Denny called a family meeting that night after the kids came home from youth group. But we could hardly get a word in edgewise. The kids had chosen to volunteer at the seven-day Cornerstone Music Festival over the Fourth of July as their mission project this summer. Excitement dripped from their pores. There’d been a big debate that night about inviting non-Uptown kids to join them at Cornerstone as part of their mission. “You know, like Yo-Yo’s brothers and José—kids who’ve done stuff with us in the past,” Amanda explained.
Uh-huh. I could see why the debate. Pete and Jerry Spencer were basically likable pagans, while José Enriquez was a church kid with a Christian family. Who needed Cornerstone more? But who would be a responsible volunteer? On the other hand, if José went along, would Denny and I need to go along as chaperones?
I stifled a groan. I didn’t need another “I Survived Cornerstone” T-shirt.
Denny finally put a lid on the Cornerstone babble and told the kids what Dr. Lewinski had said. That shut them up—for about two seconds. “But Mom!” Amanda wailed. “You don’t look sick to me.”
“I’m not, exactly. Just not up to par. Doctor doesn’t want me to risk picking up a nasty bug, especially with the SARS epidemic gathering momentum.”
Josh cut to the chase. “Does that mean the trip is off?”
Denny cleared his throat. “Well, that’s what we need to talk about.”
“Absolutely not.” I glared at Denny. “It just means I’m not going with you.”
“Oh.” Relief and guilt tussled on Amanda’s face. “It won’t be the same without you, Mom.”
“Won’t be the same without you either. All the phone calls will be for me, no punk rock—Christian or other-wise—blaring from your bedrooms, no dirty underwear cluttering up the bathroom. And the mint-chocolate-chip ice cream will actually still be in the fridge the day after I buy it.” Not to mention I’ll be as lonely as a single sock. But hopefully not as useless.
So that was that, though Denny still looked dubious. As the kids disappeared into their rooms to finish up homework before bed, Denny turned on me. “Wait a minute. Didn’t the doc say to avoid crowds? You knew that, Jodi—and yet you went to this Paul and Silas church in the city today! Isn’t that a crowd of strangers?” He rolled his eyes in frustration. “What’s up with that? What if you get sick while we’re gone?”
I shrank in my chair.Guilty as charged. It hadn’t even crossed my mind.
THE WEEK WAS SHORT, schoolwise. A professional development day on Friday gave public-school students a head start on their spring break, and my traveling trio decided to take off early Friday so they could be at the Baxter grandparents’ for Palm Sunday. But it also meant only four days to wash clothes and pack three people for nine days, get the minivan tuned up and tires rotated, and make sure the car was packed with all the necessities to function without Mama Bear along—snacks, paper tow-els, wet wipes, first-aid kit, water jug.
Might have gone without a hitch if the U.S. Army hadn’t pushed into Baghdad and claimed control of the city by midweek. But it was almost impossible to keep everybody on task when images of jubilant Iraqis toppling an ego-size statue of the dictator were being shown over and over again on national TV.
Stu caught me in the basement stuffing a load of jeans and sweats into the washing machine the night Baghdad fell,muttering dark threats because Josh hadn’t signed up for his SATs yet. “Jodi Baxter! What are you doing washing Josh and Amanda’s clothes at their age? In your condition!”
I bristled. She made it sound like I was nine months’ pregnant or nine months shy of kicking the bucket. “They do their own wash . . . sometimes. But tonight they’re all glued to the TV. And I’m fine.”
“Right. You’re fine. So doggone fine your family’s going off to New York and leaving you home to ‘rest.’ Here. Let me do that, and you go upstairs and get those two teenage misfits off their butts and down here.”
Sheesh!Who was Leslie Stuart to tell me how to run my family? Except, dang it, she was right. I snorted. “Tell you what. I’ll do this and you go upstairs and get my two misfits off their duffs. That’d shock ’em.” I started to giggle . . . and then I started to cry.
“Hey.What’s wrong? I’m sorry—”
“No, no, I’m okay. Really.” I wiped my face on a dark T-shirt and stuffed it in the washing machine. “Just feel-ing sorry for myself. Nine days without Denny and the kids feels like . . . like pulling isolation for bad behavior at the county jail.”
“Hey. I’ll be here. Do you want to have dinner together or something next week when I get off work? I could cook one night, you the next, something like that.” She smiled ruefully. “Fact is, I’m in isolation all the time.”
