Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (42 page)

Flannery lifted her chin. “I know you held Elgin down until the cops got there, which totally makes you my hero.”

“Chief had that handled,” Kade said.

And then he did stand up and weave through the bodies to get to the kitchen. I followed him, catching the door before he could close it. I found him on the back stoop. He sat dismally, nails digging into the concrete on either side of him.

“Stop it, Kade,” I said.

He lifted his hands.

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what you’re doing to yourself.”

I sat beside him. The first niggle of autumn had teased a leaf from the pecan and blown it to the step. Kade flicked it off with his finger.

“I’m not who I thought I was,” he said, eyes straight out over Owen and Rochelle’s garden.

I kept mine straight too. “Who did you think you were?”

“Not a person who could shoot somebody.”

“You were protecting me, Kade. I would have done the same for you.”

I felt him stiffen. “Would you be disappointed that he stepped away so you didn’t have a reason to bring him down?”

“Maybe not him,” I said. “But Sultan probably. Or Elgin.”

Kade looked at me. His face was pinched with pain.

“Why
not
him? After everything he did, why don’t you hate him?”

“Seems like we had this same conversation about a month ago,” I said.

“Then I guess there’s no reason to have it again.”

“I think there is.”

“Why?”

“Because now I have a different answer. Maybe even the right answer.”

Kade stared down at his hands.

“We all have a choice,” I said. “We can live our lives the way somebody else tried to shape them. Or we can live them the way God wants to shape them if we give God a chance. Guys like Sultan and Elgin and Marcus Rydell probably didn’t even know they had a choice. Troy knew, and he chose to let his father and then my father and then his own power do it for him.”

“So what’s the difference?”

Kade’s voice was flat, but he didn’t leave, and I went with that.

“The difference is that the down-to-the-core evil people never had any other kind of shaping. Troy did.”

“From who?”

“I didn’t realize it until recently, but Sylvia did. I knew she raised me, but I never thought about the influence she had on him. In some small way, she brought him up too.”

Kade looked at me again. His face struggled with itself. “Is that what he was telling you when I got there? Is that why you defended him?”

“I defended him because in the end, he was trying to save Desmond and Flannery. But you already know that.”

“That’s not all of it. The way you were looking at him when he lost consciousness. There was something else.” He pounded the heels of his hands on the step. “I didn’t get that from you. I got his drive and his hate and his—”

“Look at me.”

He turned away. I grabbed his face and forced it close to mine.

“You were born with Troy Irwin’s passion and intelligence and wit. But the Capellis raised you, Kade. They gave you the tools to become who you are, and so far you’re doing a pretty good job with that. I don’t know what you got from me, but I know what I can give you now.”

I watched his hands come up. I knew he was going to pull mine away, and I had to let him do it. I had just given him a choice. I couldn’t take it away from him.

Slowly his fingers curled around my wrists, as damp and slimy as mine ever got, and he left them there.

“So … God,” he said. “That’s the only way out of this, right?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the only way through it.”

His face gave in and he pulled me roughly into his arms, with none of the finesse of his biological father, and all of the awkward, clumsy, bottomless love of his mother.

Kade left not long after that, asking me to give his apologies to the group. He did stop on the front porch and look back at me. “I forgot to tell you that I scheduled a meeting for us and Chief with Pix Penwell. Wednesday at eleven o’clock.”

“I’ll try to make it,” I said.

When I turned to go back inside, Hank was waiting.

“You ready?” she said.

I let Kade take his place in the back of my mind and joined her and the rest of the group in the living room. The Sisters looked mystified as India spread a snowy cloth on the coffee table and Hank set a cruet of oil in the center. Bonner placed a pillow on the floor in front of it, and I took Mercedes’s hand.

“What, Miss Angel?” she said.

“This is a special night for you, Merc,” I said. “You’re graduating.”

Immediately she shook her head. “I ain’t—I’m not ready to leave here, Miss Angel.”

“We wouldn’t hear of it,” India said.

“Then what—”

I put my hands on Mercedes’s broad shoulders. “The board came together and we prayed and we feel Nudged to make you the Sister in Charge of Sacrament House.”

“Amen, now,” someone said.

“That’s right—”

The rhythm rocked in, and Mercedes looked at me with eyes like liquid gold.

“You’ve healed into this, and just like you told Flannery, now people trust you. Not just the Sisters, but all of us. Especially me.”

I turned to Hank, who had the cruet open.

“If you’ll accept, Merc,” she said, “I’ll commission you.”

I had never seen our Mercedes without words. But the stunning grace with which she nodded her fine head made words unnecessary.

And so in the name of our Lord Christ, Hank anointed Mercedes. With the hands of her Sisters and her mentors, she was prayed into her new way of being. The Nudge was at peace.

But as the Sisters left that evening, half to go in sundry directions, their longing spirits made it clear that something had to be done to keep them together.

The next day, Tuesday, was Flannery’s first day at Muldoon Middle. Although she walked into the place with her chin ready to take it over, and although Desmond vowed he would turn his attention from maidens in distress to “any fool thinks he gonna mess with my sister,” I spent the whole day wondering what things were going to look like when I picked them up that afternoon.

