Saint Maybe

8. I Should Never Tell You Anything

When Reverend Emmett had his heart attack, the Church of the Second Chance was forced to manage without him for most of the month of October. The first Sunday a retired Baptist minister, Dr. Benning, gave the sermon, but Dr. Benning had to leave immediately afterward for a bus tour of the Sun Belt and so the second Sunday Sister Nell’s uncle filled in — a nondenominationalist named Reverend Lewis who kept mixing up his “Thy” and his “Thou.” “We beseech Thee to flood Thou blessings upon this Thou congregation,” he intoned, and Ian was reminded of the substitute teachers he’d had in grade school who had always seemed just the slightest bit lacking. The sermon was based on Paul’s first letter to Timothy. Many might not realize, Reverend Lewis said, that it was love of money, and not money alone, that was held to be the root of all evil. Ian, who had never had much money or much love of money either, held back a yawn. All evil? Wasn’t that the phrase to examine?

On the third Sunday not even Reverend Lewis was available and they skipped the sermon altogether. They sang a few hymns and then bowed their heads for a closing prayer delivered in an uncertain voice by Brother Simon. “Dear God,” Brother Simon said, “please give Reverend Emmett back to us as soon as possible.” The fourth Sunday Reverend Emmett returned, gaunter and paler than ever, and preached a message of reassurance. Afterward, while shaking Ian’s hand at the door, he asked if they might have a little talk.

So Ian sent Daphne on home without him and waited at one side, listening to each member inquire after Reverend Emmett’s health. When the last of the congregation had departed he followed Reverend Emmett through the door behind the counter, into what passed for an office. Tangled pipes ran overhead and giant bolt holes marred the floor. In the center of the room stood an antique desk and swivel chair that must have come down from Reverend Emmett’s family, with two blue velvet armchairs facing them. Reverend Emmett gestured Ian into one armchair but he himself remained on his feet, distractedly running a hand through his hair. As usual, he wore a white shirt without a tie and skinny black trousers. Ian guessed he must be in his mid-forties by now or maybe even older, but he still had that awkward, amateurish air about him, and his Adam’s apple jutted above his collar like a half-grown boy’s.

“Brother Ian,” he said, “while I was in the hospital I did some serious thinking. It’s unusual to have a heart attack at my age. It doesn’t bode well for the future. I’ve been thinking I should face the fact that I’m not going to live forever.”

Ian opened his mouth to protest, but Reverend Emmett raised a palm. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t plan on dying tomorrow or anything like that. Still, this kind of thing makes you realize. It’s time we discussed my replacement.”

“Replacement?” Ian asked.

“Someone who’ll take over the church when I’m gone. Someone who might help out before I’m gone, even. Ease my workload.”

Ian said, “But—”

But you ARE the church, he wanted to say. Only that sounded blasphemous, and would have distressed Reverend Emmett.

“I believe you ought to start training for the ministry,” Reverend Emmett told him.

Ian wondered if he’d heard right.

“You know our congregation is fairly uneducated, by and large,” Reverend Emmett said, finally sitting in the other armchair. “I think most of them would feel the job was beyond them. And yet we do want someone who’s familiar with our ways.”

“But I’m not educated either,” Ian said. “I’ve had one semester of college.”

“Well, the good thing about this heart attack is, it serves as advance warning. It gives us a chance to get you trained. I realize you might not want to follow my own route — university and such. I was younger and had more time. You’re what, thirty-four? Still, Lawrence Bible School, down in Richmond—”

“Richmond! I can’t go to Richmond!”

“Why not?”

“I have responsibilities here!”

“But surely those are just about finished now, aren’t they?” Reverend Emmett asked. “Shouldn’t you be thinking ahead now?”

Ian sat forward, clamping his knees. “Reverend Emmett,” he said, “Daphne at sixteen is more trouble than all three of them were at any other age. Do you know her principal has me picking her up at school every day? I have to take off work and pick her up and drive her home in person. And it has to be me, not my father, because it turns out my father believes anything she tells him. Both my parents: they’re so far behind the times, they just don’t fully comprehend what modern kids can get into. You honestly suppose I could leave her with them and head off to Richmond?”

Reverend Emmett waited till Ian had wound down. Then he said, “What grade is Daphne in in school?”

“She’s a junior.”

“So two more years,” Reverend Emmett said. “Maybe less, if she straightens out before she graduates. And I’m certain that she will straighten out. Daphne’s always been a strong person. But even if she doesn’t, in two years she’ll be on her own. Meanwhile, you can start with a few courses here in Baltimore. Night school. Towson State, or maybe community college.”

