The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 2


Now I Lay Me Down





One of the joys of living in a charming old house: having to use a screwdriver to shut the hot water off. Rick is many things, but handy isn’t one of them.

I step out of the tub carefully. As always, I imagine my foot slipping on the tile, my hand clutching the shower curtain that circles the old cast-iron tub, pulling it loose ring by ring on my way to a hip-shattering fall. Instead—again, as always—I stick the landing. I am not as old as I feel.

Before I can get ready, I have to wipe the condensation from the bathroom mirror. Then I wipe the fog from my five-year-old cell phone to check the time. The Shaws will be here in an hour.

Yes, I’m taking a shower, my first of the day. And yes, my phone is so old that all it does is make and receive calls. No games, no music, no e-mail alert chiming every thirty seconds. Nothing but a handy clock. Which is a good thing since the battery in my Seiko died some time ago without my noticing.

Rick taps on the door. “Honey, are you done?”

“I just got out of the shower,” I say, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice.

“Well . . . there’s a lot of stuff to do before they get here.”

He pads down the hallway toward the bedroom. True, there is a lot of stuff, and Rick won’t be doing any of it. His contribution amounted to remembering the Shaws were coming, and even that he almost botched.

I didn’t wash my hair. No time for that. In front of the misty mirror, I rifle through my makeup organizer in search of my favorite blush. My makeup collection is a testament to my support of the many stay-at-home mothers at church who are trying to get a career going on the side. Avon. Mary Kay. Shaklee. Amway. Arbonne. There’s more in here than I’ll ever use, and I don’t wait to run out before reordering.

I feel for these ladies. So many of them are ultratalented. They have the degrees I wanted but never got. Some of them do it for the extra income, but at our church there aren’t many people hurting economically. It’s more about putting themselves out there, finding an identity besides wife and mother. If they can’t be in the boardroom, they can be Pampered Chefs.

Confession: I’ve never used a 1-2-3 skin-care system for longer than a week. When I admit this to the ladies, the response is always the same: “You haven’t tried this one yet!” So I write the check and, of course, nothing changes. The bottles end up in the drawer until Rick discovers them. He never met a grooming product he didn’t want to try. And anyway, everyone compliments me on my skin. “I wish I had skin like yours! What do you use?”

Confession (don’t hate me): I don’t even wash my face.





I dress in jeans and a gray knit top, stacking bracelets on my wrists, some silver, some tribal beads, none of which go together but somehow, when it’s all together, it goes. Making a pastor’s salary stretch for a family of four means not many of the clothes in my closet are original to me. I swoop down on the secondhand shops, making up for my reluctance to spend with a little good taste. I know what looks good on me, if only because I’m blessed with a husband who has no qualms about telling me what doesn’t. Not to mention two sons who’ve learned from their dad’s example.

The key to being frugal without having to host jewelry parties in my living room? It’s simple enough. I don’t waste time thinking about things I can’t have and don’t need. Things that aren’t broken aren’t replaced. Collections all seem designed to collect dust, and who needs more housework? I realize most of the planet has less than I do. That alone curbs my acquisitive instinct.

It also doesn’t hurt if, like us, you live in a neighborhood where you could never hope to afford any of the things your neighbors take for granted. When I see Roy Meakin driving by in his vintage Rolls, all I feel is aesthetic joy. I can wave at the old guy without a trace of envy. If I’m stopped at the intersection behind someone’s ten-year-old VW van, one that’s old but not ancient like ours, that’s when my thoughts go black. You’re only tempted when the prize isn’t too far out of reach.

“You look nice,” Rick says, poking his head through the bedroom door. He’s wearing his off-duty uniform: one of his ironic T-shirts, a pair of shorts, and his “dress” flip-flops, the ones with the leather trim.

“Thanks. I’m just gonna finish in the kitchen.” I slip past him, catching a whiff of floral scent. I wonder which of my cast-off skincare products he tried today. “Eli’s going over to his friend Damon’s house—”

“Damon who got the new Nintendo? We won’t be seeing him for a while. Does that mean Jed is joining us?”

I lower my voice. “Would that be a problem?”

“No,” he says, but then he purses his lips so I’ll know that it is.

“What’s wrong? You aren’t mad at Jed again.”

