Angel Falling Softly (15 page)

She walked into a dead calm that hung like a curtain over the incipient dawn. By the time she got back to the tavern, the rough edges of the Wasatch Front were painted turquoise blue. She drove home through the gray dawn. She showered and crawled into bed and slept till noon.

R
achel was standing outside the Relief Society room waiting for Sunday School to conclude when Charlene Millington rushed up to her with such enthusiasm that Rachel had to restrain herself from pirouetting out of the way like a rodeo clown dodging a charging bull.

“It’s incredible!” Charlene exclaimed, seizing Rachel’s arm in order to impart added emphasis.

“What is?”

“Andy! You wouldn’t believe it!” She released her grip on Rachel’s arm and clasped her hands to her ample bosom. “Ever since those bees stung him half to death, his allergies haven’t bothered him once! Even dairy, and that was always the worst! Thursday morning Andy got the soy confused with the half-and-half, and how that makes him swell up! So bad he can’t breathe almost! Well, I was all ready to rush him to the emergency room, but then I double-checked to make sure of the symptoms and—nothing! Like any perfectly healthy kid. You know, Rachel, I’ve heard about using bee-sting therapy to treat problems like that. My great-aunt May swore it was keeping honey bees that kept her rheumatoid arthritis at bay all those years. Always thought it was old wives’ tales, you know. But I’m beginning to think she was onto something.”

Hardly certain of where to begin, Rachel simply said, “So he’s all right then?”

“Right as rain. Oh, and that lady you had over—”

“Milada.”

“Milada. You really must thank her for me. She handled everything so calm-like. I guess when you live in New York City, nothing surprises you. I was ready to go to pieces.” Charlene paused and cast a furtive glance over her shoulder. “Did you hear about her and Troy the other night—?”

Rachel hadn’t, but her heart sank. The bell rang before Charlene could tell her. Sunday school let out, and it was time to get ready for Relief Society.

Joan Ellis walked into the Relief Society room a minute later, and Rachel couldn’t resist the opportunity to extract information from an unimpeachable source. They exchanged pleasantries. Rachel said, in as offhand a manner as she could muster, “I hear Troy had an interesting date the other night.”

“I would say so. Not that he’s told
me
all the gory details, but a mother can read between the lines.”

“What happened exactly?” Rachel asked with a bit too much intensity.

“What do you expect? A woman like
that
—” Her tone of voice said far more than her words.

Rachel felt a reflexive clenching in her gut. “A woman like what?” But she was guilty of the same thoughts:
not a Mormon, not from around here, not one of us, a
gentile.

“You tell me,” Joan shot back. “You seem to know her
awfully
well.”

“She’s a perfectly honorable woman on her own terms,” Rachel replied, even as a nagging voice at the back of her head reminded her that she didn’t know Milada well enough to vouch for her character. But she liked Milada and felt protective of her reputation and her standing in the community.

“In
my
day there were certain things
honorable
women didn’t do on a first date.”

“And I’m sure in your day no
honorable
man invited himself into a woman’s house on the
first
date
.
”

Just then Sister Garner bustled into the room with the materials for her Relief Society lesson. She practically skidded to a halt, the tension in the room hitting her like an invisible force field.

Joan took a step back and smiled thinly. “I guess I can’t exactly blame her. A woman waiting for my Troy to make the first move could get herself awful frustrated. I suppose it’s reassuring to know that women still find him attractive.”

She laughed, but there was no humor in her laughter. Her son’s marital status was a sore point with Joan Ellis. Her opinions on the subject of marriage were a matter of public record. “It’s all well and good,” she had stated on many occasions, “that Steve Young up and finally got himself married, but I do think the Brethren should have taken him aside and told him to get himself settled down. There’s no excuse for a man like that to be single and over thirty.”

With that, Sister Ellis made a show of walking over and offering to help Sister Garner ready her lesson.

Rachel’s opinion on the subject was that Joan could hurry things along greatly if she kicked Troy out of the house. Or at the least stopped making his lunch and cooking his dinner. Talk about not being willing to buy the cow when he could literally get the milk for free.

But some rhetorical weapons civilized people recoiled from using, if only to spare bystanders the collateral damage.

M
ilada sat in the wicker chair deep beneath the eaves of the porch. Fresh blood coursed through her veins. The flood of oxygen burned like a low fever, making her complexion pinker than usual and leaving her with a contented feeling.

The afternoon sun slanted down the street. The temperature hovered in the nineties. But it was “a dry heat,” as they were wont to say in Utah. And measurably more tolerable than the steaming humidity of the Atlantic coast at this time of year. She savored a respectable 1993 Merlot and watched the quiet neighborhood dramas play out in the driveways and front lawns.