I stared at her in the dim light from the swaying bulb overhead. “Sheesh, Stu.What a jerk I am. Spoiled, too, I guess.”
She shrugged. “That’s okay. I’m used to it. But I wouldn’t mind the company.”
“Sure. That’d be great.” Suddenly the week ahead didn’t seem like such a black hole.
Stu poured a capful of detergent and dumped it on top of the jeans. “Speaking of jail, I wonder what’s happening with the parole board? I sent that letter, like you said.”
“You did?” I said that? “Well, uh, that kind of thing takes time. They’ve got lots of parolees to consider.”
“Yeah, guess so. But I was thinking that maybe some of us should make another visit. Maybe this Saturday?”
I shook my head. “Count me out, Stu. Denny had a fit that I went to Paul and Silas after the doc said to avoid crowds. I’m sure Lincoln Correctional would be off the list. But you could ask some of the sisters who are already on the visitors’ list.”
DENNY AND THE KIDS took off early Friday morning in the Dodge Caravan, trying to beat the morning rush hour. After the invasion of Baghdad, the terrorist alert level nudged up to orange—but what did that mean? Nothing to Josh and Amanda. Yellow, orange, red—nothing short of a nuclear bomb on Chicago would have stopped them heading for New York with CD players, earphones, and duffel bags. I did barricade the back door with my body, and the four of us stopped long enough to hold hands in the kitchen and pray for “traveling mercies,” as my dad used to say. Then kisses and hugs and wet licks from Willie Wonka . . . and they were gone.
Me—I had to go to school as usual. I thought about using Dr. Lewinski’s order to avoid crowds as an excuse to ditch professional development day, but I realized that wouldn’t fly since I already mingled with these teachers and staff on a day-to-day basis. Besides, it was required. However, just before leaving the house, I made a rash decision and clipped Willie Wonka’s leash to his collar. He needed a walk, and he could just walk to school with me. If Avis didn’t like it, she could send me home. Poor Wonka was so pooped by the time we got to school he curled up under my desk and snored through the whole day. Avis never even knew he was there.
My third graders would have loved it. An old dog at school!
True to her word, Stu brought supper Friday night—Chinese takeout. Then she spent most of the evening on the phone finalizing the trip downstate to the prison the next day. Turned out that only Yo-Yo and Hoshi could make it. Carla was still spending every other weekend with her former foster parents, but this weekend she was home. As Florida put it to Stu: “No way I’m gonna be gone and Carla end up wishin’ she was at their house, see what I’m sayin’? Carla an’ me—we’re goin’ shopping for an Easter dress.”
That Saturday our two-flat could have doubled for an abandoned ghost town. I cleaned out two closets, washed all the bedding in the kids’ rooms, played all the gospel CDs we owned, decided against calling my parents (they’d want to know why I wasn’t on my way to New York with Denny and the kids; no reason to get them all worried), called half a dozen Yada Yada sisters just to see “whassup” but got nobody, and finally wallowed my way through a bag of potato chips watching a beat-up video of Rainman and finishing my quilt square.
When Dustin Hoffman laid his head on his sassy little brother’s chest and murmured, “My main man,” I wiped my eyes with my T-shirt and clicked off the VCR. Now what? The house was so quiet I could hear the wall clock tick, but I didn’t want more TV. Every station had constant commentary coming from Iraq. Ambushes, pockets of resistance, more terror threats . . . I shuddered. Nothing clean or quick about this war.
Pray, Jodi. Praise! Praise? Well, why not? As I walked around the house picking up stray stuff, I prayed out loud for Denny and the kids. I prayed for our soldiers in Iraq. I prayed for the Iraqi people, and even public enemy Saddam Hussein, still on the loose. I prayed for Stu and the others driving back from Lincoln, for Becky Wallace and her little boy. For Avis and Peter, for a job for Carl Hickman, for Hakim and his mother . . . and when I ran out of people to pray for, I put on a Gary Oliver CD and let myself go, dancing and swirling and singing along to “House of the Lord” and “More Than Enough.”Willie Wonka didn’t care. Slept right through it, as a matter of fact. No one else was around to bother. I hiked the music up a notch. Just me and God . . .
