Angel Falling Softly (4 page)

Three e-mail messages were waiting for her. Two from her brother Carl and one from her brother Phillip. The first was a programming question from Carl directed to Phillip. Unless it was of an expressly personal nature, Carl mailed his messages to everybody on his list, regardless of relevance.

They want me to add all this interactive garbage to the website,
Carl wrote,
and I can’t remember the JavaScript routines and I’m too lazy to look them up and I figured you’d know it off the top of your head anyway.

“They” were Carl’s investors, or the government, or the church, the forces of nature, the Godhead. Whatever. His was a binary view of life: thumbs up or thumbs down. Things were okay or they were stupid, and most things in life were stupid.

The message from Phillip was a solution for Carl.

Carl’s second e-mail was addressed to her alone.
Debby hates our guts and wants new parents. You have a spare bedroom available these days. What do you say?

Rachel had stopped being offended by Carl soon after he was born. She hit the reply button and typed,
No thanks. We already have one pubescent teenager. Maybe Mom & Dad will take her.

Carl would get the joke. They grew up in Maine until their dad took a job in the physics department at Utah State University. No surprise, then, that their parents had retired to Great Diamond Island in Casco Bay. It was, if not in the middle of nowhere, then within shouting distance. The week they’d spent there last summer for the family reunion, Debby and Laura had died multiple deaths from boredom.

Rachel pushed the chair back from the computer and stared out the sliding glass doors. New neighbors were always interesting.
A model,
she thought again. Michelle Montgomery still did some modeling for Macy’s. Maybe Michelle knew the new woman.

She shook her head in self-reproach. No, that was as absurd as the habit Utahns had of assuming that any two Mormons living east of the Mississippi must necessarily know each other. Still, a model for a new neighbor would be interesting. Not as interesting as having a daughter dying in the hospital. But even tragedy got boring when it dragged on long enough.

M
ilada had not slept well since arriving in Utah. The sun came up no earlier than in New York, but the fine weave of the curtains made it impossible for her to escape the light. Better to have drapes of rough canvas. Had she planned on staying longer, she would have had them replaced forthwith.

No need for that now.

The house in Sandy turned out to be a champion idea. Both the house and the neighborhood were utterly prosaic. But the view was not.

The Wasatch Front, the ragged range of mountains running north to south along the eastern rim of the valley, was not the subdued Catskills. It strained meaning to use the word
mountains
to refer to those rolling hills. Here at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, the Wasatch Front was a skyscraping battlement of stone, as if giant slabs of granite had been punched upwards through the earth by some aggrieved Plutonian god.

The financial transactions proved simpler than she had expected. A dollar certainly went farther here than it did in Manhattan. The lady with the funny name recommended an interior decorator named Brittney. Milada gave Brittney a budget of four thousand dollars and told her to keep it simple.

“The bedroom set goes down in the basement,” she told her.

“You don’t want the upstairs rooms furnished?”

“I suppose you could put a couch and an armchair in the living room, for the off chance I am forced to entertain.” Milada did not think it likely. “And a kitchen table, a few chairs. Put the telly in the family room—is that what you call it? And a sofa and a coffee table.”

“Some plants perhaps? I know where you can get the most wonderful hanging macramé holders. Maybe some wall coverings?”

“Macramé? I am not enthusiastic about plants. Nothing that requires extra effort to keep alive.”

What Milada ended up with was subdued Western chic, sandy tans, light blues, and off-whites. A Remington knockoff in the foyer—she supposed she could hang her hat on it—and a couple of not-bad Monet prints on the walls. Considering the milieu, Milada would have recommended O’Keeffe, but Brittney must have been working under the assumption that people of East Coast extraction went for French impressionists over American abstract modernists. Though that didn’t explain the bucking bronco in the foyer.

Saturday evening she picked up the S500 at Ken Garff Mercedes. Steven was confused. “Will you need a limo on Monday?”

“As always. Driving for me is strictly an after-hours pleasure. Fetch me Monday morning at seven-thirty. You know the address.”

She settled into the Mercedes. Feeling in a very déclassé mood, she hit the search button on the radio until she landed on a country station at the high end of the FM dial. She turned up the volume and drove home to the suburbs with Tim McGraw booming out the windows.

R
achel could still remember when they slept in on Sunday mornings.

Once upon a time, even with church running on the early schedule, they didn’t have to get up until seven or eight o’clock. There were so many things a person could do with an extra hour or two of sleep—other than sleep. She was sure she’d conceived Jennifer on a Sunday morning. Maybe if she convinced President Forbush that she became fertile only on Sunday mornings, he’d give her husband an early release, put him in charge of the nursery or something.

She lay in bed waiting for the alarm to go off. Other than daylight saving time, they hadn’t reset the alarm clock in two years. But even this was a big improvement. When David was first counselor in the bishopric, Bishop Ackerlind insisted on holding bishopric meeting at six
A.M.
in the bloody morning. Good man, Bishop Ackerlind, but he liked meetings too much.

When David became bishop, she’d laid down the law. Short of the Second Coming, he wasn’t leaving the house before six-forty-five. So he moved bishopric meeting to seven, cut it in half, and hacked Priesthood Executive Committee meeting down to thirty minutes as well.

