All Dressed Up (9 page)

“Don’t.” Emma
closed her eyes. The tears stung and swelled and she wished she
could sob more, the way she had yesterday, instead of just
squeezing out this parsimonious flow. “Not yet. We’re not talking
about it yet. I want to. With my head. With my heart I’m not
ready.”

“I guess I’m
not, either.”

“But you can
be the one to get the dress for me if you want.” She put down the
phone, depriving an unknown P.I. of some easy cash.

On Sunday
morning, Lainie attended church. At St James, where the wedding
should have been. The Reverend Mac’s eyes lit up when he saw her,
and though he quickly turned it into a smile that merely welcomed a
potential new member of his flock, Lainie wasn’t fooled. They’d
definitely been flirting the other day.

It was strange
attending church. She hadn’t in so long, not since a couple of
years as a child when she’d been sent to Catholic school, where it
was Mass. She didn’t know why she’d been sent to Catholic school,
because her family wasn’t Catholic. Some fight with the authorities
at her previous school, probably. Her father was always getting
into fights with authority figures. The Keoghs had most definitely
come from the wrong side of the tracks.

She remembered
the ritualized, poetic phrasing of the Catholic prayers and
responses with a rote familiarity, but some of it was a little
different here, so she would find herself happily joining in and
then suddenly going off track from the rest of the congregation
like a musician squawking out the wrong notes.

The service
moved her and sometimes she had tears in her eyes and she didn’t
like it. She didn’t like the way churches seemed to put God’s power
in harness. She didn’t like Mac’s minister clothes. God was surely
bigger than this place which smelled of old books and wood polish
and where the pews were by no means crowded with worshippers, so
why should it make her cry?

She felt
tricked into the emotion. She had huge issues with God, in all
sorts of areas.

Afterward, she
hung back while Mac talked to his parishioners as they filed out.
She would have found it stressful – so much greeting and caring and
remembering of people’s circumstances, all concentrated into the
space of a few minutes. At least as a realtor she got to space it
out, and it wasn’t expected to be so personal.

How was
someone’s husband? Someone else’s mother was due for her visit
tomorrow, right? Mac seemed easy with it, tireless. She thought his
congregation lucky to have a minister who was so physically strong.
She wondered what they thought of his red beard, his arm tattoos,
his motorcycle, his sparkling, drownable blue eyes.

“Good to see
you,” he said when she finally went up to him. They shook
hands.

“I – I have to
admit, I didn’t come for the service.”

“But you came
to the service, so that’s a plus.”

Too late, she
realized that she had sounded as if she was flirting again, saying
she’d come to see him. Which she had. And in exactly the way he
thought. But of course she didn’t want to say that. Not straight
out. Not even with his blue eyes all lit up for her. “I came to see
if you still had the garment bag from Emma’s dress. We think she
must have left it in your change-room on Friday… the vestry… Did
you happen to – ”

He nodded,
notching his enthusiasm down to match her practical and very
non-flirty problem. “You know what, I haven’t been in there since
Friday evening. I changed at home this morning. Give me a minute
and we’ll check.”

Someone else
wanted to speak to him, a genuine parishioner, who had
organizational questions about the Fellowship Coffee Morning. She
was also apparently involved with the mothers’ club and the Bible
group, which was another of Lainie’s problems with God and church.
It shouldn’t need to be so structured. Mac shouldn’t have to work
so hard to convince people to come along. People should just eddy
through the place like a soft breeze, whenever they wanted.

Or was this
impractical? Did it discount the realities of human nature too
much?

The
parishioner left and all of a sudden there was nobody else around,
just Lainie and Mac. “Come this way,” he said.

She followed
him down the aisle and past the altar to the little room at the
back. The garment bag was still there, and easily found, neatly but
puffily folded on the seat of the desk chair. The chair back masked
it from instant view. Lainie clutched it against her stomach and
said, “That’s a relief. I seem to be storing the gown for the time
being, so it’s best to have it in the custom-fitted bag.”