Ian said, “But also …”

“Yes?”

“I mean, shouldn’t I hear a call to the ministry?”

Reverend Emmett said, “Maybe I’m the call.”

Ian blinked.

“And maybe not, of course,” Reverend Emmett told him. “But it’s always a possibility.”

Then he rose and once again shook Ian’s hand, with those long, dry fingers so bony they fairly rattled.

When Ian arrived home, Daphne was talking on the kitchen telephone and her grandmother was setting various dishes on the table. Sunday dinner would apparently be leftovers — tiny bowls of cold peas, soggy salad, and reheated stew from a tin. “Cool,” Daphne was saying. “We can get together later and study for that Spanish test.” Something artificial and showy in her tone made Ian flick a glance at Bee, but Bee missed his point and merely said, “Well? How was church?”

“It was all right.”

“Could you tell your father lunch is on?”

He called down to the basement and then beckoned Daphne from the phone. “I gotta go now,” she said into the receiver. “My folks are starting brunch.”

“Oh, is this brunch?” Ian asked his mother.

She smiled and set a loaf of bread on the table.

Once they were seated Ian said the blessing hurriedly, conscious of his father drumming his fingers on his knees. Then each of them embarked on a different meal. Doug reached for the stew, Ian put together a peanut butter sandwich, and Daphne, who was a vegetarian, dreamily plucked peas from the bowl one by one with her fingers. Bee finished anything the others wouldn’t — more a matter of housekeeping than personal taste, Ian thought.

He missed the two older children. Thomas was away at Cornell and Agatha was in her second year of medical school. Most meals now were just this makeshift, often served on only half the table because Daphne’s homework covered the other half. And most of their conversations felt disjointed, absentminded, like the scattered bits of talk after the main guests have left the room.

“Me and Gideon are going to study Spanish at his house,” Daphne announced into one stretch of silence.

“Gideon and I,” her grandmother said.

Ian asked, “Will Gideon’s mother be home?”

“Sure.”

Ian scrutinized her. Gideon was Daphne’s boyfriend, an aloof, chilly type. Evidently his mother, a divorcee, had a boyfriend of her own. She was often out somewhere when Ian stopped by for Daphne.

“Maybe you could study here instead,” he told her.

But Daphne said, “I already promised I’d go there.” Then she picked up her empty bowl and licked it daintily, like a cat. Everyone noticed but no one objected. You had to select your issues, with someone like Daphne.

It unsettled Ian, sometimes, how much Daphne reminded him of Lucy. She had Lucy’s small face and her curly black hair, although it was cut short and ragged. She had her froggy voice. Even in voluminous army fatigues, her slender, fine bones seemed so neatly turned that they might have been produced by a lathe. Her eyes were her own, though: still a dense, navy blue. And her own native scent of vanilla underlay the smells of cigarettes and motor oil and leather.

At the end of the meal Ian’s father rose and brought a bowl of instant pudding from the refrigerator. He wiggled it at the others inquiringly, but Bee said, “No, thanks,” and Daphne shook her head. “All the more for me, then,” Doug said cheerfully, and he sat down and started eating directly from the bowl.

Was it because of the Sugar Rule that Daphne had declined? No, probably not. This was a girl who drank beer in parked cars during lunch hour, according to her principal. But she did continue to go to church every Sunday, singing the hymns lustily and bowing her head during prayers, when most other young people lost interest as soon as they reached their teens. And she flung herself into Good Works with real spirit. Whether she was actually a believer, though, Ian couldn’t decide, and something kept him from asking.

There was a knock at the kitchen door, a single, surly thud, and they looked over to find Gideon surveying them through the windowpanes. “Oops! I’m off,” Daphne said. No question of inviting Gideon in; he didn’t talk to grownups. All they saw of him was the tilt of his sharp face and the curtain of straight blond hair, and then Daphne spun through the door and the two of them were gone. “Daph? Oh, goodness, she’ll freeze to death,” Bee said.

Ian wished Daphne’s freezing to death were the worst he had to worry about.

Doug and Bee went upstairs for their Sunday nap and Ian did the dishes. Scraping the last of the pudding into a smaller container, he thought again about Reverend Emmett’s proposal. Bible School! He had a flash of himself packing the car to leave home — participating in the September ritual that he had watched so often from the sidelines. The car stuffed to the ceiling with clothes and LP records, his parents standing by to wave him off. Maybe even a roof rack, with a bike or a stereo lashed on top. Or a butterfly chair like his former roommate’s. Provided they still made butterfly chairs.

