Games of the Heart (Crimson Romance) (3 page)

Jumping from one sure-thing conclusion to the next, exceeding the legal limit, what would I have said to any other man or woman if I heard this? I racked my overly educated counselor’s brain and came up with zilch. When the loss of faith comes straight from the mouth of the man you’ve idolized for your entire life, the earth opens and swallows your most patented advice. Big help I was. I stood there mute.

“I’m a slave to this body. And before you start quoting scripture with all the verses and lines and all that other stuff, which you’re good at, it’s not like Job and the thorn in his side. There are no earthly reasons why I should continue to live as I have.”

Standing at the sink, hot water spewing, I couldn’t seem to get my mind to order my fingers to twist the knobs to shut off the flow. When I did find my voice, my hands matched the color of the car in my driveway. “Have you talked with Him?” I picked up the sponge. I scrubbed and scrubbed the plate in my hands, long after the gooey remains of cheese and egg came off. I poured out the last cold cup from the coffeemaker and drank it in one deep swallow. I wiped up imaginary spills on the counter, and I was about to organize the refrigerator and take out the trash, after mopping the floor, when finally Gramps spoke again.

“I’ve yelled a lot.”

“You look pretty calm now.” I slammed the refrigerator once I’d placed the maraschino cherries in heavy syrup next to the mayonnaise and close to the Tabasco sauce. I’d alphabetized everything while I was waiting.

“As I was hiding, I realized I was a wretched waste of humanity, actually. You don’t need to blink — I saw that — I didn’t do anything you’d find disgraceful for a man of my age. Now I think I’ve worked out a solution, of sorts.”

“Men your age still do a lot,” I interrupted because I didn’t want to putter down the pathway of anything remotely connected with Gramps’ young chick, but a gal’s got to be tough. “I still don’t get it.” For the tenth time I washed out the coffee pot that didn’t need another rinse.

Gramps stifled a yawn. “Hey, stop grumbling. You’re not boring me, but I’m fading fast.”

“Cut to the chase, Gramps.”

“It’s dancing.”

“You’re going to become a professional dancer, you who refused to dance at my wedding because you have feet of clay or something like that? Positive thinking is groovy, but dancing isn’t something you jump into, especially competition dance like those shows on TV. Um, how will this help you?”

“Honey, how can someone with your over-educated brain be so lacking in common sense? I’m old and disgusting, but I’ve got an ace up my sleeve, and you’re going to help me. We’re going dancing.”

“You’ve seen me dance, Gramps, and it’s almost as disgusting as my playing the rock music you and Slam Dunk perform. Besides, I inherited your left feet.”

“How often, Janey, do you miss this point?”

“It’s two in the morning. How’s that for a reason? If you want to go out dancing tonight, you’ve got the wrong granddaughter, even if I am your only granddaughter. Besides you’ve got more explaining to do, especially the part about the little lady who has been making you happy. Wait. Where are you going?”

“Let’s settle this tomorrow. This is a wagering town, and my best bet is that the guest room is straight down the hall, and knowing you, Jane, there will be fresh sheets on the bed, a bathrobe in the closet, and plenty of toiletries in the bathroom, still in flowered wrappers. If you want to talk more, you’re about to have the bathroom door closed in your pretty little face. The rest can wait until tomorrow, and you can come down a bit off your high preachin’ horse.” He turned and muttered in a loud voice, “Have you always been this bossy? I’d forgotten.”

I was sputtering as he limped out of sight. I really and truly wanted a strong cup of coffee, but at two
A.M.
, that’s madness, although I’ve been nuts before. What I did was to take deep cleansings breaths of the coffee beans, flicked off the light and headed to bed.

I crawled between the sheets, pulled them to my neck and tried to focus on happy thoughts. Where was my happy place? The sandman and I wrestled. Like clockwork, I checked the clock at regular intervals from two to six, when the alarm turned on the radio to those ghastly chipper voices of early morning talk show hosts, announcing another hot, but dry “reallllly fabulous day in Vegas, baby.” I slapped the thing to the floor. It bounced, and the sound hurt my head. In my quest to get to my happy place, I’d neglected to shut my blinds before those four hours of tossing and turning not to be thought of as sleep, and now the sizzle had begun to heat the room. It was going to be a scorcher, for sure.

