The jerks did it to me again. Saturday afternoon I was busy scissoring away at a poodle when Dale breezed out the door and hopped into Viv’s car. I honestly thought I was going to cry. It seemed supremely unfair that I was saddled with grownup problems – money, relationships, annoying co-workers – while also having to haul around childish emotions.
I tried to talk myself out of it. I reminded myself that I had a new friend. I was going to help with the Friends of Joshua house the next day. They say that the best way to forget your problems was to focus on helping someone else. But, while I didn’t go so far as to hope Dale was actually bumped off by some hardcore cockfighting cartel thug, I didn’t think it would be such a bad idea for him to slip quietly out of town and never come back. Ever.
That Viv and Dale came back and were waiting for me in the Bow Wow Barber’s parking lot when I got off work didn’t do much to improve my mood. By then I’d had a good couple of hours to stew, and for a moment I considered putting up a pretense that I wasn’t going to go with them. I knew it was a bluff, but part of me wanted to make them wonder a bit.
See? Childish emotions. I’m not proud of it.
“Hurry!” Dale shouted. He stood beside the Caddy, one hand on the back door handle, ready to open it for me.
It was going to be really hard to be rude to him if he was going to insist on acting like a gentleman, I thought grumpily.
“Move quick,” he said. Then he jerked the door open and shouted right in my face, “Hurry! Get in!”
Completely freaked out, I jumped in, thinking there must be a crazed gunman after us or something. Stump grunted as I landed hard on the seat and I swung my legs in after me. Dale slammed the door.
Helium balloons bobbed cheerfully in the back seat.
“What the heck?” I struggled to sit up. I pushed balloons aside to look out the back window. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Dale turned in the seat and pulled on one of the balloon ribbons. “I just didn’t want you to let any of the balloons out. They’re for Viv. Did you know her birthday was last week?”
I looked at Viv. “No, I didn’t. You didn’t tell me that.”
“She did, too,” Dale said. “She told you six weeks ago and you completely forgot.”
“Hush,” Viv said. She looked uncomfortable. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Are you kidding?” Dale’s voice was way too shrill, in my opinion. “It’s a huge deal. How many people ever see their ninetieth birthday, anyway?”
“Oh my gosh, Viv. I missed your ninetieth birthday? I am so sorry.” I felt like a complete tool. How could I have forgotten something like that?
“I said it’s not a big deal. After a while they all start running together anyway.” She flapped a blue-veined hand.
“You’re being too generous,” Dale said. “Every person deserves to be celebrated on their big day, but most especially someone who’s been such a good friend to so many. I’m really surprised your friends didn’t have a big shindig for you.” He eyed me sideways.
“Viv, seriously, I am so, so sorry. I didn’t realize...”
I was such a loser! No wonder VIv had been acting kind of distant lately. She was the best friend I’d ever had (besides Stump) and here I’d gone and blown her off like that. I guess I’d been so caught up in my own issues that I couldn’t think of anyone else. Loser. “We should have a big party at – at –” Where did one go to have an alcohol-free party, anyway? Chuck. E. Cheese? I had no idea...
“Don’t worry, I’m all over it.” Dale held up his hand and counted off on his fingers. “Balloons, check. Cake, check. Flowers, check. That’s what we’ve been up to for the past two hours.”
“You really don’t have to do all that,” Viv said. “I keep telling you, it’s not a big deal.”
Dale shook his head emphatically. “Nope, this is happening. We’re your friends, and we’re going to celebrate with you. That’s what true friends do.”
I really wanted to point out that he’d known her less than a week and couldn’t exactly count himself a true friend so soon. But seeing as how he had known her less than a week and he was the one to get her balloons, flowers, and a cake (check!), whereas I didn’t even know what day her birthday was, and I’d known her for over a year and we’d been through life-altering events together – in fact, she had actually saved my life—I couldn’t think of an effective way to reassert my first-place seat.
“That’s right,” I said faintly, sitting back in my seat. “That’s what we do.” And to think I had been ticked off at how they left me. They were busy catching up on all the best friend duties I had unknowingly shirked.
“I can’t get her pinned down on where we’re going to celebrate, but we’re going somewhere.” Dale nodded decisively.
“I told you, we’re just going out to the church to interview them, and then calling it a day. We don’t have to do anything special.”
“And I’m telling you, this is happening.” Dale crossed his arms over his chest. “This is the turnoff up here.”
