Can I Get An Amen? Read online

  It was a very quiet day at Kent & Wagner, though Philip was in the office. He had spent the majority of his morning on his line with the door closed. I was in the midst of tackling Parker’s to-do list when a call came through to me. “Hello, I am trying to reach Philip,” came an elegant, breathy woman’s voice. “Is he available?”

  “I’m afraid he’s on another call right now. Would you like to leave a voice mail, or is there something I can help you with?”

  “Look, could you let him know that Audrina called and I won’t be able to meet him later? Something’s come up.”

  I reached for a pen. “May I have your phone number, Audrina?” As I said her name, I felt Brenda take notice. She did nothing overt. She didn’t slow her typing or look over, but she was aware.

  Audrina sounded somewhat put out. “He has my number,” she said, effectively declining to offer it. “And can you let him know that I tried to leave a message on his cell, but something is wrong with his phone and his voice mail never came on. It just rang endlessly.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised because Philip’s phone was his lifeline. “Absolutely.”

  She said a quick, perfunctory good-bye before hanging up.

  I immediately checked Philip’s schedule to clear the appointment, but he had no meeting scheduled with an Audrina. It was the rare day when essentially all his meetings were internal, though there was a nebulous chunk of time blocked off beginning at 3:30, which read simply “@WHOB.”

  When I saw that Philip was off the phone, I gently knocked on his door.

  “Philip?” I said, before tentatively walking in. He had several files open in front of him, to which he was returning papers and documents. “An Audrina called just a few minutes ago. She indicated that she wouldn’t be able to meet later.”

  He remained utterly composed and continued straightening his desk. “Oh, right,” he said casually. “Thanks, Ellen.”

  “I tried to clear the meeting from your schedule, but was unclear as to which appointment it was…”

  “That won’t be necessary, Ellen. Thank you, though.”

  It was a dismissal and so I left. As I sat down at my desk, I again noticed Brenda staring deliberately into her computer screen, her lips pursed just a bit more than usual, a crease in her brow suggesting that she was either concentrating on the task at hand or thinking about something that she’d rather not.

  As I closed out of Philip’s schedule, I replayed my conversation with Audrina, the familiarity in her voice, the vague details.

  It wasn’t difficult to imagine that he was having an affair.

  Philip was handsome, was charming when he wanted to be, and had the sort of schedule and lifestyle that made it easy to hide such things. And though I knew that chances were there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the call, a legitimate meeting or round of drinks with an old friend, something in my gut told me that it was more than that. I couldn’t deny that my curiosity was piqued, and not out of sympathy for Parker. It was the sort of schadenfreude that you feel when you hear the first rumblings about a celebrity’s drug abuse or troubled relationship, a kind of theoretical conjecture that they might, after all, be human. I wasn’t proud that I took some degree of pleasure in the fact that Parker’s life may not be perfect, but I also wasn’t as ashamed as I should have been. It was all suspicions and assumptions, after all. But the reason for Brenda’s affinity for all things Parker had become much more clear. Brenda knew what it was like to be on the other side of an affair. A few days later, when Kat mentioned that she was meeting a girlfriend for a drink at the W Hoboken, Philip’s mysterious schedule entry, @WHOB, flashed in my mind.

  . . .

  It was seven o’clock that evening when my phone finally did ring. I was sitting on the couch with my parents, eating turkey vegetable soup in front of the TV. “Come on, y’all,” my mother had said. “Let’s eat in the family room tonight. My show’s on.” Almost every show on TV was my mother’s show, but tonight she happened to be referring to a reality series about a family of little people. “I don’t know why we can’t call them midgets anymore,” she murmured, shaking her head in that melancholy way I’d seen seniors do when recalling the good old days. “Everything has to be so politically correct, I swear.”

  I had turned my phone to vibrate, in the likely event that the volume on the TV would render a normal ring inaudible. When I felt the telltale buzzing in my back pocket, my heart leapt, and I pulled out the phone to see a local number that I didn’t recognize. I felt like a girl whose boyfriend suddenly pulled out a small velvet box and dropped to one knee. This must be it!

  “Hello?” I said. Hurrying out of the room, I saw my mother nudge my father to give him a look that was both satisfied and curious.

  “Hi, Ellen?” said a man’s voice that was too unsure, too nervous to be Mark’s. “This is Christopher Hapley. We met the other day at the Donaldsons’?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “Hi, Christopher.”

  “I hope you don’t mind that your mother gave me your number.”

  I heard the volume on the TV go down just a couple of levels.

  “Of course not.”

  “So, how are you?”

  “Fine,” I answered, knowing exactly why he was calling.

  “Did you have a nice weekend?”

  “I did; how about you?”

  “Yeah, it was good,” he said, his voice reaching an unnaturally high pitch. He coughed once, quickly, before he went on. “So, I, uh, know we had talked about getting together sometime, so I was wondering if you’d like to maybe see a movie on Friday?”

