6

Positive! But . . . I mean, how could . . .” I stopped, embarrassed. But my mind churned. Dexter was the one who’d been running around on his wife. Nobody would be surprised if he turned up HIV-positive. But sweet Rochelle? “Is that for sure?” I finished lamely. “I mean, isn’t there such a thing as a false positive?”

Avis shrugged. “We can hope. Rochelle insists it’s impossible, says she’s never been unfaithful to Dexter. She’s going back for a retest on Thursday. Wants me to go with her—though I’m not sure why. She won’t get the results for another week.” She smiled weakly. “But at this point, it’s enough that she wants me to go.”

“Oh, Avis.” I could hardly imagine hearing that kind of news about my daughter. People with HIV were at risk for AIDS, and people with AIDS often died a terrible, lingering death. I suddenly felt like throwing up.

Avis took a deep breath, as if collecting herself. “So . . . what’s this about a snowman?”

I snorted. “Nothing.” Which was the truth. Here today, gone tomorrow. I reached for her hand across the desk; she put both of hers in mine. What could I say? If she were in my shoes, Avis would probably offer a comforting scripture or pray. But what did one pray in a situation like this? Oh Lord, make it go away! Heal Rochelle! We know You’re going to do it! . . . I couldn’t. The words seemed hollow. Dishonest. A cliché. I didn’t know what God would do.

So all I offered was a whisper. “Oh Jesus. Help us.” She squeezed my hands.

THE SNOWMEN MET A VIOLENT DEATH sometime before the first bell. Stomped on. Kicked to smithereens. Anger boiled in my gut as I surveyed the damage from my classroom window. “What kind of deranged person would destroy a kid’s snowman?” I muttered.

Huh. I sounded like my mother. Mom Jennings just couldn’t understand anyone who would talk back to a teacher or drop a candy wrapper on the ground, much less bump off a snowman. Her world was populated by hardworking men, dutiful women, and polite children—or she thought it ought to be.

I traced a frowny face in the fog on the window. No wonder I’d had such a hard time owning the fact that I was “just a sinner,” like everyone else. Funny thing, it was such a relief not to be perfect. To know I could mess up and still be forgiven. To begin to understand what grace was all about. Yep. Jodi “Good Girl” Baxter had ugly thoughts, did things she regretted, didn’t do things she should—

Ack! My hand flew to my mouth; I peered out the foggy window. Not only had the snowmen disappeared, but the hats and scarves they’d been wearing had too! I’d totally forgotten to bring them in before going home last night. Blip, right off my radar screen. And it was starting to snow again . . .

I pulled on the jacket and boots I’d just taken off and ran out to the playground. Most of the early birds were heading for the warm gym. But Bowie Garcia and Lamar Pearson stood looking at the lumps of snow that used to be snowmen, muttering dark threats. “Man, I find out who kicked our snowmen, I’m gonna pop ’em,” Bowie said. He made his gloved hand into a pistol. “Pow! Pow!”

My own anger turned to alarm. But now wasn’t the time to talk about “disproportionate response”—though, hm, it might be a good life lesson for my third graders. “Snowmen can be remade; people can’t.” Right now, my own forgetfulness was getting buried deeper in new snow.

Several of my other third graders appeared on the playground. “Oh no!” “Who did that?” Followed by a few nasty expletives they probably heard at home.

“Sorry about the snowmen, kids,” I said. “But with this good snow, we’ll be able to make bigger and better ones, whaddya say?” Their scowls slowly turned to grins. “But tell you what, how about a contest? Whoever finds one of those hats or scarves in the snow gets a bag of Skittles. For each one!”

WE FOUND TWO HATS AND ONE SCARF buried in the snow and I was out three bags of Skittles. The lost scarf belonged to Mercedes LaLuz and she shrieked. “My mama said she gonna kill me if I lose another scarf!” Which hopefully was an overstatement. But to placate the situation, I brought in the handmade knit scarf my mother had made me and gave it to Mercedes the next morning.

Josh and Amanda thought the whole episode was hilarious. “I’ll donate my scarf to your next snowman,” Josh said, faking a straight face. “My sacrifice to a good cause.” Yeah, right. He had yet to wear the overly long and rather garish scarf his grandmother had crocheted for him.

