Life Goes On (11 page)

T
he rumor was first heard on a Monday morning in mid-November at the Coffee Cup Restaurant, where most of the town's rumors have their origins. Within an hour, it had made its way a block north to the
Harmony Herald
newspaper office, where Bob Miles sat, despondent over this bitter turn of events. He phoned Vinny at the Coffee Cup. “Is it true?”

“'Fraid so,” Vinny said, his voice trembling with grief.

Bob hung up the phone and rested his head on the desk, wracked with sorrow.

Heather Darnell was leaving the Coffee Cup. His lovely, beautiful Heather. And not just his lovely, beautiful Heather. Everyone's lovely, beautiful Heather. Or at least all the old men at the Coffee Cup who planned their days around her work hours. Now they were beyond consolation. Heather was the wife they'd never had, but maybe could have had if they had paid as much attention to their wives as they had to Heather.

By lunchtime, the men of the Coffee Cup were in a dismal mood
and, looking for someone to blame, had turned on Vinny. “She'd still be here if you weren't so cheap,” Kyle Weathers said. “We kept tellin' you to give her a raise, but did you listen to us? No, you didn't. And now look where it's got us.”

“Don't blame me. If you hadn't been such a lousy tipper, maybe she'd still be around.”

I sat in the corner eating my lunch. I had been avoiding the place in order to preserve my arteries, but had lately been craving grease and had caved in. I was also there because my wife was mad at me and had suggested I fix my own meals for a while. That too had to do with Heather, who'd come to my office the week before seeking counsel. My wife had seen her enter the meetinghouse and later that day had inquired about her visit. I couldn't elaborate, of course, because it was confidential, which riled my wife even further.

My wife is not ordinarily the jealous type, but there is something about Heather Darnell that causes even the most self-assured woman to feel threatened.

She is twenty years old and her friends from high school are away at college. They come back for the summer, walk by the Coffee Cup, tap on the glass, and wave. But she no longer gets invited to all their parties, and when she does, they talk about their sororities and how they can't wait to finish college and move to the city, far away from this place.

They make fun of the town and the people in it and, she suspects, talk about her behind her back for still living here and working at the Coffee Cup. Or so she told me.

I'd asked her how she felt about working there. “It's okay, I
guess. Everyone's nice to me and everything. I just don't want to spend my life there, that's all.”

She had broken up with her boyfriend, who'd gone to Bloomington to college and used to drive home every weekend to see her, but lately had been avoiding the trip. She had been thinking of moving to the city, getting an apartment, and finding a job.

“Why not?” I'd said at the time, not believing she'd do it.

As I reflect back, I think my being a minister carried more weight with Heather than I'd considered. My approval of her plan was apparently just the nudge she needed. Within the week, she'd turned in her notice at the Coffee Cup and packed her bags.

The men at the Coffee Cup pleaded with her to stay, to no avail. Vinny offered to raise her pay twenty cents an hour and make her manager of the noon buffet, but to her credit she wouldn't be swayed by riches or titles. Several of the men offered to accompany her to the city and, though she seemed to appreciate their thoughtfulness, she declined their generous offers.

They held a going-away party for her on a Wednesday evening, Italian Night at the Coffee Cup. Bea Majors confused her nations and played
“Vaya Con Dios”
on the organ, poorly, missing most of the notes. Fortunately, Kyle Weathers was standing near the outlet and was able to nudge the organ's electrical cord loose with his foot.

Bob Miles had driven to the jeweler in Cartersburg to buy a brass plaque, which he hung over the buffet table, proclaiming it
The Heather Darnell Honorary Salad Bar and Buffet.
Five years before, it had been christened
The Doris Elmore Honorary Salad Bar and Buffet,
but that was a minor technicality and no one even pointed it out.

