Can I Get An Amen? Read online

  “Just drop her an e-mail today and let her know your schedule. Maybe she can send you some information on what still needs to be done.”

  As Philip recommended, I quickly sent a polite but vague e-mail, hoping that Parker wouldn’t receive it until I had turned on my out-of-office alert. At 4:57 p.m., my phone rang.

  “Ellen, it’s Parker. I just got your e-mail and wanted to catch you before you left. Do you have a few minutes?”

  I pulled out a notebook and a pen and took a deep breath. “Sure.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Kat turned off the radio, which was practically inaudible over the pounding rain. I was concentrating on driving and had slowed to forty miles an hour, as had the cars around me.

  “Shit,” I said, leaning forward toward the windshield. “I can’t see a thing.” I was being led by the rear lights of the cars in front of me. When they braked, I braked.

  “Maybe you should pull over,” Kat suggested. “We can wait until this downpour is over.”

  The tractor-trailers around me had done just that, but I hesitated. “No, let’s just get there.” I strained my eyes to read the exit sign on the side of the road. It was only five o’clock in the evening, but it looked like the dead of night. “I hate daylight saving time.”

  We crept up I-95 for a bit, until the heaviest of the rain lifted as suddenly as it had come, brightening the sky a bit before the official sunset. As soon as I saw the big, rambling Boston Globe building, I knew I was back. We passed all the old familiar landmarks, and I eyed them suspiciously. It was as if they had all taken Gary’s side, like mutual friends who had made their allegiance known.

  “What’s with that mural?” asked Kat disapprovingly as we passed the building covered on one side with an airbrushed-looking under-the-sea scene.

  “I don’t know. It’s just always been there.”

  “It looks like a giant coffee mug.”

  I looked at my sister. If Boston belonged to Gary, at least I had Kat. “I’m really glad you’re here, Kat,” I said, realizing the truth of it.

  She reached over and squeezed my leg. “Me, too.” Kat wasn’t one for emoting, so she quickly turned our moment together to the practical. “It’s nice to get away from work for a few days.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” I said ominously.

  “What?” asked Kat. “Working for Parker Collins’s husband isn’t a dream come true?”

  “He’s actually fine,” I conceded. “He’s never there. I just hate having to deal with Parker.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have to deal with her. It’s not like she works there. She’s just the boss’s wife.”

  “Yeah, and she relishes that role, let me tell you. She’s been planning this holiday party thing, but now she’s claiming that she’s swamped and needs me to help her.”

  “Like, a personal party?”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “It’s for Philip’s clients, associates, that kind of thing. His last assistant had started it before she left.” I found myself almost trying to legitimize my involvement, not wanting to seem like a pushover.

  “All right, so what does she need help with?”

  “She called me on Friday and gave me a to-do list. Let’s just say that I hope I can find a company in New Jersey that will rent a Gorham silver service for eighty. Apparently, silver plate or stainless will not do.”

  “So she’ll be a pain in your ass until the party’s over. Then I bet you won’t have to deal with her for months.” Kat was doing her best to put the situation in perspective for me.

  “I don’t know, Kat. She came in the other day and said some stuff…” Realizing that I didn’t want to go down that path, I quickly tried to backtrack. “Whatever. You’re right. I just need to suck it up for a month.”

  But Kat’s antennae were up. “What did she say?” she demanded, her well-manicured brows forming hard angles above her eyes.

  Knowing it would be useless to try to keep it from Kat now, I told her everything. I told her about the prayer request and my fight with my parents and what Parker had said.

  Kat listened silently, her lips thinned and tight. “She is such a bitch,” she spat.

  I was salivating at the opportunity to trash Parker. “And you should have seen what a nightmare her kids were, too. I am sure the oldest is going to need to have his Cheerios sprinkled with Ritalin.”

  Kat gave me a look. “Not Parker,” she said. “Mom. Parker is just a miserable witch who has been competing with you since the day you met. But Mom is supposed to be your mother. And she totally disregarded your feelings and your privacy. She doesn’t give a shit about anything except her religion.” Her words were thick with bitterness that had been steeping for fourteen years, steeping since the day everything changed for her. “It’s always been that way.”

  Regretting what I had started, I weakly defended Mom. “Kat, I don’t think she knew how much it would upset me. She just didn’t put herself in my shoes.”

  But Kat had been unleashed. “She never puts herself in anyone else’s shoes. Never.” Her voice was hard and her every muscle seemed contracted. “Do you think she put herself in my shoes? Do you think she was thinking about how my life might be impacted when everything went down?”

  Kat never talked about what had happened. Only a handful of times since she had gotten back from Aunt Kathy’s had she ever mentioned it. And now, just like then, I didn’t know how to react.

  I kept silent as Kat went on. “I was sixteen, pregnant, and scared, and all she could talk to me about was sin and accountability and ‘reaping what I had sown.’ ” Kat’s breath was uneven, and she fought, as she had always fought, to remain in control. “She made me have a baby, Ellen, so that she didn’t have to challenge her faith. So that she didn’t have to have a daughter who had had an abortion.” It was a word that no one in my family ever said out loud, a word that no one spoke with the stark gravity that Kat had just given it. Not since that night when Kat came home.