Viv frowned, but didn’t say anything else. In fact, she was uncharacteristically quiet. She must have been really hurt that I’d forgotten her birthday. What a position to put someone in, I thought as I groaned inwardly. If you don’t say anything, your birthday passes unnoticed, and that sucks. If you do say something, you risk sounding like a petulant child who didn’t get what she wanted.
As we bounced over the pocked gravel road, I thought that as soon as we got back to my house, I was going to the store and getting a planning calendar. This kind of thing kept happening to me. I kept missing important things and feeling like a loser. Enough was enough. I was going to get organized if it killed me.
The church we came to looked like every little country church you’ve ever seen in movies. White, square, with a white steeple and a small set of steps leading to the front door.
Dale took a deep breath and rubbed his hands together. “Okay, listen. These are my people, so I think I ought to do the questioning here. I know how these people think, so I know the best ways to get information out of them.” He looked from me to Viv. “Okay?”
I shrugged. At the moment I was feeling incapable of basically everything, so the background seemed like a good place for me.
Viv finally nodded, but she didn’t look happy about it. She looked out at the church. “Is this that place where they have the snakes?”
I had heard about this church. It was one of the Pentecostal sects who took the shall in “they shall take up serpents” to heart. Rattlesnakes were the serpent of choice, being relatively easy to find and dramatic to boot. Ever since I’d read that verse and realized it included the words, ‘they shall drink poison,” I’d wondered why there weren’t charismatic meetings of people jumping around drinking from little vials of cyanide and shouting to the Holy Spirit, but as of yet I had not seen that topic addressed.
But here’s the thing. I didn’t like it when my religious beliefs were ridiculed. I knew that to a lot of people the idea of a divine creator and holy savior sounded like something out of a fairy tale. I knew I couldn’t prove what I believed in, and that made some people think I was a gullible fool. Even I sometimes thought, from time to time, that I was a gullible fool.
But it made me mad to be ridiculed. I didn’t see how contempt and disrespect for another person’s most precious beliefs made the world one bit better. So even if I did find the concept of demonstrating faith through snake handling a bit...unusual, I was determined to keep it foremost in my mind that I didn’t have the answers to everything, that there was more on heaven and earth than I was aware of (hey! I remembered something from Shakespeare, I thought) and that everyone’s beliefs were worthy of respect.
“They don’t do that no more,” Dale said in answer to Viv’s question. “They had to shut that down after Plug Turner died.”
“What, did he get bit by a rattlesnake?” She gave a little laugh.
Dale didn’t care for her tone. “No,” he said with a defensive sneer. “It was a heart attack.” He moved to get out of the car, then turned back. “One of the snake pens came open and the snake got out. Plug went to open the bathroom cabinet to get out a fresh roll of toilet paper and there was that snake, curled up between the towels. Heart seized up on him. They say he was dead before he hit the bathroom floor.”
I thought maybe it was a good thing that I had reminded myself to be respectful, because otherwise I might have laughed at the irony of that story and made a permanent enemy of Dale. What a shame that would have been.
I backed out of the seat, one hand up to prevent balloons from escaping, and waited patiently while Stump waddled toward me and grunted when I picked her up. I settled her onto my hip and followed Viv and Dale up the three shallow steps into the church.
It was kind of like stepping into that school/church on Little House on the Prairie. There was one big room full of pews, a wood floor, and a small altar at the front. Dale led us through the room and out the back, to a room that was apparently a combination small office and store room. It housed a dark wooden table, a laptop and a small printer. There were stacks of papers and magazines everywhere, and a rolling bucket with a mop in the corner.
A shelf above the desk held a wooden plaque with “Without Faith It Is Impossible To Please God,” burned into it, a brown pile of something that looked kind of, but not quite, like dried twigs. It also held a coiled, stuffed rattlesnake. Stump growled at that.
“You looking at my trophies?”
A short, round man with flushed cheeks and hair in need of a trim was hauling himself up into the back door.
“Brother Parker.” Dale leapt forward and took the man’s hand, helping him in. Apparently the shortness of Brother Parker’s legs was not a good match for the steepness of the steps.
“Did you kill these yourself?” Viv asked, nodding toward the various snake paraphernalia. She picked up one of the twigs and shook it, and I realized they were the rattles from various snakes. Some were just a half-inch or so long, some were closer to an inch and a half. I had heard somewhere that the number of rattles indicated the age and size of the snake, so that one must have been a biggie.
