Games of the Heart (Crimson Romance) (2 page)

“She’s not some chorus babe, Jane. She has to be, well, I’d say, eighteen or nineteen. But she could be sixteen. I’ve never asked.”

“Whoa, hold the phone. Not a chorus girl? Who is she?” I could no longer hide in the kitchen.

“She’s got nothing to do with this. I’m like a package of ham that’s been shoved to the back of the refrigerator. The whole world is out to get me, although Switzerland stays neutral. Lately I wake up in the morning and wish my parents hadn’t met.”

“Get out of here.” Mr. Rhinestone started to get up and I grabbed him. “I’m kidding, Gramps. You’re better at telling jokes than Jerry Seinfeld.”

“Humor is another way to be serious, Miss Pastor Lady. My problem is the damn-blasted stroke.”

“The stroke happened, you didn’t cause it, Gramps, and the physical therapist said you’d be okay. What changed?” I could feel the corners of my mouth head south. I looked around the room for his Bertha, his ever-present guitar. He was alone, and that troubled me enough, until it finally sunk in that he hadn’t reputed that she might be a chorus girl. For once in my life I was speechless, at least for five seconds. “Are you huffy like this to the folks you preach to? Wonder that they let you get in back of a pulpit.” He planted his boots in the middle of the “it comes furnished” living room.

I stuck out my arm, because I could sense he was about to bolt. “This isn’t about me, Mister. When were you going to tell me about this girl? Have you, um, married an adolescent? If you’re sure she’s at least eighteen, um, should I be relieved? Wait. What’s happening to my orderly world?” I held my head and rocked it back and forth.

“Stop your yammering, Jane, for sanity’s sake. It’s not like she’d have me,” he said and waved a hand in the air, raked it through his abundant steel-gray hair, and frowned. Deeply. He pushed past me and limped to the front window, stretched back the tan drapes. I followed, and we looked at the convertible.

I had to grab the above-mentioned drape for support when it hit me. Ton of bricks to the noggin. He was doing it with a teenager. I slapped my mouth. I tried to take a long, cleansing breath. In and out, yoga style. I sputtered, “Are you, well, cohabitating?”

He didn’t even look my way. He wasn’t using the cane, so that should have been a good sign until he said, “I’m old, feeble. I’m useless. I’m disabled.” He retreated to the sofa, slumped over, blending in with the beige fabric so much that if it weren’t for rhinestones I could have convinced myself this was a nightmare and the result of the diet cupcakes I had for dessert.I stared. Was that a yes or a no to my question on lusting after a teenager? His face turned to pea soup with undertones of eggplant and I winced as he slid the knee-high cowboy boots off his feet. He rubbed his toes and then let his head flop back. With his eyes closed, his face was a street map of wrinkles.

When could this all have happened? We talked every other day at least, emailed, and this was the first I’d heard of any setback or a, um, teenage romantic interest. Or his extreme lifestyle makeover to a rhinestone cowboy.

Do you think about ministers as uptight, buttoned down, repressed and sometimes clueless? Heaven help me, I’m not like that and I never get speechless. I like talking, but right then I was without a comeback, snappy or otherwise. As an itinerant pastor, actually, which means I fill in for ministers when they’re on sabbatical or away from their flock, I need a stock of flip answers because most of the time I’m cross-examined about my credentials. That was definitely the case in point when I arrived six weeks ago at Mega Church, USA, technically known as Desert Hills Community Church. Don’t know what they were expecting. What they got was a slightly less busty version of a young Dolly Parton, just slightly, without the good lookin’ makeup. It wasn’t what they’d ordered in a new youth pastor. Honestly, that’s what I heard when I was quietly taking care of business in the ladies’ room as two of the office staff were chatting about me. It wasn’t the Dolly comment that hurt, mind you — I love her — it was the dig about my inability to apply cosmetics.

Yes, being a Chatty Cathy helped in most of the scrapes in which I’ve found myself, but right then, I opened and closed my mouth and still nothing came forth.

With my history of relatives abandoning me (note to self: check the Internet to see if parents have been incarcerated again lately), I was floundering big time with Gramps, who was the color of rotten grapes and breathing unevenly on my sofa. My finger fluttered to my robe’s pocket and my cell, ready to punch 911.

