The Bishop's Wife (2 page)

Kurt closed the door behind them.

“Can you tell me anything?” I asked. Most of the secrets Kurt found out were to be held in confidence, but there isn't the same kind of strictness in a Mormon bishop's counseling session as there is with Catholic confession.

Kurt shrugged. “It will come out soon enough. Carrie has left him.”

“Last night? Did they have an argument? Why didn't he come then?”

“Apparently she left him in the night. He woke up and found her gone. She left a note saying she wasn't coming back.”

“I'm surprised she left Kelly,” I said. I was more than surprised. I was in knots about it. A mother leaving a child, it was—unfathomable to me. What pain had she been in? What had she been thinking? It was one thing to file for divorce and to ask your husband to leave the house. Or even to take your daughter and find an apartment. To leave her behind, and in the middle of the night without a proper goodbye … I shivered.

“It's hard to know what goes on in the mind of a woman,” said Kurt.

I hated when Kurt said things like that. “It is not that hard. Women are just as sensible as men,” I said. “If you understand what their lives are like.”

“Then how could she leave her daughter? I never would have thought it of Carrie Helm, of all people. She loved that little girl so much.”

Yes, she had. She had always walked Kelly to Primary and made sure she had a big hug. “She might not have felt she had any choice.”
It was the only answer I could think of. Kurt, as bishop, was the one who should know more of the inner workings of their relationship than I did. But then again, Carrie and Jared had never come to see him together, so now all he would have was Jared's side of the story. Jared had a calling as an instructor in the elders quorum and fulfilled it faithfully every month. As far as Kurt was concerned, he was the one who was reliable and trustworthy.

“I asked him if there was any hope they might still reconcile. I wish they had come to see me earlier. I might have been able to help.” He looked toward the kitchen, the smell of toast and jam drawing him, and we moved in that direction. I put new toast in the toaster and he got out a plate.

Along with his big appetite, Kurt had enormous faith in the power of prayer. He thought any marriage could be saved with enough work and help from God. I am sad to say I am not as believing. Some marriages aren't meant to last, and it was quite possible that Jared and Carrie Helm's was one of these. They did not seem like a particularly good match. There were marriages that worked despite disparities in character, but not many.

“He said she was very final about it. She said she was never coming back. He thinks there may be another man involved.”

“I see,” I said. If Carrie Helm had realized how mismatched she and Jared were, and she'd found someone who was less of a mismatch—well, it almost explained things. It was selfish, but people are sometimes selfish. Sometimes even mothers. Perhaps mothers especially, since they spent so much time being unselfish.

“He's going to have to deal with divorce papers and child-care issues, along with custody agreements,” Kurt was saying as he opened his favorite jam jars and began to stir the contents. Why he did that, I never knew. “But he wasn't up for talking about any of that. He just wanted to hear me say that he wasn't to blame for what had happened, and that God still had good things for his future.”

Well, I was glad that Kurt hadn't insisted on reconciliation, as
most bishops would have felt obliged to do to keep the family together. “Poor Kelly,” I said.

“The whole ward will have to band together to help Jared and Kelly. She'll need a lot of substitute mothers.” Kurt was looking at me then. I would do what I could, of course, but I wasn't sure I knew what Kelly needed.

“I'd like to talk to Carrie. Do you think Jared might have a number for her?” I asked.

Kurt shook his head. “He said she didn't leave any way of contacting her. We'll have to wait and see what happens in the next few days.” He stopped short of saying he hoped that she came back, and that all of this could still be fixed.

“Carrie is a good woman,” I said, hoping it was true. I had thought I knew her, but obviously I had not known her well enough.

“Well, I suppose God can find good in any of us,” said Kurt. That was as close as he came to saying he considered this situation to be Carrie's fault.

Didn't he remember those years when I had been at home with all five boys, Adam, Joseph, Kenneth, Zachary, and baby Samuel? I had never said it aloud, but there were times when I had had fantasies of walking away, going out and getting a job, finding a life of my own again, where I wasn't on call twenty-four hours a day and responsible for tiny lives. It was too much for any one person. Maybe more so for someone who had reconciled herself to not being married and never having children. And then Kurt had come along and changed all my plans, made me believe again I could have the whole Mormon dream. Husband. Children. Temple sealing. And all that went with it. We lived in a city that had once been known for the state prison at the point of the mountain and was now known for the Mormon temple that had just been built. But it seemed that the Mormon plan of happiness with a perfect family full of forgiveness hadn't worked out as well for Carrie Helm.

Cheri Tate's second daughter was to be married the next day at the church. Kurt would be there to officiate, but Cheri needed support. She was Relief Society president, and very good at that job. Give her a list and she checked off every item on it. She was in charge of making sure the bishop knew about the practical needs of all the women of the ward. No one who had a baby or was in the hospital ever went without a week's worth of hot homemade meals delivered by the Relief Society sisters, all coordinated by Cheri Tate.

Her children were younger than mine, and I had married later in life, so I suspected I was nearly fifteen years older than she was. That made me feel a little maternal toward her. I could see her flaws, but I could also see her attempts to grow. She wasn't a listener and she had no sympathy for whining, but at least she was not a hypocrite. She wasn't whining about her daughter's wedding. She was just doing what had to be done.

The wedding colors were gold and silver, which I thought was a little over the top, but I had seen worse. I went early in the morning to help with the decorations. The wedding and reception would both be held in what was called the “cultural hall,” but it looked more like a gym than anything else. It had hardwood floors and was polished every year so that now the polish was as thick as the wood
itself. It was also painted with basketball lines underneath all the polish, and there were hoops overhead.