The phone rang. Had been ringing for some time, I guess. I snatched the handset just as the answering machine picked up. “Jodi!” It was Stu. “Could you turn down the music a bit? My dishes are rattling up here.”
“Oh! Hi, Stu.” I punched the off button on the CD player. “Didn’t know you were home. How’d it go?”
“Amazing. Can’t talk now ’cause I got an emergency foster case I gotta take care of. Just to say this much—Becky Wallace is on the list for early parole!”
I WAS DYING TO hear more about Becky Wallace, yet I had to wait till Stu and I were on our way up to Nony’s house for Yada Yada the next evening. Figured if I could go to work, I could go to Yada Yada—no new faces there either. Besides, Delores had called and said she was collecting the quilt squares. Time to get them sewn together and quilted, she’d said. Still seemed pre-mature to me, but . . . whatever. At least mine was done. Boy, did I feel smug.
“So tell me what happened at the prison yesterday,” I said as Stu turned north on Sheridan Road.
“Whoa. Don’t you want to wait to hear from Yo-Yo and Hoshi too?”
“Can’t wait. Tell me now.”
Stu snorted. “Okay, okay. I didn’t plan to say any-thing to Becky about writing the parole board, because, you know, I hadn’t heard anything back. Whole thing was a shot in the dark. So we’d been talking about five minutes in the visitors’ room when Becky blurted out, ‘I’m on the list.’ ”
“She said, ‘I’m on the list,’ just like that?”
“Yeah. The list of early parolees! She was told she was being released to her ‘home address on Lunt Avenue,’ but she was kind of in shock. ‘I don’t know any address on Lunt Avenue,’ she said. Well, she threw a couple of f-words in there, but that was the gist.”
I laughed nervously. “What did you say? Is she really coming here? When? What about that business with house arrest and an ankle monitor—for how many months?”
Stu grinned ruefully. “Yeah. Guess that’s part of it. I was tempted to just let the sheriff drop her off at our house and surprise her, but Yo-Yo kept kicking me under the table, so I ’fessed up. Becky . . .” Stu’s voice trailed off as she cruised past Northwestern University along Sheridan Road, and then turned on treelined Lincoln Avenue.
“What? Becky what?”
“Her face got all funny. Maybe she was afraid she’d cry. Or maybe she was angry we interfered. Whatever, she got up suddenly and bolted for the inmate door.We sat there about ten minutes or so, and had just about decided she wasn’t coming back—oh, here we are. Tell you the rest later.”
Stu had pulled up in front of Nony and Mark Smith’s lovely two-story brick house covered in creeping ivy. I started to climb out of the sporty car, but Stu laid a hand on my arm. “Jodi, wait.”
I turned back. Her usual self-confident air had dis-appeared.
“Do you think . . . I mean, should I tell Yada Yada what happened that day, you know, after I saw Andy Wallace? And about—you know—what happened a few years ago?”
I hardly knew what to say. I could tell it’d been heal-ing for Stu to own up to the truth, to let go of her need to be Ms. Perfect. But she was doing that. A few of us knew about the abortion. Did she need to tell every-body? And yet . . . most of Yada Yada had witnessed the heated exchange between her and Chanda the last time we met at Ruth’s house. Honesty from Stu would explain a lot. And she was asking me.
I made a stab at wisdom. “It has to be up to you, Stu—you and God.Accountability is good—Lord knows I’m working on it. Trying to be honest with myself and other people. I just don’t think we have to tell everybody everything. You got honest with Florida and me—and Avis knows too. Maybe that’s enough. Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
I sat quietly in the car for several moments, my door wide open, thinking about the sin that continued to dog me, even though I had confessed to God, confessed to my husband and family, confessed to Yada Yada, been loved and forgiven. But I still didn’t feel free. I’d said I was “sorry” to Jamal’s mother that day in the courtroom—but how did she hear it? That I was sorry it had happened? Sorry she’d lost her son? Sure. Anybody would be. Yet had I ever really confessed my sin to the mother of the boy I’d killed? Could she ever really forgive me if I didn’t?
I wanted to be free. What was it Jesus said? “If you abide in My Word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
I blinked back tears. “God wants to set us free, Stu. With the truth. Listen to God’s whisper in your heart. You’ll know what’s right to say . . . or do.”
Right, Jodi. You know what’s right to do. Now do you have the courage to do it?