31

“Happy thirtieth birthday!” Joe said as he accelerated onto the highway. “How long has it been since we’ve been to It’s Italian? At least six months, right? Before Elaine was born?”

I was silent. I hadn’t even remembered that we were going there. I was consumed by one thought and one thought only, and I knew Joe would be also as soon as he heard. The only question was whether I should tell him now or wait until we were in the restaurant.

Joe eased the car to a stop in a parking place in front of the restaurant. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk it occurred to me that there might be a line of people waiting for tables, in which case it would be difficult to have a private conversation until we got seated. I needed to tell him now. I grabbed Joe by the sleeve of his leather jacket just before he got to the restaurant. “There’s something we need to talk about tonight.”

He stiffened, not sure whether to open the door. He twisted his wrist to look at his watch, then glanced over his shoulder. “Do we have to talk about it now?”

I motioned toward the door, “Let’s get inside first.”

Joe stopped in front of me, blocking the entrance. “It’s really fine. Why don’t we just stand out here and chat before we go in?”

I walked around him and reached for the door handle. “No, I want to sit.”

He jogged to catch up with me. “I think we should—”

“I’m pregnant,” I interrupted.

We both froze. He had a look on his face, but it wasn’t the sheer surprise or horror I’d expected. Rather, it was some odd mix of hesitation and confusion. He leaned forward to peer inside the dark interior of the main room, then looked back at me. He started to say something, but I pulled the door the rest of the way open and stepped inside.

A long table directly in front of the door was filled with a large group of people. They were all staring at me. Within a second, they morphed from a group of strangers to people I knew, their faces becoming familiar one by one. Irma and her daughter. Our old neighbor from downtown. My best friend from high school and her husband. Two friends who had been coworkers back in my high-tech days and their boyfriends. An employee from the firm. And a couple we had recently met at Saint William.

They all got to their feet, some throwing their arms in the air, some clapping, and everyone simultaneously exclaimed, “Surprise!”

I turned to Joe, because I needed confirmation that this was really happening.

He looked like he was in a daze. “It’s a surprise party.” I zombie-walked over to the group, reminding myself to move my facial muscles in a way that resembled a smile, and I settled into an empty chair. I found myself in the middle of a checkerboard of social awkwardness, unable to apply the usual remedy of multiple glasses of wine downed in short succession. Our employee learned from the Saint William couple that we were considering converting to Catholicism. Irma learned from our old neighbor downtown that we were almost arrested following our infamous Hip Hop Karaoke party (and he, unfortunately, spoke Spanish so flawlessly that he knew how to say “forty-ounce malt liquor” and “drinking contest” in her native tongue). And our Saint William friends learned from the gals I used to work with that the f-word could be not only a verb, but also a noun, and, after enough glasses of wine, can even be shouted across a restaurant as an adjective.

Two hours into the dinner, one of our old friends attempted to tell the story of the time Joe punched a French guy while watching a heated soccer match at a pub. It was actually a pretty funny tale that included the exchange of witty barbs and ended with Joe and the guy buying beers for one another, but the way our friend conveyed it made it seem like Joe was an anti-French madman who was out for blood. By the time the story skidded to a halt, everyone was staring at their glasses in silence. Unable to bear the awkwardness for a moment longer, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. The hallway door opened and closed behind me, and I turned to see that Joe had followed me. Neither of us spoke; there were no words that could possibly address this situation, which was like something out of a bad sitcom. We looked at one another in awed silence, then simultaneously burst into laughter.

* * *

We shut down the restaurant, one of our friends carrying a half-full bottle of wine out the door with her, holding it up to wave at Irma and the Saint William couple as she left. Joe and I rushed to the car to get out of the chilly January air. He started the engine but left it in park.

“So . . . wow,” he said. “Are you sure you’re pregnant?”

“I took three tests.”

“Are we okay on the Coumadin thing?”

“Yes, thankfully.” That was the one bit of good news: My treatment was finished. It was a tremendous relief not to have to worry about the potentially heinous consequences that could have come with a Coumadin pregnancy.

Joe smirked, as if he’d just had an amusing thought. “I guess we might need to actually learn Natural Family Planning now.”

I grunted in response, and he reached over and play-punched me in the arm. “Well, congratulations!”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were honestly excited.”

“I am. A baby. That’s great!”