He shakes his head. “It’s the other way around. He’s been on my case the past couple of days. I don’t know what I did, but it’s getting old.”

“I’m sure it’s a firstborn thing. He’s eighteen, after all. He’s trying to spread his wings a little.”

Rick laughs at this. “Who, Jed? I think you’re confusing him with someone else.”

“Lay off,” I say, emphasizing the point with a jab of the elbow.

He follows me into the kitchen, still chuckling at the thought of our tall, gangly eldest son—who’s a spitting image of Gregory, my own older brother, in body and personality, but seems to have inherited nothing from Rick’s genetic line—leaving the family nest. The problem is, in Rick’s mind, Jed is a lump of stone waiting to be shaped into a man, and Rick is the sculptor. Everything that doesn’t fit his idea of what a man should be, he tries to chisel away. The traits he wants to get rid of, though, are the ones Jed values the most. And frankly, he’s right.

But then, Rick has never much cared for Gregory either.

“Where is Jed, anyway?” I ask.

Rick shrugs. “Probably on his computer. Want me to call him downstairs?”

“I’ll do it.”

It takes a few tries, but Jed finally appears at the top of the stairs, holding his hand-me-down laptop in the crook of his arm, the screen casting a blue haze over his features. When he hears we have company coming over, he says he’ll eat upstairs in his room.

“But it’s the Shaws. You remember them. Kathie will want to see you, hon. When they left, you barely came up to here. Now you’re all grown up.”

“I’ve got some stuff to do.”

“Like what?”

“Just stuff,” he says. “Anyway, if Eli doesn’t have to . . .”

“Fine, it’s your loss.”

I turn to go back to the kitchen. His footsteps thunder down the stairs behind me.

“You’re not mad, are you?”

He’s stopped just inside the kitchen, the laptop still balanced on his forearm. The fact is, I am mad, but I don’t know why. There’s still so much to do, and it’s not like Jed knows any better than Rick or Eli how to cook. He’ll only be in the way.

“I’m just . . .” I pause to brush a lock of damp hair out of my eyes. Then I notice the back door is ajar. Through the window above the sink, I can see the light on inside Rick’s shed. “Never mind. You can stay upstairs if you want.”

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just a little stressed out, that’s all.”

He takes this onboard with a nod. We understand each other, me and Jed. Not always, and not always well, but if you were going to draw a line through the family, we both know we’d be on one side with Rick and Eli on the other. “All right, then,” he says, and disappears up the stairs.

I run the water and watch Rick’s shadow moving across the window of his shed. It’s more than a shed, really. It’s a freestanding man cave, a permanent retreat from the white noise of domestic life. Originally our home was just a kind of carriage house on the grounds of the mansion next door, and the shed was an outbuilding. By late-nineteenth-century standards, I’m sure it was quite meager, but the leaded glass windows and broad-planked wooden floors make the shed rather cozy—certainly too nice for anything like a tool to be stored within. According to the neighbors, some kind of handyman used to live there, back in the days when every well-to-do household employed a couple of servants.

There’s even a tiny wood-burning fireplace.

When I first saw the property, I imagined that little shed with flower boxes under the windows, a fire in the grate.

But Rick peered through the window and said, “I’ve got dibs on this.”

I was disappointed, but still, I love my little home. Storybook style, with an arched front door complete with quaint round windows. We have three small bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace, an eat-in kitchen, and a quarter-acre lot.

The shed sits near the edge of the yard, on the paved path leading through the English garden to the big house next door. (Confession: I’m not sure what an English garden is meant to look like, but in this case it means unruly hedges and scrappy clumps of wildflowers and weeds.) Margaret and Deedee Smythe live there, a mother-and-daughter pair, the last of the family line since Margaret has been a widow for ages and Deedee never married.

Walking the block now, you wouldn’t think that all the property at our end of the street had once been part of the same compound. The houses and outbuildings, erected by the Smythe family over a period of more than fifty years, reflect a variety of styles. There’s a giveaway, though: our house, the big mansion, and the bungalow next door are all perched on the same swell of high ground. Standing on the sidewalk, my eyes are about level with the front walkway, which connects to street level via brick steps cut into the slope.