You see, he wasn’t just my grandfather and a professor, he’d become a heartthrob. With his band, Slam Dunk, he created classic rock hits that you can’t stop humming and did it time and again. Sort of a Paul McCartney-esque guy, and maybe I’m a bit partial, but I think he’s better looking, in a grandfatherly way, than Sir Paul. He had friends, recording sessions, folks he knew at church and even an on-again, off-again romance with my good friend U.S. Senator Geraldine English.

While looking after Gramps as he recovered from the stroke, I licked my wounds from being sacked along with the serious reprimand from the council and spent quality time nagging him. That kind of stuff. Home was Carlsbad, California, and if you think about golf and tennis at La Costa, locking-block kid heaven of Legoland and a chi-chi beachy town just north of San Diego’s city limits, you’ve got a snapshot of where Gramps calls home, and sometimes me, too. If you’re singing a Beach Boys song or something from the Mamas and the Papas, you’re a bit younger than Gramps, but you probably know the kind of surf city where I grew up.

So after his stroke, I was Nurse Nancy. I needed a time-out, still store from the above-mentioned butt-kicking. When he refused all coddling, I accepted this temporary position at Desert Hills, which came with a pint-size furnished condo that had no charm or style. Somehow it suited me; I didn’t want to care. I was a temp. I would be out of the job in six months, so it would have been nuts to drag anything personal to the desert. I’m to the point when a man asks me out, I tell him to step back and think it over. How was I going to counsel Gramps with this track record? Wait, don’t answer that.

“Did you have a setback?” I swallowed fear, and it tasted just like the second boxed chicken Alfredo.

Mumble, mumble. “Yes.”

“When?”

“Not another stroke?”

I have no idea why, but I moved to the door and walked out on the porch. Okay, he’d driven here. He could control a car. That had to be a good sign, or had I been hallucinating about the car in the driveway? Even in the streetlamp’s meager glow, that Mustang was red. I closed the door. “Gramps, why aren’t you driving your Tundra truck?”

“Wanted to breathe new-car smell again before I died.”

“So you rented it, good. When did you arrive?” Call it a premonition, but I was glad I was near the sofa when he said, “Three weeks ago.”

Now it was my turn to collapse into one of the two nondescript loveseats in my beige and glass living room. “Excuse me?” I clucked. “You’ve been in Vegas for three entire weeks and you are just now coming over here to see me?”

He tilted forward, lacing his hands, resting his forehand on his fingers and, silly me, I assumed he was praying until he said, “Trying to figure myself out. All I discovered was I am a limp, broken and empty shell. Crumpled. Look at me, really look, Jane. There’s no man left. I know I’m not the first to seek refuge in the bright lights of Sin City. Yeah, all I found were bright lights and an old, big city.” He studied the cream-colored Berber carpet as if the answer to the meaning of life were in the weave.

I checked it out, too. I didn’t find any help so I said, “What you did wasn’t that unusual.” I was walking a long, thin line, like the one in the middle of a highway, with two semis heading straight at me. “Lots of men find they want a playmate.” I added, “Like your very, very, very young one.” It was grunted under my breath. It was snide. It felt good. I’m a preacher, but I’m human.

Gramps ignored me, which was just as well, and talked to the carpet, holding his head in his hands. “I’m on the run. From the world, friends, co-workers — heck, even strangers. And especially God. The body you see is as good as it’s going to get, but honestly, Jane, I’m hurting. I am angry, angrier than when your grandmother died, a heck of a lot angrier than when your folks decided parenting wasn’t their thing. Didn’t know I could get so stinking mad. I’m stinking angry at myself for getting old. I’m a worn-out geezer, a windbag, a codger.”

I circled him with my arms. He was small. When did he shrink? “Oh, Gramps. I love you. Why did you wait so long? Why didn’t you tell me? You’re not alone.” I squeezed his shoulders, and then it hit me. I pulled my arms back, stiffened my back. “Wait one confounded second. I have called you. I emailed, just today, I sent you a joke. The one about Las Vegas. Remember it? Americans spend three hundred billion dollars every year on gaming in Vegas, and that doesn’t even include weddings and elections? You wrote back, ‘Ha Ha,’ and said everything was fine.”

“Cell phones don’t care where you are. With the laptop you’ll find in the trunk of that car, I was connected with you and the college.”

“The college? Classes aren’t over. It’s not the end of summer session. Did you quit?” It didn’t seem that illogical that he’d quit a career spanning three decades since he was driving a hot convertible and living with an underage floozy.

“They let me go.”