Brother Parker shook his head. “Not all of ‘em, but a few.” He picked up the longest one and held it up proudly. “I helped with this granddaddy. It was me and three other brothers from here at the church.” He dipped his head and looked at Dale, a crooked grin on his face. “We did not handle this one except with the business end of a pistol, I’ll tell you that much!” Then he gave a wheezy laugh that made his cheeks even redder.
He mopped his forehead with a folded handkerchief and tried to catch his breath. “What can I do for you nice people?”
Viv and I looked at Dale. Stump continued to glare at the snake, perhaps to make sure it stayed put.
“We wanted to talk about that guy that got himself knocked off last week and dumped in the trash. You know anything about that?”
I looked at Viv, mildly alarmed. We had expected a bit more finesse than that. But then, Dale did say he knew how these people worked. Maybe the direct approach was best.
And in truth, Brother Parker didn’t seem particularly upset by the question.
“I know what you know, probably. Who he was and that he was murdered. If you’re asking if I know who did it, I don’t.”
Dale nodded. “Good enough.”He rubbed his hand together and turned to go.
“Wait!” Viv and I said together.
“He said he don’t know,” Dale said. “If he don’t know, he don’t know. Can’t know what you don’t know, right?” He nudged Brother Parker and laughed.
“What about your parishioners?” Viv asked. “How did the people in the church react to the stories about Hope for Home and its relationship with Friends of Joshua?”
The preacher nodded like he was thinking, running his tongue over his teeth. “Well, I’d say disappointed for the most part. People weren’t happy about it, that’s for sure.”
“Did anyone express anything beyond just...disappointment? Indicate they were thinking along the lines of violence?”
He curled his lip a little and shook his head. “Nah, not really. Oh, you know people. They talk a big game sometimes, but I reckon it’s just talk.”
“Give us an example of the big talk,” I said.
“Oh, you know – guy ought to be horsewhipped, ought to be in jail, lose his medical license. Stuff like that. Somebody was saying we ought to get Matt Macon to start some kind of protest or something.”
Dale and Viv both glared at me. I shrugged.
Anxious to turn the conversation in a different direction, I said, “Are you aware that your church is listed as a hate organization?”
He gave a chuckle. “Oh yeah. I hear that one a lot.” He elbowed Dale. “We’re big haters around here, ain’t we?” Rubbing one hand along the full curve of his belly, he said, “Mostly I just hate going hungry.”
“Do you understand why your church is on that list?”
“Well, of course I do. For one thing, people like to keep lists. And for another, we tell the truth, and sometimes the truth makes people uncomfortable. You know why John the Baptist got his head cut off, right? He told Herod he was sinning to be having sex with his brother’s wife. That’s all. He didn’t have the power to do anything about it, just told him it was the wrong choice to make. So he got his head cut off. People don’t like it when you point out their sins. Talk like that don’t get you many fans.”
“You got plenty of fans, Brother Donny,” Dale said.
“And sycophants,” I said before I could catch myself.
“Yeah, well, I don’t want neither. I’m not out here to make fans or friends or enemies. I’m here because after Brother Plug was called home, I believe the Lord called me to step into that gap and speak His Word, and so that’s what I’m doing, unless and until he tells me to do otherwise. I let Him worry about what lists I’m on.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that some of what you say might...offend people?”
He drew his head back. “Honey, you can’t breathe these days that you don’t offend somebody. If I say I like the color blue, well, I’m sexist and want to keep women down and I’m not being too nice to green. What have I got against green? Can I not see that singling blue out like that, why, that’s an act of aggression against green and it is not to be tolerated?” He shook his head. “Being offended has replaced baseball as our greatest national pastime. So no, it don’t bother me. Somebody got a legitimate issue and want to discuss it with me, well now, I welcome that. I truly do. That’s how we find the humanity in each other, in ourselves. We don’t always find agreement, but we find each other and that’s a good thing. We usually find we have more in common than we think. But no stirrin’ up stuff just for the sake of stirrin’ up stuff. No walking around life on egg shells. Got no time for that.” He laughed again. “Look, people have been calling me names since I picked up my first snake. If that didn’t bother me, then being called a hater by people who disagree with me certainly isn’t going to bother me.”
I wasn’t sure, but I was getting no lynch mob killer vibe from Round Brother Parker, either. I couldn’t speak for his parishioners, but I didn’t think we were going to get anything else out of him except a narrowing down of the list.
We stopped at Pack-A-Sack to get gas and a snack for Dale. Viv and I stayed in the car. It was thick with silent tension. I sat amidst the balloons, still kind of feeling like a big pile of dog doodoo while Viv chewed on nothing, her lips working back and forth.
