God In The Kitchen (11 page)

            “We’d probably better head home,” Chloe said, shifting Ian a bit in her arms as I removed my hand from his face. “He’s pretty tired from all the excitement.”

            Ian stirred and raised his head from his mom’s shoulder, rubbing his eyes. “Is it over?” he asked in a small voice.

            “It is for you,” Chloe said. “Tell Mr. Jones thank you for the tickets.”

            Ian looked at me with his bright blue eyes. “It was so much fun,” he said.

            “It was, wasn’t it?” I asked and before I knew what was happening, Ian had twisted himself around enough to throw his arms around my neck. In order to keep myself upright, I wrapped one arm around his waist while I slung the other around Chloe’s shoulder.

            To anyone walking by, it probably looked like a sweet moment in the life of a family. Only I was not a part of this family. I allowed myself to breath in the sweaty, soapy smell in the little boy’s hair as I reveled in the moment.

            “Thanks again,” Chloe said, as she peeled Ian away from me, limb by limb. Once he was situated back on her hip, she shifted her body, stood on her tiptoes and swiftly kissed me on the cheek. It happened so fast I hardly even felt it. “Sorry we can’t stay,” she continued. “I don’t want to push it with Ian. He gets tired pretty easily.”

            I gave Chloe a slight wave as she made her way down the aisle and slowly inched behind the crowd as it filtered out into the arena hallway. I needed to get out there as well and I made a quick exit out the side door to get back to the station booth. I would talk to listeners until the concert started again and then I would tear down the booth and head home.

            I would have liked to see the rest of the concert, but I had already heard the song that meant the most to me.

            When I got to the booth, Ricky was already there. “Took your sweet time, huh, man?” he said, shooting me a raised eyebrow look over his shoulder as he bent over the table, trying to keep up with the flow of people who wanted to meet us or say hi.

            “Sorry,” I said as I trained my eyes over the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of Chloe and Ian as they left. What I saw instead, however, surprised me even more. Abigail’s telltale red-blonde curls bobbed slightly as she quickly turned away from the booth the instant she saw me looking her direction.

            “Abigail!” I shouted, trying to get her attention. “Hey, Abigail!”

            She turned just enough so that I knew she had heard me, but she didn’t stop and I wasn’t able to chase her down. I didn’t have time to wonder what that was all about because Ricky was knee deep in listeners and needed my help.

            Once intermission was over and I had been told that I should be taller and have longer hair a few too many times, Ricky and I began to clean up.

            “So, what’s the deal, man?” he asked.

            “What deal?” I answered, stuffing the window stickers back in the promotion box.

            “You bring one girl to the concert and you have another asking about you.”

            “Who was asking about me?”

            Ricky shrugged, “The one you were shouting at when you
finally
got your butt out here. She came by the booth after you left to do the stage asking if you were here. I thought she’d come back later, but apparently she didn’t want to talk to you as badly as it seemed.”

            “Wait,” I said, standing up and kicking the box aside so I could get closer to Ricky. “The woman with the reddish hair was asking for me before the concert?”

            Ricky nodded. “Yep. I told her you had to be on stage and would be around at intermission. She said she’d try to catch you then,” he shrugged as he pulled the tablecloth off the long table and wadded it up into a ball. “She said she had real close seats so she’d be able to see you on stage too.”

            “Close seats…” I said, mulling her statement over in my mind. “How close?”

            “I dunno, man,” Ricky said.

 “Fourth, fifth row maybe.”

            I bent over the box again, shuffling promotional materials around to make it look like I was busy so I could think.

            Abigail had been there. She hadn’t said hello. But she had wanted to before the concert. What had changed her mind?

            The flash of my time with Chloe played through my mind. We had held hands, her little boy had thrown himself at me, she had even kissed me on the cheek. It might have looked very bad from where Abigail had been sitting if she had spotted us.

            But it wasn’t exactly fair for her to judge. She didn’t know who Chloe was. She could be anyone. A cousin…a friend, who knows. But she wasn’t just anyone and I knew it. Apparently, Abigail did too.

By the time I got home I was beyond exhausted, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I kept mulling the evening over in my mind, wondering what I could have done differently so that I wouldn’t give Abigail the wrong idea. Would she believe me if I tried to explain myself?

            I hadn’t gotten a chance to eat much since the meal at the diner that morning so I stood over the sink, gazing out the dark window into the small backyard, cutting an apple into slices.

            As I sliced, my gaze fixated on the window, I changed my line of sight from far out past the yard to the glass on the pane in the lower right hand corner of the window. It had been empty when I first approached the kitchen sink but a figure materialized in it shortly after I began cutting.

            I knew from the way the light bounced off the figure that it was a reflection of a person and not someone out in the yard. I squinted at the windowpane, my hands beginning to shake.

            “Evan?” I said, before turning around.

            I heard the kitchen chair squeak a bit as he sat down. I had all but convinced myself that he had been a dream, but here he was yet again. Perhaps I was asleep again?

