Redemption Road(7)

Elizabeth shook her head. She’d like to be honest with her mother, but had discovered long ago how a single lie could poison even the deepest well. Better to say nothing at all. Better to keep it in.

“Elizabeth?”

“I’m sorry.” Elizabeth shook her head again. “I don’t mean to be distant. It’s just that everything seems so … muddled.”

“Muddled?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, bullshit.” Elizabeth opened her mouth, but her mother waved it closed. “You’re the most clear-minded person I’ve ever known. As a child, an adult. You’ve always seen more clearly than most. You’re like your father that way, even though you believe such different things.”

Elizabeth peered down the darkened hall. “Is he here?”

“Your father? No. The Turners are having troubles again. Your father’s trying to help.”

Elizabeth knew the Turners. The wife drank and could get abusive. She’d hurt her husband once, and Elizabeth took the call her last month in uniform. She could close her eyes and picture the narrow house, the woman who wore a pink housecoat and weighed a hundred pounds, at most.

I want the reverend.

She had a rolling pin in her hand, swinging at shadows. The husband was down and bloody.

I won’t talk to nobody but the reverend.

Elizabeth had been ready to do it the hard way, but her father calmed the woman down, and the husband—again—refused to press charges. That was years ago, and the reverend still counseled them. “He never shies, does he?”

“Your father? No.”

Elizabeth looked out the window. “Has he talked about the shooting?”

“No, sweetheart. What could he possibly say?”

It was a good question, and Elizabeth knew the answer. He would blame her for the deaths, for being a cop in the first place. He would say she’d broken trust, and that everything bad flowed from that single poor decision: the basement, the dead brothers, her career. “He still can’t accept the life I’ve chosen.”

“Of course he can. He’s your father, though, and he pines.”

“For me?”

“For simpler times, perhaps. For what once was. No man wants to be hated by his own daughter.”

“I don’t hate him.”

“You’ve not forgiven, either.”

Elizabeth accepted the truth of that. She kept her distance, and even when they shared the same room, there was a frost. “How are you two so different?”

“We’re really not.”

“Laugh lines. Frown lines. Acceptance. Judgment. You’re so completely opposite I wonder how you’ve stayed together for so long. I marvel. I really do.”

“You’re being unfair to your father.”

“Am I?”

“What can I tell you, sweetheart?” Her mother sipped whiskey and smiled. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”

“Even after so many years?”

“Well, maybe it’s not so much the heart, anymore. He can be difficult, yes, but only because he sees the world so clearly. Good and evil, the one straight path. The older I become, the more comfort I find in that kind of certainty.”

“You studied philosophy, for God’s sake.”

“That was a different life.…”

“You lived in Paris. You wrote poetry.”

Her mother waved off the observation. “I was just a girl, and Paris just a place. You ask why we’ve stayed together, and in my heart I remember how it felt—the vision and the purpose, the determination every day to make the world better. Life with your father was like standing next to an open fire, just raw force and heat and purpose. He got out of bed driven and ended every day the same. He made me very happy for a lot of years.”

“And now?”

She smiled wistfully. “Let’s just say that as rigid as he may have grown, my home will always be between your father’s walls.”

Elizabeth appreciated the simple elegance of such commitment. The preacher. The preacher’s wife. She let a moment pass, thinking how it must have been for them: the passion and the cause, the early days and the great, stone church. “It’s not like the old place, is it?” She turned back to the window and stared out at rock-lined gardens and brown grass, at the poor, narrow church wrapped in sunbaked clapboards. “I think about it sometimes: the cool and the quiet, the long view from the front steps.”

“I thought you hated the old church.”

“Not always. And not with such passion.”

“Why are you here, sweetheart?” Her mother’s reflection appeared in the same pane of glass. “Really?”

Elizabeth sighed, knowing this was the reason she’d come. “Am I a good person?” Her mother started to smile, but Elizabeth stopped her. “I’m serious, Mom. It’s like now. It’s the middle of the night. Things in my life are troubled and uncertain, and here I am.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Am I a taker?”

“Elizabeth Frances Black, you’ve never taken anything in your whole life. Since you were a child I’ve watched you give, first to your father and the congregation, now to the whole city. How many medals have you won? How many lives have you saved? What’s this really about?”