Over the years he had often wondered whatever had become of his roommate. He had imagined Winston proceeding through school and graduating and finding a job. By now he would be well established, probably in some field involving creative thought and invention. He had probably made a name for himself.

Ian glanced down at the pudding bowl and realized he had been eating each spoonful as he scraped it up. The inside of his mouth felt thick and coated. An unfamiliar sweetness clogged his throat.

At work he was training a new employee, a stocky, bearded black man named Rafael. He was giving his usual speech about the importance of choosing your wood. “Me, I always go for cherry if I can,” he said. “It’s the friendliest, you could put it. The most obedient.”

“Cherry,” the man said, nodding.

“It’s very nearly alive. It changes color over time and it even changes shape and it breathes.”

Rafael suddenly squinted at him, as if checking on his sanity.

The shop had seven employees now, not counting the high-school girl who came in afternoons to type and do the paperwork. (And they probably shouldn’t count her; sometimes her order sheets were so garbled that Ian had to sit down at the typewriter and place his fingers wrongly on the keys so as to figure out what, for instance, she’d meant by “nitrsi.”) All around the room various carpenters worked on their separate projects. They murmured companionably among themselves but left Ian alone mostly. He knew they considered him peculiar. A couple of years ago he had made the mistake of trying to talk about Second Chance with Greg, who happened to be going through some troubles. Forever after that Greg kept his distance and so did all the others, apparently tipped off. They were polite but embarrassed, wary. As for Mr. Brant, he was even less company than usual these days. It was said that his wife had left him for a younger man. The one who said it was Mrs. Brant’s niece Jeannie, who didn’t work there anymore but sometimes dropped by to visit. Mr. Brant himself never mentioned his wife.

Last spring, Mrs. Brant had paused to admire a bench Ian was sanding and she had softly but deliberately laid a hand on top of his. Her husband was in his rear office and the others were taking a break. Mrs. Brant had looked up into Ian’s eyes with an oddly cool expression, as if this were some kind of test. Ian wasn’t completely surprised (several times, women who knew his religious convictions had started behaving very forwardly, evidently finding him a challenge), and he dealt with it fairly well, he thought. He had merely slid his hand out from under and left her with the sandpaper, pretending he’d mistaken her move for an offer to help. And of course he had said nothing to her husband. But not two months later Jeannie announced that she was gone, and then Ian thought maybe he should have said something after all. “Mr. Brant,” he should have said, “it seems to me your wife is acting lonely.” Or, “Wouldn’t you and Mrs. Brant like to take a trip together or something?”

But telling was what he had promised himself he would never do again.

Oh, there were so many different ways you could go wrong. No wonder he loved woodwork! He showed Rafael the cherrywood nightstand he had finished the day before. The drawer glided smoothly, like satin, without a single hitch.

While the other men took their afternoon break, Ian grabbed his jacket and drove off to fetch Daphne from school. He could manage the round trip in just over twenty minutes when everything went on schedule, but of course it seldom did. Today, for instance, he must have left the shop too early. When he parked in front of the school he found he had several minutes to kill, and even longer if Daphne, as usual, came out late or had to run back in for something she’d forgotten. So he cut the engine and stepped from the car. The air was warm and heavy and windy, as if an autumn storm might be brewing. Behind him, another car pulled up. A freckled woman in slacks got out and said, “What, we’re early?”

“So it seems,” Ian said. Then, because he felt foolish just standing around with her, he put his hands in his pockets and ambled toward the building. Scudding clouds glared off the second-floor windows — the art-room windows, Ian recalled, and Miss Dunlap’s world-history windows, although Miss Dunlap must have retired or even died by now. Two boys in track suits jogged toward him on the sidewalk, separated around him, and jogged on. He wondered if they guessed what he was doing here. (“That’s Daphne Bedloe’s uncle; she’s on suspended suspension and has to go home under guard.”) It occurred to him that Daphne would be mortified if anyone she knew caught sight of him. He circled the school, therefore, and kept going. He passed the little snack shop where he and Cicely used to sit all afternoon over a couple of cherry Cokes, and he came to the Methodist church with its stained-glass window full of stern, narrow angels. One of the church’s double doors stood open. Almost without thinking, he climbed the steps and went inside.

No lights were lit, but his eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom. He made out rows of cushioned pews and a carved wooden pulpit up front, with another stained-glass window high in the wall behind it. This one showed Jesus in a white robe, barefoot, holding His hands palm forward at His sides and gazing down at Ian kindly. Ian slid into a pew and rested his elbows on the pew ahead of him. He looked up into Jesus’ face. He said, Would it be possible for me to have some kind of sign?

