Yellowstone Memories (45 page)

And yet. What if they did, or what if they didn’t? This was her life, and as Taka said, she should live it to the full.

Jersey found the lipstick and tucked a simple New Mexican turquoise oval into each ear, gritting her teeth as she pushed the gold earring back through nearly closed holes in her earlobes. After all, how long had it been since she’d worn earrings? That ‘80s party Phyllis held at her house two years ago and those oversized, neon yellow bangles?

Jersey caught a glimpse of herself in the bedroom mirror as she pushed the top drawer closed: cheeks flushed and eyes bright. Her hair loose and glossy.

As if she were celebrating.

Jersey slammed her kitchen window shut and slid into her ancient Volkswagon—still boxy from mid-’90s design. It sported an extra feature that was worth every penny: automatically heated front seats. A godsend in the snowy winter months.

Phyllis’s house lay just twelve minutes away—around a couple of bends, through some rich pastureland, and over a bumpy railroad track. The church though, took an extra twenty-five to reach—following a lonely ribbon of road that stretched endlessly through rolling Wyoming prairie. Power transformers, the only interruption of a perfectly vast horizon, lined up into the hazy distance like skeletal gingerbread men.

Jersey pulled up at the little white clapboard building in a thin forest of pines, distinctive only as a church by its silent pointed white steeple, and parked in a patch of dusty gravel. Phyllis got out beside her and shut the door, its sharp sound echoing across the grove of pines to the double outhouse.

“You okay, Phyllis?” Jersey paused on her way up the simple concrete front steps, just past the low metal bar where ranchers wiped their muddy boots before entering the church. “You just seem … upset today.”

“Nah. Everything’s fine.” Phyllis gave a weak smile and patted Jersey’s shoulder. “I’m just worried about Shorty.”

“You, too, huh?” Jersey’s gaze lingered on the side of Phyllis’s short, curly ‘do a minute longer, sizing her up.

“Yeah. Poor thing. Wait’ll I get my hands on whoever did that.” Phyllis avoided her eyes, twirling a fake pearl pendant. She flipped a strand of Jersey’s hair a little too brightly. “And what about you, all dolled up. Look at that hair. I haven’t seen you wear it down since … well, have I ever? What’s the occasion?”

“Occasion? No occasion.” Jersey touched her turquoise earring nervously. “Just trying to live out my truth. As Taka puts it.”

“What truth?” Phyllis paused, halfway into the shadowy interior. One shaft of light made the liquid blue-gray of her eyes stand out behind her glasses.

“That God lives.” Jersey’s words leaped unexpectedly from her mouth, surprising even herself. “And He lives in me.”

Phyllis froze, and eyelashes, pale in the sunlight, blinked rapidly. “Hmph,” she said. Sounding like Don when she’d turned in her last funding report.

Jersey pushed open the church door with a loud groan of weathered timbers, barnlike, and slipped into the hushed sanctuary. This was it—a sanctuary. No Sunday school rooms, no foyer. Not even a bathroom. Just a few rows of rough pine benches, a wooden altar table with a Bible, a podium, and a wooden cross made of old barn planks nailed to the back wall.

The simplicity of the place enchanted her—no, fed her. After all the clutter of job decisions and disappointments, the simple pine boards spoke security. Strength. Endurance. No ornaments, no fancy trappings. A God who came near, without fanfare, and humbled Himself to birth in a manger for animal feed.

A God who loved ranchers that wiped manure off their boots before entering His sanctuary and park rangers who crawled out kitchen windows on their way to church.

“That’s the pastor, isn’t it?” Phyllis whispered.

Jersey turned, wondering why everyone whispered. It must be the reverent hush, the sacred silence that spread out under the pines and beneath the rough wooden cross.

“Oh yeah. That’s Pastor Jeff.” Jersey reached out to shake his hand—a ruddy hand, calloused. A hand to match a tall and brawny frame, weather-lined face, and black eyes. Despite his name, Pastor Jeff Cox was Shoshone—and a plumber by trade.

