A Matter of Time (13 page)

They spoke to him as little as possible, and after the funeral they went away for good, leaving their father all alone on
his grand plantation.

Eight years passed. Then three months ago, Amy’s sister had called. Their father had just undergone quadruple bypass surgery.

“So?”

“Well—he’s different.”

“How?”

“He’s sorry for what he’s done and wants to make it right.”

Amy chuckled. “Sounds like a death-bed conversion, if there ever was one. Maybe he got a little glimpse over the edge, and
saw what was in store for him.”

But Aggie was serious. “This may be for real. He wants to see us, ask our forgiveness before he dies.”

“He’s about to die?”

Aggie laughed. “I don’t think so.” She paused. “But he seems serious about wanting to get reconciled. Especially with you.
He’s reinstated you in his will.”

“Well, isn’t that special!” said Amy, with dripping sarcasm. “Did it ever occur to him that I might not be ready to forgive
him?”

Silence.

“Sorry, Ags, no point killing the messenger. Have you seen him?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He’s—different.”

Amy sighed. “All right, what do you think I should do, older, wiser one?”

“Why don’t you just come over? If he’s changed, fine; if he hasn’t, split. But if you don’t come, and something does happen
to him, it could be on your conscience for a long time.”

Amy knew she was right. “I’ll come tomorrow. Don’t tell him; I want to take him off guard.”

“Whatever you say, younger, dumber one.” Then she remembered. “If you agreed to come, he wanted to get you the ticket.”

“No. No obligations. I’ll use the trust money.”

“It’ll be good to see you, Ames.”

“You, too.”

Outside her father’s hospital room, Amy paused to brace herself for the sight of him, head wan and pale on the pillow, tubes
running out of him everywhere, an IV drip suspended above him. Taking a deep breath and putting on a smile, she entered.

Her father was sitting up in bed, doing the New York
Times
crossword. In ink.

“Thanks for coming, honey,” he said, putting the paper down. “I guess it’s too much to expect a hug.”

“It is,” she replied, taking the visitor’s chair.

“Did Aggie not tell you why I wanted you to come?” He smiled at her, looking sincere. “I’ve got a lot to ask your forgiveness
for.”

Amy clenched her jaw. “Too bad you can’t ask Mom,” she said, not bothering to hide her bitterness.

“It is too bad,” he agreed. “I’ve asked God to forgive me, over and over.”

Amy stood up. “Yeah, well, that’s great, Daddy, and I’m sure it makes you feel better. But frankly, it’s a little late! And
quite
frankly—” she almost said it. Almost left.

But if there was anything to this, anything at all, she could not in good conscience abort the process.

She sat back down.

And stayed two weeks, long enough to get her father home and settled on the road to recovery.

When she finally got back to Bermuda and aboard Care Away, she and Colin had a fight. A horrendous, unprecedented fight—in
which things were said that could not be taken back. Things that made it impossible to remain on the boat a moment longer.

She had taken Jamie with her. To Georgia.

15
  
  
fathers and sons

That Saturday was Brother Bartholomew’s birthday. His fiftieth birthday. The worst birthday of his life.

Sitting in the chair in the one-room cottage that measured ten feet by eighteen feet, staring at the lintel of the door on
which he had just struck his head, Brother Bartholomew wondered if he had ever been so miserable. Not even as a corpsman in
Viet Nam, and certainly not in nearly twenty years in the friary. This was the worst.

This was—
wretched
.

In a way, that doorway summed up everything. The cottage had been built two centuries earlier, when the height of the average
Bermudian had been five-foot-four. Bartholomew was six feet. As long as he remembered to duck, he was fine. The trouble was,
he kept forgetting.

And that bed! He glared over at “the rack.” He called it that, not as a colloquialism left over from his Marine Corps days,
but as a medieval instrument of torture. Nor could he blame the rack on eighteenth-century Bermudians; it was a thoroughly
modern invention, a bed that could be folded in half to masquerade as a sofa, if he ever had any company. Which he never did.

Like the door, it was just under six feet tall, with arms at both ends. Which meant that anyone his height or taller could
not lie out straight on it, even if he slept diagonally. Plus, there was a hard ridge down the middle, where the fold was.
If he was exhausted, he might get three hours of sleep before the rack contrived to awaken him.

He would have simply put the mattress on the floor, were it not for the cockroaches. If there was one creature on earth that
Bartholomew purely loathed, it was the cockroach. To him, they were worse than snakes or spiders; they seemed the embodiment
of evil. They came out only at night, and no matter how many you killed, there was always one more.

“Happy Birthday!” he exclaimed aloud, to break the silence. That was another thing: In the cottage the silence was so total,
it actually seemed to have a ringing quality to it.

The sad part was, his birthday had not started off that badly. When he had returned to the cottage from a morning of edging
grassy footpaths, he found that the sisters had left some ripe oranges for him, picked from the property’s little citrus grove.
With them was a manila envelope with his name on it.

It was a fax from home, from the young people in the calligraphy guild. They had composed and beautifully lettered a greeting
in Latin:

Diem Natalem Age,
Frater Bartolomeo,
tibi Deum precamur

—Happy Birthday, Brother Bartholomew, we’re praying for you.

