When I get to the church, it’s cool and dry inside and Saturday-morning loud. Pastor Jeff’s dog is downward. Everyone else’s is abuzz. Busybody Dog. Pooh has traded her wheelchair for her mat but isn’t stretching anything. Instead she’s telling everyone what Mab reported about River. Donna Anvers is telling about the moving vans. Mrs. Radcliffe and Mr. Beechman are telling what happened at school. Everyone is talking about the Templetons, but no one knows anything, which is itself noteworthy. Aside from enrolling the kid in school, the Templetons are lying low. Or else in wait.
Pastor Jeff comes up to standing, lowers his hands to heart center, takes a deep inhale, and, without opening his eyes, calls, “Mirabel Mitchell. You are not a senior.”
True. Not that I can do much yoga anyway.
“So stop spying on my yogis for your mother,” he adds on the way to his toes.
Maybe it’s years of doctoring the widest range of patients, maybe it’s years of ministering the widest range of parishioners, maybe his mind is focused from all the yoga, but it’s hard to hide things from Pastor Jeff. Plus he knows my mother almost as well as I do.
When he finds me skulking near the chancel after class, his first question isn’t a question. “You can only chase your own demons, you know.” Strange advice from a pastor. “You can’t chase your mother’s.”
I don’t need to plead the fifth to plead the fifth, but I make my face look as innocent as possible.
Because Pastor Jeff has to doctor during the week and lead services on Sundays, Saturday is his only day off, and he usually starts it, after yoga, at our house for breakfast. He and Nora don’t talk shop over the weekend, and my mother doesn’t let him preach to her, but she does like to feed him. All those pastries have to go somewhere. So after he puts all the mats away, he wanders back toward home with me. For a while, we’re both quiet. Then he asks his second question, an actual question at least, if at first it seems like a subject change.
“Did I ever tell you my mother was almost a nun?”
Pastor Jeff’s parents met in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. He doesn’t talk about that time much—he wasn’t born yet, after all—but we know all about it anyway from Mab’s ninth-grade history class. Mrs. Shriver said Pastor Jeff was descended from royalty, that his parents, whose only relation to Bourne was raising a son who later moved here, were the most monumental thing that ever happened to this town. And that’s saying something.
“She saw injustice and felt called to help, and she’d been told all her life the path to righteousness was God. She was beloved at church, and love feels holy. Is holy. But mostly, she wanted to be a teacher, and every teacher she’d ever had to that point was a nun. So that was her plan: graduate high school, go to college, become a nun.”
“What happened?” my Voice asks.
“She met my dad. Learned there were other ways to be beloved and other kinds of holy. Learned there were as many paths to righteousness and as many ways to serve as there are fights against injustice.”
I wait, but he doesn’t say anything else, so I type, “Point?”
He winks. “Not all teachers are nuns.”
I consider this. “Point?” my Voice repeats.
“Just because your mother’s cause is just and right, doesn’t mean you have to fight her fight. And if you do, it doesn’t mean you have to fight her way.”
* * *
“If you knew something, you’d tell me, right?” Nora’s waiting at the door for us and plows right in. “You wouldn’t keep it from me so I don’t start yelling like a crazy lady?”
“You are a crazy lady, Nora.”
“Exactly. So there’s no need to lie.”
“Lying is against the code,” says Pastor Jeff.
“What code?”
“Medical ethics, religious leader, take your pick.”
“I went to yoga,” my Voice tries to reassure her. “No one knows anything. Maybe there’s nothing to know.”
“I don’t need yoga.” She snorts. “I know why the Templetons are back.”
Pastor Jeff has filled his mouth with pineapple scone but raises his eyebrows at her.
“They’re here to bury evidence.” She gives a little shudder. It’s glee.
He humors her through crumbs. “Evidence?”
“Something we’re close to finding. Something that would break the lawsuit wide open.”
His eyebrows turn to waggle at me. Your mama’s nuts, they say. I grin at him.