Nothing fancy. Just something more definite than Reverend Emmett offering a suggestion.

He waited. He let the silence swell and grow.

But then the school bell rang — an extended jangle that reminded him of those key chains made from tiny metal balls — and his concentration was broken. He sighed and stood up. Anyhow, he had probably been presumptuous to ask.

In the doorway, looking out, he saw the first of the school crowd passing. He saw Gideon with a redheaded girl, his arm slung carelessly around her neck so they kept bumping into each other as they walked.

Gideon?

There was no mistaking that veil of blond hair, though, or the hunched, skulking posture. Almost as if this were Ian’s love, not Daphne’s, he felt his heart stop. He saw the redhead crane upward for a kiss and he drew his breath in sharply and stepped back into the shadow of the door.

By the time he reached the car, Daphne was waiting in the front seat. The car’s interior smelled of breath mints and tobacco. “Where’ve you been?” she squawked as he got in, and he said, “Oh, around.” He started the engine and pulled into the crawl of after-school traffic. “No Gideon?” he asked.

“It’s his day to go to his dad’s.”

“Oh.”

Daphne slid down in her seat and planted both feet on the dashboard. It appeared she was wearing combat boots — the most battered and scuffed he had ever laid eyes on. He hadn’t realized they came that small. Her olive-drab trousers seemed intended for combat too, but the blouse beneath her leather jacket was fragile white gauze with two clusters of silver bells hanging from the ends of the drawstring. Any time she moved, she gave off a faint tinkling sound and the grudging creak of leather. How was it that such an absurd little person managed to touch him so?

He thought of Gideon’s blond head next to the coppery, gleaming head of the girl in the crook of his arm.

Daphne, he should say, there’s something I have to tell you.

But he couldn’t.

He pulled up in front of their house and waited for her to get out, staring blankly through the windshield. To his surprise, he felt a kiss on his cheekbone as light as a petal. “Bye,” she said, and she slipped away and shut the car door behind her. He could almost believe she knew what he had spared her.

One day last summer, while sitting with Honeybunch in the veterinarian’s waiting room, Ian had noticed a particularly sweet-faced golden retriever. “Nice dog,” he had told the owner, and the owner — a middle-aged woman — had smiled and said, “Yes, I’ve had a good number in my day, but this one: this is the dog of my life. You know how that is?”

He knew, all right.

Daphne, he felt, was the child of his life. He wondered if he would ever love a daughter of his own quite so completely.

It was true the older two were easier. In a sense, he even liked them better. Thomas was so merry and winsome, and Agatha had somehow smoothed the corners off that disconcerting style of hers — the bluntness transformed into calm assurance, the aggressive homeliness into an intriguing, black-and-white handsomeness. He enjoyed them the way he would enjoy longtime best friends who found the same things funny or upsetting and didn’t need every last remark explained for them. In fact, you could say they were his only friends. But Daphne was the one who tugged at him most deeply.

And Daphne had always relied on him so, had taken it for granted that he would stand by her no matter what. He still had an acute physical memory of the weight of her infant head resting in the cup of his palm. Even now, sometimes, she would lean against him while they watched TV and artlessly confide her secrets and gossip about her classmates and recount her hair-raising adventures that he had had no inkling of, thank heaven, while she was undergoing them. (She knew the city inside out, and slipped without a thought through neighborhoods that Ian himself avoided.) But if he showed any concern she would say, “I knew I shouldn’t have told you! I should never tell you anything!” And when her friends came over she grew visibly remote from him, referring to him as “my uncle” as if he had no name and rolling her eyes when her girlfriends tried to make small talk or (on occasion) flirt with him. When he said he was off to Prayer Meeting, she told her friends he was “speaking metaphorically.” When he enforced her curfew, she announced she was running away to live with her mother’s people, who — she claimed — were worldly-wise and cosmopolitan and wouldn’t think of making her return to their mansion at the dot of any set time. Ian had laughed, and then felt a deep, sad ache.

That was what Daphne brought out in him, generally. Laughter and an ache.

Reverend Emmett invited him to supper. “Just the two of us,” he said on the phone, “to talk about the matter of your vocation.” Ian gulped, but of course he accepted.

Reverend Emmett warned him that he wasn’t much of a cook (his mother had died the previous fall) and so Ian asked if he could bring something. “Well,” Reverend Emmett said, “you know that cold white sauce that people serve with potato chips?”

“Sauce? You mean dip?”

“It has little bits of dried onion scattered through it.”