In back, the so-called English garden runs wild right up to an old stone wall that divides the Smythes’ yard from ours. On our side, Rick keeps the sliver between the wall and the shed well trimmed. Whenever I’m in back, I feel the urge to wander along the path past the wall and into the garden, much preferring thick, unruly nature to rigid cultivation.

They’re both eccentrics, Margaret and Deedee. According to Rick, I’m a magnet for “outliers,” by which he means crazies. They aren’t crazy, though, just a bit out of step with the modern world. Their original plan was simply to rent out the place. My husband charmed them into selling, and at a scandalously low price.

“We can’t get all this for so little,” I protested.

“Beth,” Rick had said. “God worked out the numbers. Besides, the little old lady really took a shine to you. And it’s not like they need the money.”

I was doubtful. I felt as if we were taking advantage. Still, I tried to convince myself that he was right. After all, I’d never have gotten my beloved little house otherwise. I made up my mind then and there to be the best neighbor in the world.





I know something’s wrong the moment I open the door and see Kathie Shaw’s dress. It’s a dark-red sheath, simple and elegant, accented by black spike heels and a patent leather clutch. She’s wearing a twist of pearls that gleam like teeth in the porch light.

“Kathie,” I say, holding the screen open with my hip. After a slightly awkward pause, I give her the most tentative and delicate of hugs.

“I won’t break,” she says, squeezing me tight.

Behind her, Jim stops halfway up the walk to push the lock button on his car key. The exotic coupe in the driveway beeps and flashes. He notices me for the first time and breaks into a smile, then envelops me in the arms of his exquisitely tailored jacket.

“Beth, Beth, Beth,” he says, “it’s been too long. We should have done this ages ago. Where’s the big man? Is he still putting his face on?”

“You know Rick.”

In the living room, the four of us give each other the once-over. Rick wears a dazed smile while Kathie gives an imperceptible wince, like she’s in pain and trying to hide it.

“Let me guess,” Jim says, turning my way. “We got our wires crossed somehow. I told Rick we were taking you guys out and he told you we were coming over for dinner. Am I right?” Rick starts to reply, but Jim keeps going. “You know what? This is better. This is cozier, right, Kath? Absolutely. Let’s do it. I’m pumped about this. And hey, where are those rug rats? Trying to hide from Uncle Jim?”

It all comes back to me now, how much I loved this couple. Jim’s way of spotting a crack in the social fabric and plastering it over with words before anyone else noticed it was there. His melodious voice accustomed to summing up for the jury, laying out a thought process, then walking us right through it. There was a time, before Rick and I were married, before Jed was born, that I had plans to become a lawyer myself. More than plans: I’d taken the LSATs, done well, and been accepted into a school.

Then life intervened. Literally. In the form of Jed.

I’d forgotten, too, the way Jim Shaw sees the distribution of domestic labor. In the space of five minutes, the re-introductions are over and Jim has peeled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves to help in the kitchen. Rick, who acts like he doesn’t know where to find anything in the kitchen, who still asks where the bowls are even though I know he knows, is squiring Kathie around the house, giving her the obligatory tour.

“He didn’t tell you why we’re here, did he?” Jim says.

He’s found the good china without having to be told where it is. When did they stop making men like this?

“I’m totally in the dark. I thought maybe it was just for old times’ sake.”

“You know something?” He puts the plates down on the little island. “That’s what it should be about. We had these plans when we left. We were going to stay in touch. And look at us now—it’s been, what, eight years?” He shakes his head. “It’s my bad. It was the job. I got sucked in and I never came up for breath. I’ll tell you what—” He breaks off. “Well, who do we have here?”

Much to my surprise, Jed is standing in the doorway. He takes a step forward. Jim flings his arms wide to embrace my son, then backs up for a good look at him. “You must be, what? Seven feet tall?”

“Six three.”

I haven’t seen Jed like this, so boyish and bashful, in a long time. I feel something in my chest, fluttery and warm. A mommy thing. Hard to put into words.

“Just look at you,” Jim says. “And I bet you’re still the brain, aren’t you? I remember how sharp you always were. Sharper than me, and that’s saying something!”