Heather gave a speech about how she would always remember the Coffee Cup for giving her a start in life. The old men began to weep, dabbing at their eyes with faded red bandanas they pulled from their back pockets. Vinny gave her a pen and pencil set from the Rexall drugstore, and the men presented her with a set of matching luggage they'd purchased at Kivett's Five and Dime.

Heather was outside the Rexall the next morning at ten-thirty, waiting for the bus to the city. Her parents were with her, along with a cluster of grief-stricken old men wearing their funeral suits, as if gathered for a wake. Bob Miles snapped a picture for the
Herald
.

They heard the bus before they saw it—a low, diesel rumble coming up the hill past the park. Then the bus heaved into sight near the Dairy Queen, its silver skin gleaming in the morning sun, a purveyor of suffering and woe.

Heather's father hugged her close, her mother kissed her good-bye, and the men lined up to shake her hand and pat her back. They gathered for one last group picture while the driver loaded Heather's new suitcases into the belly of the bus. Then Heather mounted the stairs and sat in the front seat, reaching her hand through the window to touch her parents one last time.

She came back that weekend for a visit, then Monday morning returned to the city to look for a job. She's staying with Shirley Finchum's niece and her husband, who have three small children and live in an old house on the north side, where all the rich people live. The agreement was for her to help with the kids four hours a day in exchange for a room in their basement.

She found a job at a restaurant where the waitresses wore skimpy
T-shirts that showed their belly buttons. She wore a sweater her first day, which the manager instructed her to remove so the customers could see her T-shirt. Heather doubted it was her T-shirt they wanted to see and said so. Then she asked why he didn't wear a T-shirt that showed his belly button, and that was when he let her go.

The next job, working as a cashier at a gas station, went a little better. She kept that job until noon, when the manager caught her talking people out of buying lottery tickets. She wanted to discuss whether it was right to encourage poor people to gamble. Unfortunately, her boss was not the philosophical type and promptly fired her.

Her third day in the city, she found a job at a McDonald's, working on the French fry line. By the next day, she had broken out in acne, wrenched her back after slipping on grease, and decided to take early retirement.

On the fifth day, she woke up early, packed her bags, and used the last of her money to buy a bus ticket back to Harmony. She worried the whole way home what her parents would think. The bus pulled up to the Rexall at four o'clock just as Kyle Weathers was closing his barbershop. He spied her out his front window and hurried outside to help with her luggage. He loaded it in the back of his truck and drove Heather home to her parents.

Mr. and Mrs. Darnell saw them turn off the highway and come down the driveway, Heather and Kyle in his Ford pickup. Her parents' worst nightmare—their beloved daughter throwing her life away on an old geezer like Kyle Weathers. She hadn't gone to the city to live. She'd run off to get married and now was coming home to tell them what she had done. She was pregnant and Kyle
Weathers was the father and they were going to get married and live in a trailer at the edge of town. And he would die when she was thirty-five, leaving her with nine children and a mortgage. She would have to go on food stamps and get a job tending bar at the Buckhorn. Their beautiful, precious daughter. All of those images flooded their minds as they watched Kyle climb from the truck, come around, open Heather's door, and carry in the luggage.

So when Heather told them the truth, that she'd gone through three jobs in four days and had come home and Kyle had been kind enough to give her a ride home from the bus stop, they were delirious with joy and not at all upset, as she had feared they would be. And though Heather was pleased with her reception, she couldn't understand it. But then who can figure parents?

She lay low the entire weekend, resting her back and scrubbing her face. Then on Monday morning she returned to the Coffee Cup to ask for her job back. Vinny was there by himself, frying bacon and making coffee. He didn't notice her come in. It was early; the morning crowd hadn't arrived yet. In fact, since Heather had left, there hadn't been a morning crowd. Or an afternoon or evening crowd for that matter.

Her apron was hanging on a hook next to the brass plaque. Bob Miles had framed a picture and placed it alongside the plague, over the phrase
Forever in Our Hearts.
It was the picture of her seated on the bus, looking through the window as it pulled away. She lifted down the apron and tied it around her waist.