“You mean onion soup dip?”

“That must be it,” Reverend Emmett said. “Mother used to make it whenever we had guests, but I haven’t been able to find her recipe. I thought maybe you could ask your mother if she might fix it for us.”

“Shoot, I’ll fix it myself,” Ian said. “I’ll bring over the ingredients and show you how it’s done.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Reverend Emmett told him.

So Tuesday evening, when Ian rang the doorbell, he was carrying a pint of sour cream and an envelope of the only brand of onion soup mix on the market that didn’t contain any sugar. He had washed up after work but (mindful of the sin of superficiality) kept on his everyday clothes, and Reverend Emmett answered the door in jeans and one of his incongruously jaunty polo shirts. “Come in!” he said.

Ian said, “Thanks.”

To tell the truth, he felt a bit apprehensive. He worried that Reverend Emmett labored under some false impression of him, for how else to explain his plans for Ian’s future?

The living room was small but formal, slightly fussy — the mother’s doing, Ian guessed. He had seen it on several occasions but had never gone beyond it, and now he looked about him curiously as he followed Reverend Emmett through a dim, flowered dining room to a kitchen that seemed to have been turned on end and shaken. “I thought I would make us a roast of beef,” Reverend Emmett told him, and Ian said, “Sounds good.” He wondered how a roast could have required all these pans and utensils. Maybe they’d been used for some side dish. “Would you like an apron to work in?” Reverend Emmett asked.

“It’s not that complicated,” Ian said. “Just a mixing bowl and a spoon will do.”

He emptied the sour cream into the bowl Reverend Emmett brought him and then stirred in the soup mix, with Reverend Emmett hovering over the whole operation. “Why, there’s really nothing to it,” he said at the end.

“A veritable snap,” Ian told him.

“Would you mind very much if we ate this in the kitchen? I’ll need to keep an eye on the roast.”

“That’s fine with me.”

They pulled two stools up to the counter, which was puddled with several different colors of liquids, and started on the chips and dip. Reverend Emmett gobbled chips wolfishly, a vein standing out in his temple as he chewed. (Had his doctor not warned him off fats?) He told Ian to call him Emmett. “Oh. All right … Emmett,” Ian said. But he could force the name out only by imagining a “Reverend” in the gap, and he thought, from the way Reverend Emmett paused at each “Ian,” that he was mentally inserting a “Brother.”

“The fact is, um … Ian, hardly anyone I know calls me just plain Emmett anymore,” Reverend Emmett said. “The fact is, this is a lonely profession. Oh, but not for you, it wouldn’t be. You would be training among our own kind from the start. You would be making your friendships among them, and whoever you marry will know she shouldn’t expect a half-timbered rectory and white-glove teas.”

“But … Emmett,” Ian said, “how can I be certain I’m cut out for this? I’m nothing but a carpenter.”

“Our Lord was a carpenter,” Reverend Emmett reminded him. He rose and went to peer inside the oven.

“Maybe so,” Ian said, “but that might have been made a little too much of.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, we don’t seem to hear about anything He built, do we? I wish we did. Sometimes when I look at paintings of Him I try to see what kind of muscles He had — whether they’re the kind that come from hammering and sawing. I like to think He really did put a few bits of wood together; He didn’t just stand around discussing theology with His friends while Joseph built the furniture.”

Reverend Emmett set the roast on the counter and cocked his head at him thoughtfully.

“Or camel barns, or whatever it was,” Ian said. “I hope I don’t sound disrespectful.”

“No, no … Could you bring in that salad, please?”

“But anyhow,” Ian said. He picked up the salad bowl and followed Reverend Emmett into the dining room. “I’m getting off the track here. What I’m trying to say is, I’m not sure someone like me would be able to give people answers. When they had doubts and serious problems and such. All those ups and downs people go through, those little hells they go through — I wouldn’t know what to tell them.”

“But that’s what Bible School teaches,” Reverend Emmett said.

“It’s not enough,” Ian said.

They had both taken their seats now at the lace-covered table. Reverend Emmett was brandishing a bone-handled carving set. He paused and looked at Ian.

“I mean,” Ian said, “maybe it’s not enough.”

“Well, of course it is,” Reverend Emmett told him. “How do you suppose I learned? No one is born knowing.”