“I told you he’s good-lookin’,” Phyllis whispered when he passed.

“Shh.” Jersey scowled, smacking Phyllis’s beige-pants-clad knee. “He’s married, and so are you.”

“Well, you aren’t. What about that Mackenzie fella?”

“What?” Jersey gasped in horror. “Cut it out,” she whispered fiercely. “He’s twice my age!”

“No, he isn’t. He’s …” Phyllis paused, hand on her chin. “Okay. So maybe he is. But that doesn’t mean anything. Sixty’s not so old if you think about it.” She poked Jersey’s arm. “That is if Nelson doesn’t walk into a wall when he sees you tomorrow, with your hair all down and all.”

“Phyllis! We’re in church. Quit!” Jersey hissed, putting a finger to her lips. “At least try to think about spiritual things, will you? Otherwise I’ll drop you off by yourself at that giant First Baptist downtown next week with nothing but a Bible and a Bundt cake—and you know those ladies will put you right to work.”

Phyllis pretended to zip her lips, affecting an exaggerated posture of horror.

The church had emptied, except for Pastor Jeff standing just outside the door, waiting to lock up with a plain padlock and chain. After all, what was there inside to steal? A couple of hymnbooks? But the church had been defaced once by a band of vandals, and only after that came the chain and then, reluctantly, the padlock.

Phyllis still sat there on the pew, staring down at her lap. Twisting her purse strap between shaking fingers.

“Phyllis,” Jersey tentatively poked her arm, “what’s wrong?”

Phyllis didn’t answer. She just twisted the purse strap until Jersey thought it would pop off the metal hinge.

“What, the sermon?” Jersey ran a hand over her forehead, trying to understand. Some verses about God’s amazing power to change lives, and the simple testimony of a rancher who prayed for salvation just minutes before he planned to turn an old cattle pistol on his head. “Or the music? Sorry. I know I can’t sing, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”

Phyllis chuckled, but her eyes filled with tears. She looked away, face crumpling, and then buried her head in her hands. Shoulders shaking.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jersey could see Pastor Jeff lean inside the building, his face lined with worry and compassion, and then he lowered his forehead into a wrinkled hand. Eyes closed and free arm raised slightly toward Phyllis, lips moving in silent prayer.

“Phyllis?” Jersey tucked a tentative arm around Phyllis’s shoulders, not sure what to say or do. Bungling butterfingers that she was sometimes. “What’s going on? I was kidding about the First Baptist thing, you know.”

Phyllis sniffled and dug in her purse for a tissue, taking off her glasses. “I dreamed about her again,” she finally managed through sob-tight breaths.

Jersey leaned closer to hear better. “Dreamed about who, Phyllis?”

Phyllis’s face contorted again, and Jersey had to hold her breath to understand the words. “About … about my daughter. I saw her last night.”

Jersey’s mouth opened for the words to fly out, and at the last minute, she smacked her lips together.
Phyllis doesn’t have a daughter
.

She had two sons—one fifteen and one seventeen. Both rosy brown boys with laughing eyes and black curly hair like their dad.

“Before I married Terrance,” Phyllis whispered through a voice choked with grief. “I was nineteen years old. Mother said I was too young and Terrance was no good for me.” She covered her face in white-knuckled hands. “And I believed her.”

The bench creaked slightly as Phyllis rocked back and forth like the swaying pine boughs outside the window, painfully brilliant in a shaft of summer sun. “The nurses told me she wouldn’t … feel a thing. That she wouldn’t know … wouldn’t …” She groaned, bending over double at the waist.

Jersey sat there like a chunk of granite, stupid, her eyes tear-glassed. Staring. Then she shook herself awake and hugged Phyllis tighter, letting their heads press together.

