The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(13)

“He has his sons with her, I suppose,” I said, opening the door and stepping out onto the porch. Did this bureaucratic detail bother her? If anyone questioned the nitty-gritty details of who would be with whom in the afterlife, we were told that God would work it out, and that there was the whole millennium for church work and temple sealings to be finished while Christ Himself would be leading the church. But why had Tobias not had the sealing done here and now? The Mormon church didn’t allow living widowed women to be sealed again to a second husband, though men had a different rule. A man who had been a widower could be married to a second wife so long as she hadn’t been sealed before. And if his second wife died, even a third wife could be sealed to him while he was still living. If he was divorced, that was a different story completely, and he’d have to have special permission for a sealing to be canceled by the First Presidency before he married again.

I wondered if Kurt even knew that Anna was not sealed to Tobias. “You can always be sealed now,” I said.

Anna shook her head. She was leaning against the door, holding it open now, though before she had nearly closed it on me. “He won’t do it. I always thought he would change his mind. He said that he never would. At least he warned me. He is one of the most truthful people I know. His truth may hurt, but at least he does not hide it.”

“Yes, I prefer the truth, as well. Might as well get it over with from the first.” I felt a surge of sympathy for Anna once more. Why had I never gotten to know her better? Fear of not being good enough had kept me from someone who might have been a dear friend.

I told her I would come see her again soon, then went home and read an old Agatha Christie novel, one of my favorites, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. I had always liked mysteries.

Samuel came home in the afternoon, and he mentioned he was trying to decide between two girls to ask to a dance at school.

“You should go with the person you want to go with,” I said, thinking it was a simple choice. I didn’t remember any of my other sons having this problem.

“But how do I know who I want to go with?” he asked, looking genuinely confused.

“I thought you said there was a girl you wanted to spend more time with?”

“There is,” said Samuel. “But she isn’t—I don’t think she feels like that for me.”

Like that? I suppose he didn’t want to go into more detail with his mother. “And another girl does feel like that for you?” I asked.

Samuel squirmed, which looked very odd at his height. A giant child-man. “But I don’t feel like that for her, and I worry if I ask her out, she might think …” He trailed off.

Samuel thought I understood what he was talking about. He was supposed to suppress sexual feelings as if they were wrong. I supposed there were advantages to this indoctrination. At least the church taught clearly that it was not his right to satisfy sexual urges on any girl he thought was pretty.

“I wish we could put aside the whole dating thing and just go out as friends. Not pair up or anything, just be a big group,” said Samuel.

Again, I thought how different he was from my other sons, who had complained that they wished there weren’t so many strict rules on where you could touch a girl, how you could look at her, and how long you could kiss. “Well, eventually, you’ll be thinking about getting married, you know. You might as well practice spending one-on-one time now.”

Samuel made a face, but he didn’t say anything more, just loped upstairs to do his homework. He was such an easy kid in so many ways. He’d always been obedient. He was kind and gentle and he understood feelings in a way that even teenage girls struggled to do. But there were these weird areas that he didn’t manage, like dating. It seemed like it should have been so natural, especially for someone like Samuel, who socialized easily. But it wasn’t, and that was just one of the mysteries of my life, I suppose.

Kurt came home at six, the usual time for dinner. We sat and ate, the three of us. It was good family time, with inside jokes Samuel then texted to Joseph and Adam to make them laugh.

After dinner, when Samuel had gone back upstairs, I found a moment to talk to Kurt as we worked together on the dishes. I told him about Tobias Torstensen’s heart, and about the fact that he had never been sealed to Anna.

“He’s been a wonderful ward member. We’ll be sad to lose him,” said Kurt, handing me plates. “But there’s nothing I can do about his choice not to be sealed to Anna, you know. That’s a personal decision between him and God. And his first wife, of course.”

I felt a pang for Anna. Would she be alone in the eternities? The church taught that everyone who was in the celestial kingdom had to be in a marriage—marriage was the highest law of the gospel—but that didn’t mean she had to be married to Tobias. In the old days, people would say worthy single women were lucky because they’d be married to Joseph Smith or Brigham Young in the afterlife. But people didn’t say that anymore since anything but historical polygamy had been scripted out of the mainstream Mormon church. Who would all the worthy single women marry, then? The boys who died young and were supposed to be “perfect” because they hadn’t had a chance to sin before the age of eight, the age of accountability?

“What about his first wife?” I asked Kurt. “Do you know how she died? Anna said it was her heart, but I always thought it was cancer.” I didn’t even know her name, I realized. I was rinsing dishes in the sink. You were supposed to save water in Utah and let the dishwasher rinse, but it never worked that way in my experience, no matter how new the dishwasher was.