Читать книгу Born in Syn - Beth Kander - Страница 17

On the second anniversary of her husband’s death, Lila Golden Fell went to his grave. Going to the cemetery was what she was supposed to do; everyone said so. But no one told her what to do once she got there. So Lila just stood and stared at the stone monument, flanked by both of her small sons. Nathan was silent. Howie was unabashedly sobbing.

I should comfort him, she thought dully. But she didn’t know how.

She was thirty and a widow. The very word seemed to age her. Widow. It hung on her like a thick-linked chain, weighing her down, limiting her ability to move. She stood there reading and re-reading the name of the man she married, carved letter by letter into unforgiving granite. Staring at the grave of the man who promised to grow old with her, she felt her own aging process lurch forward; felt her skin wrinkle, her heart harden, each strand of dark hair inch its way toward dull gray resignation.

“I miss Daddy,” wailed Howie. Five years old, having lived fully half his life without his father, he still asked about Ernest daily. What would he be doing if he was here right now? What new word would he teach me today? What would he have bought you for your birthday this year? Those questions from Howie used to cause Lila physical pain, but eventually she numbed to them. But his keening that morning was harder to ignore. He raised the volume: “I…. missssss Dadddyyyyyyy!”

“Howie! Hush your mouth. You’re yelling loud enough to wake the dead!”

“Dangerous place to do that. All these folks wake up, place might get a little crowded.”

Lila jumped, startled by the voice behind her. Turning around, her alarm quickly dissipated. She hadn’t seen those blue eyes since they were looking down from the lectern at her husband’s funeral, but they remained unmistakable.

“Reverend James?”

“I’m sorry. That was a terrible joke, inappropriate—”

“It’s fine,” Lila said. “No need to apologize. You remember my boys, Howie, Nathan—”

Nathan kicked at the dirt and did not acknowledge the preacher. Howie looked up at him, still huffing with grief. Reverend James handed Howie a handkerchief, which Howie quickly smeared with tears and boogers. When Howie politely tried to return it, the man of the cloth gestured for Howie to keep the filthy rag.

“Two years today?”

“Yes, Reverend.”

“James, please,” the minister urged.

“James,” Lila repeated. “Are you here for a funeral, or…?”

“Not today,” he said. “I’m just—visiting. At least once a week I come to the cemetery and pick a row, and visit that whole row, grave by grave. Offer prayers. Reflect on the next stage of our journey. Death is a master teacher. We’re all scared of the final exam, of course, but I find that—as with all subjects—studying can help take away some of the fear.”

This sentimental confession seemed odd to Lila. She assumed all Christian clergymen were like her father-in-law: men of scripture who worshipped the letter of the law and enforced God’s will with rigid, unforgiving rigor. She didn’t expect gentler philosophy, let alone humor. She looked a little more closely at James, his thin buttery hair, his warm blue eyes. He looked more interesting than she remembered. Not more handsome, but more—yes, interesting.

“Well,” she said. “I guess when it comes to death, I’m like most students. I put off studying. Figure I’ll just cram, right at the end. Of course, our family got an unexpected pop quiz…”

“Some teachers aren’t fair,” the minister nodded. Ah yes, Death really was quite the cantankerous old so-and-so. Or maybe he meant God, not Death, was the unjust instructor.

“I’m hungry,” Nathan said out of nowhere, loud and demanding.

“Right, okay, we can go,” Lila said. Then, impulsively, she said to the reverend: “Would you like to join us for dinner?”

“I’d love to,” he said, triggering an instant panic in Lila.

The house is a shambles. All I have in the kitchen is peanut butter and Wonder Bread. Nathan will say something cruel. Howie will wail the whole time. I’ll come apart at the seams. This is the worst idea I have ever had.

Lila realized she was staring at the reverend, as if he had just invited himself. She knew all too well that she had one of those faces that required careful monitoring; her default expression was dour, particularly in widowhood.

“We’ll have to stop at the grocery on the way home,” Lila said quickly, forcing a smile to sweeten any sour look she accidentally gave the poor man. “And you’ll have to forgive the house. It looks like sh—sure is messy, is what I mean, but if that doesn’t bother you, well, then…”

“Fortunately, I’m in the forgiveness business,” smiled the minister.

He walked with Lila and her sons to the A&P. They picked up some vegetables, a chicken, and cereal for Nathan (who would currently eat nothing else). Then they went home. Nathan went to his room to do whatever it was he did, alone in there. Howie hunkered down with a handful of Cheerios and the book he was reading (Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods).