He started slicing the roast. Plainly it was overdone — a charred black knob glued fast to the pan it had been cooked in. “When I began seminary,” he said, sawing away manfully, “I had every possible misconception. I thought I was entering upon a career that was stable and comfortable, my father’s career — a family business like any other. I envisioned how Father and I would sit together in his study over sherry and ponder obscure interpretations of the New Testament. Finally he would think well of me; he would listen to my opinions. But it didn’t happen that way. What happened was I started reading the Bible, really reading it, and by the time I’d finished, my father wasn’t speaking to me and my fiancée had left me and all my classmates thought I was some kind of mental case.”

He laid down his knife. “Oh, dear,” he said, “that’s not the point I was trying to make.”

Ian laughed. Reverend Emmett glanced at him in surprise, and then he laughed too.

“Also, this meat is inedible, isn’t it?” he said. “Let’s face it, I’m a terrible cook.”

“We could always fill up on salad,” Ian told him.

“We could, but you know what I’d really like? I’d like to polish off that dip, your onion dip. That was excellent!”

“Let’s do it, then,” Ian said.

So while he helped himself to the salad, Reverend Emmett went out to the kitchen for the chips and dip. “No,” he said, returning, “that wasn’t my point at all, believe me. No, my point was … well, the ministry is like anything else: a matter of trial and error. I’ve made so many errors! In the hospital it seemed they all came back to me. I lay on that bed and looked at the ceiling and all my errors came scrolling across those dotted soundproof panels.”

“I’ve never seen you make an error.”

“Oh, Ian,” Reverend Emmett said, shaking his head. He noticed a blob of dip on his finger and reached for a linen napkin. “When I was starting out, my church was going to be perfect,” he said. “I figured I was setting up the ideal doctrine. But now I see how inconsistent it is, how riddled with holes and contradictions. What do I care if someone drinks a cup of coffee? Wouldn’t I have done better to ban TV? And here’s the worst, Ian: the thought of doing that did cross my mind, back in the beginning. But then I said, no, no. And never admitted the reason, which was: how would I get any members, if I didn’t let them watch TV?”

Ian didn’t know what to say to that. He supposed it would have been nearly impossible to get members, come to think of it.

“And then there’s tithing,” Reverend Emmett said. “Who am I to tell them they have to give a tenth of their income? Some of those people are dirt poor. Not a one of them is wealthy. Now I see that’s why I dispensed with the ritual of collection. I said, ‘Slip your envelopes through the mail slot, no return address,’ because secretly I hoped they wouldn’t tithe, even when the heating bill had to come out of my own pocket; and I didn’t want to have to deal with it if they didn’t. I preferred to be looking the other way. There’s so much I’ve looked away from! I see everyone has made Second Chance his own, adapted it to suit his own purposes, changed the rules to whatever is more convenient, and I pretend not to notice. I know Brother Kenneth smokes! I can smell it on his clothes, although I never say so. I know Daphne smokes too, and also drinks beer, and Sister Jessie has never given up her evening cocktail, not even the day she joined the church, which rumor has it she celebrated with a split of champagne after services. But I’ve never so much as mentioned it, because the awful truth is I find I don’t mind. I find as I get older that it all seems just sort of … endearing, really: this little flock of human beings who came to me first to atone for some sin, most of them, and then relaxed and settled in and entirely forgot about atonement. How long since you’ve seen someone stand up at Public Amending? And Christmas! Three-quarters of the congregation marks Christmas with trees and Santa Claus, don’t you think I know that?” Ian stirred guiltily.

“But the silliest,” Reverend Emmett said, “is the Sugar Rule.”

“Oh, well …” Ian said.

It wasn’t as if this subject hadn’t come up before, here and there.

“I knew almost from the start I’d made a mistake on that one. I just didn’t know how to get out of it. And truthfully, I never felt sure that I wasn’t merely rationalizing, once I’d seen how hard the rule was to follow. But in the hospital I was reading this book Sister Nell brought me. This nutrition book. I was trying to learn how to eat more healthily. Although,” he said, waving a hand toward the potato chips, “I may not always act on what I’ve learned. Well, I came upon a discussion of sugar, and do you know what? It’s not a stimulant.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s a tranquilizer.”

“It can’t be,” Ian said.

“It’s a tranquilizer. Oh, it gives you energy, all right. Physical energy. But as far as the mental effect: it lulls you.”

“Well, uh …”

“Want to know what is a stimulant?”

“What?”

“Milk.”

Ian thought about that. He started grinning.

“See?” Reverend Emmett said. He was grinning too. “How could you give answers any more wrong than mine have been, Ian? Why, you could be a better minister with one hand tied behind you!”

“No one could be a better minister,” Ian said.

He meant it with all his heart. Reverend Emmett must have realized that, because he sobered and said, “Well, thank you.”