            “You’re not asleep,” Evan replied to my thought.

            “Okay,” I agreed, feeling the sticky apple juice running down my hand as evidence.

            “You can finish,” Evan said, nodding to the apple and I turned back to the sink and finished slicing. I tossed the slices into a bowl similar to the one the carrots had laid in during Evan’s first visit. I felt like I was in a trance as I walked over to the table and set the bowl in the middle. I lowered myself into a chair and the squeak it made was the only sound in the room until Evan leaned forward and grabbed an apple slice.

            “You know,” he said, holding up the slice, “people think that apples are an evil fruit.”

            I raised my eyebrows, curious as to what he was going to say to explain that.

            “Adam and Eve and all,” he continued, biting into the juicy apple slice. “They took a bite of the apple in the garden, mankind fell from grace, the beginning of the end.”

            I stared at Evan in disbelief. Had he really appeared in my kitchen a second time to talk theology?

            “But it wasn’t an apple at all,” he said and I frowned. “The Bible says they ate the forbidden
fruit
, not apple. The paintings that have been done of that scene usually portray that fruit as an apple so everyone thinks that’s what it was.”

            “So, what was it?” I asked, expecting a man with so-called spiritual authority to have all of the answers.

            Evan shrugged. “Don’t know. Wasn’t there. But I like to think it was a paw paw.”

            “Excuse me?”

            “You know, a paw paw. It’s a fruit tree that is native to South America, but it’s also in the eastern part of this country. Even Australia has some. You don’t hear much about the fruit anymore so I figure it’s probably because it was forbidden at one time.”

            I nodded. I wasn’t sure if it made sense or not, but I certainly wasn’t going to disagree with the man who had just materialized in my kitchen for the second time in a week.

            Evan popped the rest of the apple into his mouth, chewing noisily. As he swallowed, he fixed his eyes on me and I felt a warmth wash over me. The kindness in his eyes was something I wanted to carry with me at all times.

            Evan brushed his long hair off of his face and leaned forward, glancing at the apple bowl as if considering a second slice.

            “How is everything going, Jared?” he asked instead, piercing me with his kind stare.

            “Everything?” I asked, wondering where I was supposed to start. Was he asking how I was doing with losing my father? What was going on with my job? Or something else?

            “Last time we spoke,” Evan said, placing his right ankle on top of his left knee, “you were sure you needed love in order to be happy.”

            I remembered all too well. Though I had since convinced myself that it was a dream and that meeting two women in the same day was a coincidence.

            “And you were certain that you needed to pick the woman who you would marry and love. So,” Evan paused, finally taking the second apple slice, “have you picked?”

            My eyebrows knitted themselves together and I gave him a look. “It’s only been a few days.”

            “Yes, that’s true,” Evan said, inspecting the apple in his hands as if considering it as the forbidden fruit all over again. “But you have two women in your life and it’s time to choose.”

            “Choose?” I asked. “Between…”

            “Abigail and Chloe,” Evan interrupted. “Yes, that’s right. You don’t think you should go on seeing both of them, do you?”

            “Wait, I’m not seeing…”

            “How do you think it feels to them?” Evan asked. “You fixed Chloe’s car…took her to a concert…held her hand.”

            “She held my hand!” 

            Evan continued as if he hadn’t heard my protest. “And Abigail…you pursued her…told her you’d call…”

            “Okay, okay,” I said, conceding. “Maybe I am kind of seeing both of them, but I didn’t mean to!”

            “I know your intentions are good,” Evan said, popping the rest of the apple in his mouth and taking time to chew as if savoring the flavor to its last drop. “But you need to choose.”

            I needed to choose. How was I supposed to do that?

            “You wanted to choose,” Evan reminded me, answering the thought that had run through my head once again.

            I nodded. It was what I had said. But I didn’t realize how hard it would be. On the one hand, Abigail was the type of girl I had always dreamed of having by my side. She was strong, independent, beautiful, and she seemed to really love life. On the other hand, Chloe really needed me. And Ian was a little boy I could never seem to get off my mind, no matter how hard I tried.

            “I’ll choose,” I said, making the decision to keep my choice to myself since I had not yet made it.

            “And then?” Evan asked, folding his hands together on the table in front of him.

            “And then I’ll tell them,” I said. “I’ll tell the women what I want to do and how I want to move forward.”

            “Good,” Evan replied, nodding his head in agreement.

            I woke up the next morning with a strange sensation buzzing around my brain. It wasn’t a headache, really, but it was definitely a form of pain with which I wasn’t familiar with. Because of Evan’s second visit, I was now pretty certain he was real. He told me I needed to choose and that was just what I was going to do. It didn’t take me long to figure out that it wasn’t my head that ached at all, but rather my heart. Since my brain controlled portions of my heart, it throbbed in sympathy for the pain I was about to inflict on someone else.