When I drove up in the van, Skeeter Iseley had already stationed herself on the sidewalk for duty. The Nudge was immediate.

Go—

I know, I get it.

I got two things, but I knew only one was from God. The other was just a little housekeeping detail.

“No motorcycle today,” she said when I joined her. “No Harley.”

“No room for two passengers,” I said. “Did you by any chance get a new student today?”

She adjusted the sunglasses. “No. Why?”

“Just wondered.”

Check. Now on to the God-thing.

“Would you like to have coffee sometime, Skeeter?” I said.

If I had asked her to the prom she probably wouldn’t have looked more dumbfounded.

“We have more in common than you realize,” I said. “Starting with being used by the same man. But it goes deeper.”

“Deeper,” she said. She was obviously too flabbergasted to come up with a synonym.

“We both care about the at-risk kids,” I said. “You obviously do or you wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to look into Desmond’s history and share it with a virtual stranger.” Her jaw dropped, but I went on. “You understand the obstacles they face. I have a way of helping them knock those down. Maybe we can help each other.”

She looked as if she were waiting for me to drop another shoe. When I said nothing, she nodded.

“All right,” she said. “Coffee. Sometime. Anytime.”

“I know where to find you,” I said, and stepped away to locate my kids.

It was too bad mosquitoes didn’t transform into butterflies the way caterpillars did. But there was hope for Skeeter Iseley. I could feel it.

“We need to celebrate Flannery’s first day,” I told her and Desmond when we’d all climbed into the van.

Flannery sniffed. “What’s to celebrate? All those kids are so immature.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Desmond said.

That launched them into the inevitable banter, during which I observed Flannery in the van’s rearview mirror. She was always going to be more mature than kids her age, and some adults for that matter. Some of that came from her fight to be who she was made to be, and it was good. But some emerged from experiencing things no child her age should ever have to live through. No child. No woman. No anyone. I didn’t need a Nudge to tell me I had to stay on that until no one suffered such things, or until I died. Whichever came first.

Flannery requested Georgie’s, I suspected because she hoped Kade would be there. Desmond had never been, so they set off to inspect the jukebox while I looked for a table, and discovered who
was
there.

Yates Chattingham slipped from his stool beside Christine at the soda fountain and came to me, both hands extended. The better half of my mixed feelings pushed me to take at least one of them.

“Will you join us for a minute?” he said. “We haven’t wanted to bother you with all that y’all have had to deal with, but we’d really like to talk to you.”

I looked around for Desmond and Flannery, who were curling their lips over the musical selections, and nodded at Yates. I might have a few things to talk about as well.

“This has to be a divine appointment,” Christine said when Yates ushered me to the stool between them. “What can we get you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m with my kids. So … how did you know we’ve had a lot going on?”

Christine turned a pretty shade of pink. “They didn’t give me any details. They just said it’s been a little rough.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“I can tell you, right, because you already know they’re in NA?”

“They?”

“Rochelle and Gigi.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You didn’t know I’m their sponsor.”

“No.” I pulled my hand through my hair because what else was there to do when you felt like an idiot?

Yates came to the rescue. “Christine and I were just wondering, and you may not know this with everything else happening, but do you have any idea what happened to Tango? We haven’t seen her since, when, Chris?”

“The night she was arrested for pounding a teenage boy a block from the Hot Spot?” I said.

I watched them both, but they just looked at each other, faces blank.

“So where is she now?” Christine said.

“My source says she’s been sent to the juvenile correctional facility.” I craned my neck for sight of Flannery, who was now examining the menu with Desmond at a table where two milkshakes had already appeared. “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything about that in front of Flannery. She doesn’t know yet.”

Christine’s eyes drooped. “So she and Tango … worked together.”

“And now Flannery has a chance and Tango doesn’t,” Yates said.

“Ms. Chamberlain obviously can’t take all of them in, Yates.”

“I didn’t mean that—”

“What ticks me off is that Tango is in jail. I only got to talk to her twice, but I thought we were getting somewhere.”

“Which is probably why she was kicking that kid’s butt instead of offering him her services,” I said.

Christine pushed her Coke aside so she could grab my wrist as she went on. I was getting the impression that she couldn’t speak unless she was touching the person she was talking to. I found myself not minding it.

“What we need is someplace where they can go while we work with them,” Christine said. “I’ve checked it out, and there is nothing like what we had in Atlanta.”

“I keep telling you, start something,” Yates said.

“Big Al! Whatchoo want to eat?”

I held up a finger to Desmond and slid off the stool.

“I need to get over there before they order an entire buffet,” I said. “But I would like to talk more sometime.”

“How about Friday night?” he said. “After you talk to the kids at the Hot Spot. You’ll do that, right? I mean, isn’t that what you do? Give people hope?”

“That’s what I hear,” Christine said.

I gave her a smile. “Gigi and Rochelle talk too much.”

Christine shook her head. “I didn’t get that from them. I mean, not in those words. I heard that from Pix Penwell.”

I was once again reduced to “oh.”

“Big
Al
!”

“Go,” Yates said. “We’ll see you Friday.”

All right, already,
I said. Not to the Reverend Chattingham. To God.