Come Sunday: A Novel Read Free

door.
    “What walrus, Mommy?” asks Cleo.
    “Dad means he’s going to check whether our new roof kept the garage dry.”
    The two-car garage and workshop, up until a couple of days ago,functioned alternately as a cistern and a sieve, seldom as a dry shelter for the car. It has been patched so many times that instead of being flat it sagged in the middle so that the birds bathed atop while buckets were positioned beneath it. We made do with buckets until Greg had the gumption to ask his mother for a small loan to help pay for a new roof. He insisted it was a loan, but I am the one who pays the bills each month and who notices that there is never a little row of numbers on our bank statement we can theoretically call “savings,” or which can go toward reducing our indebtedness and my mother-in-law’s righteousness. We will not be able to pay her back the two thousand dollars for roofing materials, just as we have not been able to pay back the airplane tickets for the family get-together last Christmas or her contribution to the down payment on our house. Not unless the church decides to pay its minister a salary roughly comparable to that of a car dealer. Maybe that is what Greg should consider doing: trade in Jesus and start selling Jaguars to aging symphony supporters. Bet he would have more takers than he does now.
    I am picturing Greg taking the elderly for test drives when he skulks back into the house, slamming the door behind him. He collapses on the couch with an exclamation: “We should have hired professionals!”
    “It didn’t work?” I ask. Jakes and a friend recently paroled from prison just spent two days reroofing the garage. “A piece of cake,” they had said.
    Greg shakes his head. “It’s worse.”
    Of the two of us, it is typically me who holds the glass-is-half-full policy, so when my husband makes understatements, as infuriating as they often are, they always give me a measure of hope because things seldom turn out to be as bad as he assesses them to be. Just how bad can a bad moon be, I wonder, charging out to the garage to see. The smell of damp and mold is overpowering when I open the door, and then I notice little tidal pools everywhere: between Greg’s tools, next to the storage closet, around the car. What used to be water-stained ceiling tiles is now mush the consistency of porridge on the roof and windshield of our car, and on the tool bench. Water is being siphonedthrough the garage door opener. Turds are floating around in the cat tray. Two thousand dollars washed away. Two. Thousand. Dollars. I look up where the ceiling once was and see right through to its exposed underbelly, where it is still leaking although the rain abated hours ago.
    Walking out of what will soon be a rust heap, I head for the ladder still propped up against the wall on the south side. Before I mount it, I spot at the head of the pathway next to our mailbox a small yellow box. What on earth? When I approach it, I can tell that it is a box of sandwich bags, and adjacent to it lies one of its bags sealed with something in it. Crouching down, I pick up the bag, and it suddenly becomes apparent what its contents are: dog turds.
    I look around. There are no neighbors out on this drizzly morning, not that there ever are, but for a moment I think perhaps someone must have dropped the parcel while walking their dog. That is before I remember that no one walks a dog with a box of Ziploc bags. In fact, no one walks a dog around our neighborhood association, a little cul-de-sac of six homes ruled as though it were East Berlin. Certainly not since Mrs. Chung, the Kaiser, bolted billboard-sized NO TRESPASSING signs to the entry of the private driveway the day after I gave the homeless guy who sleeps on the bus stop bench (West Berlin) some food. It can only be one person. Kaiser Chung!
    “Do you know what this is?” I spit, holding high the offending bag as I barge back into the house. Greg lifts his head from the back