House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  That last question was the only one Reverend Kendall answered definitively. “God help you if you don’t!”

  Leigh didn’t join in the laughter that time. She was still thinking about the truth panel and how the votes would come in. Even if the panel were expanded to include strangers with no stake in the outcome, she knew she’d lose. Even if she put it out to the whole world. A mother’s grief wouldn’t count for anything in their deliberations. Not when weighed against the future of a bright young man.

  Cookies and coffee were available in the lobby afterward, but Leigh didn’t want to linger. The girl from Boston was rooting through her suitcase in search of some books she hoped to get signed, so Leigh said good night and skirted the other way to the aisle, then outside into the summer night. Some smokers were out there already, sucking up a quick hit of nicotine before they rejoined the crowd inside, and she hurried past them and down a shrub-lined path to the parking lot. She turned on her phone as she reached her car. A text lit up the screen in the dark. From Peter.

  “Leigh! Leigh, wait!”

  She spun around. Stephen Kendall was loping down the path after her.

  “Oh! Hello.”

  “I thought I spotted you in the audience, but the lights were dim and I was afraid I’d imagined it.” He smiled. “I’ve been hoping to see you again.”

  “I was hoping to see you, too,” she said. “Then I saw a poster about your lecture tonight.”

  “You’re not leaving already?”

  “I’m sorry. It was very interesting. But I really have to go.”

  “Have you had dinner?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Dine with me, won’t you?”

  “Oh,” she said, startled. “No, I don’t think—”

  “Please. You’d be doing me a big favor.” His eyes twinkled imploringly in the streetlight. “Because otherwise I’m about to get roped into some stuffy trustee meal.”

  “Well.” She smiled a little. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”

  He beamed. “Wonderful. I’m promised to sign a few books, but I won’t be ten minutes. If you’d like to wait for me here? Or at the restaurant.”

  “Why don’t I go on ahead?” That would give her time to reconsider. She could send him a text in ten minutes—Something came up. Sorry.

  “Great. Do you the know the Acropolis?”

  Leigh nodded in surprise. She was expecting him to name some sedate café, the kind of place where intellectuals went to pick at salads and have cultured conversations. Not a noisy Greek diner where the menu was twenty pages long and you could get breakfast all day.

  “Wonderful.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “I’ll get away as soon as I can.”

  He ran back up the path as she got in the car. This was a bad idea, she decided as she exited the lot. She didn’t even need ten minutes to think better of it. She was in mourning. She didn’t do casual social affairs, and certainly not with a man she barely knew, no matter how kind he was. She pulled over in the next campus parking lot and took out her phone, but even before the screen lit up, she realized she didn’t have his number. She couldn’t call it off.

  The text from Peter glowed on the screen. Shep’s in the kitchen. He didn’t want to leave home.

  If only Peter felt the same way, she thought. But he’d rather sleep on a cot in a half-built house than come home to her.

  She put the phone away and drove on to the diner.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Hey there, Padre,” the elderly proprietor called out when Stephen came through the diner door. “The usual?”

  “Not tonight, Nick.” He spotted Leigh in a booth and gave her a wave. “I’m trying to impress my lady friend here, and it won’t do to dribble a gyro all over my tie.”

  The proprietor laughed, but he gave Leigh a careful once-over, and so did the waitresses behind the counter. She could see that Stephen was not only known here, but he was also liked, and they were protective of him. They knew his history, too, she suspected. His terrible personal tragedy.

  He slid into the vinyl bench across from her. “Are you hungry?” he asked as he opened the laminated menu. “Public speaking always makes me hungry. Which is a real occupational hazard when you’re both a preacher and a teacher.” He gave a rueful pat to his stomach.

  They were both overdressed for the diner, Stephen in his suit and Leigh in her silk dress. The young people crowding into the booths around them probably thought they’d met on SeniorMatch.com and were trying to impress each other on their first in-person date.

  “I enjoyed your talk tonight,” she said. “Though the topic was a surprise. I thought you were going to talk about the one-percenters.”

  He gave a shrug as his eyes skimmed the menu. “Lecturer’s prerogative. I tend to talk about whatever’s most on my mind at the moment.”

  “Lying’s been on my mind a good bit, too.”

  His gaze rose to her face. “Did I say something to upset you? I was afraid— I thought you looked troubled when I saw you in the audience.”

  She was spared a response when the waitress presented herself for their orders. A spinach pie for Stephen, an egg white omelet for Leigh. She changed the subject as the waitress bustled back to the kitchen. “I have a confession to make. I didn’t actually see a poster for your lecture. The truth is, I googled you.”

  “Oh?” He shook out his paper napkin like it was cloth and placed it on his lap. “What’s the internet saying about me these days?”

  “Nothing bad, I can tell you that. You have quite a loyal following. In fact, I sat next to one of your groupies tonight.”

  “Oh, the girl with the, uh—?” With a grin he drew an imaginary streak through his hair.

  “I can only imagine how devoted your parishioners must be.”

  “They’re a little impatient with me, to tell the truth. My sabbatical’s already lasted longer than any of us contemplated.”

