Lay It on My Heart (2 page)

I concentrate on my stomach. Or right below it, a spot I haven't been aware of before recently. Now I can feel it, I guess, but nothing really hurts. Womb. Womanhood. “No,” I say.

“Good,” she says. Then she forgets she told me to stand up and sits down again herself. Then she thinks better of it and stands up again. “Are you nervous?” she asks.

“No.”

“Good,” she says. “Me neither. Excited?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

The flight's in already, just arrived from Chicago and getting ready to go on its way to Atlanta. The huge, parked plane stretches across all the airport windows, like a sea creature in the world's largest aquarium. I
am
excited. I have missed my father, and even though Phoebe says he's a difficult man, and she's been happy for the break, the truth is that when he's not keeping her occupied, she doesn't know what to do with herself. Or with me either. And I don't know what to do with her. Left to ourselves, we have not exactly brought out the best in each other.

When the people start trickling through the gate, they're blinking like they've been deep underwater instead of up in the air. One tanned, elderly couple passes through the doorway whispering and glancing behind them at a skinny man with a wild beard. He's dressed like an illustration from the Bible, in a brown robe and rope sandals, and for just a moment I think that's why he looks familiar. Then Phoebe's hand on my shoulder gets so heavy it hurts.

“Oh,” she says, and suddenly, beneath the beard, I recognize my father. His lips are moving like he's talking quietly to himself, which means he's probably receiving prophecy. It can come upon him any time, like a spell.

“David,” Phoebe says. She waves her arms until he sees and heads in our direction. His legs work slowly against the heavy robe, like he's wading through water. I'm used to thinking of him as a prophet, which some people consider unusual even in a town as full of churches as East Winder. But until now he's always kept his hair short and his face shaved, and he's always worn the regular clothes Phoebe picks out or sews for him. Still, you never know what you're getting with my father on any given day. “The prophet,” he has said in the past, “is different from the man.”

Now he stands in front of Phoebe with his hands on her upper arms. His lips stop moving, and he smiles his warm, sad prophet smile and says her name. Then he turns to me and palms the top of my head the way he did when I was little, and that's when I smell him. Not exactly a bad smell. Kind of sweet and rotten at the same time, like fruit that's gone by. The people from the plane stare or look away, but they all give us a wide berth.

“Dad,” I say, and he gives me the same smile he gave Phoebe, his I-love-the-world-and-you're-part-of-the-world smile, which means that right now he is more prophet than regular person. My stomach drops the way it does in the elevator at the retirement home. All of a sudden I do feel a pain there, a slow squeezing.

We turn and make our way back through the airport, me trailing them by two steps. On the escalator down to baggage claim, my father ducks his bearded head and tells Phoebe that he is not quite himself because he is full of the spirit of the Apostle Paul.

Phoebe waits, a rare blankness on her face.

“I have been given a vision much like his,” says my father. “You may find that the Lord calls upon you to adjust your expectations.”

“My ex-pec-ta-tions,” Phoebe says, tasting each syllable like she's unfamiliar with the word.

“Isn't it interesting that the biblical Phoebe was a special helper to the Apostle Paul?”

“My expectations,” Phoebe says again. “My expectations.” It's like she's doing what I used to do when I was little, repeating a word but emphasizing a different syllable each time just to see what it sounds like. It's not a good sign, but my father doesn't notice.

“I stood where they all stood,” he says. “I traced their steps. It was profound. It was real. It worked on my spirit until I was open in a new way, and you can't believe, you can't believe what's possible when we let go of the limits we place on God.” He speaks in a hoarse voice that is also loud, and getting faster, and people gliding past us on the up escalator stare openly.

Phoebe nods once and bites her lips. She shoots me a worried glance, and part of me feels sorry for her. But a bigger part of me feels impatient, because she's the one always reminding me that mere humans can't imagine in advance what the Lord has in store, and she has gone ahead and tried to imagine it anyway, hoped for it, and it's her own fault if she is disappointed.

At baggage claim my father's lips start working again. I don't want to stare at him, and I don't want to see other people staring at him either, if they are, so I train my eyes on the suitcases snaking by on the rubber mat. One right after another, with a secret message for me: whatever's coming is going to come.

