Avra's God (4 page)

Kallie’s affirmation rubbed salve into the
part of him Dad rejected. Dad would never hear his songs. Creating
music, or any art form, was pretty much loafing in Dad’s mind. A
man labored hard with his hands or his intellect. That much he’d
absorbed from his father. He worked hard at his music. Not that he
ever expected to see any appreciation from Dad.

After class, Jesse stood outside the door
till Kallie stepped out. “Thanks.” The connection he’d felt that
first day slid back into place as their eyes connected.

“Anytime.” Unasked questions swirled in the
green depths of her eyes.

Questions he didn’t want to answer.

Avra led Kallie through her living room. Kurt
and Drew sprawled on either end of the couch, hair damp from
showers, their usual Saturday morning ratty T-shirts and gym shorts
replaced with board shorts and this year’s shirts. As if a girl
like Kallie would give them a second glance.

“Kallie, my brothers. Kurt and Drew, this is
Kallie,” she flung over the railing on the way up the steps.

Kurt’s eyes swerved from the TV to Kallie and
stopped as if somebody hit his internal pause button. “Hey.” Oh,
yeah. He had it bad. She’d seen more than one guy on campus look at
Kallie like that.

“Hi ya,” Drew said. “You can come watch
‘Sponge Bob’ with me when Avra bores you cross-eyed. I’ll save you
a seat.” He thumped the couch cushion beside him, flinging dust
particles into the morning sun.

Kallie jogged up the stairs behind her.
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

She closed the door after Kallie. Her
porcelain doll, Justine, watched them from her faded floral pillow
sham with layers of pink skirts fanned around her. Justine’s nose
tipped in glass disdain as though the room were too shabby for
her.

She glanced at Kallie. “Don’t mind my
brothers’ drooling.”

Kallie sank into the lumpy, slip-covered
chair in the corner. “I always thought I’d like to have some
brothers.” Her features clouded. “Maybe then I’d understand
males.”

Avra laughed. “They’re all about bodily
functions—the louder the better.”

Kallie smacked her forehead with her palm.
“So simple. I hope you explain calc as well as you do guys.”

An hour later Avra stretched the kinks out of
her back. “So, if f of x equals three x minus six, and g of x
equals three, then to find f of g of x, substitute x from f of x
with g of x, and solve.”

Understanding lit Kallie’s face. “I get it! I
really get it!” She high-fived Avra. “Thanks.” Kallie pushed up the
sleeves of her shirt to her elbows. “You’re so together.”

“Me? I thought
you
were together.”

Kallie held up a hand. “Whoa, girl. I don’t
have a clue about what I’m going to do with my life. I was a voice
major in Miami, but I’m going to pick up business courses. I need
something stable.” She picked at her cuticle. “My parents divorced.
My grandparents divorced. I’ve got to take care of myself. But not
with math, that’s for sure.”

She offered Kallie a pretzel rod from the jar
on her desk. “I said I couldn’t help you with calc because I was
jealous of you. I’m sorry.” She glanced at the wrought iron cross
over Kallie’s head and back at Kallie. Coming clean felt good.

Kallie’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“Jealous of what?”

She cracked a wry smile. “All the guys turn
and watch you walk by.”

Kallie’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding,
right?”

“Nope.” She’d settle for one guy in
particular
. No. Don’t even go there.

Kallie dismissed her words with a quick shake
of her head. She sucked the salt off her pretzel and stared out the
window.

The rustling of leaves from the giant oak was
the only sound in the room.

Kallie sat up straight and rubbed the small
of her back. “Actually, I do have a brother. Maybe more siblings,
for all I know. My dad and his new wife had Stevie.” She counted on
her fingers. “Seven years ago. The last time I saw him, he was a
newborn. I’ve got a suitcase full of issues.” She shivered as if to
shake off the memories. Her tone lightened. “
I
should be
jealous of
you
.”

Avra chewed on the inside of her cheek. Boy,
had she been wrong about Kallie. “Yeah, you’re jealous of my calc
grade.”

“Duh.”

Laughter rippled between them, and she looked
up at the cross.

At two in the afternoon Avra sat in the
deserted Student Union paging through her Humanities text. The
remains of a bagel lay in a paper basket beside a Styrofoam cup of
iced tea.

