16

I was on my third run-through of an Israel Houghton CD—after cranking up the volume so I could hear it while enjoying a long soak in the tub—when the music suddenly went dead. In the silence I heard, “Jodi?” Denny’s voice. Loud. “Where are you?”

“Tub!” I shouted back. “Be out in a sec.” I toweled off, pulled on a big T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and came out to find Denny rummaging in the refrigerator. “How was the awards banquet? Didn’t they feed you?”

“Sure. Hours ago.” He gave up on the refrigerator and threw a packet of microwave popcorn into the microwave. He lifted an eyebrow at me. “What’s with the earsplitting music? Could hear it a block away.”

“Driving out demons.” I said it lightly.

“And husbands,” he muttered under his breath.

“Sorry.” I got out a bowl for the popcorn and then touched his arm. “Actually, I am sorry for jumping all over you last night. Forgive me?”

He looked at me sideways. “Only if you jump all over me tonight.”

“Denny!” I swatted his shoulder. “I’m making a serious apology here! And I need to talk to you about something.”

The microwave beeped. Denny pulled out the puffed-up bag, opened it gingerly, and dumped the hot popcorn into the bowl. “Apology accepted. Want some of this? Where are the kids?”

I trailed Denny to the living room and flopped beside him on the couch. “Movie. They took the el, but Josh went with them, so they should be OK. Amanda and José, I mean. But I wanted to talk to you before they got back . . .”

Dipping into the popcorn bowl, I told Denny about my talk with Avis, what she’d said about spiritual warfare, and about the message she’d left on the answering machine. “You weren’t here to pray about those books, so I went upstairs to see if Stu was home. She wasn’t, but Becky had a friend over. An old friend. Male. Made me nervous. I mean, what sort of people did she hang out with before she went to prison? So, OK, she’s been clean for eight or nine months now, and she got baptized spur of the moment, John the Baptist–style. But I don’t know how long her new life will last if all her old buddies suddenly show up.”

Denny crunched popcorn and nodded thoughtfully. “Don’t think Stu is home yet—at least her car wasn’t in the garage when I came in. Should I go upstairs and meet this ‘old friend’? You know, let him know another guy is in the house?” He snorted. “If you didn’t drive him out already with that deafening music.”

“Ha. Maybe I did.” But I shook my head. “No, don’t go up. Maybe this sounds weird, but I would like to pray, you know, like Avis suggested. Pray against any evil that could come into this house through those books, pray for protection on this house, protection for our family. Protection for Stu and Becky too.”

He sat silently for a moment, as if wrapping his mind around the idea. Then he nodded. “Sure. Why not? Guess it’s up to us to pray, and up to God to sort it out.”

THE KIDS GOT HOME ABOUT ELEVEN—José had already headed home on the el—but by then Denny and I had walked hand in hand around our house, praying in each room, praying for protection from the Evil One. We lingered in Josh’s room, praying especially that God would protect his mind and his heart as he grappled with the ugly things written in those books. We ended by praying for Nony and Mark Sisulu-Smith and their children, for the students on Northwestern’s campus, that the upcoming “free speech” rally would be peaceful, and that the hateful ideas of this White Pride group would fizzle out.

Both kids home. House saturated with prayer. I slept like a baby.

Guess Stu didn’t, though. The next morning, she stormed into our kitchen about eight o’clock and started venting. “I am so mad, Jodi! Do you know what happened last night?” She plopped down on our kitchen stool, no makeup, wisps of hair falling from a hasty twist. “I got home late, maybe ten-thirty, after a killer day. Had to follow up on a runaway foster kid—turns out he had a good reason to run away. Ended up having to call the police and file a complaint against the foster mother’s boyfriend, who’d been . . . never mind.” She rubbed her temples. “Anyway, got home, dying for a hot bath, some hot milk and honey, and some peace and quiet so I could curl up with a good book—and there was Becky with some . . . some strange guy in my house, a man I didn’t even know. Laughing, watching a dumb car-chase video he’d brought, eating my food. Dirty dishes everywhere. Worse, they drank all the milk. Every drop!”

She left the stool and started pacing from one end of the kitchen to the other, but I knew she wasn’t done, so I poured another cup of coffee and waited. She stopped abruptly and wagged a finger in my direction. “But you know what makes me really angry? I don’t know if I have any right to be angry! I mean, Becky lives here—I invited her myself, didn’t I? And she’s stuck in this house, day after day, can’t go out as long as she’s wearing that electronic monitor. So of course she wants to have friends come over.” Rolling her eyes, she plopped down on the stool again. “I just . . . I don’t know, Jodi.”

I sure didn’t know either. Seemed like we were stuck with Becky—or she was stuck with us. But did any of us know what we were getting ourselves into? An “old friend” comes over to watch TV one day—but what next? I didn’t want to mention my own fears. A parade of “old friends”? Druggies? Street people? A lover?

Oh God. Help.

“We’ve got to get Becky some new friends,” I blurted. “And get her that Bible we promised her.”