“Look,” I finally said, leaning forward. “I feel awful about your birthday. I would love to do something to make it up to you. I swear I have no memory of you ever telling me – ”
“Would you just hush?” Viv she swatted at the seat irritably. “Just let it go.”
“I can’t let it go. You’re one of my dearest friends, and I feel horrible. I need to do something.”
“It wasn’t even my birthday!” she snapped. Her lips drew down in a frown, and she opened her mouth like she was going to say something else, then stopped.
“Ummm...what?”
“It wasn’t really my birthday.” She looked annoyed.
“Why in the world did you say it was?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I just...I had my reasons.”
“Viv!” I gripped the edge of the seat and leaned forward. “Are you frigging kidding me? I felt awful!”
‘Yeah, well. That’s what you get.”
“For what?”
“You would have forgotten my birthday, if I’d ever told you when it was.”
I had to allow that.
The next thing I knew, though, she picked up a magazine from the seat and swatted at my hand.
“Ow!” I said, rubbing my fingers. “What was that for?”
“He told you it was my ninetieth birthday and you didn’t even question it. Neither one of you.”
“Oh,” I said meekly. I hadn’t questioned, in fact.
“Not one bit of incredulity. Would it have killed you?”
“Actually, I did think of it, I just didn’t want to be rude and make it sound like it was really old or anything.”
“Ninety?! Are you frigging kidding me?”
“Well, how old are you? I’ve always wondered.”
“Would you believe 140?” She swatted me again. “Why yes, I believe you would!” She flounced in her seat, arms still crossed, glaring out the driver’s side window.
Dale came sauntering out of the store carrying a Big Red and a bag of Cheetos.
“Don’t tell him!” Viv hissed.
Dale opened the car door and set the stuff inside. “Don’t eat ‘em all before I get back,” he said, grinning at me.
Between my fury at Dale and my fury at Viv, I’m somewhat surprised I didn’t explode. I wanted to grab that bag of Cheetos and crush them over Viv’s head, then take my dog and go home. I imagined a few scenarios where I did just that, but they all ended with me having to walk too far, and Dale and Viv ending up in the news as they received the reward and the glory for finding CJ Hardin’s killer.
Viv and I sat in stony silence as Dale pumped the gas. I waited for Viv to apologize for lying to me, even though I knew that would never happen. I figured she was waiting for me to apologize for believing the lie she told, and that wasn’t going to happen either.
Viv looked out over the parking lot, ignoring me. I slipped my hand into my pocket and drew out the short rattle I’d kept from Brother Parker’s desk. I held it in one hand, pulled one of the balloons down to my lap and squeezed it gently between my knees.
Stump looked grumpily at me and shifted, and I mouthed a silent “Shhh” at her.
I leaned closer to the back of the seat, put the rattle up close to Viv’s ear, and shook it steadily.
Her entire body went rigid.
I squeezed my knees hard. The pop! sounded like a bomb going off in that small space.
Viv let loose a torrent of swearing and jumped from the car. She danced around the parking lot, flailing and swiping at her legs, at her shoulders, tugging at her shirt. “Is it on me? Is it on me?”
Dale stared at her with a wide-eyed, pole axed expression. Then he ran after her, swiping helpfully, saying, “What? What? What?”
They jerked around the parking lot until finally Viv got a look at me, slumped against the car door, laughing so hard I was sliding into the floorboard. She froze and narrowed her eyes at me.
Dale kept pulling at her clothes and looking for snakes until she finally batted his hands away. “Never mind! It was nothing.”
Dale didn’t seem to notice the tense silence between me and Viv as we drove back through town, because he was filling it with his own ridiculousness. He could definitely handle those snakes. They thought he couldn’t because he’d accidentally dropped one near a kid one time, but that hadn’t been his fault. The kid had been being all bossy and trying to tell him how to handle it, like he was going to know better than Dale who was trying to listen to the Holy Spirit. Not even the Holy Spirit could work around that kind of yammering. Anyway, if the kid knew as much as he claimed he did, he shouldn’t have screamed like that with a snake so near him. That’s why he almost got bit. It wasn’t Dale’s fault –
“Hey, is that an Hombre following us?” Viv asked, looking in the mirror.
Dale shut up and slid down in his seat. “Is it?!”
I looked behind us, but didn’t see anything other than the usual minivans, pickups and SUVs.
Viv swung the Caddy into a car wash and parked in one of the bays. She turned to Dale. “It was a white pickup with some kind of logo on the back window. It could have been an Hombre. I couldn’t tell.”