She yawned and closed her eyes, leaning back
in the hard plastic chair. She thought about Saturday’s
conversation with Kallie. She’d been praying for Kallie three times
a week for over a month. She never would have believed it, but
Kallie had needs after all. Calc tutoring was a given, and maybe
she even needed a friend.

Cisco appeared in the doorway, and a herd of
moths careened to life in her stomach. He sauntered across the room
toward her, his Walmart uniform unbuttoned, exposing a snowy
T-shirt. “Avra, what up?” He sat down across from her.

The guy oozed enough testosterone to disturb
any girl’s equilibrium.

He waited for her to say something.

“You know that essay we have to write for
Humanities on how the arts answer life’s unanswerable
questions?”

Cisco grimaced. “Yeah.”

“So, give me an unanswerable question.”

His lips flattened into a thin line. “Why
does a man check out on his family after eighteen years? Why does
he wake up one day and decide he can’t live with the problems
another day?” The pain in his eyes begged for an answer.

Lord?

Cisco pursed his lips. “Arts—drumming—doesn’t
answer squat.” Cisco slouched in his seat. “I don’t know. Maybe it
releases some anger. Psychobabble might say the rhythms give me
structure, patterns. But drumming doesn’t answer the ‘why.’ All I
know is that after two and a half years, he’s not coming back.”

“You just wrote your paper.”

“Great.” His voice was flat.

“Do you ever see your dad?”

“Not much. What’s the point? He’s over us or
he wouldn’t have left.”

“Maybe he’s only over your mom.”

“That’s what he says. But I don’t care.”

“Yes you do.”

His eyes swerved to hers. He stared hard at
her as seconds ticked by. Finally, he blew a breath out.

I’m so sorry you hurt like this
. She
reached across the table and gripped his hand.

He looked down at her hand and back at her
eyes, emotions she couldn’t read playing across his face. What if
he thought she was after him? She pulled her hand back into her
lap, her skin recording the warmth of his skin, the feel of his
thick knuckles under her palm.

He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I gotta
go to work.” He stood. “Thanks for getting me started on my paper.”
He reached over and tugged a lock of her hair. “See ya.”

Sun shone through the window and splashed
prism colors across his empty chair. What made him trust her?

Jesse lay on his back on the storage shed’s
attic floor.

Kallie sat cross-legged three feet away.
“Breathe with your diaphragm. Here.” She reached for a hymnal and
swiped it across her jeans leg, dislodging the dust. “When you
breathe with your diaphragm, the book will move.” She set the
hymnal on his stomach.

The scent of autumn rain mingled with dust.
He gritted his teeth. Dad’s music sitting on him—how fitting.

Kallie scrutinized him as the hymnal rose and
fell, his breathing the only sound in the room. He felt like a frog
on the dissecting table. How long would she watch him breathe?

She edged away from him.

He sat up, slinging the hymnal across the
floor toward the stack. “Okay, enough breathing already. I’m going
to hyperventilate.”

“Sing from your diaphragm. Open your mouth
wide to let the full sound out.”

Twilight’s magenta lit the room, leaving the
corners in shadow. Cool air streamed through the window. He watched
Kallie’s mouth and followed her voice through warm-ups.

Kallie touched his arm. “No, like this.” She
sang the notes again.

“Here.” She placed his hand on her diaphragm
and breathed in and out. “Do you feel it?”

Her body warmed his fingers and his palm
through her T-shirt. “Oh yeah, I feel it.”

She pushed his hand away. “Okay, follow me
through the scales.”

His voice melded with Kallie’s. He felt the
connection somewhere deeper than the sound in his ears.

Kallie led him through diction exercises and
into
You’re Callin’ My Name.

But you’re that mysterious pond in the
woods.

Nobody knows how deep.

Nobody knows you’re even there.

Their voices stilled in the middle of the
song as though they’d planned it. Moonlight and dew-heavy air
spilled onto the floor near the window.

Jesse stretched and groaned. “Quitting time?”
He could just make out Kallie in the shadows.

“Yeah.”