Then from the living room, I heard elevator music. I don’t even have an elevator. It was from
West Side Story
. The normal Gramps, before he became a rootin’-tootin’ cowboy, would have listened to the Rolling Stones, rap, or hip-hop. This was bad, I thought, as I pulled myself up to sit on the edge of the bed. Now some preachers get on their knees, and trust me, I’ve got the calluses to prove I do this, but right then God and I needed to look at each other. “I know you never give us more than we can handle, but Lord, I am just not that good. If you want my help, give me a clue.” I shrugged into my robe, dove under the bed for my scuffs and headed to the living room as I mumbled, “Help me because I may just do something I regret.”

Miracles were real. “Thank you, Jesus,” I yelled and waved my hands above my head just like an old-fashion revival meeting.

He was gone. As anyone who knows me will gladly tell you, I have a fertile imagination, so I could nearly believe that he’d left or been Raptured, but the crispy bacon calling my name from the stove told the truth and nothing but it. Plus the table was set for two. At one place were chocolate chip waffles and tall OJ. The coffee smelled strong; the mug was steaming. The newspaper was folded to the comics.

What’s a girl to do? I dove in to the feast. If I was wrong and I had been Raptured, I was thrilled to see that the food was yummo.

As I pierced the last forkful, using it to wipe up a puddle of Log Cabin syrup, Gramps limped through the front door with a plastic grocery sack in his hands.

“So, they were edible?”

“I should have waited.” My mind raced to the “situation,” as I’d named this catastrophe sometime between 3:15
A.M.
and 4:30
A.M.

“No way, Janey girl. I figured coffee would get you up. I’m not sleeping well and been up for hours.” He poured a mug of coffee, took the carton from the bag, and added enough milk to make this java junkie cringe. “Before you start haranguing an old handicapped geezer about how I don’t need milk in coffee because it just takes away the real coffee taste and blah blah blah, you’ll want to know the church secretary, Vera, has been calling you every fifteen minutes since the crack of early.” He lifted the coffee mug and said,
na zdrowie,
which as everyone of Polish descent knows is the right toast for any drink.

“Forget the ‘to your health.’ I want to know why you didn’t holler for me when I got the calls.”

“I’ve been around a few churches and found that the preachers need their sleep as much as their flock needs to talk with them. Besides, she said it wasn’t
that
urgent. Isn’t Desert Hills like the rest of them, and if someone stubs their toe they’re popped on the prayer chain, or is it more a gossip mill?”

I wasn’t going to fuss, although the stubbed toe crack clipped a nick too close to the quick. The prayer chain at Desert Hills did spread the word about illnesses, deaths, and various folks entering rehab. That said, I sometimes thought people didn’t pray, but preyed off the info. I’d noticed whispering during the hospitality time and how people quieted when I walked by. Hey, maybe they had me on the prayer chain for God only knew what. A bad hair day? I chalked it up to an ugly part of human nature, and that some folks are uglier than others.

I dialed the church’s number and reached Vera. She cracked a “Good morning, honey,” and then said, “First off, the District Council is visiting next Friday and requested an appointment with you, but that’s not why I’ve been calling. Pastor Bob says he has a surprise for you and the youth group.” I could tell by the tone that her eyes were rolling and her head was making circles. Vera had been the secretary for Desert Hills Community Church for decades, seen other preachers come and go, and little except Pastor Bob’s “surprises” fazed her.

There was more to Vera than met the eye, which was plenty considering she looked about as much like a church secretary as sixty-ish Sarah Jessica Parker if she stumbled into Desert Hills, forgot any fashion sense, and plunked her keister behind a computer. The only secretary-like item was cat’s eye glasses that perched on her nose. She smelled as if she were marinated in Smuckers jam, which wasn’t appealing when mixed with the essence of Marlboro on her breath.

“Any idea what it is?” Did I need a surprise with my beloved grandfather on the lam from God, taken up with an adolescent deviant, and the District Council waiting to slip my neck through a noose? Not.

“You’re not going to like it, Pastor Jane. But heck, it’s a crapshoot around here. Might be something you can add on to what you’re already doing. Hold on, Jane.”

I could hear her cooing to someone standing in her office about, “You are so sweet,” and then she was on the line with, “Put on your big girl panties and make up your own mind. I gave up mind reading years ago when I quit traveling with the circus.”

The line went dead and my appetite with it, which says a lot. Pastor Bob Normal, whom I had begun to secretly and in various muttering times call Ab, apparently was taking over my life in ways that are abnormally annoying even for him.

