Locked Doors

20

THE last Wednesday of each month is unfailingly baked spaghetti night at Lighthouse Baptist Church. It is tradition, a comforting inevitability for this Christian community.

The congregation slowly progressed from the kitchen into the fellowship hall much as it had done every Wednesday evening for the past twenty-two years. Each churchgoer carried a paper plate laden with baked spaghetti, a yeast roll, a salad of wet lettuce and shredded carrots, and a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea.

They dined with their brothers and sisters in Christ at the circular foldaway tables, happily consuming the insipid meals, the fellowship hall resounding with myriad conversations and rampant children, while praise music flowed from speakers on the stage, an auditory warmth. Through tall windows the dying sun funneled weaker and weaker, now only a suggestion of purple in the late October sky.

Violet King sat at a table with her parents, Ebert and Evelyn, and a friend of her parents named Charles. Charles was thirty, single, and on fire for Jesus. Violet disliked the way he looked at and spoke to her, as though he were privy to some secret she had not disclosed, as though he were something more than a shallow acquaintance.

Charles had been monopolizing the conversation for the last five minutes, narrating his attempt to witness to a “troubled black youth.”

But Violet wasn’t listening. She just stared at the cube of baked spaghetti on her plate.

“…and I told him, ‘Jesus died for you, little fella.’” Charles’s bottom lip had begun to quiver, his voice gone soft and earnest with emotion. “And you know what he said to me? It’ll break your heart, Ebert. He said ‘How come God loves me?’ And I told him, I said… You with me, Violet?”

Violet looked up into those small lonely eyes across the table.

“Yes, I’m with you, Charles.”

“I told him, ‘God loves little black boys just as much as He loves little white boys.’”

A four-year-old boy ran over and stopped in front of Violet, a chocolate icing ring around his smiling little mouth.

“You’re pretty,” he said, then ran away shouting, “I did it, guys! I did it!”

The young woman laughed.

“Where’s Max, Violet?” Charles asked.

“Same place he was when you asked me a week ago,” Violet responded but she did not say it bitterly. “He’s coaching cross-country this fall. They had another meet today.”

Is that all right with you you freaking weirdo?

“Just don’t want to see him backsliding on us. You start skipping Wednesday nights, what’s next?”

“My son-in-law ain’t no backslider, Charles,” Ebert said. “You know I wouldn’t tolerate that. Ain’t that right, baby?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Violet smiled at her father, a big brawny man, whitebearded and baldheaded. He’d earned that shiny red dome working his dairy farm. Their table smelled faintly of manure.

As Violet sipped her tea she felt Charles eyeing her. She often caught him staring, especially during Sunday sermons. He was always chiding her about her “boy haircut,” said women were supposed to have long and flowing hair, encouraged Violet to let her blond locks grow out.

Her pager buzzed against her hip and she glanced down at her lavender skirt.

When she saw the number she stood up.

“Mom, if Max comes, tell him I’ll be right back.”

“Everything all right, Vi?”

Evelyn stared up at Violet through cloudyblue eyes that picked up the gray in her hair.

How can you sit here with this whacko? “Yes ma’am.”

Violet walked out of the fellowship hall into the corridor of classrooms. At the end of the hallway, the double doors had been thrown open and she could see into the new sanctuary where the music director was furiously arranging chairs in the choir loft in preparation of the practice that would immediately follow the fellowship dinner. She didn’t feel up to singing tonight. She wanted to go home, crawl into bed with a pint of Cherry Garcia, and watch television, preferably a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.

With the commotion of the feasting congregation now a whisper, Violet stepped into a dark classroom and closed the door behind her.

The pager vibrated again.

She rummaged her purse for the cell phone.