They both reached the steps at the same time.
Kallie’s shoulder bumped Jesse’s, startling him off balance. He
stumbled and grabbed for her, ending up with a fistful of the back
of her shirt. Kallie teetered and clamped onto his arm, a nervous
chuckle slipping out. Blackness shrouded the lower portion of the
steps.

He fumbled for her hand. “We’ll go down
together.”

They matched their steps, the quiet
magnifying the sand grating under their shoes as they moved down
the stairs. Her hand was smooth in his. When they stepped into full
moonlight, she let go. The instant coolness of his palm felt
wrong.

He led the way toward the pines. “Thanks for
the lesson. I owe you.”

“You’ve got the pipes to be a vocalist. Ever
thought about a rock career?”

He stepped onto the sidewalk, Kallie close on
his heels.

Stars glowed beyond the streetlight
halos.

He rubbed the night’s dampness from his arms.
“Every day.”

“Why aren’t you going after it?”

“Might preach.” What made him blurt that out
like an attack of Tourette’s?

Kallie tripped on the uneven sidewalk. “You
mean like a priest in church?”

He caught her arm as they stepped over broken
cement in the sidewalk and wished for another excuse to keep
touching her. “Something like that. My dad’s a preacher.”

Kallie stopped and stared at him. “You’re
kidding. I’ve never even spoken to a minister, not even my priest.”
She stepped off the curb. “So, you want to preach because your dad
does?”

He let out a dry laugh. “No. I don’t want to
have anything to do with my dad or his religion.” More Tourette’s.
What was it about this girl?

“You’re weirding me out.”

The bridge lights winked in the distance. “I
don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s not something I’ve ever
talked about.” He filled his lungs. “When I was six, an old
preacher came to our church. Before he left, he squatted down,
looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Jesse boy, I believe God wants you
to preach.’”

“That’s it? You have to be a preacher because
some old man said so? What about your God-given musical
talent?”

Jesse grabbed the back of his neck. “Why have
I remembered what that man said for a decade and a half?”

“Would God make you do something you don’t
want to do for the rest of your life?”

“If He’s anything like my old man.”

Kallie turned at a brick walk with grass
sprouting through the cracks. He followed. She jogged up the two
steps and slipped behind the screen door. “Well, I hope God’s not
like your dad—or mine. ‘Night, Jess.”

The latch clicked shut in the porch light. A
paint chip dropped to the stoop. He’d just lobbed his life into her
court for the second time in a week—first the song, then telling
her something even Cisco didn’t know. She’d knocked him off balance
ever since the day they met. He headed for home, his mind sliding
back to the day he almost stumbled over her in the church shed.

Under his damp shirt, his back had been stiff
from hunching over his guitar. The final notes hung in the air,
mingling with the scent of gasoline and cut grass. Heat radiated
from the shed’s tin roof, chasing away the cool of the rain. He
stood and stretched. His eyes caught on a stack of hymnals—his
father’s music. Bitterness churned below his ribs. He shoved his
guitar into its case and clattered down the steps.

What the—?
He halted short of stepping
on the sleeping girl. Her curled form imprinted on his mind in the
seconds before she woke. Her head rested on her arm. Silky,
white-blonde hair spilled across her shoulder. Tanned legs tucked
close to her body in the dim light of the landing. Her eyes blinked
open.

He grinned. “So, who are you? One of my
adoring fans?” His grin spread. “Usually, I keep them awake.”

She stared at him stupidly, slogging toward
alertness. “Kallie… came in out of the rain… tired from unpacking…
just moved in… today. Nice tunes—unfamiliar, but nice.”

“Just nice?” He grinned at her again. “I
wrote them.”

Kallie studied him with eyes the color of
evergreens. “Nice enough to put me to sleep.”

Out in the sunshine, he stumbled, the full
force of her beauty hitting him. Long legs brought her nearly to
his height. A sliver of skin peeked between her shorts and T-shirt.
His eyes flitted away. He wanted his equilibrium back, and it
wouldn’t return as long as he stood there with a silly grin on his
face.

“Hey, so next time maybe I’ll keep you awake.
The name’s Jesse. Catch you later. Gotta run.” He waved and headed
across the parking lot, his guitar case thumping against his leg.
Kal-lie, Kal-lie, Kal-lie. It had touched the back of his tongue
and the very tip, brewing a song.