Come Sunday: A Novel (16 page)

It was Kelsey and Warren who ran the church, who made the big decisions. It had always been that way. And then Greg had to show up and insist he have a say. He wanted to do things differently. Now, it’s one thing when a minister makes a few changes to the Sunday bulletin—heck, he might even get away with introducing a few new hymns occasionally—but anything that involved spending money was downright meddling as far as they were concerned.

“There are two types of people,” Greg told me after spending the better part of the evening at a finance meeting trying to convince the members that the parsonage, rented out, could fetch a price more than enough to cover his housing allowance. “Those with a mentality of scarcity and those with a mentality of abundance. As Christians, we ought to be operating with the latter.”

“Oh, like the ‘The Lord will provide’ and all that?”

“Hasn’t he?”

“I’m beginning to think the Lord is a miser, Greg,” I told him. “His staff get paid like clerks and treated like errand boys.”

“No, I think you’re confusing the Lord with Kelsey,” he replied.

“Well, who has more clout around here?”

Church members remembered how Kelsey had spared the church from bankruptcy in the seventies, raised the money to repair the sanctuary’s collapsing balcony in the eighties, and led the crusade to build a monstrous new organ in the nineties whose bellows the termites had already made good work of. He had outserved three pastors, two district superintendents, and a couple of bishops, and there wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that he would outserve Greg too.

It seemed to me, then, that the dithering group of old-timers had a collective will mightier than the Lord’s. Greg didn’t find this nearly as troubling as he should have, not until that group turned its squinting attention from bean-counting to Greg’s bullet-point plan for church growth.

It is fair to say it wasn’t entirely Greg’s plan but one that resembled similar plans all over the country that were credited with the transformation of dwindling congregations to multimedia centers attracting the masses. Just before Cleo was born, very much in the mood for new
birth, Greg preached a sermon and distributed a one-page document outlining his plan for the church’s revitalization. If some of the church members had been cold and unintentionally unwelcoming before, now, with Kelsey’s vocal opposition to it, determined rigor mortis set in. “We don’t have but a handful of youth in this church anyway,” Kelsey declared, objecting in the all-church meeting to what he called an unnecessary expense of a youth pastor.

“That’s the problem,” Greg retorted, straining at the effort of collegiality.

“Can’t see why you don’t have Deighton do the youth program,” Kelsey barked at the chairman of the staff-parish relations committee.

“It’s
Reverend
Deighton,” said Gregory, pried away from his usual ledge of self-restraint, crumpling in one hand his one-page plan.

Some said it was tampering with the way things had always been done, but it was that single aggressive gesture that made people swing their heads—and their votes—from Greg to Kelsey Oliver for the last time.

IT MUST BE SATURDAY, because when I get up and pass the bay window I can see Greg in the garden, trimming back the halekonia, careful to leave their red-clawed blossoms. I put the kettle on and walk out the front door, down to the mailbox to get the midweek paper. Just as I head back to the house, I hear Mrs. Chung’s screen door open and her shrill voice call my name: “Mrs. Deighton! Mrs. Deighton!”

The ill feeling stiffens my neck and I know that what is to follow will surely be a complaint.

“What is it this time?” I snap. “The wind chimes, the cat, the bird feeder? Did someone park the wrong way in the parking stall or is our mango tree dropping leaves in your yard again?”

Her rickety-stick frame slows from a trot to a hobble and she holds out a white plastic bag as though it were a white flag. “Please,” she says, “I would like you and the Reverend to have these.” She approaches me
cautiously and hands me a bag of oranges. “They’re from our tree.” And before I can thank her, she is headed back to her screen door.

Once inside, I stack the oranges in the fruit bowl with the two overripe bananas and open the card that is taped to the outside of the bag. A short, impersonal note of condolence is typed below the card’s preprinted message. What kind of person types a condolence message? I wonder aloud. The kind of person who accounts for each orange on her tree and shares them with no one. “She’s too stingy to eat them,” I used to tell Greg each time I saw her standing with her notebook making an inventory of the oranges in her tree. Today she has given us eight of her finest.

I am unpacking the dollhouse’s living room set, marveling at the miniature rug and matching pillows, when Greg sits down on the floor.

“I met with the district superintendent yesterday, Abbe,” he says.

“What about?”

“Seems that Kelsey and his recruits don’t think I’m up to par. They have asked that I be transferred to another church.” Funny how rumor travels faster than news. I have been waiting for the official word on the subject for months, ever since Jenny heard from someone that Kelsey was recruiting church members for a coup. Nobody was questioning Greg’s commitment to his calling or had any quarrel with his doctrine; it was that silly plan that was going to sink his ship. They said they were not opposed to change, it was the price tag attached to it.

“When?”

“Apparently they wrote a letter to the bishop before Cleo died, but Alex didn’t have the heart to tell me till now.”

“No, I mean when do they want you to go?” Somewhere a voice is telling me I should be more shocked, to muster, at least, a little outrage.

“First of July,” he says.

“But Greg, that’s a month from now.”

“I know. It’s not going to happen. Alex says the bishop and the cabinet have made all the appointments for the year already, but it will probably mean a mid-appointment move, if they can find us a church.”

“And where might that be?”

“Well, that’s the thing, Abbe. It’s not likely to be in Hawaii.”