  Jill had been spending the night with me. We were supposed to be studying for our finals, but since it was our senior year, we had spent most of the afternoon lying on my bed and flipping through catalogues looking at bikinis and trying to decide which would be best for our respective body types. We talked about college and the summer and who we were going to be come September. It was just before five when my mother came into my room, wringing her hands. She looked as though it was taking all of her strength to keep her building hysteria just below the surface.

  “Jill, honey, I think you better go home,” she said. Jill and I exchanged looks, both sensing that we should keep our mouths shut, that we should duck and cover. “We have a family matter to discuss.”

  “Sure, Mrs. Carlisle,” Jill said tentatively.

  I walked Jill out to her car, then cautiously approached my mother, fearing that she had found out about Kat. She was at the kitchen sink. “Mom, what’s up?” I asked nervously, but with enough attitude that she wouldn’t suspect me of being complicit.

  “Your father and I need to talk to your sister,” she said, bracing herself against the counter. And with that I went upstairs.

  From my bedroom window, I saw Kat’s car drive up. She had been at an away lacrosse game. I had no chance to warn her about what was waiting, so I stayed as still as I could and prayed that I was wrong. This was before my parents had moved to their new house with its cathedral ceilings and open floor plan, and our home then was a center-hall colonial in an established neighborhood. Its multitude of smaller rooms rambled over its nice, large lot, making it difficult to hear conversations taking place on different floors or at other ends of the house. But I heard everything that night. It was as if the world around us had stilled and there were no distractions, no rustlings of life to drown out the confrontation. I heard my mother’s shrieks and sobs, I heard my father’s quiet monotone, and I heard Kat wailing her protests. I sat in front of my full-length mirror and watched my face as I listened.

&nb
sp; My mother’s voice shook the house when she yelled, “You are going to have this baby!”

  She had found out. From just a phone number written on a Post-it note in Kat’s room and tucked carefully into the bottom of her underwear drawer. My mother had figured out the rest.

  I heard Kat’s feet fly up the stairs and into my room. Kat and I spent the rest of the night sitting on the roof outside my window while my mother was on the phone with Aunt Kathy, making plans. Kat would leave at the end of the summer. She would stay with Aunt Kathy until she had the baby, which would be put up for adoption. As those first tense weeks passed, the story we would all learn to tell began to take form. Kat was taking the first half of the year off from high school, to go stay with family in Southern California. She would be attending school there and helping our aunt, who was ill.

  By the time Kat left, we all had it down. “Cancer,” we would say. “Breast cancer,” which we discovered invited no further conversation. And Kat learned the story, too. Her face was emotionless and empty as she recited her lines. But she never—no matter how hard my parents pressed, no matter what they threatened or took away—told them who the father was. She never told anyone. Not even me. Everything else, Kat went along with. She was like a rag doll that summer: lifeless and static, at the mercy of whoever was holding her.

  But the truth of her pregnancy eventually came out. And all of our careful constructs were revealed. “Did you tell Jill?” my mother demanded. But I hadn’t. I always could keep a secret, and it wasn’t until the rumors were weaving their way around us that I confided in my best friend. The only other person outside the family who knew what had happened was the boy. He was the only possible source of the gossip.

  The talk had started long before Kat came home. I was in college and far away from it all, but I felt my mother’s panic every time she would call me, wild and frantic, over a comment that was made or a remark she had overheard. “Do you think they know?” she would ask.

  I would always tell her that no one knew. “How could they?” I said quickly, before making an excuse to get off the phone.

  When Kat finally did come home, on January 3, two weeks after she had given birth to and then given away a seven-pound, six-ounce baby girl, she was fundamentally changed. Her wildness, once always coupled with a carefree spirit, with youth and innocence, was now hard and defiant. Having that child was the last thing she ever, ever let anyone make her do.

  Kat never did return to Horton, never did finish high school. She took some odd jobs until she turned eighteen, and then she left, heading first back to California. But over the course of three years, she was slowly pulled, as if by gravitational force, back to New Jersey, moving first to Colorado, then to North Carolina. I had just graduated from Northeastern and was living here in Boston when she went home. I remember sitting in my bedroom, looking out onto the stretch of road that we were now flying down, when she called with the news that she was going back.

  “Isn’t that your old apartment?” asked Kat, breaking the silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Before going to the hotel, we drove by my old house, the sweet little cape with the oak tree in the front yard. After the final hearing, Gary and I were going to go through the house before heading to see Daniel, where Gary’s mother, Beverly, would meet us. Although from what I understood there would be some red tape around filing the divorce judgment, I knew that as far as we were both concerned, we would no longer be married as soon as we signed those papers in front of the judge.

  “I still can’t believe you didn’t get a lawyer for all of this,” said Kat as we slowed to a crawl, looking into the dark windows of my house. I hadn’t expected Gary to be there, but some residual jealousy stirred all the same when I thought about where else he might be.

  “It just would have been an unnecessary expense,” I said. “Gary made sure that everything was weighted in my favor; that I assure you.”

