Once Beyond a Time Read Free Page A

confidence. He is a man who doesn’t worry. “Listen,” he said, nodding toward the porch, away from the women who were cleaning up the kitchen. Steve and I stepped outside. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one, throwing the match into the grass at the foot of the steps. “Listen,” he said again. “I know things are … tense … right now, between you and Meg. But she’ll come around.”
    I found myself sighing heavily.
    “I mean,” he went on, “you’re not the first guy to ever—well, you know. Women get over it.”
    I looked at him for a long while. I’ve seen Steve only a few times in my life, whenever he and Donna came up to Philly to visit. We never came down here, never could afford a real vacation on my pastor’s salary. So I don’t know Steve well, but he’s my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother, and he’s already extended his hand to me. He’s bailed me out. I need his friendship, and so far he’s been friendly.
    It felt awkward, but I went ahead and asked, “Were you ever unfaithful, Steve?”
    “Me?” He tapped his chest with the hand holding the cigarette. “Yeah. Once.” He shrugged, like he was telling me he’d once gone fishing.
    “Donna know?”
    “Sure. Yeah, she knows everything. It was a few years ago.”
    “So what happened?”
    “I was in the doghouse a couple of months, you’d better believe it. Imean, she wouldn’t cook for me, do my laundry, nothing. And as far as …” He paused, looked at me, took a long pull on his cigarette. “Well, let’s just say, I got pretty well acquainted with the guest room before I ever laid my head down on my own pillow again.”
    He said it like he shouldn’t be talking about such things with a pastor, because everyone knows pastors are different. Not quite human. No, more than human. Holy, somehow. Incapable of
being
human. Incapable of sin.
    I am a used car salesman.
    But for the moment, Steve seems to forget that. To him, I am still a pastor. He must be careful.
    “So what happened?” I asked again.
    “Well,” he said with a smile, “you know, after a while it gets old for both of you. If you just go on working and bringing home the bacon—and a few roses don’t hurt either—you eventually fall back into the old routine. You don’t even have to say anything, you know. She just starts making your dinner again and washing your socks. And then someday it’s almost like it never happened.”
    Like it never happened? For me, it will never be like that. In this house, there are four bedrooms. One for Linda, one for Digger, one for Meg, one for me.
    I am no longer married. What I wouldn’t give to be married again. Not just to anyone, but to Meg, my wife.
    It’s heading toward twilight and I’m in my room now, a spacious square at the back of the house next to Digger’s room. The girls have the front rooms that open up onto the porch. I thought they’d like that. But I don’t know. Obviously, neither of them seems very happy about anything right now.
    I look out the window and see Digger jumping from that big rock in the backyard. His arms are raised toward the sky and he’s holding a stick in one hand. He jumps, he yells, he climbs the rock, and jumps again. Oh, son. You have it all ahead of you. Don’t mess up. It’s easier to makea tangle of things than I ever imagined, but maybe, if you’re very, very careful, you’ll be all right.
    I had prided myself in my goodness. Funny, isn’t it? How can one be proud that one is good? The one negates the other. So yes, maybe I too believed a pastor is somehow more than human. Somehow immune to sin. And yet I did something I thought I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—ever do.
    Her name was Charlene McMurphy.
    “She was engaged to be married, and now her fiancé has gone and called off the engagement,” Meg explained. Meg had come to my office at the church, Charlene’s letter in hand. “Now she wants to leave Des Moines and make a fresh start