“The chancellor fired you? The best music professor in the entire University of California system?”

“Might just as well have. Retirement. There, I said it.”

I felt the air slide from my lungs. We both knew it would happen sometime, but my grandfather always looked and felt young, at least that’s what he said and what I wanted to see. “Retirement.” It was the F-word for people who never planned to grow up or slow down. I sounded disgustingly chipper as I said, “This is great. Why, you can create some new music, you can travel, you can have hobbies, you can — ”

“Stop your preaching. Jane, look at me. I’m not some coot who lives in the past, who sits around whittling apples and bananas out of wood or solving the world’s problems with the other coots at a local watering hole. I’m a musician who had a stroke and now finds even walking a pain in the — well, and a royal pain it is. I can’t play because these fingers can’t even manage to find the frets.” He stared at his hands and balled them into fists. “As for traveling, just getting to Vegas last month was all I could do. This kid, who turned out to be the pilot and was barely shaving, asked me if I wanted a wheelchair to get off the stinking airplane. For Pete’s sake, they had me board with the mommies and the babies.”

“Gosh, Gramps, I’m coming with you next time.”

“Jane. The geezers board first.”

“Ah, do you want to tell me what you’ve done here in Las Vegas?” I asked, and it was a roundabout way to learn if he was doing the horizontal snuggly-buggly with the underage hoochie-coochie strip club dancer.

“Nothing.”

“You sure?” Okay, I really didn’t ask that because I really didn’t want to know. I just nodded.

He loosened the leather and silver braided bolo tie from his neck, slipping it out of a clasp that looked like the great state of Texas. Unbuttoning the shirt’s top buttons, he rubbed his throat and said, “Sitting in a hotel room overlooking the Strip, watching the fireworks go off at Treasure Island, that hotel with the pirate theme, ordering room service and watching Nick at Nite, reruns of
Andy Griffith
and old movies. That’s what I’ve been doing. Most of the time, I was having my own, what do you call it, pity party, like you did after Colin’s death.”

I moved the ten feet to the kitchen and grabbed bottles of water. “But you’re here now. We’re a pair when it comes to pity parties.” I pretended to wipe something off the stove, squeezing my eyes shut. But bringing up Colin’s name made an image flash into my mind. For the millionth time I could see me in the stands as Colin’s F-15 explode into a fireball right over the airfield. The air show crowd gasped. I remembered falling forward into the crowd with my chin hitting the bleacher in front and then everything in my world went black. Now each day as I brushed my teeth or dried my hair, I saw the scar on my chin from my fall. It was a constant, daily reminder, if I needed one. Pilot error, the final report had said. Not enough left to bury him.

I blinked back tears. “Remember you dragged me back home? I recall you stormed my quarters on the air force base and snapped Ben & Jerry from my quaking fingers. You growled, ‘Get that caboose of yours off the sofa and put on some clothes, girly. You’re coming home.’”

Gramps laughed. It was hollow with a raspy cough, too, but it was a start.

“Yes, and then you stopped at Denny’s, forced me to eat something other than ice cream, and took me to a jam session with Slam Dunk. As I remember it, soda spewed from your nose when I tried to play some of your music.”

He laughed a bit more, less shallow.

“Was it root beer or Pepsi?” I asked.

“You were so pathetic.”

“Yeah, runs in the family. Look at you. Let’s get you an omelet or a peanut butter sandwich. Then you can tell me your plans.” And for a second I regretted that word “plans,” because a seventy-year-old midnight cowboy driving a brand-new scarlet-colored Mustang might not have the wherewithal to formulate good plans. There was also the matter of the lady with the pasties on her feminine places. She was hanging in the air, at least in the air I was breathing.

“Jane, girl. There’s more.” By that time, he’d finished the makeshift midnight meal. “The crisis is more than just this failing body, this bundle of bones. God’s let me down. I’m not a Christian anymore. Maybe it’s me who has let Him down, don’t know the answer on that.”

“Um, oh.” You’ve probably made notes right now that if you ever need counseling, I’ll be the last to be asked. I don’t blame you. I wasn’t too keen on myself at that second. But you have to understand that this was the man who had taken me to church and introduced me to the congregation three days after I was born. This was the man who had given me away when I married, been there just five months later when the jet exploded, and Gramps arranged Collin’s funeral. He had cheered me on when the District Council of my denomination granted my pastoral papers and held my hand when the same District Council threatened to withdraw them.