Down the hallway, I hear Rick saying something about the history of the house. Whenever he walks people through, I have to stop myself from interrupting, from correcting the little details he inevitably gets wrong. The death of a thousand cuts, that’s what he calls it, the way I harp on every little thing he says. It’s not that he hates to be corrected. He just hates to be corrected by me.

“I saw that car outside,” Jed is saying, wonder in his voice. “What is that?”

“That is a Maserati. You wanna take a spin? We could go out later, if your mom says it’s all right.”

I nod absently, still listening for Rick’s voice. I can’t make out the words, but the pride comes through loud and clear. You’d think he’d inherited the place and not swindled it out of a little old lady. No, that’s not fair. That’s my own guilt talking. I’ve been in a funk all day, and even this strange reunion can’t seem to cut through it.

Kathie’s heels tap their way into the kitchen, leaving Rick behind in midsentence.

“Is that Jed?” she says. “I can’t believe it.”

While the Shaws fawn over our son, I catch Rick in the corner of my eye. He leans against the door frame, arms crossed, a strange expression on his face. My irritation melts away. After nearly twenty years of marriage, I can read that man’s face. Only I can’t, not now. The downward curl of the lip isn’t a frown exactly. It’s more of a flat line of anxiety, like he’s holding his breath, waiting for something terrible to happen. For a moment, I feel as if I’m seeing something I’m not meant to, something he’s hidden for as long as I’ve known him.

I walk over and graze his hand with mine. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

“What?” He looks down at me blankly, then pulls away. “No, nothing.”

When I look up, Kathie is glancing my way. She tries to smile, but there it is again: that microscopic wince of suppressed pain.





After dinner, Rick takes Jim out to the shed for a man-to-man.

“That’s what he calls it,” I explain to Kathie. “That’s his job these days, having man-to-mans.”

“That’s his job?”

“Yeah,” Jed says. “Dad’s the Men’s Pastor at church now.”

“The what?”

“The Men’s Pastor.”

She shakes her head. “And what’s that, exactly?”

“Don’t get him started,” I say.

“What they should call him is the Sports Pastor,” Jed says, “because that’s all it is. He goes to a Ravens game with some men from the church, plays some tennis, some handball, whatever. Golf every weekend, pretty much. But if they came out and called him the Sports Pastor, that would be too much. It’s like the dude selling indulgences in the Reformation. People would flip out if they knew what was going on, so they call it being a Men’s Pastor.”

To her credit, Kathie takes all this in with a placid smile, choosing to interpret Jed’s speech as an attempt at humor from an affectionate son. The reality is more complicated, as she probably realizes. The change in Rick’s job description happened three years ago. The senior pastor, a Promise Keeper from way back, returned from a conference convinced that the church wasn’t doing enough to meet the needs of men. We were in danger of losing them, he said, because the church had become too feminized, too therapeutic, too soft and mushy. Rick went along with the diagnosis just to humor his boss. From time to time, the senior pastor would drop hints about the succession, implying that he was grooming Rick to take over, so whenever he latched onto a new trend, Rick did whatever he could to appear supportive. Only this time, he miscalculated.

“I want you to run with this,” the senior pastor had said.

“Absolutely,” Rick replied, not realizing until much later what he’d signed on to do. By then, his new business cards proclaimed him the church’s first-ever Men’s Pastor. He only started using them once all the old Associate Pastor cards had been handed out, hoping for a reprieve. Since then, he’s made the best of it.

To Kathie, who’s wincing again, I say, “Rick’s worked harder at being a Men’s Pastor than he’s ever worked at anything before.”

Jed gets up from the table. “That’s the only thing he works at.”

After he’s gone, I give Kathie a wan smile. “Sorry about that. At least you know we’re not putting on airs.”

“I feel like I’m still part of the family.” She rises and helps me clear the dishes. “I guess the job has been hard on the boys? I can relate to that, you know. At the firm here, Jim set a pretty easy pace, but the new one has pretty much run him ragged. As long as we’re not wearing our church masks, I might as well admit, there were times I was just about out the door.”

“Not you and Jim,” I say.

“Oh yes. That’s all over now. He apologized.” She smiles and pulls at the strand of pearls around her neck. “In fact, I’m wearing the apology right now.”

“Good for you.”