I cocked my head in disbelief. “A baby!. . . And no insurance! Another $10K on top of the medical bills that were already killing us! And more shots in the stomach! It’s all great!”

“God will work it out,” he said.

At first I didn’t think I heard him correctly. “Did you just tell me that God is going to work it out?” I did believe that God was real now; I just didn’t know that we were going to act like God was real.

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “I mean, do you think that what the Church teaches is guided by God?”

“I guess I’m starting to think that it could be. Why?”

“Do you think God would hand down a set of rules for people to follow that would be bad for them?”

I held out my arms and pointed back to myself as Exhibit A. “Evidently, yes.”

“Yeah, but you’ve been following the rules as part of an intellectual investigation. Are you seeking God like he’s a person, or like he’s a concept?”

A concept, of course. Until now it had never occurred to me that there was any other way. “Next you’re going to ask if I’ve made Jesus the lordship of my life,” I joked.

“The Lord of your life,” he clarified. But he didn’t seem amused by my comment and instead looked at me without a trace of irony. “So, yeah, where are you on that?”

My husband—Joe Fulwiler—wanted to know if I had made Jesus the Lord of my life. And I had thought that the evening couldn’t get any more surreal. Not knowing what else to say, I shot the question back to him. “Have you?”

Joe started to respond, but the last of the employees emerged from the darkened restaurant, and we exchanged waves as they passed in front of the car on the way to their vehicles. Then Joe fell into silence. After a full minute, he spoke. “About a week ago I was lying in bed, tossing and turning, sweating, couldn’t sleep—that’s never happened to me before. I’ve never been that stressed. I was thinking, Is Amos Adler going to find a way to get me disbarred in the Jaworski case? Are we going to be broke forever?”

The car, the restaurant, the parking lot, and everything else receded as I focused only on what Joe was saying.

“I was half-asleep, and I heard this tone that lasted for about five seconds. And you know how dreams don’t make sense? Well, somehow I just knew at that moment that the high-pitched tone was my name, being spoken to me by God.”

“What?” I said the word as a gasp. Joe never talked like this. Never.

He thought for a moment. The inside of the car was so still, I could hear him breathing. “It’s like I was being called. I was in God’s presence, like when I was baptized. I knew that God could see everything about me, everything I had ever done. It was terrifying, and there was a moment when I felt like I had a choice. I could run away. But I decided to stay, even though I felt incredibly scared. And then I realized I was awake, and I just lay there like that for an hour or two. I was calm. My problems didn’t seem to matter anymore. I felt at peace—truly, deeply at peace.”

I felt like a more spiritually mature person would understand the significance of this moment. “So . . . did God, you know, tell you anything?”

“No, that was it. Then, when we went to Mass at Saint William’s, the priest did that thing where he says ‘Peace be with you’ and holds out his hands like an offering to the congregation. When he turned toward me, I physically felt a wave hit me in the chest. And I relaxed. I just sort of . . . let go.”

“That’s great. It really is,” I said. “And maybe that was God calling out to you that night—I could believe that. But the truth is that people who follow him have crappy lives all the time.”

He snapped out of his daze. “Oh, well, if you mean that they’ll have a bunch of tough things happen to them, sure. Do you remember what Noe said they do to Inquirers at the Rite of Acceptance?”

“Not really.”

“They mark them with the sign of the cross. The sponsors trace a cross over their eyes, their ears, their lips, their heart, their shoulders, and their hands and feet. It’s to prepare them that the cross will touch every part of their lives.”

“What?” My face contorted into a frown. “Well, that sounds horrible. Where do I sign up to have more misery in my life?”

“No. I said ‘suffering’, not ‘misery’.”

“Same thing.”

“But it’s not!” Joe said, an urgency behind his voice. “That’s Christianity’s whole message: The more you love, the more you’re going to have to give up—you can’t hold anything back. And that’s going to mean suffering. But it’s also going to mean joy and peace.”

I stared at my hands. “I’ve been doing this Christianity thing for months now, and I think I have less joy and peace than I used to.”

“But are you really putting God first?”

I didn’t answer.

“We might go broke, or have to live with your mom for another decade, or whatever. It probably won’t be easy. But we’ll have peace.”

I stared at him, searching his face for the smile that would accompany the punchline to this dry joke, but it didn’t come. In his eyes was a gentleness, a bottomless vulnerability that I had never seen before.