“Crap.” Dale looked around wildly, reaching into the back of his pants for his “not a toy” gun. “Are they back there?”
“I don’t think so. Go peek around the corner and see if you can tell which way they went.” Viv nodded toward the front of the bay.
“Me?” His voice actually squeaked.
“Yeah. Just go peek around the corner.”
He looked at her doubtfully for a few minutes, then opened the door and slipped slowly outside.
He edged up to the front of the car wash and slowly peeked around the edge of the cement wall.
“I mean it,” Viv said to me. “Don’t tell him.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want him to know I lied, of course.” She glowered in the mirror at me.
I was supposed to be the bad guy for believing her lies, and now she was concerned with what Dale thought of her.
Obviously she was fine with me knowing all her nasty secrets.
I might have been a little more forgiving if I hadn’t felt so bad for forgetting her fictitious birthday, or if she had acted like she was sorry at all.
It was time to call in bigger guns.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. “Les!” I said cheerfully. “Guess what? We missed Viv’s birthday!”
She whipped her head around with her mouth in an “O.”
I gave her a quick sneer before I said, “I know! Can you believe it? I feel awful.”
I probably should have felt bad for involving Les, but I filed this one under Necessary Evil.
“We have to do something,” Les said.
“It’s okay, Dale and I are already on top of it. Actually, Dale is. He’s ordered a cake, and the car is full of balloons.”
“Salem, I have an Exodus meeting tonight. Can you bring her by here? I’d love to wish her a happy birthday.”
“Of course!” I crowed happily. “We’ll be there around seven.”
I flipped the phone shut and slid it back into my pocket with a smile. “Exodus at seven,” I announced. “They’re blowing it out for Viv’s ninetieth birthday.”
“We really don’t have to do that,” Viv said stonily.
“Oh, but we do. Lots of folks want to celebrate with you, Viv. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, your ninetieth birthday.”
I clapped her on the shoulder. She jerked away, her chin stuck grumpily out, and hunched over the steering wheel. “Where are we going next?”
“Next” turned out to be a bit of a mess. We were driving back down Slide when we heard a motorcycle and Viv became convinced a thousand Hombres were after us. She floored the Caddy and raced onto the Loop, weaving in and out of traffic. We thought we’d lost them when Viv took the spur out west of town and down some narrow back roads.
Then lo and behold, another motorcycle was right behind us. The driver wore a bandana and had a gray handlebar mustache.
“Viv!” I said. “Look in the rearview mirror!”
I shouldn’t have said that. As soon as she took her eyes off the road, we swerved to the left, then back to the right when she saw what I was talking about.
Viv screamed and jerked the wheel hard. The car fishtailed down a dirt road. Dale and I hit the floor. I cradled Stump under me, expecting bullets to start pinging against the Cadillac.
“He’s coming after us!” Viv said. The car bounced hard, and my heart pounded even harder.
Then, suddenly, we weren’t going so fast. I could feel the car straining to speed, but I could feel just as clearly that we were dragging, slowing almost to a crawl. I raised my head and peeked over the edge of the door.
“Ummm...Viv?”
“Mmm?” she said.
“Are we in a cotton field?”
“We’re beside a cotton field.”
We were in a cotton field. Not in the actual field, but along the edge. Where tractors with very large tires drove.
I looked to the right to see the motorcycle riding off into the sunset.
“I, um, I don’t think he was coming for us after all,” Viv said. The Caddy slid to a slow stop.
“He must have given up, since he was outnumbered,” Dale said.
Yeah, I thought. He gave up when we got stuck in the sand and there was no longer any challenge in it.
Viv tried to turn the Caddy around, but the strip of dirt was too narrow and she couldn’t bring herself to drive over someone’s tall cotton. She put the car in reverse, but the wheels got bogged down pretty quick.
Dale got out to look. “You’re stuck,” he said, climbing back in.
We all climbed out of the car and Dale got behind the wheel. He rocked the car back and forth a few times, racing the engine loudly while the Caddy lurched forward, then back, almost coming out of the deep ruts but then sinking back in at the last second. Viv and I watched while Stump snoozed in my arms, bored.
“We need more weight in the back.” Dale got out and leaned over to check the growing pits beneath the back tires. He looked up at me. “Salem, you’re gonna need to get in the trunk.”
“What?!”
“I’ll leave it open,” he said, as if pointing out something that should have been obvious. “Just sit cross-legged in the trunk to give it some extra weight back there. We’ll get some traction then.”