“How about I start mixing the pancake batter?” she said.

Vinny spun around at the sound of her voice. He didn't speak at
first. He tried, but words wouldn't come. “Is it really you?” he asked after a while.

“It's really me. And I might be available for employment again.”

“Whatever it takes,” Vinny said. “Name your price.”

“A twenty-cent-an-hour raise and manager of the noon buffet.”

“Done.”

“Let's shake on it,” Heather said, reaching out her hand.

So they shook on it.

“Maybe we oughta talk about you buying into the business,” Vinny said. “A young person needs a stake in the future, and I'm not going to be around here forever.”

“I don't have any money.”

“Maybe you could ask your boss for loan. I think he'd be open to that suggestion.”

“You'd do that for me?” Heather asked.

“For you,” Vinny said, “I would do that.”

It took thirty minutes for word to circulate among the elderly gentlemen in town that Heather was back to pouring coffee and consoling them in their old age. Within an hour, the Coffee Cup was full to overflowing. Men were peering through the window, praising God for this miraculous turn of events.

I stopped past around three, after the crowds had dwindled down. I ordered a Coke and made my way to a booth. Heather brought me my soda and sat down across from me.

“I see you're back,” I said, stating the obvious.

“Yes, I'm back.”

“So how do you feel? The last time we talked you didn't want to
spend your life being a waitress.”

Heather smiled. “I'm not a waitress. I'm an entrepreneur. Vinny is letting me buy into the business.”

“That's wonderful, Heather. I'm happy for you. So how does it feel to be an entrepreneur?”

“Pretty good so far. Vinny's put me in the charge of the noon buffet and next week we're adding croutons and pineapple chunks.”

I nodded my head solemnly. “Sounds like a fine place to start.”

We sat quietly. I stirred my Coke, forming a tornado in the glass, while Heather surveyed the restaurant.

“Maybe now people won't think I'm a failure,” she said after a while.

I continued stirring my Coke, then asked if she had ever seen the movie
It's a Wonderful Life
.

She thought for a moment. “Is that the one where the man jumps off a bridge and an angel takes him around town and shows him what it would have been like if he hadn't been born?”

“That's the one. Anyway, do you remember the end of the movie, when the angel says that no one is a failure who has friends?”

Heather nodded, then smiled. “You think that's true?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What if she's only a waitress?” Heather asked.

“She's not. She's an entrepreneur.”

We laughed. I rose to leave. “It's good having you back, Heather.”

“It's nice to be back.” She stood and I gave her a ministerial hug, not too tight and very brief, which made it all the more remarkable that my wife had chosen that very moment to walk past the Coffee Cup, glance through the window, and see us embracing.

“It was just a hug,” I told her later that evening. “Nothing more. Purely innocent. I hug lots of women in the church.” Which, in retrospect, was not the brightest thing to say.

I slept on the couch that night, thinking of the city, where morals are looser—women wear T-shirts that show their belly buttons and people gamble and ministers hug their parishioners and no one thinks a thing of it.

“I'm glad Heather's not there any longer. I'm glad she's back home, where people love her, some of them a little too much, to be sure, but in a harmless sort of way. And lying on the couch, listening to an occasional car driving past and Hester Gladden's dog barking in the distance, I thought of Heather and remembered what it was like to be young and full of dreams. I remember when I was her age, how my parents sent me off from home, hugging me close and telling me to shoot for the moon, that even if I missed, I'd end up among the stars.

S
hirley Finchum had invited us to Thanksgiving at her house, with her two daughters and their families. This was their first Thanksgiving after Albert's passing. I knew it would be a glum day and was glad I already had plans.