  “You don’t want to return to your church?”

  “Someday, of course. But for now, my extracurricular work seems more important than preaching to two thousand comfortable souls in Chevy Chase.”

  “Two thousand!”

  “Don’t be impressed. They’re not all regulars. Many of them we see only twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. And quite a few we see only three times in their lives.” His mouth twitched. “You know the saying? We hatch ’em, match ’em, then dispatch ’em.”

  Leigh gave a guilty laugh. That expression more or less described her own church attendance record over the last many years. Baptisms, weddings, funerals. “I meant to ask you,” she said. “The day we met, when I followed you home?” She flushed at the memory of her madness that day, but pushed through to the question that had been on her mind since then. “Could I ask what you were doing out there?”

  “Where?”

  “On Hollow Road. In St. Alban.”

  “Visiting a friend,” he said. “What about you? What brought you there?”

  She hesitated. She couldn’t talk about her litigation against Hunter Beck, and she didn’t want to bring up Peter and his construction project. “I was visiting a friend, too. She owns a retirement horse farm there.”

  “You don’t mean Golden Oldies?”

  “You know it?”

  “Only to drive past. But I always think what a worthy project it is, giving those old horses a comfortable exit.”

  “My, uh, my daughter—Chrissy—did volunteer work there.”

  “What a lovely thing for her to do.”

  Tears rose in her throat. She was about to sabotage a pleasant conversation by crying. She dug her nails deep into her palms to hold back the tears until the waitress rescued her with the delivery of their orders. For a few minutes, she could busy herself with her napkin, the salt and pepper, a sip of her water until the threat receded.

  “Tell me about your work,” Stephen said next, rescuing her completely. “What kind of law do you practice?”
<
br />   “Divorce.” She was surprised to hear her own answer. She never answered that way, because it usually brought guffaws or shudders or jokes about taking men to the cleaners. She tended to offer the more palatable matrimonial law in its place. But in truth, even when she advised couples contemplating marriage, divorce was what they were really contemplating.

  Stephen didn’t guffaw or shudder. “We have something in common then,” he said with a thoughtful nod. “We both see people at their worst. When they’re angry or hurt or guilt stricken or desolate. And we do our best to help them get through to the other side.”

  Leigh gave a startled smile. He’d managed to take a career that always had a taint of shame about it and turn it into a calling almost as noble as his own.

  They skimmed the surface of their own divorces after that. Hers from Ted seemed a lifetime ago, and she could sum it up with a handful of quips and barbs that had lost all their power to sting. But Stephen’s was more recent—only a year ago. After their son died.

  She wasn’t sure what to say. “Something like that—it would put a horrible strain on a marriage.”

  He paused to reflect. “What I find in my work is that some couples’ bonds become even stronger after they face tragedy together. But others crumble under the added weight. Especially when the foundation was already cracked.”

  She bit her lip and looked away. She hadn’t told him anything about the state of her own marriage, but obviously he’d guessed. Her failure must be written all over her face.

  “I’m afraid that was the case with Claire and me.”

  “Oh.” He was talking about himself. She was embarrassed at how self-absorbed she was, always imagining everything was about her. “Yours had cracks?”

  “Mmm. It’s not easy being a pastor’s wife. She comes from a wealthy family and never quite adapted to life in a parsonage, even a well-to-do parsonage like ours. And she was always unhappy with what she called my crusades, especially the time I devoted to our inner-city ministries. She was terrified that those elements, as she called them, would follow us home. And then—and then when it happened . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “But you don’t know that the burglar came from the city.”

  “No. No, he was never found.”

  He picked up his fork and for a few minutes they ate in silence. Leigh couldn’t erase the image she’d conjured in her head, Andy sprawled on the floor, Stephen dropping to his knees in the puddle of his blood, his face frozen in shock and anguish. Instead of probing into Andy’s death, she should ask about his life. “What was he like?” She added, “If it’s not too painful to talk about him.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “There’s nothing I like better. Though that wasn’t always the case. I used to cringe whenever I heard his name. Because it was always, Reverend Kendall, Andy’s been smoking in the nave again. Or, Reverend Kendall, Andy’s drinking the communion wine.”

  “Oh, dear.” Leigh laughed.

  “He was your typical preacher’s kid. Raising hell for the hell of it. Sarah was never like that, but Andy felt the stigma more, I suppose. Claire and I were on the brink of despair more than once while he was growing up.

  “But eventually he grew out of it. In fact, after college he thought he heard the call to the ministry. He planned to spend a few years working with our Columbia Heights mission before going on to seminary.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “No, wait,” he said with an unexpected chuckle. “After only a few months, he decided that the last thing these people needed was more spiritual care. What they really needed, desperately, was legal advocacy. He’d just been accepted to Yale Law.”

  “Oh, Stephen, I’m so sorry.” All that young promise, his whole bright future, gone.

  “No, don’t be. It makes me happy to talk about him. To think about him.”