  I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall, wincing as I spoke. “Actually, I’m afraid I have plans this Friday.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said, clearly discouraged but not defeated. “Well, what works for you, then?”

  I didn’t know what was best, to rip the Band-Aid off now or slowly, in tiny increments, as he called again and again and I just happened to always have plans. “Actually, Christopher, I’m not sure if my mom told you, but I just went through a divorce.”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said uncomfortably. “Yeah, she did, uh… mention that.”

  “And so I just think I should be honest and let you know that I’d love to go out as friends, but I’m really not ready to date yet.” It was a lie, but in my mind a harmless one.

  “Oh, sure,” he said weakly. “I understand. Yeah, maybe we could catch a movie together another time.” Now he just wanted to get off the phone.

  “Sounds good.”

  “So I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

  “Definitely. See you around.”

  “Bye, then.”

  I felt terrible.

  “So who was that?” asked my mother as I walked back into the family room, anticipating just such a question.

  “You know exactly who that was,” I said coldly, my tone indicative of the outcome of our conversation. “Why would you presume that you could give him my cell phone number?”

  She shifted her body on the couch so that she could face me with squared shoulders. “Well,” she said, her eyes wide with defiance, “after our conversation in the car, I didn’t think you’d have any issue with it.”

  “You mean the conversation in which you told me he had one nut and that I had to move out? That conversation?”

  My father’s head was lowered. He was listening but avoiding heading for the trenches just yet. My mother charged onward, working herself into a lather that rivaled my own. “I swear, I think the only reason you won’t go out with him is because he is a Christian.”

  “Bingo!”

  “Ellen Louise Carlisle!” gasped my mother.

  “Listen, one person forwarding me those ‘One Hundred Blessings’ e-mails is plenty.” Only that day I’d received one, a chain e-mail that you were supposed to forward to ten people within ten minutes, at which point God would be compelled to bless you one hundred times over the next fort
y-eight hours.

  “Don’t you mock the Lord!” she shouted.

  “That’s not who I’m mocking.”

  “That’s enough,” commanded my father, always intolerant of us kids crossing the line with my mother from good-natured ribbing to something less kind.

  I turned on my heels and walked upstairs.

  . . .

  When Wednesday came and I still hadn’t heard from Mark, I called Kat. But before I launched into a description of our encounter, we had a few other matters to catch up on.

  “Have you talked to Jill?” I asked casually. Jill wasn’t supposed to be telling anyone about her pregnancy yet, but I knew her too well to think that she’d managed to keep it much of a secret.

  “I know! Can you believe it?” I loved hearing that kind of joy in Kat’s voice. “I can’t wait to find out what she’s having.”

  I realized that I had neglected to ask Jill if she was going to find out the gender. “So she’s finding out?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s Jill. Of course she is,” answered Kat. “I hate it when people don’t find out.”

  “I always said that I wouldn’t find out.”

  “Oh my God, are you serious? If I ever have a baby, I’m going to find out immediately.”

  It was the first time I had ever heard Kat talk about having children. As I debated about what to say next, how to follow up on what was a difficult topic for Kat, I lost my opportunity.

  “So, Luke said that Thanksgiving was just a gas,” she said sarcastically.

  “It wasn’t great. I think everyone missed you.”

  Kat made a scoffing noise.

  “You know Aunt Kathy’s coming for Christmas.”

  “Luke mentioned that, too.”

  “You’ve got to see Aunt Kathy while she’s here. I mean, I know you’re pissed at Mom and Dad, but what did they really do, Kat?” We all hated calling Kat on the carpet—we all feared her anger—so I took a deep breath before adding, “You were the one who was out of line that night.”

  “Ellen,” she said bitterly, “you just need to stay out of this. There is a lot that you don’t know.”

  I took this to be a proverbial statement about not having experienced what she’d experienced, about never having walked in her shoes. We stayed on the phone in silence for a moment.

  “Kat, just tell me that you’ll come see Aunt Kathy. It would be so sad if you missed her.”

  “Fine. Whatever,” she said. “Let’s just change the subject.”

  As luck would have it, I had another subject at the ready. I told Kat about Mark.

  “So call him,” said Kat.

  “I didn’t get his number,” I said meekly. I could see Kat rolling her eyes. She was always the one to take the number, always the one to call, always the one to have the power.

  “Well, then you’re fucked.”

  “Why do you think he hasn’t called?”

  “Maybe he dropped his phone in the toilet. Maybe he has been busy. Maybe he’s playing hard to get.”

  “No,” I said. “He’s not the game type.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Elle.”

  . . .

  When Thursday night passed without a call, I knew that I wouldn’t hear from him. It felt like a sucker punch, another disappointment, another hand-wringing period of waiting followed by the inevitable letdown. It was trying to have a child. It was waiting for Gary to come back.