I don't know Shirley well. She and her husband, Albert, began attending Harmony Friends back in August, when Albert caught a whiff of his mortality after being diagnosed with heart trouble. He was one of those people with impeccable timing who put God off all their lives, then at the very last moment sneak in the door—like the workers in the vineyard who arrived late but still received a full day's pay. I could tell it annoyed Dale Hinshaw, who griped that he had been laboring for the Lord sixty-three years and here came Albert Finchum, who got saved the week before he died and was even now lounging on a cloud while he, Dale, was left to inhabit this veil of tears.

I'd conducted Albert's funeral over the objections of his two daughters, who attended Harmony Worship Center and were
concerned my presence at the funeral would undo their father's salvation after Pastor Jimmy had gone to all the trouble of getting him saved in the first place.

When Albert had begun attending Harmony Friends, he was hoping that washing dishes at the Chicken Noodle Dinner and mowing the churchyard a time or two would be enough to get him in God's good graces. It took Pastor Jimmy four home visits to set him straight, telling him if he weren't baptized in the name of Jesus he would roast in hell. And none of this sprinkling stuff like the Episcopalians and Catholics, Pastor Jimmy warned, but a good dunking in the stock tank behind the pulpit at the Harmony Worship Center. So Albert, anxious to cover all his bases, snuck off there one Sunday, got himself baptized in the name of Jesus, then returned to our meeting the next week, his sin purged.

A month later Albert Finchum shuffled off to glory. We held the funeral at the meetinghouse and buried him in the South Cemetery on Lincoln Street, across from the Co-op. The ladies of the Circle cooked the funeral dinner—ham, green beans, cheese potatoes, fruited Jell-O, lemonade or tea (mourner's choice), with pumpkin pie for dessert.

In lieu of flowers, donations were made to the meeting and we raised two hundred dollars, which the men of the church wanted to use to buy a memorial lawn mower, reflecting Albert's passion for lawn care. Albert's daughters wanted to use the money for a bookcase. The church quickly divided into lawn-mower and bookcase factions and likely would have split, until Miriam Hodge persuaded Uly Grant to knock twenty dollars off the price of a lawn mower
and suggested to Albert's daughters that a bookcase made little sense in a church without books. So, instead, they purchased a book in their father's memory, which left enough money for the lawn mower, and a crisis was averted.

It took Albert's daughters several days to select a book befitting their father's stature in the community. They were torn between purchasing a Bible or a book about the Cincinnati Reds, Albert having been a big fan. After a round of arguing, they couldn't agree and compromised by buying a book they'd heard about on “Oprah”—a novel about women in the Bible.

Frank the secretary mentioned it in the church newsletter, along with a quote from me thanking the Finchum daughters for their generosity in donating this fine book, which I was confident would have a profound impact on anyone who read it. And though we were grieved by Albert's death, this book would remind us of his several weeks of selfless ministry to the church.

Fern Hampton signed it out the first Sunday it was available. No one heard or saw her for three days. She skipped the Christian Education meeting on Monday night and failed to show the next morning for the Friendly Women's Circle noodle making. When she did surface, in my office on Wednesday afternoon, she was livid.

“I'm just glad my mother isn't alive to see this,” she said. “If she weren't dead, this would have killed her.”

“What would have killed her?” I asked.

“The pastor encouraging us to read smut. Have you read that book the Finchum girls gave the church?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe you should,” she said. She shook her head in disgust. “Perversion. Nothin' but perversion. Full of filth. Sam Gardner, if the Lord doesn't strike you down, He ought to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, that's all I've got to say.”

And with that she turned and stalked from my office.

I gave Fern several hours to calm down, then phoned her, asking if I could come by her house and get the book.

“Bea Majors has it. I told her all about it, and it upset her so much, she had to read it for herself.”

Within a day, word of the book had spread through the Friendly Women's Circle, who, in the interests of maintaining community standards, vowed to read the book to judge whether the Finchum daughters should be drawn and quartered.