It took me twenty-five minutes flat to jump into tan slacks and a blazing pink cotton T from the last Victoria’s Secret sale and drive to church, just two miles north of the condo. I like to think I’m hip but I’m unhip about mega churches. Give me a steeple and a cross? I’m good. That said, when I drove up to Desert Hills a few weeks ago, I thought I’d stumbled into the Silicon Valley. The building humongous, all windows and sand-colored brick, stretching greenbelts and a flagpole plunked in the middle of it all. The cross? Good question. I asked, too. There isn’t one outside, and that, I was told, goes along with the new trend to make the worship center more available to all people. Call me old-fashioned — wait, don’t you dare. Yet, it’s been my thinking that a church isn’t a church without looking like a church. Since I didn’t get a vote — and since I was only filling in for the youth pastor, I probably would never get one — on this issue I kept my lips sealed. I know that’s a shock.

Faced with a crisis at home and one at church, I gingerly parked my scuffed SUV in the “staff” zone and slapped the sunscreen over the dashboard so that later, when I left for the day, I wouldn’t scorch my bountiful backside, and straightened my spine. Like a courteous little soldier, I marched up the marble walk to face my fate. I had barely plastered on a tooth-brightener smile when the pastor met me as I whooshed through the automatic doors into the Foyer of Heavenly Conditioned Air.

“’Bout time you’re here. Memo’s on your desk. Questions? Vera’s got it,” said the senior minister, all this with the palm of his hand facing my face.

There was this thing about him that brought out a feeling of grease in me, like the kind that forms on the top of simmering spaghetti sauce when you use cheap hamburger.

He cocked his Elvis-impersonator head. “Yes?”

I was grateful the man wasn’t psychic, but I refused to talk to the hand so I waited until he dropped it. “Good morning, Pastor. How are you today? Questions about what?”

“Board decided. Youth group. You. VBS. Great opportunity.”

“Excuse me?” I shivered. “Repeat that, please.”

“No can do. Off to a fundraiser breakfast. Think again, Pastor Jane, if you have any notions that this place — ” He waved a hand around the cavern of the foyer and then swept it toward the marble floor. “ — Well, if you think for one second the church is financed by prayer. Money talks, not just here, but everywhere. Vegas is no different. Never kid yourself about that.”

Taking yet another cleansing breath, I touched the sleeve of his blue silk suit jacket. “Vacation Bible School starts Monday. And where did you leave that reality check? Today is Friday. You’re saying that my youth group will handle it?”

“What don’t you get, Pastor Jane?” It came out in a huff as he smoothed the sideburns that went out in the seventies.

Trust me, the man was not into retro. He’d just forgotten we were in the twenty-first century, and possibly women didn’t always do what big old strong men ministers said to do.

The gauge on my internal combustion steam-ometer was shouting, “Danger, danger, run for your life.” Alas, being low woman on the church totem pole didn’t give me any wiggle room. Even if you were on my side, and even if I’d become Old Faithful and blown my cool, I would have been out the door and on the pavement before you could say, “Amen to that, sister.”

I bit my tongue, really, clamped it so I didn’t shout how he could have found other flunkies to do his bidding, because Ab was in a heated discussion on his cell.

“For golly goodness’ sakes, hold it, will you?” he said to the phone. He pulled it away from his ear and turned to me, his eyebrows knit together. We were so close I could see stubble from a unibrow. I might be his flunkie of the month, but the unibrow produced wonderful waves of superiority in a deliciously perverted way.

“Now what is it? Jane, are you or are you not a minister? Then minister. For heaven’s sake, do the job you’re being paid to do, which if you’ll check your business card, madam, it is to be a minister. Organize VBS.”

“Yes, of course,” I snapped. Flunkie or not, he was the boss, even if the last twelve hours had been rotten.

“Then why
are
we having this conversation? Get on it or get out.” His cheeks became blotchy, and I believe I was about to get a royal chewing out when Vera’s five-inch platform heels came clopping down the marble hall. We both nodded as she walked by and, not for the first time, I wondered what control the secretary had over the minister. Suddenly he was all milk and honey when he said, “Listen, Jane, you’ve come highly recommend, can do miracles and walk on water, that kind of stuff. We’re excited to have you here at Desert Hills. You know what I’m talking about, even with your very public mishap, shall we call it, and I know you are capable. Besides, these are little children, not something like the hardcore hoodlums you personally arrested while preaching in Los Angeles, in that ’hood. I’ll be praying for you. Hey, we’ll get the entire prayer chain to jump on this. Works for me,” he said. He patted me on the arm and began talking about market gains, and I knew that was the end of our meeting.