The rhythm of people passing up and down the sidewalk told her when services began and ended at the Mormon chapel a block north on Willow Way. She made a game of guessing which of her neighbors were Mormon and which were not. The man in the red shorts washing down his mud-splattered Dodge Ram pickup, probably not. Ditto the two teenagers who’d set up a ramp at the end of their driveway and had been practicing backside one-eighties on their skateboards for the last two hours straight.

The breeze shifted about. She caught the smell of steak broiling on a charcoal grill. From over a fence and across a backyard came the shout and splash of a kid cannon-balling into a swimming pool. A lawnmower started up. The Mormons allowed considerable leeway in their
sharia
as far as the gentiles were concerned. Utah had a paucity of Blue Laws, though obtaining the Merlot had approximated a visit to a twenties-era speakeasy.

The bishop strode down the sidewalk. He was wearing an off-the-rack navy blue suit. It looked like something his mother got for him at Sears. He stopped and talked to the man washing the truck. They both laughed. The bishop slapped him on the back.

So Mr. Red Shorts was a lapsed Mormon.

The bishop waved at the skateboarders. “Hey,” the tall one replied, with practiced slacker nonchalance. A lady stepped out of the house opposite Milada’s and called to the bishop. He jogged up to the front door, and they spoke briefly. Then he headed across the street, and Milada realized he was coming to visit her.

“Good afternoon, Bishop.”

He stepped up to the porch. “How are you doing, Miss Daranyi?”

“Milada,” she said. “I am doing quite well, thank you.” She set down the wine glass. She took off her sunglasses and hung them on the second button of her blouse.

“You’ve had a—pleasant weekend?”

“Quite satisfying.” She smiled. He was circling an uncomfortable subject. She could imagine what it was and decided to play along. No sense getting in a high dudgeon over her sense of privacy. Besides, she was curious to hear how the other side of the story was playing out in the public imagination.

He got to the point. “Troy does have a tendency to overreact at times, judge situations rather severely. Especially when he’s shown to be not as close to perfection as he imagines himself to be.”

Milada almost laughed. That made her—what, Bathsheba, despoiler of Christian manhood? She had tried. And if she hadn’t been so impressed by the bishop’s wife, she might have tried playing the game with him. Troy, though, had proved something of an object lesson in that regard. The payoff was not worth the risk.

He quickly backtracked. “I don’t mean to imply—”

The sparkle in her eyes stopped him. “Rest assured, Bishop, I have no schemes on the boy.”

“No,” he agreed wearily, “I didn’t suppose you did.”

She could guess at the other questions he’d intended to ask. About how Troy had insisted that what had transpired that night had involved something more than mere temptation. About how she had “overpowered his will,” whatever that meant. But she believed the bishop was a man predisposed to see the best in people—especially those he did not know well—and enough of a chauvinist to consider a woman’s virtue the man’s burden and responsibility.

D
avid’s conclusion: the boy kept his pants on, and that’s all that mattered in the end. “Why did he even ask her out in the first place?” he asked his wife that night. He sat in bed thumbing through the Sunday
Deseret Morning News.
Reading the Sunday paper was how he unwound from his ecclesiastical duties.

Rachel stared at him as if he were rather dim. “Because she’s young and beautiful and rich and successful. And not a little exotic, don’t you think?”

“And a nonmember. This is Troy we’re talking about, remember. He won’t even read the Sunday paper on Sunday!” He shook the newsprint for emphasis. “Can you really imagine Troy marrying someone like Milada Daranyi? Or seriously dating her?”

“Of course not. I think for a brief, silly moment he was reliving his missionary days—dreaming about taming the she-wolf, or whatever he fantasizes about. I haven’t the slightest idea. Even Troy is smart enough to know that life isn’t like an Anita Stansfield novel.”

“So why doesn’t he ask out Michelle Montgomery? If that’s the type of woman he’s attracted to.”

“To begin with, Michelle is not the slightest bit interested in going out with Troy. I would be disappointed with her if she did. Troy is definitely
not
Michelle’s type. And nothing against Troy, but she can do better.”

“Who is Michelle’s type?”

“A man not intimidated by the thought of being married to a successful, independent woman.”

“I was intimidated by you.”

“Really?” She cuddled next to him. “I saw you in my family home evening group that first week at BYU, and I said to myself, I’m going to marry
him.
My only worry was that one of my roommates might have picked you out first.”

“Like I say, the person who knows what he—what
she
—wants always has the advantage.”

“And you didn’t?”

“I was just off my mission. For the past two years I’d done nothing
but
think about what I was going to do for the rest of my life. But I was hardly prepared to
do
anything about it.” He tossed the sports pages down to the foot of the bed and picked up the financial section.

“That’s why I had to. It’s a lot easier for a man to find himself if he’s got a woman telling him where to look.” She thought about it for a minute. “I wonder what Milada wants.”