“It’s okay, Phyllis,” she whispered, tears streaking down her cheeks. “We all make mistakes. You were nineteen. What could you have known about life back then?”

Phyllis didn’t answer, the graying threads in her caramel-colored hair standing out in ashen tones. “She’d be twenty-three years old, you know that?” She raised a wet face and turned pale eyes to Jersey. “A college graduate by now. Beautiful. Taller than me, probably, and eyes just like Terrance.”

“Just about everybody’s taller than you, Phyllis,” Jersey said lightly, hoping she didn’t sound flippant.

To her relief, Phyllis gave a brief smile before her face clouded again with fresh grief. “But I’ll never know, and neither will she. Because I never gave her a chance.”

Jersey swallowed hard, her heart beating in her throat as she searched for the words to say. To tell her own tale of agony—that began—and ended—much the same as Phyllis’s but with a slightly different wrench of pain between the two.

“Phyllis, I know some of what you’re talking about,” Jersey whispered, forcing her tremors down her throat. “That’s what my mom was calling about. I finally talked to her, and it wasn’t pretty.”

Phyllis didn’t seem to hear. She pressed a trembling tissue to her eyes, rocking back and forth. “I took her life, her future. Everything. The nurses said she wasn’t alive, really—that she was little more than a blob of tissue. But I felt her kick me. Here.” She pressed tear-wet fingers across her abdomen. “She wanted to live, Jersey. Her heart was beating strong on the monitors. So strong I could almost feel its pounding in my own blood.”

Without warning she looked up at Jersey with red, bleary eyes. “You’ve never done something like that, have you?”

Jersey’s mouth went cotton-dry, and she thought she’d vomit. “No,” she finally whispered, hugging herself with her free arm to keep from trembling. Hating herself for not being able to relate in just the way that would comfort Phyllis. “Not exactly.”

Phyllis’s eyelids fell closed. “I knew it.”

“But I know what it feels like to lose a child.” Jersey’s lips felt so stiff she could hardly move them. “Don’t assume that my life is any squeakier clean than yours. We’ve all done things we’re sorry for.”

Jersey saw, out of the corner of her eye, Pastor Jeff ease silently to a kneeling position in prayer, his hand covering his eyes. A gentle breeze made the pine walls around them groan lightly as if lifting up compassionate voices in sympathy, and a flutter of pine needles tickled the window glass.

“They told me my life would be better.” Phyllis’s voice came so soft and crushed that Jersey could barely hear. “But she
was
my life. I didn’t know that then. And I still dream about her—even all these years later. The smell of the antiseptic. The hard table, and the nurse’s cold hand squeezing mine. The frightened flutter in my belly, and the kick of her feet.” She wheezed. “She knew, Jersey. I’m sure of it. And until the day I die, I’ll never live down what I’ve done.”

“Phyllis.” Jersey’s whisper seemed to echo against the hushed walls of the chapel. “God forgives.”

She didn’t reply, so Jersey laced her arm through hers. Drawing out a fresh tissue and wiping Phyllis’s cheek. “God forgives. Do you believe me?”

Phyllis’s shoulders jumped slightly as she shook her head. “God. My mother told me I’d go to hell for what I’d done.”

Jersey winced. “For … for …?”

“For getting pregnant before marriage. She called me all kinds of names. My dad threatened to beat me within an inch of my life. He told our church congregation I was a sinner, headed straight for hell, and I wasn’t fit to set foot inside a church so long as I lived.” Her breath contorted, pale eyelids fluttering closed. “I guess he’s right, but I felt safe here for some reason.” Her hand squeezed Jersey’s. “Like maybe I could make it all right again somehow. But the dreams keep coming. Maybe that’s my penance—God’s way of punishing me when I dared to think I could go on with my life instead of paying for what I’ve done.”

Jersey blinked, horrified. “But you said they wanted you to have the … operation.” She licked her lips nervously, afraid to say the word
abortion
out loud. So harsh and raw it sounded.