I leave the dishes in the drying rack and top off our glasses. Kathie leans against the counter, her back to the sink, and I prop myself against the island. Over her shoulder I can see Jim peering through the shed window. It looks like he’s doing a lot of talking.

An evil thought flashes into my mind, remembering Kathie walking away from Rick in midsentence and that strange expression on his face. There are five other pastors on staff at the church, and their wives all claim to envy me. When your husband’s the Men’s Pastor, they say, you don’t have to worry about women throwing themselves at him. “And a good-looking man like him too,” the older ones add, like they’ve been tempted by the idea themselves.

Did something happen while Rick was giving his tour?

“What about you, Beth? Are things all right?”

“Things are fine,” I say. Too quickly.

She pauses. “Really?”

I’m thinking crazy thoughts now. Of course nothing happened. This isn’t me. I’m not the jealous type. Besides, Rick has never given me any reason. He’s not interested in other women. Fidelity seems second nature to him. He’s not a wolf, no matter what the official line might be about Mars and Venus, and the sinful nature of man.

No, we have other issues. Deeper ones.

“Okay, you caught me,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. “Things are . . . I don’t know. Tricky. But I have hope. I’m not sure how it happened, but the latest idea to take hold at the church is this sabbatical thing. The pastors need a break to recharge. Rick’s getting the whole month of October off. He doesn’t know it yet, but we’re going to Florida. You remember Stacy? She’s got a beach house down there and today she handed me the keys. Can you believe it?”

She sees through me. She knows I’m hiding something. But she’s too gracious to push. “That’s great. So, a romantic getaway, huh? Or are the boys going too?”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead. They can’t be out of school for a whole month, so . . . yeah, I think we need some time on our own, just the two of us. Maybe that’s the answer.”

“It is the answer,” Kathie says. She reaches for my hand, squeezing it tight. “Now, listen. I know you love this house and this neighborhood. I know Jed’s almost out of high school and I’m sure Eli’s happy where he is. But I want you to promise me you’ll keep an open mind.”

“An open mind about what?”

“Jim’s explaining everything to Rick now. I’ll let him tell you what’s going on. It’s something good, though. Something wonderful. It could be like old times. So don’t dismiss it out of hand, all right? Promise me you’ll think about it, pray about it.”

“Pray about what?”

“Jim made me swear I wouldn’t—” She stops abruptly, doubling over. Her hand reaches back, trying to set her glass on the counter. I have to take it from her or she’d shatter it.

“Kathie, what’s wrong?”

She straightens herself, pressing her fingertips against her jaw just in front of her ears. She opens her mouth wide, shuts it, closes her eyes in intense pain. I take her by the shoulders, not knowing what else to do.

She lets out a long breath, then lowers her hands. “It’s okay.”

“Are you all right?”

“It’s stupid,” she says. “Have you ever heard of tinnitus?”

“Of course. It’s, like, ringing in your ears?”

“No, it’s more like hearing feedback from a speaker. It’s this high-pitched electronic whine. It started a couple of months ago. At first I thought my hearing was going bad, but according to the tests, it’s all in my head. Stress-induced. I told my doctor, I’ve never been less stressed out than I am now, but . . . I don’t know. I guess this is what it’s like to get old.”

“We’re not old.”

“Speak for yourself. I looked in the mirror this morning and, Beth, I have jowls. Look at this . . .” She runs her hand up and down the line of her chin. “These are my mother’s, not mine.”

I remember my own glimpse in the mirror this afternoon, my truer, younger self staring back at me.

“Do you take medicine for tinnitus?”

“Usually it’s a symptom of some kind of hearing loss. I thought maybe I’d gone to too many concerts as a wild child. But no, what the doctor prescribed was behavioral cognitive therapy, which is a fancy way of saying I go to a shrink. Does it help? Not so far.”

“Do you always hear it?”

“The funny thing is, you learn to tune it out. It’s there but somehow you push it into the background. Then your brain starts messing with the volume knob. All night long, it’s been going crazy.”

“Maybe it’s the stress of coming here.”

She smiles. “You want to hear something funny? As much as it hurts, I don’t feel like something’s wrong with me. What it feels like is a part of my brain switched on and now I can hear things that people aren’t supposed to hear. You know how dogs can hear frequencies that humans can’t? In this analogy, I’m the dog. I never catch myself thinking, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ The question I ask is, ‘How can they not hear it?’ Isn’t that strange?”