I WAS SO GLAD YADA YADA WAS GOING TO MEET this weekend that I made chocolate-chip cookies from scratch to take to Adele’s. Had to slap a few greedy hands or the cookies would’ve disappeared by the time Sunday evening rolled around. I almost called the sisters to ask if we could meet at my house and do some of that “praying for protection over the house” as a group. But it wouldn’t have worked. Uptown’s youth group had been cancelled because of the holiday weekend, so Josh was holed up in his room reading up on White Pride, and Amanda and her dad were cranking out some serious homemade ice cream in the backyard.

“Maybe we should invite Becky down to help crank the ice cream, give her something to do while you women ‘yada yada,’ ” Denny said. There was no humor in his eyes. “Did you Yadas think about meeting here so Becky could attend?”

“Yeah,” I said defensively. “But you forget we don’t have a family room or a basement rec room anymore. You and the kids would end up stuck in your bedrooms all evening. Or out in the yard with Willie Wonka.” It wasn’t the first time I’d let Denny know I missed our spacious house out in Downers Grove.

His comment stuck in my brain as I bundled up Avis and Peter’s friendship quilt in a garbage bag to keep it clean, grabbed my plastic container of chocolate-chip cookies, and made a beeline for the garage before Becky showed up to crank ice cream. It was awkward, taking off for Yada Yada and leaving Becky behind—though what could we do about it? Just because she was on parole didn’t mean the rest of us had to be on house arrest.

I fumbled for the minivan keys as a figure showed up in the door to the yard. I looked up, expecting to see Stu.

“Mom!” Josh’s six feet filled the doorway. “You’re going to Yada Yada, right? Can you give this note to Edesa? Uh”—he looked at my loaded arms—“where should I put it?”

I just stared at him, mouth open. A note for Edesa? Grinning, he stuck the envelope in my mouth and said, “Bite easy!” Then he squeezed out the door just as Stu showed up. “Hi, Stu. Bye, Stu.”

Stu looked after my son, then back to me as I stood between the cars, my arms full, Josh’s note in my teeth. “I’d better drive,” she smirked, opening the passenger door of her Celica and squeezing me, bulky garbage bag, and container of cookies into the front seat.

“What’s that?” Stu spun out of the alley and headed for Clark Street.

That’s what I’d like to know. I took Josh’s note out of my mouth and stuffed it into a pocket of my jeans as I patted the garbage bag. “Avis’s quilt.”

“What have you still got that for? Don’t you see Avis every day at school?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “But some of the Yada Yadas asked me to bring it to the next meeting and give it to her there. Most of the sisters didn’t get a chance to see the quilt squares the others made.” Understatement. The quilt had barely gotten stitched together in time for Avis’s wedding, where it showed up draped over the Jewish huppah. And the reception, where we were supposed to have time to gawk at the quilt, had fizzled out because of the free-for-all baptism at the lake.

“Oh. Good point.” She merged into the two-lane traffic on Clark Street, thick with pedestrians as well as cars enjoying the Memorial Day weekend. Handcarts and sidewalk vendors sold everything from corn dogs to enchiladas and burritos. “Humph,” Stu grumbled. “Would’ve been faster to take the side streets.”

Denny’s comment still niggled in my head. “Stu, should we invite Becky to come to Yada Yada?”

Stu swung her gaze from the traffic and looked at me. “How could we do that? She can’t leave the premises. I mean, sure, she can come when Yada Yada meets at your apartment or mine, but other than that—hey!” Stu slammed on her brakes just in time to miss hitting a pedestrian who insisted on crossing the street in the middle of the block, dodging cars. “Stupid jerk!”

I waited until the car started to move again. “Yeah, I know. We’d have to make adjustments, like meet at our house most of the time. Or”—I glanced at her sideways—“get permission from her parole officer to leave the house every other week. Couldn’t we do that?”

Stu was quiet for several moments, threading the car through holiday-happy youths, most of whom were yelling at each other in Spanish. Then she shrugged. “I don’t know. Guess we could try. But usually those requests have to come on letterhead from some organization. Last I checked, Yada Yada doesn’t have letterhead.”

I giggled. “Yeah. Even if we did, not sure what the state of Illinois would think of letterhead that said ‘The Yada Yada Prayer Group.’ ”

Stu laughed. But her smile quickly sobered, almost to glum level. “Gotta be honest with you, Jodi. I’m not all that excited about inviting Becky to Yada Yada. I mean, I live with her. She’s in my living room, my kitchen, and my bathroom whenever I come home. She’s coming to church at Uptown now. I’m not eager to have her in my face everywhere I go.” She grimaced. “That sounds really selfish. But there it is.”

I looked at Stu; her face was flushed. The calm, cool, and collected Stu I’d known for just over a year had let down her guard with me twice in one weekend. She was being honest with me. I felt . . . honored. My up-and-down relationship with Stu had definitely turned a corner.

But it put me in a bind. How did I respect her feelings—I certainly understood them!—and still deal with the growing certainty in my gut that Becky needed to be part of Yada Yada? We didn’t like her “old” friends, but how else would she make new ones? And Becky was a new Christian, like Yo-Yo. Brand-spanking new. Didn’t she need the kind of sister support and prayer and Scripture challenges the rest of us needed? That I needed, even though I’d been a “good girl Christian” most of my life?

Yada Yada had turned my life upside down. Maybe “rightside up” would be more accurate.

How could I keep that for myself and shut Becky out?