Later that week, Shirley Finchum was at the Kroger, where she ran into Miriam Hodge. Miriam hadn't read the book, but had been receiving a torrent of phone calls about it. And though she didn't want to add to a grieving widow's burden, she did think Shirley ought to know what had transpired, in the event her daughters were taken out by a Friendly Woman bent on purifying the world.

On Friday morning, Bea Majors passed the book on to her sister, Opal, who gave it to Hester Gladden, who read the first three chapters, was thoroughly scandalized, and in a fit of righteous indignation hauled it to the burn barrel in the alley behind her house and set it ablaze. She went to bed that night pleased with the day's work, the pleasant odor of Inquisition fresh in her nostrils.

As for me, I couldn't sleep for worrying about whether I would be the sacrificial lamb at our next monthly meeting for business.
I tossed and turned for two hours, then got dressed, put on my coat, and went for a walk. I headed toward town, past Grant's Hardware and the Legal Grounds, then turned west and passed by Kivett's Five and Dime. It was quiet outside. The houses were dark. I stopped for a moment and watched the fish tank in the front window of the barbershop, then walked past the Dairy Queen, now shuttered for the winter. Oscar and Livinia had left for Florida the week before.

There was a light on in the meetinghouse. I tried to remember if there had been a committee meeting that night and someone had left the lights on, a not uncommon occurrence. The back door was unlocked, which wasn't unusual, since Frank forgets to lock it half the time. I walked through the meeting room toward the office, when I heard a quick shuffle of feet and muffled whispering. Burglars! Probably poised to leap from a closet and shoot me down like a dog.

I backed out of the meetinghouse and jogged home the three blocks to call Bernie the policeman, who was asleep and had to get dressed and brush his teeth before meeting me back at the meetinghouse. It took him thirty minutes, and by that time whoever was in the church had left. One of my desk drawers was open, though nothing appeared to be missing.

I have several magazines hidden in my file cabinet under the letter
P
for
Progressive Christianity,
which I don't want anyone to know I read, for fear of being branded a godless heretic. Thankfully, they hadn't been discovered.

Bernie sniffed around the church a few minutes, poking his head
into closets and shining his flashlight behind the furnace and into the crawl space beneath the cloakroom.

“Looks like whoever was here is gone,” Bernie said. “You sure you heard someone?”

“Yes, there were at least two of them.”

“Robbing a church,” Bernie said, clearly disgusted. “People like that, they're goin' straight to Hades. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“Well, it wasn't quite a robbery. It doesn't look like anything's missing.”

“How about I loan you my gun. If they come back, you go ahead and plug 'em. Just make sure they're inside the church when you shoot 'em, so's we can call it self-defense.”

“That's all right, Bernie, but I'd just as soon not kill anyone. It was probably just some kids. I'm sure everything will be fine.”

He drove me home, and I fell into bed exhausted and slept until six o'clock the next morning when my boys began jumping on the bed. It was Saturday. I ate breakfast, then walked to the meetinghouse to finish my sermon. As I neared the meetinghouse, I heard the squeal of tires and saw a white car speed away with two people hunched down in the front seat. The license plate was smeared with mud.

Someone had been in my office. The file cabinets were open. A copy of
Progressive Christianity
lay open on the floor to the centerfold of Charles Darwin. Someone had drawn horns coming out of his head. Still, nothing seemed to be missing, so I didn't phone Bernie. Instead, I finished my sermon, then went home to spend the day with my family.

A little after midnight that night the phone rang. This isn't unusual for a pastor. I routinely field phone calls at all hours of the night from people who believe I'm wide awake, poised by the phone, waiting to solve their latest dilemma. Dale Hinshaw is particularly notorious for late-night calls, phoning to correct my thinking or elder me for some slight sin I had inadvertently committed.

So when the phone rang, I thought it was Dale and didn't pick it up. It rang a dozen times before falling silent. Five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I pulled on my bathrobe and negotiated my way through the dark to the front door. It was Bernie.