“Here it is,” says my father, and reaches down for his deflated canvas duffle.

“What about the rest?” says Phoebe.

My father hoists the bag over one shoulder, which lifts the robe and exposes a constellation of small brown scabs on his ankle. “I divested myself of anything that wouldn't fit into a single bag,” he says. “And anyway, I've been wearing this robe for two weeks now.”

“I see,” says Phoebe, and I know she's thinking of the trip organizer's list of suggestions we followed to the letter. The loose linen clothes that were supposed to withstand the heat of the Holy Land. The search in Lexington for the appropriate walking shoes, for the hat that would protect his face and neck from the Middle Eastern sun. The list had been specific. And expensive. And Phoebe said she felt humiliated to go around raising support for the trip from hardworking people while we ourselves were forgoing work in order to live on faith alone. Which my father said was her pride talking.

“I have shed many things,” he says now, as if he's thinking of the list, too. “But I didn't come home empty-handed.” He winks at me and pats part of the duffle that looks flat, like maybe it contains a shoebox.

Outside, the clouds have turned deep gray and it has begun to rain. Phoebe and I trot across the road to the parking garage, then wait for my father, who takes his time, palms and face lifted gratefully to the rain until he is soaked through. Phoebe watches him and says nothing, which makes me nervous. The rain steams up from the road, a metallic smell I usually love, but now it's just turning into a heavy, wet dread in my lungs.

“I haven't seen rain in a month,” my father says when he reaches us. “You forget how nice it can be.”

Phoebe slides a foot out of her satin pump and regards her toe, which has turned blue from the wet dye. She slides her foot back in without comment. She points her chin. She offers my father the keys to the Pinto, but he shakes his head and opens the passenger door, flipping up the seat for me to climb in back, which I do, holding my dress against my legs. Outside the parking garage the rain comes down steadily. Our windshield wipers keep time with the dull throbbing in what I can't stop thinking of, now, as my womanhood. Phoebe heaves the Pinto through its gears, and we grimly, silently make our way over the back road home.

 

Daze is chatting with Mayor James on the front porch when we pull up. At five feet nine she stands taller than the mayor, and straight as a pole, too, until her shoulders narrow and curve in on themselves like the tip of a canoe. She squints through the rain in the direction of the passenger window. When we get out, she smiles hard at my father and runs two manicured hands over her silver hair, which is pulled straight back from her forehead with a clip. Since she turned sixty-five a few years ago and splurged on permanent lip liner and eyeliner, she has been pulling all of her hair back from her face to tighten everything up.

“Well,” Daze says to Mayor James. “I guess you can tell where he's been for the last month.” She gives a single clap of what might be delight. A woman's real emotions, she likes to say, should hold some mystery.

“Surely,” says Mayor James. He shakes my father's hand, looking him up and down with the deep, friendly brown eyes that make him a good mayor. “You keep me guessing, David. Can't wait to hear all about it.”

“Can't wait to tell it, Mayor,” says my father, “and a few other things too.”

“No doubt,” says Mayor James. He sticks his hand out from under the porch roof to check the rain, which is letting up. “And now I'm going to get after the weeding while the ground's still wet.” And we all watch from the porch as the man hightails it back to his own yard, leaving family to deal with their own.

I've been trying to remember everything I know about the Apostle Paul. He never married, which might be what my father means when he says that Phoebe is going to have to adjust her expectations. Though the Apostle Paul did say it is better to wed than to burn, which means burn in hell for lustful activity outside of marriage. He didn't have children, either, that I know of, so I may have to adjust my expectations, too. I don't know what happens to Daze. The Apostle Paul had to have had a mother. But my father just does the same thing to Daze that he did with Phoebe. He doesn't call her “Mother” or “DeeDee,” his pet name for her. He just pats at her thin upper arms and delivers the smile.

Over his shoulder, Daze makes big eyes at me; I make them back at her and shrug. Then she arches an eyebrow high into the middle of her forehead, which she knows I like, to let me know she's not worried.