“But I’ll think about Bible School, um, Emmett.”

“Wonderful,” Reverend Emmett said. Then he reached for another potato chip. His eyes seemed no longer brown but amber. “Oh,” he said, “it would be so wonderful to have somebody working at my side and calling me Emmett!”

And he popped the entire chip into his mouth and chomped down happily.

Bert was telling the new man, Rafael, how Mr. Brant had discovered his wife had left him. “First he claims she’s kidnapped,” Bert said. “He shows Jeannie the closet: ‘See? All her clothes still hanging here. She can’t have left on purpose.’ ‘Uncle,’ Jeannie goes. She goes, ‘These clothes are her very least favorites. Where’s her silk blouse with the poppies on it? Where’s her turquoise skirt? These are just the extras,’ she goes.”

Rafael tut-tutted. He said, “Womens always got so many emergency backups.”

“Tell about the neighbor,” Greg said, nudging Bert in the ribs.

“Jeannie goes, ‘Uncle, your neighbor Mr. Hoffberg is missing too. His wife is just about frantic.’ Know what he says? Says, ‘Why!’ Says, ‘Why, it’s a rash of kidnaps!’ ”

The three men chuckled. Ian frowned at the bureau he was working on. He should have given Mr. Brant some warning. He wished he had it to do over again.

Unexpectedly, Gideon and the redhead strolled through his memory. Framed by the church’s doorway, they kissed, and Ian all at once straightened.

What if that was the sign he had prayed for inside the church?

But if it was, he had no idea what it meant.

The others went for their break and Ian drove off to pick up Daphne. It was a crisp, glittery day, and the leaves were at their brightest. He found the ride so pleasant that when he reached the school, it took him a moment to notice the place was deserted. Not a single car sat out front; not a single student loitered on the grounds. He got out of the car and went to try the main entrance, but it was locked. A janitor pushing a broom down the hall saw him through the glass and came over to open the door. “School’s closed,” he told Ian. “There’s a teachers’ meeting. Kids got out at noon.”

“Oh. Great,” Ian said. “Thanks.”

He walked around to the phone booth at one side of the building and called home. “Mom?” he said. “Is Daphne there?”

“Why, no, I thought she was at school.”

“They got out at noon today.”

“Well, you might try calling the Locklear girl,” she said. “Shall I look up her telephone number?”

“Never mind,” Ian said.

He wondered how his mother could stay so naive. She must work at it. She still thought the biggest issue confronting a teenaged girl was whether or not to kiss on the first date, and the answer (he’d heard her tell Daphne) was no, no, no. “You have years and years to do all that. You don’t want them saying you’re cheap.”

He drove to Gideon’s — a sagging, unpainted house on Greenmount — and parked sloppily and crossed the porch in two strides and rang the doorbell. No one answered, but he sensed a sudden freezing of movement somewhere inside the house. He opened the screen and knocked on the inner door. Shading his eyes, he peered through the windowpane. He saw a threadbare rug, part of a banister, and then Gideon lumbering down the stairs, tucking his shirt into his jeans. For a moment they faced each other through the glass. Gideon yawned. He opened the door and stuck his head out.

“I’d like to speak to Daphne,” Ian told him.

Gideon considered. “Okay,” he said finally.

He had a burnt, ashy smell, as if his skin were smoldering. And although his shirt was more or less tucked in now, it wasn’t buttoned. A slice of his bare chest showed through. “Daph!” he called. “Your uncle’s here.” He went on facing Ian. Up close, his hair was brittle as broom straw. The color must come from a bottle.

“Ian?” Daphne said. She came clomping down the stairs in her combat boots. Her face looked puckered, the way it did when she first woke up, and her eyes were slits. “What are you doing here?” she asked, arriving next to Gideon.

“I might ask you the same,” Ian told her.

“We had a half day. I forgot to mention.”

“Did you also forget the way home?”

She adjusted an earring.

“Let’s go,” Ian told her. “I’m running late.”

“Can Gideon come?”

“Not this time.”

She didn’t argue. She tossed Gideon a look, and Gideon gazed back at her expressionlessly. Then she unhooked her leather jacket from the newel post. She shrugged herself into it, slung her knapsack over her shoulder, and followed Ian out to the car.

When they’d been driving a while she said, “You didn’t have to be rude to him.”

“I wasn’t rude. I just want to talk to you alone.”

She clutched her knapsack to her chest. Now that she sat so close, he realized she too had that burnt smell. And her lips were swollen and blurry, and a red splotch stretched from her throat to the neckline of her Black Sabbath T-shirt.

“Daph,” he said.

