Riverbend Reunion(2)

Then she took another long look at the old community church her Uncle Elijah had built back in the day, when he got sober for the seventh time—or was it the eighth or ninth?—and got religion.

The windows in the white building were dirty, but it was a miracle they were all intact. Scaling paint testified that no one had kept up the building since the day Elijah gave up trying to build a congregation and headed to the nearest liquor store down in Burnet, Texas. Seven posts held up the roof to a wide front porch. Jessica wondered whether that number was significant.

She heard a noise to her left and glanced that way to see a squirrel fussing at her. The critter’s tail twitched as he barked out a warning.

“This is my church, and it looks like you’re sitting on my steeple, even if it is laying on the ground,” she argued with the animal.

She and her cheerleader friends—Risa, Haley, and Mary Nell—had thought they were being so rebellious when they were in high school. Now she wondered whether drinking beer, dancing, and making out with guys in a church parking lot had brought all of them bad luck. Risa was headed for a divorce. Mary Nell had given almost twenty years of her life to a boyfriend who’d kicked her out a while back. Haley had lost her mother recently. And Jessica had inherited a church from her last living relative. There was also a lot of money involved in Uncle Elijah’s estate, but she had to deal with this church sitting here like a white elephant with a bad case of peeling skin before she could think about what to do with the rest of her life.

Risa had said that her mother, Stella, had had some roof damage to her house when a tornado or straight-line winds had hit Riverbend the year before. Evidently, that same storm had whipped the steeple from the roof and tossed it out onto the ground beside the building. Jessica glanced over at the squirrel, and the sassy critter started barking at her again.

“You want to buy this?” she asked. “I’ll sell it to you for a reasonable price, and finance it for you, but I want payment in dollars, not pecans.”

The squirrel flicked its tail a couple more times and then ran away.

“See there, Uncle Elijah? I can’t even sell the place to a squirrel.” She groaned.

Since the pandemic, folks had gotten spoiled to watching Sunday morning services online rather than going to an actual church. Jessica was surprised that the existing churches didn’t have “For Sale” signs out on the lawns. With a population of less than nine hundred people and six different denominations trying to stay afloat, a person or persons would be crazy to try to start up a new place to worship in Riverbend. Add to that the fact that it was so far out of town—the only reason the squirrels stuck around was for the pecans they could eat on the trees around the old church. Then it was down a dirt road—that got a car dirty every Sunday morning, and the nearest car wash was at least thirty minutes away, down near Burnet. No one wanted to drive that far every week to remove all the dust from their vehicles, and everyone knew it was a sin to drive a messy car. Just a minor sin in the scheme of things—at least according to Jessica’s mother before she was killed in a plane crash. Nowadays, according to what she heard from Risa, Stella carried that list of sins high in the air so everyone could read it.

Maybe Jessica should just donate the church to the town and keep driving until she found a place that felt like home. Other than the church, there was nothing for her in Riverbend except her besties—Mary Nell, Haley, and Risa, who were all waiting for her call that evening—and who knew how long they’d stick around when the summer ended?

Haley might go back to her old job in Alabama. Risa could easily give her husband in Kentucky another chance. And Mary Nell could get homesick for Tennessee at the end of summer. Jessica just needed to find a place to put down roots as soon as the monstrosity in front of her was taken care of, and she didn’t have a clue where they would be.

Memories of a church a lot like the one she was staring at flashed through her mind. It had been a white building, but the stained-glass windows were shiny clean, and the paint wasn’t peeling. She’d had her folks’ memorial services there on Orcas Island when they’d been killed in a small plane crash. She’d read the report dozens of times, but all the technical legalese didn’t make much sense to her. Something with the fuel tank had gone wrong, and the plane had crashed, killing the pilot, her folks, and two other passengers as they traveled from Orcas Island, where they lived, to the mainland.

The crematorium had asked her about an urn, but she couldn’t decide on one, so they’d given her the ashes in simple cardboard boxes. Afraid that the boxes would get wet and disintegrate, she had mingled her parents’ ashes together in a red plastic coffee can, taped the lid shut, and carried them with her for the past five years.

Even after all this time, her chest still tightened at the memory of how she’d felt when she got the news that they were gone, and tears hung on her eyelashes. The feeling of being so alone—except for an alcoholic uncle—that had hit her as she realized the finality of a memorial service five years before wrapped itself around her again as she stared at the white clapboard church that was now hers. The building seemed to be trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t grab hold of whatever it was.

Her plan had been that someday she would retire from the military and live on Orcas Island, close to her folks. She would be there for them as they got older and needed her help. Then, like a puff of smoke, they and a place to put down roots were gone. The money they’d left for her brought little comfort, and she’d never touched a dime of it. Then her Uncle Elijah passed away and left her his estate, which included more money and that church she had to deal with.