I arrange the TV set, the bookshelf, and the floor lamp.

“Maybe they can find us something closer to Rhiaan and Cicely,” he continues. “Maybe it’s not the end of the world.”

“But what about my work?”

“Are you going back to the magazine? I just assumed you were going to resign.”

“I can’t move, Greg.” And that’s that.

Move. God knows I cannot muster the strength to drive to the grocery store; California is hardly an option. And the house, with its imprint of Cleo all over it. There cannot be a new house. There has to be her room and her closet with her little clothes hanging in it.

“It’s not going to happen for a while . . . Maybe we’ll get lucky; maybe something will open up here. But wherever it is, we are going to get through this together.” The microwave pings. “Now come and eat lunch with me. Oh, where’d the oranges come from?”

“Mrs. Chung’s tree,” I answer.

“You are always on at me for stealing them,” he says.

“She gave them to me.”

“Miracles never cease,” he says, shaking his head.

Yes they do.

I have taken to watching clocks. There’s the digital one on the nightstand of what used to be Greg’s side of the bed, the one whose alarm used to wake him at five-thirty on Sunday mornings—but no more, not since his insomnia dispensed with all that. And not since he stopped sleeping in our bed. Sometimes, when I have spent an afternoon castigating my former self for dressing up a crush in True Love’s clothes, I think it is because of that filigreed locket. Other times, when the jagged edges of self-recrimination cannot be dulled even a little by the yellow pills, I believe Greg’s absence from our bed is because Cleo’s death has decanted the curdled illusion that Greg and I were a couple. When I hear Greg weeping outside my window where he tends the orchids that stubbornly refuse to bloom, I feel sure it is Cleo’s absence that has wedged between us, every bit as palpable as a lover. And while the red digital numbers flip over themselves, I wonder why I did not spend more time thinking about Cleo and less about the jilted leftovers of another woman’s marriage, which is what Sal has now become. Guilt stains my thoughts, like the nicotine-tainted tips of my father’s fingers.

An antique clock is mounted on the wall to the left of the dressing table mirror, and because it never chimes is more decorative than functional. Before, its hands would be frozen on the same time for months,
seven years, for lack of attention. I wind it every other day now. There is also a clock in the guest room in which Greg pretends he has not moved, although his clothes are draped on the back of the chair and the debris from his pockets is strewn on the bedside table. Located inconveniently on the high shelf, the clock requires that I bring in the rattan chair from the hallway and get up to wind it.

They are all Greg’s clocks, except the one in the dining room in the glass display cabinet that was my mother’s twentieth-anniversary gift to my father. It is the only thing of his I have. Greg used to keep his clocks going; companionship, he called it, an old habit from his decadelong bachelorhood. But now I have assumed responsibility for them, and it is the only thing I am diligent about.

The kitchen has two clocks, both built into the appliances—one in the microwave and the other in the oven. I watch them both whenever I am in the kitchen, which is seldom. The one on the VCR I finally figured out how to set, but there is no setting the grandfather clock that Greg’s mother gave—it either goes too fast or too slow, but either way, it is of its own choosing. It is the only inanimate object about which I have harbored homicidal thoughts, chiming as it did boldly off-key and off the hour, often just when I had rocked the baby to sleep. When it chimes now I long for the baby’s cry that used to accompany it.

The poets write of time standing still when someone dies. It is not true. Time comes alive and takes up space. Time-past and time-tocome compete for turf in my ticktocking house. Every second mushrooms; every minute is counted in deliberate increments. Hours march steadily, calculatedly, through the afternoon like the Night Marchers on their ghostly patrol through the valley. The colon blinks like a heartbeat, as though it can push blood through the veins of a pallid day.

Greg does not approve of my clock-watching. He draws in a deep, nasally breath each time he sees my clock-winding ritual, steadying himself like an arrow drawn tight on a bow, the epitome of restraint. What he does not know is how the clocks all tell me the same thing: I am alive and she is dead. I have lived four thousand four hundred and twenty
hours since she died, four thousand four hundred and twenty hours when I wanted to stay asleep, be unconscious, die. A captive to time, I am the mute witness to past events as they unfurl around me in uninterrupted and overlapping sequences: accidentally closing the car door on Cleo’s finger, staying late at work too many evenings, walking out of Cleo’s room when she cried for me to stay and read one more book.

Cleo’s is the only room where there are no clocks, where time is neither kept, marked, nor marching. At the threshold of her room, I watch the way the light comes in through the blinds. If I have gotten a late start to the day, like today, the sun shines in through the southfacing window and almost reaches her bed. If it is before ten o’clock, the light spills in through the east window and her bed is bathed in light. After taking stock of all her toys and her pajamas still lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of her bed, I sit down next to Mimi, her first doll, at her rightful place on the pillow. It all stays the same, as though Cleo has been hurried off to day care and will return anytime. Only the shadows and light move, and the dotted line of ants that have taken up residence around the discarded lollipop stick on her bedside table.

Today Pilgrim is sprawled out on the sunny spot next to her tea set, having left another gift on her bed: the remains of a ghost-colored gecko. Startled at the shattering of quiet by the ringing of the phone, I walk downstairs to answer it. It is twenty to twelve, according to the grandfather clock.