“Well,” I say, “believe it or not, it isn’t the strangest thing I’ve heard today.”

Kathie smiles again and reaches for my hand. She tells me she’s missed me and that we’re going to stay in touch from now on, and how happy she is to have gotten to talk. But as she’s saying this, I can see her eyelid fluttering slightly and her lip pulling taut. She can hear it now, I realize, that secret frequency all her own. I can’t imagine what that must be like.





Rick and I stand on the front porch waving until the Maserati is out of sight. Once the men came in from the shed, Jim took Jed for the promised spin, then it was time to call it a night. As he turns to go inside, I loop my arm inside Rick’s.

“What’s going on?” I ask. “What was Jim talking to you about?”

“Haven’t you guessed?”

He goes around the house turning off the lights. I turn a few back on for when Eli comes home. Rick heads upstairs, beckoning me to follow, and behind the closed bedroom door, he peels his shirt off and pulls me against him. I can’t remember the last time we held each other, the last time we kissed. His lips are cold.

“It was a job, wasn’t it?” I ask.

He backs us toward the bed, plopping down and pulling me after him. He pulls on my top, but I close my hand over his.

“Tell me.”

He sighs contentedly. “Their church in Virginia. The lead pastor retired and now Jim’s on the search committee. He’s the chairman, in fact. He says they trust him to find the right guy.”

“And you’re Jim’s guy?”

“I am Jim’s guy.” He kicks his shoes off, then his socks. “My talents are wasted here, he says. You know what I think about that. I feel like I don’t even have a voice here anymore, and Jim says I should. I should have a big voice in the Church—the capital C church, not just ours. The church in Virginia isn’t as big as ours, but I’d be the lead pastor.”

“Okay . . .”

“‘You’d be trading a megachurch for a megaphone,’ that’s how he put it. I’ve been ‘hiding my light under a bushel,’ a lot of stuff like that. He really wants me to do it, Beth.”

I slide myself next to him, resting my head on his chest. “And what do you want?”

“What do I want?” He slips his hand under my top, resting his cool fingers against the warmth of my back. “I’m gonna have to think about that. I can see the pros and the cons. I’ve invested a lot in my current position—”

“Would we have to move? Of course we would. I don’t know how I’d feel about that.”

“We could make a nice little profit selling this place.”

That’s not what I want to hear.

“Rick, I’m not sure about the timing.”

“You mean the boys? I don’t know.” He falls silent, his eyes studying the cracks in the ceiling. He runs his hand absently up and down my spine. I can hear his heartbeat like it’s inside my own head. His slow, steady breath.

“We have a month to think it over,” I say. “And guess what?”

I get off the bed and start digging through the pile of junk on the dresser.

He props himself up on his elbows. “Another surprise?”

When I turn, the keys are dangling from my hand. “These go to a beach house in Florida. It’s ours for the month of October. We can drive down on Monday. If you want, we can leave right after church on Sunday.”

“The boys have school.”

“They’re responsible,” I say. “Plus, Deedee’s next door and she won’t mind checking up on them, I’m sure. What do you say?”

He reaches for me. “Let’s do it.”

I toss the keys on the bed and follow them there.

Is this happening? It is.

And afterward, I pad to the bathroom and back, feeling better about Rick and worse about the job offer. Accepting would mean leaving everything we know. On some level, I’d be willing to do that, but there would have to be some concrete purpose, a real hope of change, and not just the prospect of living in the same rut with better pay and another rung up the ladder.

None of which I can confide to Rick, not yet. Sprawled on his side of the bed, eyelids heavy, he couldn’t process any of it. Since I’m in the mood to ramble, I curl up beside him and launch into an inventory of the day’s events, all the details of frenzied preparation he set in motion with his announcement this morning. When I get to the part about Chas Worthing and the Rent-a-Mob, my embarrassment at the sparkling Jesus fish, he chuckles and coils an arm around me.

“I don’t know if you draw the crazies to you,” he says, “or if you actively seek them out.”

“Don’t complain. If I didn’t seek them out, we never would have met.”

“Meaning what?”

