “That boy’s a thief. Everybody here knows that. And several of us believe he’s dangerous. If you’re so fired up to do the pastor thing, you ought to make sure he ain’t stealing from Vastine and Peggy. They’re the ones who need watching out after, not him.”

  He stuck the toothpick back in the corner of his mouth and readjusted his hat. “You weren’t here when that boy made all his trouble; we were. And I’m here to make sure right from the start that none of that mess is going on at this church.”

  He put his hands in his pants pockets and jingled his keys. “Our welcome lasts just as long as his good behavior. If stuff starts getting missing around here, we’re pressing charges.”

  He stared at Charlotte like he knew she was covering something. “And you can mark my words about that.” He curled his lips around the toothpick and nodded like he was finished.

  Charlotte did not move. “I thank you for your concern today, Grady. I’ll check the heat and lock the doors behind me.”

  The man made a huffing sound like perhaps he would say more, but he didn’t. He walked out of the office without even offering a good-bye.

  When the back door slammed Charlotte ducked her head beneath the desk, trying once again to locate the CD player. She searched behind the trash can, next to the small table; she even got up and opened the cabinets, thinking that perhaps she had stuck it inside, on one of the shelves. It was definitely not in her office.

  She recalled what Grady had said before his grand announcement
about what he considered as his responsibility to protect the belongings of the church and remembered that Lamont had been standing outside her office just before church had started. When she saw him, she asked why he wasn’t in the sanctuary, and he reported that he was going outside to smoke a cigarette before he joined the others. At the time Charlotte hadn’t thought anything about it. But she knew that the missing item had been left beside her desk before the service.

  She had played a CD for the choir director during Sunday school, an old gospel hymn that she thought the choir might want to learn for later in the spring. After playing the song, she had taken out the CD and given it to the music director and had put the player beside where she was sitting. Lamont had come around just about that time.

  Charlotte got up from her chair and walked through the outer office into the sanctuary. She sat on the first pew, without turning on any lights. Even in the darkness she could see the drippings from the candle wax that had been spilled in front of the chancel steps during the Christmas Eve service two years before. No one had cleaned the stains.

  The church was quiet, the way she preferred it, and she positioned herself way down in the seat, resting her neck against the top of the pew. She laid her hands in her lap and closed her eyes. She sat in the silence and thought about Peggy and Vastine and about Lamont, the young man who had returned to the church, stirring up gossip and nerves.

  She wasn’t sure if she should confront the boy about the missing CD player, go over to Peggy and Vastine’s and make sure that he wasn’t stealing from his grandparents, or just leave things alone, waiting until she heard from them.

  She knew that it would be difficult for Peggy to admit if Lamont was stealing from them, and Charlotte understood that he could take everything from his grandparents before anyone else might hear about what had happened, leaving them in dire circumstances.

  The minister placed her hands on top of her head and interlaced her fingers and remembered how Peggy had appeared when Lamont got out of the car and walked toward the house, having just come home from jail.