The ward had survived.

The clock radio clicked on. The radio was tuned to KUER, the University of Utah station. Sunday morning they played gospel music from six till nine. Not music she’d ever hear in a Mormon sacrament meeting, but she liked it. It got the blood moving in her veins.

“Yolanda Adams and the Union Temple Concert Choir,” the disk jockey intoned in his low, rumbling voice, “singing the Lewis E. Jones hymn,
There is Power in the Blood.
”

The music started in a slow blues rhythm, the piano leading off, Hammond organ filling in between the chords. Rachel found the tune more familiar than the lyrics. Yolanda Adams began in solo:

Would you be free from the burden of sin?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood;
Would you o’er evil a victory win?
There’s wonderful power in the blood.

The choir came in on the second stanza, repeating the last three lines in counterpoint:

There’s power in the blood, power in the blood;
Would you o’er evil a victory win?
There’s wonderful power in the blood.

Yolanda sang in recitative shout and response, “
You’ve got to make yourself free from your passion and pride. There’s power in the blood, power in the blood!
” The chorus belted out in the background:

There is power, power, wonder-working power
In the blood of the Lamb;
There is power, power, wonder-working power
In the precious blood of the Lamb.

David climbed out of bed, stretched and yawned, and shuffled into the bathroom. Rachel put on her bathrobe and headed down to the kitchen. She got bacon and eggs out of the refrigerator, the frying pan out from under the stove. Except that today was Fast Sunday. She sighed, put the food back in the fridge, and stowed away the frying pan. She found a mug in the cupboard, ran the water hot at the sink, and added a teabag, herbal orange. There were limits to how far she could take this fasting business, and dehydration was right out.

To be honest, she’d never found much spiritual value in fasting, at least not in the warm-fuzzies department. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe it worked for other people—she was willing to give any faith-promoting rumor the benefit of the doubt. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t given it her best shot. The first time the doctor had used the words
cancer
and
Jennifer
in the same sentence, she’d fasted every week until the bishop told her to cut it out.

“I’m doing it for Jennifer,” she’d insisted.

“You’re not exactly being spiritual about it.” He meant she was getting to be a real pain to be around. He was right. Low blood sugar made her grouchy and gave her migraines. Besides, she knew perfectly well what she was doing. If she couldn’t control the world, she’d settle for controlling herself. But God certainly knew the difference between faith and an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Herbal tea, she rationalized, didn’t have any calories.

The bishop walked into the kitchen wearing a white shirt and tie, black pinstriped suit coat, and matching slacks. He hardly ever wore a suit to work, and once a week he really looked fine in one, the junior exec with the power marriage. Well, they could pretend.

“Hi, handsome,” she said.

He kissed her. “You taste nice.”

“It’s the orange.” She put the mug down on the counter and straightened his tie. “By the way, Norma and DeMar are up in Pocatello today. Grandchild number three. So I’ll see you at PEC.”

Since there was no breakfast to prepare, she held onto him a while longer. But they had their morning ritual to attend to. David fetched the scriptures from the hutch. They sat down at the kitchen table. Alternately, one read aloud from the New International Version while the other followed along in the official King James.

It was a practice her husband had first observed when they visited her parents after getting engaged. He confessed to her later, “When I saw your mom reading out of that NIV Scofield Study Bible, making lengthy references to Dummelow, I thought I was marrying into one of those families of Mormon radicals. Next thing, you’d be trying to convince me that women ought to get the priesthood.”

“That’s sweet,” Rachel replied. “Wait till you meet my brother Carl.”

After meeting Carl once, David had done his level best to avoid ever meeting him again.

They were presently working their way through Isaiah, dense going no matter what the translation. David glanced at the clock. “I’d better get going.” He got up from the table, leaned over, and kissed her forehead. “See you at church.”

He picked up his briefcase and left. Rachel replaced the bookmarks and then flipped back through the pages to Job. She had developed an affinity for the last ten chapters of Job, even more so in the King James Version. Perhaps that was because the poetry of the language pretty much disguised the fact that for all the grief they give Job, Elihu and God don’t come up with much of a philosophy of suffering. She always imagined Robert De Niro as God, saying to Job at the beginning of chapter 38, “You talking to me, Job? Huh? Are
you
talking to me?”

Basically, God’s philosophy was: “I’m God. You’re not. Trust me on this.”

Nevertheless Job was somehow reassuring. No reasons, no answers, no profound philosophies of life. But Job gets his reward anyway. As if Job had his lawyers sue God and they settled out of court, big time. New house, new family, a whole bunch of sheep and camels to boot.
Hey, sorry for the trouble.
The moral of the story: complain hard and long enough and maybe the check won’t bounce.

She closed the book and put the bibles back on the shelf.

The bishop glanced at his itinerary, tugged at his necktie. With nine people stuffed into his office—his two counselors, the elders quorum president, high priest group leader, Young Men president, the ward clerk and executive secretary, and his wife representing the Relief Society—it was getting stuffy. Stuffy meant it was time to get it over and done with.