“So Charlie
doesn’t have it? I’m sorry, I told Emma he did.”

“No, I have it
now. I’ll call her or her mom and let them know.”

“How are they
both doing, Emma and Charlie?”

“I haven’t
spoken to them. Charlie’s back in the city. I guess Emma’s with her
family. I really want to call her, but – ”

“I think she
has a few things to work out.” He looked as if he might have
something more to say, but nothing came.

Lainie
wondered when he’d seen or spoken to Emma, to tell her that Charlie
had the dress, but didn’t want to ask. “Well…” she said.

“Want to stop
in for coffee at my place?”

“I’d like
that.”

A weight
seemed to lift from both their shoulders. They hadn’t just imagined
this. They both went a little silly for a few minutes, the same
kind of silly that leads little boys to pelt balls of screwed up
paper at the little girls they secretly think they might marry when
they grow up.

Lainie admired
his garden and his view of the lake. He asked her, not seriously,
how much this place would go for if the church ever decided to
sell, and she advised him, not seriously either, to put in a deck,
another bathroom and a triple garage. They twinkled and sizzled and
smirked at each other.

They got as
far as making coffee, sitting outside on the garden bench and
starting to drink it, but then God somehow reared His ugly head and
Lainie heard Mac say to her, “There was this big empty space inside
me and God just came flooding in to fill it even though I didn’t
want Him to.”

“I’m sorry, I
have to tell you,” she blurted out, “I hate when people talk like
that.”

After half a
breath of silence, he answered, “I know, it sounds really
trite.”

“Is that
sarcasm?”

“No, no, it
does, you’re right, it sounds trite, but I don’t have better words.
I think that’s often why there’s this whole formulaic evangelical
Christian phraseology, because people can’t find good, original
words for it so they at least use familiar ones. It’s a kind of
code. A currency.” He looked out at the lake where there were
sailing boats full of people who hadn’t attended church this
morning.

“You’re pretty
smart, aren’t you?” She turned her head long enough to smile at
him, frowning at the same time because she strongly suspected that
the best of their relationship was already over. Talk about the
hectic pace of modern life!

She was pretty
smart, too, as it happened, but she hadn’t had many
opportunities.

“Yeah, my
father was a nuclear scientist,” Mac said, “and my mother was
ruthless about general knowledge. She was appalling. I grew up
knowing everything about nothing, and nothing about – ”

He spread his
arms and let Lainie fill in for him, which she correctly did,
letting her tone turn the words into a formula. A code. A currency.
“God. So there was an empty space.”

“And He filled
it,” Mac said. Obviously he could see her distaste for what he was
saying, but he wasn’t going to back down. She should probably
admire him for that. But in her experience, people who were
comfortable talking about God in that way never did back down. They
didn’t seem to have any kind of a reverse gear at all. “Took a
while. Heroin filled it first. Then service. Drug rehab counselor.
Paramedic. Dad. There you go, life story – life stories, for all
four of my lives – in around twelve words.”

“Oh, you have
kids?” Might this common ground be enough on which to build?

“One daughter.
Grown. Twenty-seven. She’s amazing. She’s an anthropologist.” His
expression grew more animated, then fell. “But she lives in Texas,
so I don’t see her as often as I’d like.”

No, it would
be cheating to call kids common ground. Everyone had kids. “I’m
sorry,” she told him. “I just don’t have it in me to believe in God
in that structured way.”

“Because He’s
trite?”

“And don’t try
to turn that around into some kind of test He’s sending me, that I
have to get past the triteness.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, you give
in that easily?”

“Who says I’m
giving in? My strategy is way more complicated than that.”

Lainie laughed
despite her best intentions. “You don’t have a strategy.”

He dropped his
voice, the more intimate pitch reeling her body closer like a fish
being reeled in on a line. “I can, um, get one…” He cleared his
throat. “Excuse me… if you want me to have one.” He looked across
at her, his expression shrinking the space between them on the
garden bench. It was the big moment, and they both knew it. The
naked meeting of glances, the zing in the air, the molding of flesh
into a new shape just because they were both in the same space
together.