  They were finishing their meals when Nick, the proprietor, came over to ask if everything was to their liking, then he lingered at their tableside to talk baseball. He was a Yankees fan and Stephen liked the Red Sox, and the two men pretended to argue about their teams’ respective merits and faults with an intensity that matched the age-old rivalry between the two ball clubs. Leigh listened with a smile to the heated exchange. Stephen was a man for all seasons, she thought. Equally at home pontificating at a lectern and bullshitting in a diner.

  Nick slapped the check on the table, and Stephen grabbed it before she could and insisted on paying it. He allowed her to leave the tip, then there was nothing to do but stand up and say good night.

  “How about a nightcap?” he said.

  “Oh, no, I—”

  “I have an excellent cognac back in the Snuggery. A snifter would be the perfect end to the evening.”

  It was the Snuggery that persuaded her, not the cognac. That wonderful inside-out terrarium. “Maybe a quick one,” she said.

  She followed his Saab along the back roads to his cottage. He’d left the lights on, and the Snuggery glowed through its glass walls like a jewelry store window in the dark woods. When he ushered her inside, she felt as if she’d climbed into the window, and all the rich jewels of books and rugs were hers to touch.

  “Sit, please,” he said, and she sank deep in the plush velvet chair while he went to the bookcase wall. He opened one of the cabinet doors to reveal a very-well-stocked bar. “I’m an Episcopal preacher, remember,” he teased as he splashed some Godet into two snifters and handed one to her.

  Behind another cabinet door was a sound system, and he pushed a button and a symphony swelled out into the room. He settled into the chair beside her and clinked his glass against hers. “To new friends.”

  If he were anyone else, she would suspect an ulterior motive. The bar, the sound system, the soft upholstery—it was a scene set for seduction. But it was impossible to find any predation in the eyes of this gentle man. She took a sip and settled back in the chair as the smooth burn rolled down her throat. The music was something classical but nothing she recognized. It was lyrical and melodic and reminiscent of an old folk song notwithstanding the layers of orchestration. She tilted her head to one side, listening closely. “Who is this?”

  “Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composer to the Church of England, some call him.” At her blank stare, he said, “You probably know this one. ‘Hail Thee, Festival Day’?” He sang a few bars in a boisterous baritone, and she nodded as she recognized the hymn. “But he also wrote symphonies and operas, and even movie scores. Wait.” He got to his feet and went back to the sound system to push another button. “Here’s one you may like.” He returned to his seat beside her as a solo violin slowly began.

  “What is it?”

  “One of his secular pieces. Called The Lark Ascending. Can you see it?”

  Leigh closed her eyes, and yes—yes, she could. The notes from the violin rose up and up like a little fluting bird beating its wings skyward. She took another sip of her cognac, and as the sweet warmth flowed down her throat, the orchestra came in softly below the fluttering flight of the violin.

  She laid her head back. The violin melody soared up and up, so high that at times there was barely a shimmer of sound from the strings, and the orchestral accompaniment lilted richly below it like the rolling countryside beneath the bird’s flight path. The bird swooped down, skimming the treetops and entwining itself playfully around the branches before it soared upward again, higher and higher in the sky until she felt it would break through the firmament.

  “This is beautiful.” She sighed.

  “Hmm. Uplifting but also so peaceful.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder if now you could tell me what it was I said that upset you during my talk?”

  The question startled her out of her trance. “Oh.” She sat up straight and took another sip of her drink before she answered. “It wasn’t you. I was thinking about my stepson. His lie about Chrissy being the driver. If a panel of people were convened the way you discussed, they’d declare it to be a good
lie, wouldn’t they? No harm to Chrissy, not anymore, and plenty of benefit to Kip.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But what about the harm to me? Shouldn’t that count for something in the calculation?”

  Stephen swirled the liquid in his glass. “I think the question to ask yourself,” he said finally, “is why are you hurt? What is it about that particular statement that causes you harm?”

  “Because—” She faltered. “Well, because—”

  “If it’s a lie, how does it hurt you?” If he were opposing counsel, she’d object that he was badgering the witness, but his voice was too soft for badgering. “What hurts is if it isn’t a lie. Because then you’d have no one to blame for your loss.”

  She stared at him.

  “You need someone to blame, and you can’t blame your stepson if he wasn’t driving.”

  “That’s not it. I know it was an accident. I don’t blame him for that.”

  “Of course you do. You might forgive him, but you still blame him. It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s how we all cope with grief. Find someone or something to blame. But you can’t blame Christopher if he wasn’t driving. That’s what’s causing you so much pain.”

  She put her glass down on the table between them. There was something familiar in what he was saying, but it was familiar the way the tune of “Hail Thee, Festival Day” was familiar. Remote, and unconnected to her. “If that’s true,” she said finally, bitterly, “what does that make me?”

  “Human.”

  “You didn’t need to blame anyone to get through your grief when your son was—when you lost your son.”

  “Of course I did. I’m as human as anyone else. When I couldn’t blame the killer, I blamed the gun. All the guns and the companies that make them and the legislators and lobbyists who allow them to proliferate. I blamed all of them. It was the only way I could get through my grief to get anywhere close to forgiveness.”