I prop myself up on my elbow. “You haven’t forgotten how we met, have you?”

“Of course not,” he says, without elaborating.

“The Baptist Student Union, remember? One of those Monday night jam sessions they used to have on campus—”

“There was nothing crazy about that.”

“There was to me. All those people holding their hands in the air, the choruses repeating over and over, the earnest, handsome man up front giving a talk from his falling-apart Bible.”

He smiles. “It was in pretty bad shape, wasn’t it?”

“I would never have gone in there, only . . . I don’t know. Like you said, I actively seek them out.”

“You can’t honestly compare the BSU to a bunch of lefty antiwar nuts, Beth.”

“No, of course not,” I say.

“Be-e-e-eth.”

“Is that the time? I feel so sleepy all the sudden.”





My eyes open and the room is dark. If I could see myself in the mirror, I know I’d be smiling. I’d see a stupid, teenage grin, the kind of smile I haven’t believed in since forever. Is it really that easy to make my problems go away? Maybe it is. My body is warm under the covers, but the air on my exposed shoulders is pleasantly cool. I roll over toward Rick, expecting his tousled hair and sleep-puckered lips. Instead, the sheets are pushed back and he’s gone.

The nightstand clock says it’s three in the morning. I get out of bed, fumbling in the dark for my robe. On the landing I pause at Eli’s door, listening for the music he always plays to go to sleep. He’s in there, dead to the world. I pad down the stairs, expecting to find lights on in the kitchen. The house is dark. Through the back window, I see the lights on in the shed.

After watching for a minute, waiting for some sign of movement, I decide to go out and check. Rick’s never disappeared in the middle of the night. Then again, this has been an exceptional day. There’s no way of predicting how it might end up. I left my slippers upstairs, but a pair of Rick’s boots stands in the mudroom beside the back door. I step into them and let myself out.

Walking outside under the moonlight in nothing but a terrycloth robe and a pair of oversized boots is a magically illicit experience. Half fairyland elf, half little girl playing dress-up. The shed gives off a faint orange glow, last traces of a dwindling fire. Instead of the door, I go to the window, pressing myself close to the windowpane.

For such a small space, Rick has managed to pack it full of creature comforts. A little couch and chair, a bookshelf, a cast-off rug, a locking rolltop desk where he keeps his computer. All of this is lit by the flickering fire, which casts as much shadow as it does light. At first, there’s no sign of my husband.

Then I see him. In only his boxers, lying facedown on the floor, his arms thrown wide. My heart jumps and I recoil from the window. He’s dead, his body cooling on the floor, victim of a tragic post-coital heart attack. But no. I look again. I smile at my fright. He’s not dead, he’s . . .

Praying.

That thing happens in my chest again, the fluttering, heaving thing where the space that seemed so compact, so full, suddenly expands on you. This whole new capacity in your heart to love. And you feel warm and vulnerable and alive.

I pick my way around the side of the shed, the door latch cold in my hand. The door opens without a creak. I step inside, feeling the heat, the sniff of woodsmoke. I pause at his uncovered feet, then lower myself down, getting almost to my knees, touching the couch to steady myself, unaccustomed to the motion.

I want to touch him, but I don’t. I want to say something, but I keep silent.

I wait.

This is a vigil he’s keeping. He read it somewhere or saw it in a movie—a young knight on the evening before he was to be dubbed kept vigil all night in the church, his face to the floor, his arms spread like Christ on the cross.

“Rick,” I say, exhaling his name, the slightest of whispers. I wait, listening for an answer.

My husband takes a breath, a deep breath, then lets it out in a long and tremulous snore. He is not praying. He is asleep.

So what, right? Even Peter couldn’t keep watch for an hour without nodding off. This is natural, I tell myself. Absolutely normal. Whatever it is, Beth, it’s not a metaphor summing up the nature of the man. Don’t let yourself start thinking that way.

You’re not thinking at all. You’re feeling. And what you’re feeling is the ground dropping from beneath your feet, leaving you to kick through thin air, falling. It makes no sense, but it doesn’t have to. When did the heart start having to make sense?

I get up quietly, straighten the front of my robe, and trudge back across the yard to the house. Up above, the moonlight shines down on me like a dull throb, like a painful keening only my ears can detect.