I looked around, furious. The sun was heading toward the horizon with a nice pink glow and pickups raced by, headed for evening chores and dinner. No alternative to Dale’s plan presented itself.
“Here,” I said huffily, placing Stump into Viv’s arms. I climbed over the back bumper and sat on the spare tire, leaning forward to keep my head from bumping against the raised trunk lid.
“That’s perfect,” Dale said. Because he was an idiot.
He raced around to the wheel and rocked the car back and forth a few more times. It was like being on the back of the world’s most sluggish bucking bronco. I was about to let him know how furious I was about his failed plan, when it suddenly succeeded. The Caddy lurched out of the hole and Dale drove it onto higher ground.
Because Viv was not quite the idiot Dale was, she kept her mouth shut as she got behind the wheel and I climbed out of the trunk and into the backseat.
I fumed all the way back into town.
Exodus Ministry was in yet another shopping center full of potholes and faded striping. Viv pulled the Caddy into the lot and then froze.
There was a lot to take in, for one thing, the news vans. There were three of them, with the big antenna on top, and lots of other cars, much more than the usual Exodus bunch. Apparently they were looking for more fuel for the Les fire.
Then, there was the banner, stretched across the front of the building.
“Happy ninetieth Birthday ‘Viv’!!” it read.
“What the hell?” Viv said.
“Look at that!” Dale shouted and pointed to the banner. “Somebody remembered!”
Viv rolled her eyes. “You – you –” But whatever she was going to say, she thought better of it. “They didn’t remember, Les just had them do it after Salem called.” She glared at me.
“Come on!” I hopped out of the car and grabbed the balloons.
“Would you look at this, Viv?” I said. I leaned in close and took her by the elbow, like she needed the assistance. “All your friends have come out to wish you happy birthday.” I talked slowly and raised my voice like her hearing was bad. “Isn’t that so nice?”
Viv batted my hand away and looked mad enough to spit nails.
Not even the fact that the Exodus crowd was ninety percent male pacified her.
Les came up and gave Viv one of his signature bear hugs. “Viv,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her face. “Happy birthday, friend.”
Viv tugged her lips back in a flat smile and nodded, but even she couldn’t be mad at Les. Les was just too good, too honestly good, through and through, and people couldn’t help but feel that when they were around him. That was the main reason I’d enlisted him to help with this ‘party.’ Viv wouldn’t be able to be mad at him, so she would have to feel guilty for all the fuss made under her false pretenses. She had nowhere to go but guilt.
A tapping at the door caught my attention, and I looked up to see the annoying reporter from Channel 11 looking hopefully through the window.
I pushed the door open two inches and said, “There’s no controversy swirling around here. It’s just a birthday party.”
“I see that,” she said brightly. “I wondered if Mr. Nolan would be willing to give us a few minutes of his time for a follow-up interview.”
Mr. Nolan has given you more than enough, I thought irritably, but didn’t get the chance to say anything because Les reached around me and took hold of the door.
“Thanks, but this is a private party.” He smiled benignly and closed the door.
The girl looked surprised, then – seriously, a grown woman – she pouted. I guess the bright smile and wide eyes usually worked, and she wasn’t sure how to proceed when they didn’t. She raised her hand to try the door again, but the cameraman lowered the camera and held up a hand to stop her. At least one of them had sense.
I wandered around the periphery of the party and called Trisha on her cell. “You have to call off your cub reporter,” I said when she picked up.
“Which one? Oh, Katelyn? She’s not my problem tonight. Scot and I are going to dinner and to see that new Julia Roberts movie.” She said something – I assumed to Scot – then came back. “Where are you?”
“At Exodus. We’re throwing Viv a surprise ninetieth birthday party.”
“What’s Katelyn doing there?”
“She’s not here for the party, she just wanted to talk to Les. Actually, a whole flock of you guys are here,” I said. “She was the only one brave enough knock on the door, though. She said she wanted a follow-up interview.”
Trisha laughed. “She’s got enthusiasm, I’ll give her that much. She’s all excited about getting the scoop.”
“She’s a pain in the ass,” I grumbled.
“We all are. She’ll calm down, don’t worry. She just needs a few doors slammed in her face. Listen, do you know what time the Fat Fighters meeting is on Sunday? I might need to go to that one instead of our regular Monday meeting.”
“I don’t know, I think around 2:00 in the afternoon.”