Ruth Garfield, on the other hand, was full of advice. She called midweek to ask how the first week back at school was going. With the phone cradled between my shoulder and ear, I moaned about the vandalized snowmen in the schoolyard while trying to fry up some hamburger and peel potatoes for a Baxter version of shepherd’s pie.

“Vandals? A lesson from us you should take. Havah and Isaac’s snowman—”

“Havah and Isaac’s snowman?” I snickered so hard the phone lost its precarious perch and crashed to the floor. I snatched it up. “Oops. Sorry. Ruth, what are you talking about? Havah and Isaac are . . . what? Six weeks old? You didn’t take them outside to—”

“Six-and-a-half. Very bright they are too. Looking around, taking in everything. Ben decides to make a snowman so the twins can see it from the front window—”

“Ben made a snowman? Ben ‘I’m-Too-Old-to-Have-Kids’ Garfield?” Now I was laughing out loud.

“What are you, my echo? Don’t be a shmo. I’m trying to help you, Jodi Baxter. Ben knew the little nudniks on our block would knock over anything in the front yard, so he sprayed the snowman with the garden sprayer. Froze solid overnight. Any juvenile delinquent who tries to kick down that snowman is going home with a broken toe.”

“Love it!” I hooted. I had visions of young thugs hopping around the schoolyard bawling like branded calves. But my ecstasy was short-lived. “On second thought, if we did that, the school would probably get sued for erecting ‘dangerous structures’ on public property.”

“Humph,” Ruth sniffed. “You could always melt the evidence—wait a minute.”

In the background, I heard Ben yelling. A minute later, Ruth was back. “Blind as a bat, he is! Turning everything upside down looking for a pacifier. I show him, there it is, pinned right to Isaac’s sleeper. Does he say thanks? No. Tells me, why don’t you put it somewhere I can find it? Such a klutz.”

“Uh-huh.” I dumped the peeled potatoes into a pot of water and turned on the gas burner. Ruth plunged on, though she lowered her voice.

“But here’s the good news. ‘Ben,’ I say, ‘I want to go to Beth Yehudah services on Saturday.’ So Ben considers. I see his brain working. If I go by myself, he’s stuck with the twins all morning. If I take the twins, he’ll worry I can’t manage car, car seats, baby carriers, diaper bags all by myself. So he says, ‘All right, all right, I’ll drive you.’ ” I could hear the chuckle in her voice. “Once we get there, he’ll have to help me take the baby carriers inside, and once he’s inside . . .”

“Ruth! You’re shameless!” But I laughed. The good people at Ruth’s Messianic Jewish congregation would fall all over themselves, oohing and ahhing over the twins. A good number had been at Isaac’s brit mila and baby naming. Proud daddy Ben would eat it up and hang around, not wanting to miss a minute of adoration. “Well, that’s one way to get Ben Garfield to church.”

She sighed. “He might go to church more often if he could hang out with Denny or Peter Douglass or Carl Hickman or Mark Smith. He respects all those guys . . . wait a minute. All those Yada Yada husbands ended up at Uptown when it merged with Mark and Nony’s church, didn’t they! Maybe we ought to come visit you some Sunday . . .”

“That’d be great, Ruth! Just don’t call it Uptown anymore. We’re meeting in New Morning’s new space, which makes it kind of awkward. Guess we need a new name in a hurry. We have a business meeting this Sunday to talk about it.”

“Yachad,” she said. An infant started wailing in the background.

“What?”

“Yachad! A good name for your church.”

“Yachad? What kind of name is that? What does it mean?”

The wailing was now a duet and rising in intensity.

“Yachad. It’s Hebrew. Look it up—sorry. Feeding time. Talk to you later!”

IT WAS SATURDAY before I had time to “look it up,” as Ruth ordered.

Almost a foot of snow fell that week, and my class and I tried to build some new snowmen during Thursday lunchtime. Kids from other classes joined us, which is probably why the new snowmen lasted two days. Snowmen was a bit of a misnomer, though; the hapless creations looked more like “snow bumps with eyes.” This time I donated the black and red checkers from our old checkerboard at home for eyes, along with a bag of carrots from the Rogers Park Fruit Market for noses. Even bought a disposable camera and shot the whole roll.