Lainie
couldn’t believe they were managing to use God as a series of
pick-up lines. At their age. Or that they were negotiating the
future of their relationship so soon. “I – I don’t think so,” she
told him finally. “I don’t think I need you to work out a strategy,
Mac. I think the God thing is a bit too much of a barrier.”

“Because we
would keep needing to have these trite conversations?” He made the
trite God conversations sound like something to want, like an
adventure. He seemed more at ease with her wobbly belief systems
than she would have thought, which felt okay for a few moments, but
then pretty fast turned into a new reason to mistrust. He saw her
as a conquest to be made on God’s behalf.

“And then you
talk me round to a position of defined faith, and then what?” she
asked. “The challenge is gone, and you’re onto the next lonely
middle-aged female agnostic with good legs.”

“Eyes,” he
said.

“What?”

“It’s your
eyes. Your brown eyes. And your rusty hair.”

“Right.”

There was a
second of silence, then he asked in a lower voice, “What is it
about me?”

“Your size.
Your beard. Your voice,” she blurted out. “Your eyes, too.”

“And always a
few things you can’t put your finger on.”

“Always.” She
closed her eyes for a moment, feeling an absurd sense of loss. “But
sorry, no. It’s not going anywhere this time. I just don’t think
there’s a good place for it to go.”

She listened
to the silence that greeted her decision and felt like a total
idiot and a masochist for crushing that lovely feeling she’d had –
and obviously he’d had, too – since Friday afternoon. The
breathlessness. The disbelief. The suddenness. Even when she was
otherwise so down about Emma and Charlie, the giddy twinge of
knowledge that Mac McLintock liked her had still been there, and
lovely.

Just
lovely.

Why couldn’t
she have let both of them live in a fool’s paradise for a little
longer?

“Sorry,” she
blurted out. “Sorry. I’m such an idiot. I just go headlong into
things, sometimes. You asked me across for coffee and I skipped
right on to our grounds for divorce.”

“What do you
want to handle next week, then? The property settlement? Custody? I
warn you, I’m keeping the hymn book collection.”

“Sorry. I’m so
sorry.”

“It’s mutual,
Lainie. I’m divorced from one atheist, it’d be crazy for me to get
involved with another one.”

“I’m not an
atheist,” she said quickly. “Not at all. I think God is very
important, I just think He’s a lot more unknowable than you do,
maybe not all that helpful to us when we ask, and I don’t like
bringing Him into conversations.”

“Can I get
back to you on it, then? Now that you’ve clarified? On whether your
theology is compatible with my needs? I could work up some dot
points.”

“Oh… no… no,”
she apologized in an anguished way, then realized too late that he
was joking. She felt so awkward. She got herself away, leaving the
coffee unfinished and feeling certain that she wouldn’t see him
again.

Chapter
Five

“Well, okay, I
won’t push the idea, but what did you think of it?” Angie asked
Brooke, about Emma’s dress.

“Oh God, I
thought it was beautiful!” Brooke wore her maroon nurse’s scrubs,
and had a bagel spread with cream cheese in her hand. She looked so
young and pretty with her highlighted blonde hair and her blue
eyes, but she was going to get hippy soon if she wasn’t careful. It
had already started.

“You see,
that’s ironic because I didn’t care for it all that much,” Angie
told her, instead of warning her to stop eating. She hated that she
wanted to warn her, hated her own narrowness about things like
weight gain and other people’s success. Her words had come out all
tight and snippy, though, and Brooke knew her too well.

“Oh, because I
chose not to blow Scott’s and my house down payment on a more
expensive gown, or hit you up for the money?” She gulped some
coffee, and then a mouthful of orange juice. She chewed off a piece
of bagel, which stuck itself to the roof of her mouth with the
cream cheese for glue, then went back to the coffee.

Again, again,
Angie had to bite her tongue. She bit and bit, and felt proud of
herself for biting. See? I didn’t say a thing. “I said I didn’t
like Emma’s, not yours,” she said to Brooke.