“Got a light on down at the church and the back door's wide open. Thought you might want to catch 'em in the act.”

I hurried upstairs, got dressed, and two minutes later was seated in Bernie's patrol car, as we eased our way through the ally in back of the meetinghouse. He slowed to a stop behind a white car.

“That car was here this morning,” I said. “They must have come back.”

Bernie unbuckled the flap over his pistol. This alarmed me greatly. The last time Bernie had unholstered his weapon, Bill Muldock had nearly been killed for taking a whiz in his own backyard in the middle of the night.

We left the car and crept across the parking lot, making our way toward the back steps of the meetinghouse, then up them and in. The light in my office was on and we could hear two people bickering. It sounded like women.

“It's not here, I tell you.”

“Well, don't get mad at me. It was your idea, after all. I can't believe you didn't read it first.”

I heard weeping and sniffling. “I knew you'd end up blaming it on me.”

Then, in an exasperated tone, “Oh, quit your crying and help me look for it. Did you check Frank's desk?”

Bernie and I froze. At the moment, we were crouched behind Frank's desk. The door to my office opened and one of the Finchum daughters, the heavy one, appeared in the doorway.

“Freeze!” cried Bernie, leaping to his feet, his pistol extended.

The lights in the office went out and the electric pencil sharpener I kept on my desk came hurtling through the air, catching Bernie squarely in the face, though not before he'd managed to squeeze off a shot in the general direction of my office.

There were screams, the scent of gunpowder stung my nostrils, and my ears were ringing. Bernie slumped to the floor with a groan, done in by a pencil sharpener.

“We surrender,” the Finchum daughters yelled, emerging from the office. They saw Bernie lying on the floor, out cold, blood dripping from his nose. “My Lord, we killed him,” they cried in unison. The Finchum daughters did everything in unison and always had, as doing things together spared them the difficulty of having to think for themselves. They'd married the same day, to brothers, lived next door to one another, went to the same church—the Harmony Worship Center—and believed everyone who didn't share their narrow ideology was destined to spend eternity in a warm climate.

After a few minutes, Bernie began to stir, then moan. We helped him up to his feet and seated him in Frank's chair. An egg-shaped
bump was rising on his forehead. He was still dazed, but after a moment his eyes began to focus on me. “Did I get 'em?”

“It appears you've killed my office clock,” I informed him. “Fortunately, the Finchum daughters are alive and well.”

He shook his head in confusion. “The Finchum daughters? What are they doing here?”

I turned to face them. “Yes, what are you doing here?”

They looked away.

“And you were here earlier, weren't you? Last night, and then again this morning?”

The heavy one was the first to speak. “You should be ashamed of yourself, reading magazines like
Progressive Christianity
.”

“Aha! So you're the one who drew the horns on Charles Darwin!” I had them dead to rights.

“Oh, just tell him,” the other one said. “Then we can get it and get out of here.”

“Tell me what?”

“It's that book we donated to your church in my father's name. We want it back. It's, uh, not appropriate for a church.”

“Why didn't you just ask me for it?”

“We didn't want to be a bother.”

“So, instead, you broke into the church, kept me up two nights in a row, and nearly killed Bernie with a pencil sharpener. This is your idea of not being a bother?”

“Maybe we went about it the wrong way,” they conceded.

“Yes, maybe you did.” Then I told them I didn't have the book, that I wasn't sure who did, but when I found it, I'd give them a call.

It had been a while since Bernie had arrested anyone. He was all for slapping the cuffs on the Finchum daughters and driving them to the jail in Cartersburg, but I managed to talk him out of it, pointing out that it wouldn't do wonders for his reputation to be known as the first police officer in history to lose a gun battle to a pencil sharpener.

We reached a compromise. I agreed not to press charges if they agreed not to tell anyone about my reading
Progressive Christianity.
They apologized to Bernie for knocking him out, and he apologized for trying to kill them. I was out an office clock, but decided not to push the issue.