Embrace Me (16 page)

I realized the extent of my popularity on
The Port of Peace Hour
the Thursday before Easter. Harlan Hopewell called me on my cell phone as I worked out at the gym near the mall.

“Drew, Charmaine and I got the greatest idea.” He paused.

“Well, okay, Charmaine got the greatest idea, and we want to tell you about it in person. Can you come on over to the house this afternoon?

Charmaine's making an icebox cake. She makes the best icebox cake you've ever tasted. And she got a pound of hazelnut coffee from Java Jane's too.”

Elysian Heights basically shut down from the Wednesday before Easter until Easter Sunday, upon which our celebration blew the doors off of Mount Oak. Yes, I can hear you sigh, Father Brian. Well, Good Friday is such a downer, isn't it?

For the previous two years, our sunrise service was the most well-attended service in the entire state.

“I can make it, sure, Harlan. Right now?”

“That would be great. Charmaine!” he called, right into the receiver. I held it away from my ear. “He can come right now! Okay, good, Drew.”

He clicked off.

The phone rang two seconds later. “Didn't mean to cut you off. I mistakenly hit a wrong button with my chin. I hate these cordless phones.”

“No problem.”

That was Harlan for you.

“Well, good. See you soon then, Drew.”

I showered, changed, and hurried over in my Civic.

Pulling onto their blacktop driveway, I had to wonder about the Hopewells. Charmaine made a lot of money from her gospel music career. She toured in a big silver bus every summer, headlined at Gospelganza each July in Greenville, and was always winning Dove awards. Granted, all the money that didn't go to pay for the show's expenses went to counseling ministries and homes for addicts and unwed mothers and such, but certainly Harlan drew a good salary from a congregation that size. It was the largest church in Mount Oak at that time, and I knew how well Elysian Heights paid me.

Yeah, no vow of poverty for us.

And yet, their house looked like the digs of a small branch bank loan officer, or the manager of a radio station, typical middle-middle class. Nothing fancy but not a hovel either—the red brick rancher sat on a dead-end street amid other ranchers alarmingly like it. New landscaping had been planted, judging by the tender shrubs still resting arm's length from one another. But other than fresh paint around the window frames and on the green door, maybe on the shutters, the house didn't seem to have been added to since it was built.

I remember wondering at the time how they could be content there like that. They had to have been raking in the donations.

But they'd been caught up in those televangelist scandals back in the eighties, not so much for excess but for Harlan's antipsychology message. They were playing it safe and who could blame them? They should have been more careful back then. Covered their backsides more thoroughly.

Seeing their home still made me feel good about my small apartment over Java Jane's. The Hopewells had the right idea if they were as committed as I was to traveling light.

“Could it be they were just content?” you might ask. Perhaps yes, but that thought wouldn't have crossed my mind that day.

Harlan greeted me at the door and ushered me through the living room, furnished with antiques and a couch with doilies, and into a kitchen decorated in shades of red and yellow. Two older women stood side-by-side at the kitchen counter, quite possibly explaining the antiques. Charmaine didn't seem like an antiques kind of lady, more of a Wal-Mart gal.

I was horrible. I am horrible. I realize this, all my posturing and judging. But believe me, it's pretty uncomfortable for a jackass like me to admit I had feet of clay clear up to my thighs. A man people looked up to, asking him to show them the way to God.

Show them the way to God? As if I knew!

Oh sure, I knew about salvation and Jesus's death on the cross, but knowing God, walking in the cool of the evening in the garden with Him? I couldn't have gotten them closer to their Creator any more than I could have set their feet on Saturn.

I was liar and a phony. Lying about who God is and speaking of Wal-Mart. That's what I was. A sprawling old big-box store stealing customers from the mom-and-pop shops. God have mercy. We actually ran our church on a “business model,” as if efficiency and the bottom line would usher in the Kingdom of God.

The parish system is looking better and better.

Of course the Hopewells welcomed me into their home like I was a long lost relative, their favorite nephew come home from a three-year stint around the world.

“Grandma Min, this here is Drew Parrish. Drew, Minerva Whitehead.”

“Hello, Drew. Just call me Min.” Her smile stretched to its limits beneath light blue eyes and white hair shorn close to her head.

“And this is her daughter, Charmaine's mother, Isla Whitehead.”

Isla didn't say anything. She turned her head, lovely eyes staring in blankness. Overweight, she must have once been a beautiful woman. It was easy to see.

Harlan offered no explanation just then.

Grandma Min tucked her arm through her daughter's. “We'll just take a little walk out by the daffodils, Isla.”

I looked out the sliding glass doors visible from the kitchen. Yellow blooms popped up in all the wrong places.

Harlan explained. “When we moved here, the previous owner had planted bulbs all over the yard. It's the craziest thing you've ever seen. But Charmaine won't get rid of them. Her mother, Isla, well, you've got to have noticed she's not quite all there. Schizophrenia.