She hugged her knapsack tighter.

“Daphne, some things are not what they seem,” he said.

“Watch out for that car,” she told him.

“I mean some people aren’t what they seem. People you imagine you’ll be with forever, say—”

“That car’s edging over the line, Ian.”

She meant the dark green Plymouth that was wavering a bit in the right-hand lane just ahead. “No doubt some teenager,” Ian grumbled.

“Prejudice, prejudice!” Daphne scolded him. “Nope, it’s an old man. See how low his head is? Some white-haired old man just barely peeking over the steering wheel and hanging on for dear life.”

Ian said, “What I’m trying to tell you—”

“He’s showing off for his girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend!”

“See the lady next to him? Probably this hot-and-heavy pickup from the Senior Citizens’ Center. He’s showing her how in-charge he is, and reliable and steady.”

Ian snorted. He applied his brakes and fell behind, allowing the Plymouth more room.

“You think I don’t know what I’m up to, don’t you,” Daphne said.

“Pardon?”

“You think I’m some ninny who wants to do right but keeps goofing. But what you don’t see is, I goof on purpose. I’m not like you: King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe.”

“Now look,” Ian said. “The Plymouth is slowing down too. Seems he’s set on staying with us.”

“Mess up, I say!” Daphne crowed. “Fall flat on your face! Make every mistake you can think of! Use all the life you’ve got!”

Ian glanced over at her, but he didn’t speak.

“Let’s pass,” Daphne told him.

“Pass?”

“Speed up and pass. This driver’s a turkey.”

He obeyed. He whizzed through a yellow light, leaving the Plymouth behind, while Daphne rolled down her window and squawked out: “Attention! Attention! Lady in the green car! Your date’s been spotted on an FBI’s Most Wanted poster! I repeat!”

“Honestly, Daphne,” Ian said. But he was smiling.

He turned down Waverly Street, pulled up in front of the house, and sat there with the engine running. He said, “Daph?”

“Thanks for the lift,” she told him, and she hopped out.

He watched her cut across the front lawn — her knapsack bouncing, her ragged hair ruffling. The sole of one combat boot was working loose, and at every step she had to swing her left foot unnaturally high off the ground and stamp down hard. It gave her a slapdash, rollicking gait. It made her seem glorious. He was still smiling when he drove away.

* * *

At Prayer Meeting, the church always felt even smaller and cozier than it did ordinarily. It was something to do with the darkness closing in around it, Ian supposed. This was especially true tonight, for he was early and the fluorescent lights had not yet been switched on. He made his way through the rows of dimly gleaming metal chairs. He stepped behind the shop counter and tapped on the office door, which showed a thin line of yellow around the edges.

“Come in,” Reverend Emmett called.

He was sitting in one of the armchairs with his legs stretched out very long and straight. He was thumbing through a hymn pamphlet. “Why, Ian!” he said, smiling, and he rose to his feet in his loose-strung, jerky manner.

Ian said, “Reverend Emmett—”

He probably could have stopped right there. Reverend Emmett looked so crestfallen, all of a sudden; he must have guessed what Ian was about to say.

“It’s not only whether I’d be able to give people answers,” Ian told him. “It’s whether I’d want to. Whether I’d feel right about it.”

Reverend Emmett went on waiting, and Ian knew he should explain further. He should tell him about the sign from God. He should say what the sign had finally recalled to him: Lucy rushing home out of breath, laughing and excited, and his own arrogant certitude that he had an obligation to inform his brother. But that would have opened the way for debate. (When is something philosophical acceptance and when is it dumb passivity? When is something a moral decision and when is it scar tissue?) He wasn’t up to that. He just said, “I’m sorry.”

Reverend Emmett said, “I’m sorry, too.”

“I hope we can still be friends,” Ian told him.

“Yes, of course,” Reverend Emmett said gently.

Out in the main room, Ian lowered himself into a seat and unbuttoned his jacket. His fingers felt weak, as if he’d come through an ordeal. To steady himself, he bowed his head and prayed. He prayed as he almost always did, not forming actual words but picturing instead this spinning green planet safe in the hands of God, with the children and his parents and Ian himself small trusting dots among all the other dots. And the room around him seemed to rustle with prayers from years and years past: Let me get well and Make her love me and Forgive what I have done.

Then Sister Myra arrived with Sister Edna and flipped the light switch, flooding the room with a buzzing glare, and soon afterward others followed and settled themselves noisily. Ian sat among them, at peace, absorbing the cheery sound of their voices and the gaudy, bold, forthright colors of their clothes.