There was more mumbling talk with Scot, then she came back on. “I might do that. Although I’m a little nervous about weighing after a restaurant meal. Have you tried the fish tacos with mango salsa at Tuco’s yet? I heard they were fantastic and they’re only three units each. I’ve been saving up my bonus units all week because I knew we were going out tonight, but I might not even need them.”
She sounded way too excited.
“I haven’t been to Tuco’s,” I said, making an effort not to sound pouty, after I’d just stood in judgment of the cub reporter for doing the same thing. Tuco’s was a trendy new ‘fusion’ restaurant downtown in the old library. I’d heard you could count on spending about fifty bucks a head for a dinner, so I figured I’d be sticking with regular old six-unit tacos at Taco John’s.
“Do you want to check out the Sunday meeting with me?” Trisha asked.
“I can’t. I volunteered to help with the Friends of Joshua house from one to four. We’re doing demo.”
“You?” She laughed.
I didn’t care for her tone. “Yes, me.”
“Well, it is demo.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I should be able to get that right.”
“I’m sorry, Salem, I just can’t picture you doing anything...handy.”
“Me either. But Marky assured me they can put anyone to work.”
“Marky. He’s the guy CJ Hardin left his fiancée for?”
I made a noncommittal noise, because I wasn’t sure about the sequence of events, and I was still kind of irritated with her for her disparagement of my handyman skills.
“Is Tony going with you?”
“To the Friends of Joshua thing? No, why?”
“You should take him. He’d be a big help.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said, although it also felt like a bit too much, seeing Tony twice in one week. Like things were moving too fast.
He would be a big help. Tony would more than make up for whatever damage I was guaranteed to do. He’d built the most beautiful cradle for our baby when I was pregnant. He had some handyman skills.
“I need to go, the movie’s starting soon. If Katelyn bugs you again, tell her I said she needs to get back and edit her piece for tomorrow... Tell Viv happy birthday for me. I can’t believe she’s ninety years old. That’s incredible.”
Viv stood and received her well-wishers. She looked like she was starting to enjoy herself, which was obviously not acceptable. So I was glad to see Cecil Turnbull milling around at the back of the crowd, waiting his turn.
Cecil was somewhere around Viv’s age (although who the heck knew what that was) with white hair and the wardrobe that (I imagined) an insurance salesman would wear while taking the weekend off to putter around the yard. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was, and I didn’t want to think about how many pounds lighter. He was pudgy, but not fat.
He habitually walked with his elbows out, his wrists on his hips, and his hands to his back. It was almost like he was subconsciously hiding something, but it was an unusual enough stance that he actually attracted attention to himself. What he lacked in physical stature, he more than made up for in ego. He’d been convicted of embezzling from the bank where he worked, and served almost four years in prison. After he got out, he had volunteered at Exodus because there wasn’t much else for him to do. He and his wife had sold their big house and bought a little condo, and none of his old friends would talk to him, but he still acted like he ran the place.
I was pretty sure he had a thing for Viv. Viv wasn’t going near him. Although she loved men, she loved her money way more, and she wasn’t letting any known thief near it.
“Vivian,” he said, unclamping his hands from his side to reach out to her. “Many happy returns of the day.” He was the kind of guy who said stuff like that.
He leaned in to hug her, and she dodged sideways, patting him on the arm. “Thank you, Cecil. That’s very kind of you. Is that cake?”
After we sang “Happy Birthday” to Viv and she cut the cake, we all milled around talking and eating. Les walked up to me with a small plate full of cake. “Did you tell me you just met this guy?” he asked, nodding toward Dale.
“Yeah, Monday,” I said. And now here he was, a constant fixture in my life.
“But he knew Viv before, right?”
“No, she met him when he showed up at my house Monday evening.”
“Really?” He smiled as he watched Dale and Viv holding forth in front of a group of people. Whatever story were telling, apparently it was funny. “They act like old buddies,” Les said.
I jabbed at my cake and remained silent. I wasn’t in the mood to talk about Viv and Dale. Plus, I found that I couldn’t look at Les without seeing the comedian with the banjo music playing in the background, so I wasn’t really in the mood to talk to him yet, either.
“You too?” he said after a moment.
“Me too what?”
“You’re disappointed in me too?” He gestured with his head toward the front windows, where the small crowd of reporters waited for something newsworthy to happen.
“I’m not disappointed,” I said. “I’m just...” I wasn’t sure what I was, actually. “Confused, I guess.” I remembered what Marky said, about people like Les being the biggest part of his problem. It hurt my heart to think that – it felt like a betrayal. Les was good. He was a good man. It didn’t make sense to me that anything he did or said wouldn’t make the world a better place.