She's catatonic without her meds. But heaven help us, she loves the flowers.”

“You have a schizophrenic living with you?”

This was news to me.

“Oh sure. On her meds she's a lamb. Doesn't say much, but Min takes good care of her.”

“Both of them live here?”

“Yep. Got a regular intergenerational something going around here. Four generations of Whiteheads. Well, if you count our own children as Whiteheads, which they half are. Although our oldest, Grace, is adopted. She's away at college. Charmaine!” he hollered.

“Be right there!” Her voice came from one of the bedrooms down the hallway. “Just mash the button on the coffeemaker, if you please, Harlan.”

“All right, shug!”

He put some reading glasses on his nose and searched for the button. Finding it, he pressed it down. “Have a seat at the table, Son.

We're glad you could come and hated putting you out, but we wanted to strike while the iron was hot, as they say.”

Charmaine bustled into the room, a tomato pincushion fastened to her wrist. “I've just got to finish the kids' Easter outfits. I'm so behind.

Make the news quick, Harlan, so I can get back to my machine.”

“You make your kids clothes?” I asked.

“Mine too.”

“She's a whiz on that machine, Drew. I tell you what.”

“I would never have guessed.”

Charmaine laughed. “I like to sew, Drew. It relaxes me. Do you have a hobby?”

Hmm. “Does reading church growth books count?”

Harlan slapped his hand on the table. “It does to me.”

“Oh, Harlan.” Charmaine slid into the seat opposite me. “Well, get on. I want to see the look on his face.”

“All right, then. Here it is. You've become so popular on
The Port of Peace Hour
, I think we need to do something about it.”

I nodded my head. “And that would be?”

“A spin-off!” Charmaine sort of hopped in her seat.

“A spin-off?”

“Your own show!” Charmaine practically shouted it.

“From my church?”

“Well, not yet.” Harlan scratched his cheek. “We don't have the financing to get that kind of operation going. We were thinking something more intimate, like a talk show.”

“A talk show?” I was stunned. Charmaine filled in the silence.

“Oh, not the Phil Donahue type, but the Johnny Carson type—without the audience.” Charmaine stood up and crossed to the cupboard. “Harlan wanted the Phil, but I reminded him about the cost of a studio audience, not to mention a studio.” She laughed, pulling down three mugs as the coffeemaker gargled and spat the last of the water in its pipes.

“Where would we tape it?”

“We'll take the Sunday school room closest to the sanctuary and make a set.”

“It sounds like it could work,” I said.

“Now, it'll be up to you to find guests, incorporate regular features,” Harlan said. “We'd like this to not just be about spiritual matters but current events, human interest, subjects across-the-board.”

“How about Daisy?” Charmaine lifted the coffeepot. “Wouldn't it be great to have her sing each week?”

“Oh, shug, that's a fine idea! I tell you, Drew, the woman's a whiz.”

“Sounds good to me.”

And I began to dream, picturing myself sitting on the couch with famous people. Oh, my father would be a great resource. We'd have Christian ministry leaders due to his connections, politicians too.

Charmaine could help us with the celebrities. I'd be more popular than
The Port of Peace Hour
—you could bank on that. Harlan was a good preacher, but that kind of show was on its last legs.

I called my father on the way home and told him the news.

“Your own show from right there in little Mount Oak,” he said.

“It'll go all across the country.”

“On cable I presume?”

That day I drove fifteen miles from town to a small gas station and bought a pack of Marlboro Lights. I pressed the burning tip of the cigarette into my flesh right there in the car. And I felt such release. I'd been cutting myself for years before that. Not much. Just every once in a while to relieve the pressure. I was sixteen when it started. The same year my father told me my mother committed suicide. A friend in school did it and said it helped him cope. He was right.

Another sin, surely. But then again, Father, your people mortified the flesh. Is that what I'm doing now?

I haven't burned myself for three days. The first notebook is full and I've given it to Father Brian. This one's cover sports an extreme, bulbous close-up of a Jack Russell terrier. I write as Hermy sits at the end of the bed reading
Animal Farm
, with
1984
lying next to him.

The phone rings.

“Drew Parrish?”

“Yes.”

“The truth will set you free. Thus saith the Lord.”

“Who are you?”

“I can't say.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . I love you, Drew.”

And she hangs up after gulping down a sob.

My face burns as realization fills me, bringing with it more questions than I knew could be asked.

“Who was it?” Hermy asks.

“It was my mother.”

“Isn't she . . . ?” He draws an index finger across his neck.

“I guess not.” My veins catch fire.

“Crazy.”

“Tell me about it. Hey, I gotta go.” I grab my beach chair and head out to the sand. I smoke every last cigarette in a brand new pack, a new theory erupting with each one, none making any sense whatsoever.

I place a phone call to my father before he leaves for work the next day. “So where's Mom these days?”

He huffs his condescending laugh, but I hear the fear around the edges. “Have you gone a little crazy, son? You know as well as I do that your mother is dead.”