  “What’s gotten into you, Ellen?” my mother had asked over dinner. It was just the two of us, as my father was working late. Our fight, like all of our fights, hadn’t lasted long. My mother hated to be at odds with her children, and since the Kat situation hadn’t rectified itself, I was granted leniency.

  “I guess I’m just down.”

  She looked into the distance and muttered something to herself, thinking the solution to my problems was no farther than church. When I went up to my room that night, there was a book lying on my bed with the title Joy of the Spirit. I tossed it under the bedside table.

  . . .

  I was in my car on my way to work on Friday morning, talking to Luke, who was walking to the subway, when a call waiting came in. Since the only people who called me this early—who called me period—were my family and Jill, I answered without checking the caller ID.

  “Hello,” I said plainly.

  “Ellen.” I recognized his voice immediately. “It’s Mark.”

  “Mark?” His name came out like a riddle.

  “I’m so sorry that I haven’t called.” His voice was strong but sincere. “But I would still love to take you out to dinner tonight. If you’re free.”

  And all the contingency plans I had made in case he did call went right out the window. I wasn’t going to pretend I was busy or tell him that I was seeing someone. I forgot about all the cautions I had repeated, all the warnings about another broken heart. At that moment, I didn’t want vindication. All I wanted was to be next to him. “Yeah,” I said, feeling a thawing sensation in my body. “That would be great.”

  There was a smile in his voice when he spoke again. “Do you like Cuban food?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As he pulled out my chair, the metal legs screeched against the industrial tile floor. The restaurant, which was located at the end of a strip mall in a blue-collar, largely Hispanic town in New Jersey, didn’t seem like a typical choice for a first date, but the lighting was dim, the food smelled good, and the music made you feel like all was well with the world. The other tables were filled with families and older couples, mostly Hispanic. I was totally and unconditionally charmed.

  Mark sat down across from me, wearing a thin thermal-knit long-sleeve navy blue shirt and a pair of jeans. He smelled good in the way that some men just do, without the aid of aftershave or cologne. He wasn’t wearing his glasses tonight but was still unquestionably handsome. He looked around the room, as if trying to view it from my perspective, then smiled shyly. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but the food is amazing.”

  “No, it’s great,” I assured him. “I’m excited to try it.”

  As if on cue, a busty, heavily made-up woman with olive skin and curly, almost black hair came to the table with two menus.

  “Hola, Marcos. Me alegro de verte,” she said, smiling warmly, a large gap between her two front teeth. She set a menu down in front of each of us and appraised me like a mother.

  “Hola, Armena,” said Mark, rolling his r perfectly, sounding as comfortable in Spanish as he did in English. “¿Cómo estás?”

  “Buena,” she answered, before nodding toward me. “Ella es bonita, Marcos.”

  “Si, Armena.” Mark smiled shyly. “Ya lo sé.”

  “Bien,” she said, walking slowly away.

  “Sorry,” he said, turning back to me.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  He lowered his head and leaned toward me. “She said”—he glanced at the waitress, who was staring back at us—“that you are very pretty.”

  I looked down at my menu and blushed. I had worn a ruffly sleeveless silk chemise and tight black jeans with black boots, which I had rushed home to get on my lunch break. My sweater was hanging on the back of my chair.

  Mark had offered to pick me up at home, which as far as he knew was Kat’s home. “Actually, I have to work late,” I had said, “so maybe we could just meet at the restaurant?” But we settled on Mark picking me up at work. I had changed and primped in the women’s room after most everyone had left for the night, the office all but empty and silent as I applied my shimmery gray eye shadow and slicked my lips in a barely there pale pink gloss.

  “So what is good here?” I asked, always embarrassed by compliments.

  Mark looked reluctantly away from me and at the menu. “Their ropa vieja is amazing.”

  I read the description. “Sold,” I said. Though this cuisine originated on a warm Caribbean island, it sounded perfect for a cold December night.

  Mark ordered for
us after introducing me to the waitress. “He is a good man,” she said in heavily accented English, patting Mark on the shoulder.

  The restaurant was BYOB, so Mark pulled a bottle of red wine from his beat-up army surplus messenger bag. I immediately recognized the brand; it was a respectable twelve-dollar bottle available most everywhere. I remembered my first date with Gary, how impressed I had been when he ordered a shockingly expensive bottle of cult Cabernet. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

  Armena opened the bottle and brought us two tumblers, into which Mark poured the wine. There was no pretentious swirling or sniffing, no bombastic presentation of the cork as there had been with Gary. Mark simply held up his glass. “Salud,” he said as our tumblers clinked.

  “Where did you learn Spanish?” I asked.

  He ran his fingers through his hair and looked like he was trying to remember where along the timeline of his life he had happened to pick up the language. “I lived in Honduras for a few years between college and graduate school.”

  Again I felt a little intimidated by his adventurous résumé. “What were you doing there?”

  “I went down to do some volunteering, building houses and schools, that kind of thing.” He spoke as if it were the most natural, commonplace thing in the world. “But then I ended up teaching English after a while.”