“Do you really feel that way?” I blurted. “What you said on TV. Is that what you really think?”
He gave me a tolerant smile that made me suddenly want to smack him. “Have you ever known me to be untruthful?”
“No, but...”
“But what?”
“Are you sure about that? I mean, have you really...did you think your answer through?”
This time he didn’t even try to look patient, he just gave me a very bland look and remained silent.
I rolled my eyes, frustrated. Just as Les was never untruthful, he was also never flippant. He never spoke lightly. “But, Les, seriously. How can – how can it be sinful to love someone? If God is all about love, why would he disapprove of two people loving each other, even if they are the same gender?”
Still with the bland look. “When did I say it was sinful for two people to love each other?”
“Les, don’t tell me you have not heard the way people are making fun of you.”
“Of course I have,” he said mildly. He raised an eyebrow. I knew him well enough that I thought he wasn’t as impervious to all the commotion as he wanted me to believe.
I took another bite of my cake, not sure what to say. I guess if he didn’t think it was a big deal that half the country was making fun of him, I wouldn’t either.
That resolve lasted roughly fifteen seconds. “I hate this,” I said. “I hate seeing you be the butt of jokes. I hate people calling you a hater. And I hate...” I hadn’t even realized I thought it, until the words came tumbling out of my mouth. “I hate wondering if you’re wrong.”
“And I hate you thinking that I can’t possibly be wrong.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you can’t put me on a pedestal, Salem. You can’t make a false god of me.”
“I’m not making a false god of you, Les. I just...I trust you. I know you’re a person who prays all the time, who studies your Bible. I know you’re someone who has no agenda except to please God. I count on you, Les.”
“That was all good up until that last sentence. You can’t count on me, Salem. Not to know the answer to everything.”
“Then what? Are you saying you were wrong?”
He shook his head. “No. She asked me a question and I answered it truthfully. If she asked me again right now, I would say the exact same thing.”
“Really? I mean seriously, Les, think about it. The Bible was written a long time ago. People have changed. Rules of society have changed.”
“God hasn’t.”
“But the Bible wasn’t written by God, it was written by men who were speaking for God. What if they were wrong? I mean, they were people. They were human. We all see things through the lens of our own understanding, right? We – we have certain assumptions based on what we’ve been taught, based on how we’ve experienced the world. Those guys did, too. They weren’t completely neutral. They couldn’t have been. So why should we live our lives based on the prejudices of a guy two thousand years ago?”
“Why would we live by anything in the Bible says, then? Salem, I can’t just take out the parts I don’t like and pretend they don’t exist.”
“I’m just saying, maybe it’s not as black and white as you think it is. Maybe there’s room for interpretation there.”
“Of course there’s interpretation. Salem. We’re all interpreting. That’s all we’re doing. In the absence of God coming down with a PowerPoint presentation and a bulleted list, we’re interpreting what has been written. Even if he did come down with a bulleted list, we’d be interpreting the list. What I gave was my interpretation. My understanding, based on what I’ve read and understood, and what people – people who are a lot smarter than I am – have read and understood.”
“Well, if we’re all interpreting, then...we could be wrong.”
He nodded, as if this was a given. “Yep.”
“Maybe you could go back and talk to that reporter. Tell her there’s a possibility you were wrong.”
He laughed. I wanted to take the last bit of my cake and throw it at him, but instead I popped it into my mouth.
“I just got through saying that if she asked me again, I would give the same answer.”
I sighed and tossed my paper plate into the trash can nearby. “I get it. You need to take a stand for what you think is right.”
“Salem, I’m not taking a stand on anything. She asked me a question, I answered it. I’m not the one who blew it into this big social commentary mess.”
“I hate it.”
“You said that already.”
“But I really hate it.”
“I know.”
“You know that people think you’re the face of oppression and intolerance.”
He nodded. “Some do.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course it does. But does it bother me enough to lie? No.”
“Stubborn,” I said, wrapping an arm around his waist and leaning my head against his shoulder.
“There are worse things than people thinking badly of you,” he said, his hand warm and a little clumsy on my head.
“I know,” I said. “There’s people thinking badly of you.”
He sighed and stepped away. “Count it all joy, Salem. Let patience have its work and all that.” Then he nudged me gently back toward the center of the room. “Now go wish your friend a happy birthday. I can’t believe that woman is ninety years old.” He shook his head.
“I know, right?” I said.