  I was almost bitter that he got to feel noble about his generosity. I imagined him furrowing his brow as he said somberly to the friends that were close enough to ask about the settlement, “I just wanted to be more than fair to Ellen.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t want to keep this place. You could have stayed here in Boston,” said Kat as she looked around the neighborhood, a suburban utopia. “You should have made Gary find a new place to live.”

  “I could never have afforded it on my own. Honestly, I really don’t know how Gary’s going to do it.” But in truth, I knew exactly how Gary was going to do it—with someone.

  . . .

  I couldn’t sleep that night at the hotel. The pillows on the beds were thick and hard and the sheets smelled like industrial-strength laundry detergent. I rolled from one side of my double bed to the other, trying to find rest on my stomach, then my side, finally flopping onto my back when I had given up. I had wanted to get a good night’s sleep; I had wanted to look refreshed and rested when I saw Gary.

  Kat, who was sleeping in a duplicate double bed across from me, rolled over to face me.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  I stared at the ceiling. “No. I’m not nervous. I think I just want to get it over with.” I had been so insistent that I needed to see Gary again, to see Daniel and Beverly and the house. Now I almost wished that I had followed Gary’s advice and let this all play out remotely.

  “I think you are doing the right thing, being here and everything,” said Kat, seeming to read my mind.

  “It’s been three months since I saw him.” Lying in the dark, I pictured his face, and the way it used to soften when he was amused with me. “Ellen,” he would say, during the first couple of months we started trying, “we’re going to have a baby; it just takes a little bit. Don’t worry so much.” And then he would wrap his thick, strong arms around me and I would take a deep breath and he would kiss the top of my head. He’s right, I thought as I relaxed into him. Of course he is right. His arms seemed to be able to hold the weight of the world. It’s hard not to believe someone with arms like that.

  . . .

  As I dressed the next morning, the black pants suit that I had planned on wearing didn’t seem right. It was the suit that I had picked out with Jill for my interview with Kent & Wagner.

  “Does it look too severe?” I called from the bathroom, where I stood twisting in front of the mirror. Kat was lying on the bed drinking a cup of Starbucks that she had just retrieved from the hotel lobby. Her face was freshly washed and smelled like lavender.

  “It only looks severe because you have your hair pulled back like a nun. Wear it down,” she said as she considered other edits to my look, “and put on a statement necklace.”

  “I didn’t bring a statement necklace!” I said, panic-stricken, sticking my head out of the bathroom.

  “Relax,” said Kat as she reached down into her handbag next to her and pulled out a gorgeous costume necklace that she had purchased at Barney’s, a twisted tangle of gray pearls and smoky crystals.

  “Oh my God, thank you, Kat!” I gushed as I rushed to retrieve it.

  She eyed me as I fastened it, then turned to appraise the revision in the mirror. “What shoes were you going to wear?” she asked.

  “My black pointy-toed flats.” I always wore flats, a throwback to being the tallest girl in the class, beginning in elementary school.

  “Wear those instead,” she said, pointing to her beautiful black ankle boots.

  “Should I do a dramatic eye?”

  “No…,” she said, as if she had already thought it through. “I think we might already be pushing the limits for a nine a.m. court appearance.”

  . . .

  The courthouse was a foreboding brick building with squeaky tile floors and archaic letter-board signs that provided information about departments and locations. It looked perfectly content to sit stoically as the wind attempted to batter it, whipping about the few stray
leaves that had managed to hang on this long. With my head down, I marched forward with a confident determination that I didn’t feel. It just seemed to be the way that one should approach such a structure: with purpose. I nestled my face down into my thick scarf and stepped quickly up the stairs, Kat’s shoes making a muted clacking noise as I went.

  “Ellen.” He said my name with quiet recognition, stepping out from the portico.

  I jumped, more surprised than I should have been at the sound of Gary’s voice. I’d thought that he might try to meet me outside. It was part of why I had arrived thirty minutes early, to deny him his last act of chivalry.

  “Hi, Gary.” He was wearing his gray wool overcoat and was holding his leather briefcase.

  “It’s good to see you, Ellen.” Resting his hand lightly on my elbow, he leaned forward and gently kissed my cheek. As his clean-shaven face brushed against mine, I could feel how cold it was. He must have been waiting for some time. “I know that it can be… intimidating in there, so I thought that we could walk in together.”

  My hair blew across my face, and I pulled a hand from my pocket and tucked it back behind my ear. “I would have been fine.”

  “I know,” he said softly, trying to smile. “You look great.”

  My face did not change, but I averted my eyes. “Thank you,” I said coldly.

  An older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a thick, lined sweatshirt walked past us into the building. As he opened the door, a gush of heat rushed out. “Well, we may as well get out of the cold,” said Gary, reaching for the door with a glove-clad hand. I paused, looking at him as he held it open. He was the archetypal ideal husband. He was the man that an advertising agency would cast to sit on the deck of an oceanfront summer home to sell financial services. He’d stare triumphantly at the horizon as the camera panned out to show a wife collecting shells on the beach and two children sailing toy boats in the water. We can get you here sooner than you think, would come a deep and steady-sounding voice. Then the background would drop to black and a staid-looking logo would flash on the screen.