A Minister's Ghost Read Free Page B

meant.”
    I set the cup down in the sink, didn’t look at her.
    â€œI’m here now,” was all I could think to say, staring down at the stainless steel faucet.
    â€œI didn’t mean … ,” she began, but fell silent.
    â€œYou meant,” I told her, swinging slowly around, leaning back against the counter, “that you’re glad I’m back, glad I’m here now. You meant you missed me when I was gone. You meant you like it better when I’m here than when I’m not. You can put me down for all of that too, in spades. You think I don’t understand something mysterious or secret about our relationship, but I do know a thing or two. I know, for instance, that I’m the only one you called last night. And you know what that means?”
    â€œWhat?”
    I looked down at the clean old linoleum floor.
    â€œI believe you’re sweet on me.”
    â€œHow much more complex is it than that?” she asked, her eyes brighter. “In your mind.”
    â€œEnormously,” I shot back. “A genuine adult relationship is supposed to be dense; the primary sin of popular culture is a lack of complexity. I consider it our duty to help ameliorate that situation by
indulging in the most complicated emotional miasma of the current century.”
    â€œWe’ve certainly got a head start on that . And well begun is half-done.”
    â€œA bird in the hand,” I said, launching my frame away from the counter, “is worth two in the bush, and I’m off.”
    â€œI’ll just wait here, then, shall I?” She didn’t move.
    â€œMaybe we could have lunch when I come back.” I suggested. “What’s today?”
    â€œSaturday.”
    â€œAre you on call at the hospital?”
    â€œI’m supposed to go in,” she said hesitantly.
    â€œYou’re taking the day off. That’s not a question.”
    â€œAll right,” she agreed. “I’ll call them right now.”
    â€œI’ll see myself out.” I headed out the door without looking back.
    â€œI might be in the garden,” she called out, “if you phone.”
    I smiled at that: Saturday gardening could mean that she felt better.
    I paused a moment in the living room to pick up my black leather jacket and to get a good look at one of the photographs on the mantel. Two teenaged girls stood side-by-side holding a carved pumpkin and a blue ribbon between them. Autumn light brushed their faces, and the clarity of their eyes was piercing, even in the photograph. It was signed at the bottom, “To Aunt Lucinda, love Rory and Tess. Look, first prize!”
    Â 
    Pine City isn’t far from Blue Mountain as the crow flies, but if you’re forced to take the main road, it twists around for nearly half an hour before you see their town hall. I pulled my ancient green pickup to the side of the road close to the railroad crossing and got out. I hadn’t been there in a while, but everything I could see was exactly the same as it had been since I was a boy.
    The road I parked on was the axis of town, the railroad crossing about five hundred yards shy of the square. The cross street where I stood had been a gravel road when I was a boy, but blacktop had long since replaced gray rocks. The rails toward town veered off
sharply to the right, away from the square, just after the crossing, and rhododendrons twice my age had grown high enough to hide the trains as they passed. The other side, the direction from which the train would have approached the night before, sloped downward from where I stood, making it impossible to see anything coming until it was less than fifty feet away.
    Like a lot of other towns in Appalachia, the railroad had made a city out of a gathering of scattered farms and businesses. The train station, only a little farther on down the tracks after the curve and the rhododendrons, had once been a palace where exotic treasures from