James unloaded the groceries, then asked for a paring knife. Lila had no idea what a paring knife was, so she just slid open the cutlery drawer and gestured for the preacher to take what he needed. He did, and then expertly sliced the vegetables; cleaned, patted dry, and seasoned the chicken; turned on the oven. He kept a running chatter the whole time, as he rattled pots and pans, sprinkled salt, and generally gave the appearance of knowing what he was doing in the kitchen.

Lila simply watched and listened for the first five minutes, before excusing herself to set the table. Before setting it, she had to clear it of the debris of their past week—pieces of cereal, abandoned crayon drawings, unopened mail. She then hastily tidied the dining and living areas and even shoved some laundry into the hallway hamper. When she returned to the kitchen, the chicken was roasting alongside the vegetables and her home miraculously smelled like a meal.

“Where did you learn to cook?”

James shrugged. “I wanted to be a chef, before I decided to go to seminary.”

“Maybe you should’ve stuck with the chef plan. Surely God wants His people well-fed.”

“Well,” James smiled. “There’s always time for a second chance, isn’t there?”

“I’m hungry,” said a small, crisp voice, startling them both.

Nathan was standing in the doorframe, toeing the line between the dining room and the kitchen, scrawny arms folded against his chest. Howie was standing behind him, waiting to see what his little brother’s demand might yield.

“I think it’s a few more minutes until dinner’ll be ready—” Lila started, and then her young son cut her off, aiming his next statement at the interloper in their home.

“Tell me what you made.”

A command, not an inquiry.

James was unfazed. “Wasn’t sure what you’d like. So I made roasted chicken and seasoned vegetables, and also some batter for pancakes, which you can have tonight or save ’til tomorrow or—”

“Cereal,” Nathan interrupted, defiant and definitive.

Lila felt trapped by her petulant child, as always. She knew he needed discipline, but he’d had such a hard life. Born sick. Father died. He was so easily upset, and who could blame him? So she said nothing when he spoke rudely to their guest; she just guiltily watched James’ face fall. To his credit, the clergyman quickly recovered.

“Sure, Nathan. Cereal, coming right up. Howie, how about you? What do you want for dinner?”

Lila felt Howie pressing into the back of her legs, peeking around her to look up at James and the various pots and pans deployed for the first time in months. Lila knew Howie was torn. His loyalty would make him want to take his brother’s side. But he also loved chicken.

“I’ll have some chicken,” Howie whispered at last. And then, louder: “And some cereal.”

James’ resigned smile became a genuine one, and he winked at Lila.

“Chicken and cereal,” he said. “Sounds great to me.”

“Thank you,” mouthed Lila.

The evening’s feast of chicken and cereal, with vegetables enjoyed by the adults (their praises loudly sung by Lila, in a fruitless attempt to coax her children into taking a bite), became the first of a series of dinners.

The next week, James called Lila before coming by; week after that, he simply arrived with a bag of groceries—featuring a prominent box of Cheerios poking from the top of the grocery sack. Proving that “tradition” could be defined as “doing the same thing more than three times,” the fourth Sunday evening when James arrived Lila had already set the table.

At some point, a few months in to the arrangement, Lila started calling James each Saturday to ask if there was anything he wanted her to pick up at the grocery. But he insisted on bringing his own ingredients. Howie and Nathan grudgingly accepted the weekly dinner. Nathan hated James on principle, from day one, and never relented—despite the fact that Reverend James brought a weekly offering of Nathan’s prized cereal. Nathan ate the cereal. He just didn’t award the preacher any brownie points.

Howie, on the other hand, liked James. He began looking forward to the Sunday dinners. Although he did feel the need to periodically remind his mother that the reverend was not as good or smart or interesting as his father had been.

“He doesn’t want to replace your dad,” Lila assured her son, wondering if he did.

She couldn’t tell if James was interested in that scenario—in being the boys’ father; in being her husband, or lover, or anything beyond friend. He was so respectful, so unassuming. He just showed up and cooked. Not just that, though; he showed up and talked. Listened. Made her feel, for the first time in two years, both interesting and interested. She was relieved to have someone who saw her as more than That Poor Widow. It was a balm, soothing her crone-fears, smoothing some of the imagined wrinkles from her skin.

“You were a reporter?” James asked, over a dinner of grilled salmon and asparagus.

The first course had been cereal for the boys, and one glass of good red wine for each of the grown-ups. Then both boys turned up their noses at the fish and went off to read and play. Alone, with real food and real conversation and a second glass of wine in-hand, Lila felt dangerously close to being on a date.