I dipped into the school office Thursday afternoon to update Avis on Bethune Elementary’s snowman project, but her inner office was dark. “Oh, Mrs. Douglass left at one o’clock,” Ms. Ivy offered, fiddling with the temperamental photocopy machine. “Said she had an appointment.”

Ouch. That’s right. Rochelle’s retest . . .

Almost decided not to call Avis about the retest. What was the point? They wouldn’t know the results for a week anyway. But on Saturday morning—I still had two weeks until my turn came up to volunteer at Manna House, hallelujah!—as I stuffed laundry into the washing machine in the basement of our two-flat, it hit me: waiting is sometimes harder than knowing.

I called Avis on my next trip through the kitchen. Peter Douglass answered. “No, Avis isn’t here. She drove down to Manna House to take Rochelle shopping.”

Shopping. Yeah, I bet. More likely Rochelle needed some propping up. There was nothing in Peter’s voice to indicate that Avis had told him about the HIV diagnosis, though. Maybe she was waiting for the second test; probably didn’t want to get him all upset until they knew for sure. Or maybe it was Avis who needed propping up! Mother-daughter shopping could be a good emotional Novocain.

Peter’s voice plowed into my thoughts. “I was just about to call your house anyway. Is that man of yours there?”

“Nope. Gone to a basketball game over at West Rogers High. Intramurals. You know Denny; he’s got coaching in the blood.”

“Yeah, well. Tell him to give me a call when he gets home.”

I hung up, feeling a strange warmth. What was it—appreciation? Well, yes. But more than that. Feeling blessed . . .

My mind lingered on Avis’s new husband as I trekked back down to the basement to change laundry loads. When Peter first started courting Avis, we Yada Yadas were like a bunch of schoolgirls. “Ooo, girl, that man is fine!” We started making her a wedding quilt before he even popped the question! Then . . . I started worrying that Peter might take Avis away from Uptown Community Church. He seemed uncomfortable being the only African-American male in the congregation; came only because his ladylove was a member and worship leader there. But when New Morning Christian Church, which was mostly black, started using our building for their worship services, Peter Douglass was one of the first people to articulate that “God had a reason.”

Now, with the extraordinary decision to merge Uptown and New Morning, Peter had jumped in with both feet. “Thank You, Jesus!” I said, dumping a capful of detergent into the washing machine and pushing the Start button.

Hiking back up the basement stairs with a basket of hot, fluffy towels, however, I knew the blessing was bigger than just “not losing Avis.” God not only brought Peter Douglass into Avis’s life, courting and winning her after several years of widowhood—the first wedding I’d ever been to where the bride and groom “jumped the broom”!—but He’d brought Peter into our lives too. A seasoned businessman, Peter had not only found a job at Software Symphony for Carl Hickman, Florida’s husband, but took Josh on, too, when our son decided not to go to college this year. But more than that, Peter and Denny seemed to respect each other, even though the two men couldn’t be more different. Peter—serious, thoughtful, businesslike, always practical. Denny—the sports-crazy kid who never grew up. But it was Peter Denny had talked to when struggling with whether to take the job of athletic director at the high school. Peter who had said, “It’s not just about what you like to do. Where can you be the most influence on those kids’ lives?”

“Wonder what he wants to talk to Denny about?” I murmured, stepping over Willie Wonka’s inert body at the top of the basement stairs. The dog opened one eye at me but didn’t move. The dog rarely moved these days. Slowing down. Waaay down. One of these days, I’m going to trip over that dog and kill myself.

I set the basket of clean towels on the dining room table and began to fold. Maybe Peter wanted to talk to Denny about the men’s breakfast next Saturday . . . or the church business meeting tomorrow. We were all supposed to come with ideas for a new church name—

“Yachad.”

My telephone conversation with Ruth earlier that week popped into my head. Ruth had just thrown that word into the ring and told me to look it up. Not sure why I should bother. What a weird name for a church. Maybe it meant something in Hebrew. Might be a nice name for a Jewish synagogue or a Messianic congregation. But the hodgepodge that was Uptown–New Morning? Nobody would know what “Yachad” meant.

Still, curiosity got the better of me. I dumped a towel in mid-fold and booted up the computer. Took me a while to Google it, but finally I found it in an online Old Testament Hebrew lexicon. “Yachad . . . ”

“Whoa!” I said. Then, “Wow.” I moved my cursor to Print Current Page, typed in “20” copies, and hit Print.