“Let go of me.” Shame slowly creeps into his eyes. I no longer feel my heartbeat through the flesh of my right arm. “If I listen to you, if I leave her alone too long, it’ll happen again.”
“What will happen?” My father’s face tightly creases and then relaxes with the bleak understanding of what I mean. “She won’t...do that.”
“You don’t know, and you didn’t find her the first time. You didn’t see—”
“Turn on the lights and start laying today’s programs on the seats, please. Thank you.”
There are times when Dad plays the role of someone truly listening. He nods, but he’s already forming a response because his mind is made up. It’s been that way for years in my calculation and it won’t change. He’s shut down so I shut down. It’s a silent waltz, a graceful movement of questions and nonanswers perfected over many years. That is the end of the conversation. That firm “Thank you” is as good as him saying “Get out.” There’s no reasoning or persuading.
He’s set and so am I.
I close the door harder than I need to.
“Layla, I just fixed the hinges on that door yesterday. Can you let a man enjoy his work before you undo it?” Timothy Simmons smiles as he scolds me.
“I’m sorry. I just...”
“Come here, Layla,” Tim says as he gently takes my hand and leads me to an alcove nearest to the bathroom, a small space where prying eyes can’t reach, and he puts his arms around me. His embrace provides a calm to the uneasiness I’ve felt since Auntie Alice’s murder. I listen to his heartbeat for a minute and try to time my breathing along with it.
“He never listens, Tim.”
“You can make anyone do anything, Layla. Remember when you convinced me and Ruby to sneak out with you so we could go to the Usher concert?”
“We had a great time though.”
“Yeah, I thought about it a lot after I enlisted. That night. We didn’t have problems or pressure. My dad wasn’t a drunk. Ruby’s wasn’t mean. Yours wasn’t—”
“A pretentious jerk.”
“Layla!”
I laugh and Tim does too, despite his better judgment.
“My point is if you can convince us to sneak out on a Saturday night before church, you can make your Dad listen.”
I let go of Tim and raise my face to kiss him, his lips are soft, melting into mine with warmth and ease. I can stand here and kiss him all day, but there’s much I need to do before the service starts. The light click of heels in the hallway causes him to break our kiss. “Make him listen, Layla,” says Tim as he leaves the shadow of our small, sacred space.
Tim is wise, but not when it comes to the ways of my father. Jackson Potter never listens. He won’t listen to my words and he can’t see what I see in Ruby, how she is slowly folding in on herself and turning brittle like fallen leaves. It’s true that the church can cocoon Ruby, but that protective layer can suffocate her, too. I’m all too familiar with that kind of pressure.
Nevertheless, Ruby and I are bound by these walls and these pews and the cracking stone and chipped wood. When we were small, we ran down the halls, our patent leather shoes slapping against the old tile in the basement as we played games or laid our backs against the old mint-green wall and held hands and talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. Neither one of us became what we thought we’d be.
The Sunday after Auntie Alice died, there were so many rumors moving back and forth in Calvary Hope Christian Church. So many people eager to know the details, some feigning concern for Ruby and Lebanon, others asking if they needed someone to help them clean the house or cook a meal. Sister Washington thought her nephew might know someone who saw something. Sister McKay believed she saw someone running from the house “real suspicious-like.” But no one, no one could give the police any facts or actual leads. They brought pies and cakes and looked at the dried blood stain on the living room floor.
I was the one who held Ruby until she cried herself to sleep in my arms, felt her body shake so hard I thought she might fall apart, flesh and bone, in my hands. I told her it was going to be okay, though neither one of us believed it then and still don’t. I made her eat. I call her every two hours, because I know her potential for destruction in a way no one else at this church, save a few, understand.
In this way, Ruby and I are bound together. We are bound by her blood and her survival. Sometimes, I don’t know how I can bear the weight of it, of what I think is one of the truest relationships I’ll ever know.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. A text from Ruby. Beverly Café. 1:30 p.m.
I feel a pang in my chest.
I try to call her. No answer.
I try again. No answer.
I try again and again and again.
No. Answer.
CHAPTER 2
CALVARY HOPE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
In this world, all things have a presence, a subtle realization about life and the humanity around them. Though I don’t possess a traditional body with arms and legs and a brain, I have, over my years in being, come to witness a collective series of events and lives blending in a sometimes gentle, but often garish, rhythmic pattern and hum. It produces what some overly educated philosopher might call a consciousness.
Within my walls and rooms and arched wood roof, I hold the laughter and sorrow, hope and regret, love and hate of a people who escape into services and music and speaking in tongues and dancing and prayer. My form was created fierce and strong by rough, scarred hands long since passed from this earth. The men who built the foundation, placed each of my limestone blocks ever upward, laid the floors and crafted the windows, praising God through their trades and perhaps thought they bartered their way into the pearly gates with their bodily offerings. Maybe they did.
Two nine-foot bloodred wooden doors with creaky, black hinges are set on each end. Open square eyes with no pupils, I stare into the pockmarked street. The winter was not kind to my paint. There are cracks on the steps leading to my entrance. Once small hairline fractures, they are now open crevices, gap-toothed remains of grimy gray concrete puckering up toward a gray sky.
My rear corridor forms an L shape, a rusting blue metal door heralding the third entrance. Though bumped and nicked, it is still somehow sturdy and not falling off the hinges. God’s grace shines in the smallest of things. Constructed during the 1960s, my addition is a lighter shade of brown, but still melds itself perfectly against my older stone in mottled tans, coffees, gingers and hazels.
Some of the church elders still call it “The New Building.” Sunday school, Bible studies and smaller church meetings take place here. During the week, all seven rooms hem and haw with church trustees brainstorming ways to reconcile decreasing offerings with a need to minister to a community of which they are increasingly afraid. Here, children learn their books of the Bible, their young mouths unable to yet form the complicated syllables of the longer books like Leviticus or Deuteronomy. The usher board debates among each other the best tactics with which to welcome new members to the church. So many conflicting agendas, so much to accomplish, but some things remain the same no matter the measured progress.