A pseudo-date, at least.

“Yes,” Lila said. “Until we had Howie. I worked right up until the day I had him, in fact. He was just about born in the newsroom.”

“Really?”

“I was on a deadline.”

“Overlapping deadlines, huh?”

“Met ’em both,” she said, proud.

He smiled, warmly. “What got you into it?”

“Oh,” Lila said, enjoying the memory as she unpacked it, carefully, gently. “Our local newspaper had a competition when I was in the seventh grade. An essay contest, ‘Why Newspapers Matter.’ I wrote the essay that would win, got a youth-voice column in the paper, and from there—”

“You said ‘you wrote the essay that would win,’” James interrupted. “Don’t you mean you wrote the essay that won?”

“Well, it won,” Lila admitted. “But it won because I wrote the essay that would win. It was strategic. I wrote what the judges would want to read. I didn’t write what I believed, I wrote what they wanted to read.”

“Clever little girl.”

“Clever enough.”

“And it worked.”

“It worked,” Lila agreed. “I got my fifty-dollar savings bond. I got my column. Kept it up until I graduated from high school. Parlayed that into a spot on the editorial team for my college newspaper. Majored in journalism. Applied for any newspaper job I could find. Wound up at the Ann Arbor Gazette.”

She’d been Lila Golden then, and seeing her name—LILA GOLDEN—credited with a byline was thrilling. Her first assignments were basic and dues-paying, but not altogether boring. She enjoyed researching and writing obituaries, though they were often uncredited. She enjoyed attending city meetings, interviewing politicians, elbowing her way around the old boys’ clubs at the papers, staking out her own spot in the ground upon which to press her ear.

“So I guess you liked it.”

“I loved it,” she said, the clacking of a typewriter singing in her ears, her nose recalling the smell of ink. She knew she was romanticizing her newspaper days, overplaying the good moments and downplaying the stress, the misogyny, the pressure to perform. Despite her love for the work, she was an unreliable witness when it came to the details of its downsides.

“Do you miss it?”

She knew she should have said no, not really, being a mother is so fulfilling, I’ve never really looked back. That’s what the other mothers of Ann Arbor would expect her to say, and certainly what their husbands would assume. It’s what everyone wanted to believe, to validate their own choices and pay homage to the world as they understand it. But losing her husband also helped Lila lose any ambition she had of fitting in with the successful wives, the ones who decorated cakes and kept their children in matching socks and had husbands who were still breathing. And anyway, James wasn’t like them. So she told him the truth, unfiltered.

“I miss it more than anything.”

As soon as the words escaped her mouth, as soon as she heard herself say them, she dropped her fork and let out a small, strangled cry. Because, of course, there was something she should—and did—fundamentally miss even more.

Ernest, Ernest, my God, I’m so sorry—

How could she have said that? She was glad the boys weren’t in the room to hear her say that. She couldn’t imagine what James must think of her for saying something like that. Even a man as understanding as he couldn’t possibly—

“It’s okay,” James said, and his hand was on hers. That was all he said, and he said it again: “It’s okay.”

His blue gaze held hers, without judgment or expectation, just simple acceptance. He was in the forgiveness business. She knew she could trust him. She knew despite her baggage, their religious differences, despite everything, he was interested in her, the entire her. Although it had only been two years since her husband’s death, she knew she could be interested in him.

She knew it all in that moment, and only for that moment.

Because as soon as she relaxed her hand under the reverend’s gentle fingers, Nathan walked into the room. He saw the man’s hand on Lila’s, and his eyes went wide.

“NEVER DO THAT,” he screamed. “DON’T TOUCH HER! I’LL KILL YOU!”

James’ hand sprang from Lila’s, leaping away like an independent entity, landing hard back in his own lap. Lila sprinted toward her son, but Nathan turned and ran, still shrieking his disapproval. She chased him down the hall, but he slammed his bedroom door behind him and wouldn’t let her in. She sat in front of the door, pleading, but he just kept screaming.

When James came to check on her, Lila waved him away, eyes desperate. He left, quietly. She sat outside Nathan’s door all night, until he finally stopped screaming. Then she opened the door, which her son had passed out against. Careful not to hurt or wake him, she pushed the door open enough to step through it, picked him up, and whispered apologies into his hair as she put him in his crib. Howie watched the whole thing from the hallway. He had to wait on the fit to end, too; the boys still shared a room.

James did not come for dinner the following Sunday.

Or any Sunday thereafter.