The cultural hall was behind the chapel in the standardized, streamlined church design that allowed three different wards to share the same building for Sunday and weekday meetings. Around those two central large rooms were hallways that led to a ring of smaller classrooms and the offices for the bishopric, Stake Presidency, and High Council. There was also a kitchen—only to be used for warming up food, since no one in the ward had a state food preparation license—on the side of the building, so it could be ventilated easily if something burned.

I found Cheri in that kitchen, with her daughter, Perdita, who was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt. Obviously she hadn't headed off yet to have her hair and makeup done at a salon.

“How can I help?” I asked.

“Oh, Sister Wallheim! I'm so glad you're here. The gazebo isn't set up yet, but the pieces are in the gym,” said Cheri. “Do you think you can manage it? I asked my husband to come, but he can't get here until four and we'll only have two hours until the wedding then.”

“I'll see what I can do,” I said.

There would be no elaborate dinner, nor even a luncheon for this. The reception was after the wedding itself, starting at seven, just as it had stated on the original invitations.

Perdita, who was eighteen, and her fiancé, Jonathan, had been dating steadily since they were sixteen, despite Cheri's lectures. The Mormon church's rules on dating were clear. No dating at all before sixteen, and no steady dating until after a mission. But apparently Perdita always said she was going on group dates (which she was) and promised her mother that she and Jonathan weren't going to have sex before they married. Cheri thought that meant they'd wait until after Jonathan went on a mission, but Perdita and Jonathan had declared they were too much in love to wait for two years.

They might still have been married in the temple without Jonathan going on a mission. But when it came to their premarital and temple recommend interview, it turned out that Perdita and Jonathan had come so close to having intercourse that Kurt told them they couldn't get married in the temple unless they waited another three months. And kept their hands off each other until then. Completely off. Kurt hadn't told me specifics about what they had and hadn't done, but it was his right as bishop to determine who was worthy for a temple recommend and who wasn't.

In the end, Perdita and Jonathan decided to go ahead with their original wedding date. They had already sent out the invitations. They would have had to send out a set of cancellations, and then new invitations several months later. It would have been confusing, and expensive. But most of all, it would have been embarrassing. The words “sealed in the Salt Lake Temple” were embossed in gold on the wedding invitations, but since only thirty or so people were allowed into the sealing room—the closest of family members with temple recommends themselves—few people would know about the canceled temple ceremony.

“It smells wonderful, by the way,” I told Cheri and Perdita. The kitchen was filled with cinnamon, ginger, and allspice.

“It's a kind of post-Christmas theme,” said Perdita. “I love gingerbread.”

“Ah,” I said. That explained it. I gestured at the twenty-gallon pot on the stove. “And that is?”

“Wassail,” said Perdita. Nonalcoholic.

“It's pretty adventurous, doing it all yourself,” I said. “You weren't tempted to get caterers?”

Perdita shrugged.

Cheri put in, “We told them that if they did it themselves, they would get the money we saved to live on.”

“Do you know how much caterers cost, Sister Wallheim?” asked Perdita, her mouth open wide.

“Actually, I do.” I had two married sons, and even if I'd never had to do as much work as the mothers of the brides, I had paid for half the catering to be fair. I also thought it was worth every penny. A wedding was stressful enough—all the family members coming in, the emotional difficulty of letting go. I didn't think anyone should have to put more on their plate.

Cheri, for instance, looked like she had spent the last two weeks in a clothes dryer. Her hair was frizzled under the curlers she had in, and her skin was worse than the normal Utah winter desert crack.

“Well, we can live for three months on that, if we scrimp,” said Perdita.

I glanced at Cheri, who looked away. I was more and more impressed with Perdita and her good sense. She might be just out of high school, but she knew who she wanted and she knew how to survive. That was more than I could say of myself at that age. I had been a disaster, and had spent six years figuring out how to move on with my life.

“I'll come back when I'm done with the gazebo,” I said with a nod toward the cultural hall.

“Don't hurt yourself,” said Cheri.

The gazebo wasn't heavy, but it was tricky to put together. I painstakingly put part A in slot B, then part C in slot D. And the gazebo went up. When it was taller than I was, I got some chairs to stand on. I heard a door open and saw an unfamiliar face bringing in flowers.

“The Tate wedding?” he asked.

“Yeah, that's here.”

He nodded and carried in several boxes of flowers, then left again.

The silver and gold ribbons were wrapped around cardboard in a pile by the door. I got them out and tried twisting them together and arranging them on the gazebo. I wasn't an interior designer by any means, and my house was proof of that. But ribbons I thought
I could manage. I poked around in the flower boxes and found some garlands to put over the top of the gazebo, as well. It wasn't going to look like a summer wedding, but it would be nice.

Just as I was finishing, Cheri came in and stared at the gazebo. “Thank you so much,” she said. “I really didn't think that was going to get done. I was so worried.”

“Now you can go home and take a nap before the wedding,” I suggested.

She began to cry.

Cheri Tate. I had honestly never seen her cry before, not even when her older son was in the hospital with double broken arms from a skateboarding accident. She had mostly been angry then.

“It's all right,” I said, moving closer to her. “It's going to be fine.”

“I just—never thought that Perdita would be married like this. It feels so wrong. It should be at the temple. I talked to her all those years about being married in the temple. A white dress, a white tuxedo, and pictures at the temple to put on her walls forever. And now this.”

A church wedding also required the couple to make certain promises about their religious beliefs. But a temple wedding is the symbol of extreme righteousness. Perdita and Jonathan hadn't had any problems with the tithing, Word of Wisdom questions, or attending church every week and supporting their leaders. But the chastity outside of marriage question had been the stopper. I tried to make Cheri see the bright side in all of this. Her daughter was getting married and this should be a happy day. “She still has a beautiful white dress. And Jonathan seems like a nice young man. He loves her deeply and they seem sensible.” Not that either of those qualities would make marriage easy. But at least they would get through the first few years, which could be the hardest.