He could have cried.

Homesickness, like breaking surf, had washed over him before. Yet he’d always been able to regain his footing and shake it
off. But this was a tidal wave—and for once, he gave in to it.

In his mind he was back in the friary’s
Scriptorium
, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Through the open window wafted the indolent sounds and smells of summer, while on the window
seat beneath it was curled the friary cat, Pangur Ban—basking in the sun, supremely confident that all was right in his world.

His young charges were perched on stools in front of the five drafting tables—two boys and three girls, high schoolers, from
abbey families. In front of each was tacked a clean sheet of white paper. Playing softly on the stereo was a recording of
the abbey’s monks singing Gregorian Chant, the notes echoing off the stone of the basilica, evoking a timelessness well suited
to the ancient craft they were about to practice.

At the blackboard stood the master calligrapher, his chalk held horizontally, in imitation of the square nib of a lettering
pen. He deftly drew a large capital R and smiled at them. All was right in his world, too.

“Like everything we’ve covered so far, adding a swash is not as easy as it looks. After you’ve formed your basic R, start
lightly here,” he said, beginning to duplicate the swash, “apply pressure—here, and begin your lift-off—here.”

With a graceful gesture he lifted the chalk from the board. “You see?”

He nodded to them, confident they would be able to do what he’d just demonstrated. And they hesitantly nodded back.

Hands clasped behind his back, he moved slowly behind them, pausing to murmur a suggestion here, an encouragement there.

“Now again.”

They drew another. And once more he passed behind them, offering the help that each needed. His smile never wavered—and gradually
theirs gained confidence.

Finally, tall, willowy Kate, in an exaggerated Rex Harrison accent, exclaimed “I think we’ve got it! By George, I think we’ve
got it!”

Bartholomew beamed. They had indeed.

Now, gazing down at their elegant birthday effort, he missed them terribly.

He got up. He’d send them a reply, something light and cheerful. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was twenty minutes
to noon. If he went down to the main house right now, he could get a fax off before they started lunch.

He went down the path, composing one as he walked. He’d commend their Latin, and their fine hand (probably Kate’s). He was
just imagining their delight at hearing from him, when he arrived at the kitchen door. He asked if he could use the fax machine,
and the sister at the stove gave him the office key. Letting himself in, he dashed off the note, popped it into the fax, and
for once it went through without balking.

Returning the key to the kitchen, he was suddenly assailed with the aromas from not one but several simmering pots. All four
sisters were in the kitchen now, tossing a salad, slicing a loaf of homemade bread, getting out the dinner plates.

Noting his expression, the sister at the stove seemed to
read his mind. “Happy Birthday, Bart!” she exclaimed. “You’ll stay for lunch, of course!”

“We have plenty,” the bread sister assured him.

“These are Greek olives and Feta cheese,” added the salad-making sister. “I’ll set a place,” said the fourth.

With the salivary juices already building in the back of his mouth, Bartholomew murmured, “Well, perhaps I—”

Father Francis came in. “He’s not staying!” he announced flatly. “He’s here on personal retreat. He’ll eat up at the cottage.
Alone.”

The sisters were crestfallen, but none more than Bartholomew. He trudged back up the hill, and sitting morosely on his little
stoop, he chewed his cold, dry turkey sandwich and added Father Francis to the list of things he loathed about Bermuda. At
the top.

The list grew longer later that afternoon at the grocery store. Purchasing the ingredients of his solitary birthday supper,
he reached for what would be its
pièce de résistance
, a pint of Rum Raisin ice cream.

And stopped. He had the distinct impression that God did not want him to have it. He knew why; his cholesterol had gotten
high enough that the abbey’s doctor in residence had recently cautioned him to avoid high-fat foods or face serious trouble.

He reached for it again, only to receive another interior warning, clear and unmistakable.

“But I
always
have Rum Raisin ice cream on my birthday!” he declared under his breath, not caring that he’d now joined the ranks of those
who muttered to themselves as they pushed their carts through supermarkets.
Or that he sounded, even to his own ears, like a petulant child.

By the time he got through the checkout counter, he was so angry that he retrieved a discarded
Royal Gazette
from the trash bin by the door, though on a personal retreat one was not supposed to read newspapers or anything else that
would bring back the world he was supposed to be retreating from.

That evening after supper, he read the old paper from cover to cover, even the endless descriptions of distant cricket matches.
He went to bed at eight o’clock, an hour earlier than usual, just to be done with the worst birthday of his life.

He did not say good night to God. He had not spoken to God since the ice cream incident, not even to return thanks before
his meal.

He fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, until awakened by the creaking rack at eleven. Which made him angry—even angrier
than he’d been three hours before. He lay there in the darkness and steamed.

But while he was not on speaking terms with God, it seemed that his heavenly Father would have words with him.

Get up
, came the thought.
I want to talk to you
.

Well, I don’t want to talk to
you
, Bartholomew thought back.

Nevertheless, he got out of bed, pulled on a sweater, and slouched down in the chair. From the table next to him, he took
up his clipboard and wrote down what it seemed God was saying to his heart:

Is this the way friends treat friends?