In the kitchen, Phoebe takes two casserole pans from the freezer and peels back their tinfoil. I'm expecting her to launch into her encouraging speech, the one she makes whenever our lives change direction according to the Lord's will, but she just hands me the bowl of sourdough and says, “Biscuits, please.” Then she switches on the oven and adds, “Feed the dough after.”

“I know,” I say.

“Flour and a little sugar water.”

“I
know
.”

When we're alone, Phoebe wants to talk to me like I'm an adult, but the second that Daze is in the room, Phoebe snaps back into treating me like a child, just to let Daze knows who's in charge. Daze would take over everyone's life, Phoebe says, if you let her. Which doesn't sound all that bad to me.

I spoon out eight biscuits onto the cookie sheet. The cramps come regularly now, like a slow, airless breathing deep inside me. As one fades I find myself waiting for the next, and when it comes, it's comforting, in a way.
There you are
.

Daze lowers herself into a seat at the table. She makes a teepee of her long forearms and props her chin on top. “Can I help?”

“No, thank you,” says Phoebe.

“Got those biscuits okay, sugar?” Daze says to me, and I tell her yes. “I always say your sourdough's on the strong side, Phoebe, but then the biscuits turn out fine. I wonder what Mary James did that was different.”

It's a sore spot that Phoebe didn't take her sourdough starter from Daze. Instead she took it from Mayor James's wife, Mary, who got her own starter twenty years back when she cleaned out a dead woman's refrigerator. There's no telling where the dead woman got hers, because sourdough can last for generations if you keep feeding it.

Phoebe snatches the cookie sheet from me and sets it on top of the oven.

“You never can tell, can you?” Daze says.

When Phoebe doesn't answer, Daze turns to me.

“No,” I say.

“I guess this means he won't be going back to work right away,” Daze says.

“We haven't discussed it,” says Phoebe.

“I think—” Daze begins.

“We haven't discussed anything,” Phoebe says. She smoothes wrinkles from the two sheets of tinfoil like it takes all her concentration. I sit down and pull my knees up under my chin to see if it makes a difference in the way my stomach feels. It does, then it doesn't. I want to go find my father, who has stopped off in the living room. Probably to pray. But I don't want to miss what Phoebe and Daze might say about the situation, either.

“David is a man after God's own heart,” Daze says, after a time. “But it would be wonderful, maybe, if he finished with this latest”—Daze waves her hand respectfully in front of her, looking for the word—“it would be wonderful, maybe, if he didn't go back to
The Good Word
until he was sure he could fully focus on it.” Daze is the one who set my father up with the job in the first place. She doesn't mind reminding people that the press was started by the late, great Custer Peake, with Peake family money, the rest of which my grandfather ran clean through before he died, but she leaves that part out.

“We haven't even had a chance to sit down,” Phoebe says through her teeth.

Daze's hands drop from her chin and hit the table in fists. “I can get his job back, but I don't know if I can get it back over and over.”

“I don't need for anyone to get my job back,” says my father from the doorway. He raises his arms to the side, and the sleeves of his robe spread out like wings. “The Lord has given me new direction, and everything will be taken care of. Hasn't he taken care of us so far?”

Phoebe turns to the sink, her back to him, and stares out the window. Her shoulders rise and fall slowly with one deep breath.

“Hasn't he?”

“I guess he gave me the means to cover your mortgage, praise Him,” Daze says.

“And someday we will pay you back,” says Phoebe, speaking toward the backyard. “And it won't be soon enough.”

“We had plenty to eat, too,” says my father. “And when it looked like we weren't going to, the Lord provided.”

At the sink, Phoebe whips her head around so fast her bob whirls into a circle, the swingy ends of her hair crashing into her cheeks. I hold my breath, worried that she's mad enough to reveal her secret tailoring money. It seems possible my father would do something from the Bible if he found out, like rend his garments or smite himself on the breast, and I say a quick prayer that God will strike Phoebe dumb, if he has to, just for a moment, like he did John the Baptist's father for not having enough faith. You can ask God for things like that, but it's not really what prayer is for, and he often says no.