Lay It on My Heart (26 page)

Phoebe's poking around on the armrest in the door. Everything on the Buick is electronic. “Where's the window button?” she says, then, “I can't believe we're driving all the way to Clay's Corner for McDonald's, which we can't even afford. I must be out of my gourd. Look. I believe the man should be the head of the home, like Christ is the head of the church, like it says in Ephesians. But when something goes wrong with the head, I mean the head of the church or your father's head, then all of a sudden you're looking back over your life, wondering how long you've been talking yourself into things. Know who I'd like to run a few things by?”

She waits until I say “Who?”

“The late, great Custer Peake, that's who. All your father ever heard growing up was Custer Peake this, Custer Peake that. Tried seminary, but your father? Not exactly built for standing up in front of people. Not going to be Billy Graham and son, not going to bring back the Great Revival.” She moves her hands from the bottom of the steering wheel to the top and frowns. “The Great Revival,” she says again. “Can you believe it didn't even cross my mind to pray for myself and see whether or not the Lord was calling me to get married? I was Phoebe Savage. And I gave it up like it was nothing. All because I'd been chosen by the only son of the great Custer Peake.”

We're pulling into the McDonald's parking lot. Kelly-Lynn says this is where the high school kids hang out on weekend nights, orbiting the building along the drive-thru path, adding alcohol to their Cokes. At the counter, Phoebe orders two plain hamburgers and one small fries. She informs the girl behind the register, who couldn't care less, that we will both be drinking water.

“I'll be hungry,” I say, without any hope. She reminds me, as I knew she would, of the half-dozen hard-boiled eggs in our minifridge. If I'm still hungry when we get home, I can enjoy one of them.

“Maybe I'll get a job at McDonald's,” I say as we sit down. “I could bring home dinner.”

“If you're looking for something to do, you can learn to plan our meals at home. Now that it looks like we could be there indefinitely.”

The word
indefinitely
batters at my ear. Five short syllables. Like a woodpecker. Over so fast I might have imagined the sound.

“Because here's what we need to talk about. Your father has decided to move into a halfway house in Lexington, when the time comes. Do you know what a halfway house is?”

It could not possibly be other than the obvious. A place for people who are ready to leave a hospital but not ready to come home. Or who are not ever coming home and need time to make other plans. A place for people caught between what their lives used to be and what their lives might become. “Until when?”

“Until I don't know. Indefinitely, I said. Your father is either not himself right now, or he's more himself than he's been in a long time. Either way, he's not the person we've been living with. It might be very difficult, even if he did come home.”

“But you said he was hard to live with before,” I say, “so if he's not that person anymore, isn't that a good thing? You complained about everything, and now everything you complained about is gone.”

“Don't talk with your mouth full.”

“You're just letting this happen,” I say. “You didn't even put on lipstick last night. You got mad. You cried. Why would he even want to come home?”

“You think it's that easy? You think all it takes is lipstick? Why don't you make him want to come home, yourself? What kind of man has a child, a precious little daughter, and then doesn't come home to her as soon as he possibly can?”

I swallow hard and feel the bite of burger go all the way down. In the plate-glass window, Phoebe and I are two unhappy people, talking, mirrored back to each other against the fading daylight. Out of nowhere, the prayer comes back.
Inhabit me, O Lord God
. I don't try to stop it, but I don't try to keep it going, either.

“I mean, seriously, Charmaine. I'm not saying he can help it, I'm just saying don't blame me. If anyone's giving up, here, it's your father.”

I shake my head so violently it's like something up there comes undone and shifts around. I feel dizzy.

“Think about Titus, Charmaine. Think what if you were out somewhere with him, downtown in some city, and someone asked you to set him down on the sidewalk and just walk away.”

I do think of Titus as she says this. I think of how he likes for me to pick him up and sink my hand into his fat belly and how afraid I am that he is dead and how much I wish he would come back. If someone asked me to leave Titus on the sidewalk somewhere there is no way I would ever, ever do that. But then I remember Tracy's dog, Corky, and how mean he is, snarling and biting hard enough to hurt. “I wouldn't leave Titus on the sidewalk,” I say, “but I might leave Corky.”

“Who?”

“No one would leave Titus anywhere. He's a good kitty.”

“Yes, they would,” Phoebe says, “and that is the point. If they weren't well. It's not about the cat. If it's a good cat or not. This has nothing to do with you. Believe it or not, the world doesn't revolve around you. Truth be told? It has nothing to do with me either.”

But I'm studying Phoebe's face, the way her chapped, bare lips form around each word. The way they close over a bite of hamburger, containing it while she chews. I've never watched anyone eat this closely before, not even her, though it is something I must have been seeing for years. Suddenly the way the shapes of the food move around under her cheek looks grotesque. And after she swallows I can see her tongue running across her teeth, just behind her lips, seeking any remaining food. One of her eyes is smaller than the other, too, just a little, and it seems awful the way she eats only an inch of one French fry at a time, dipping each next segment into the soft mound of ketchup. The yellow overhead light makes her skin look like raw chicken. Now she is reaching out to tap my shoulder.

“What?” I say.

“Are you okay? I just asked you if you were okay.”

“Fine.” But I am not okay. I understand now that Phoebe is less appealing than any other person in the universe, and that I am just like her, or at least fully one-half of me is just like her. And all the times I want to get away from her, her hands, her feelings, my father must feel the same way, and he must feel that way about me too, or at least one-half of me. And now I think that if my father really has been crazy, then maybe it's been because of Phoebe and me, because of how unbearable the two of us are, and if he isn't coming home, it is because how unbearable we are is even more obvious now that he's thinking straight.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Phoebe asks as I put down the remaining half of my hamburger. “You better eat some of these fries before I polish them off.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“I knew it,” Phoebe says, pulling my food toward her. I watch it go. “And you thought we needed to order more.”

O
N FRIDAY, IN ENGLISH
, a pale, twitching girl gives a how-to speech on selecting the proper pet based on your home situation. Dogs need a stay-at-home mom just like toddlers do. And a yard. Raise your hand if you have a dog. Cats are a good choice if your parents are busy or if you live in an apartment. And they're usually softer too. Raise your hand if you have a cat. I raise my hand and try to believe that Titus is alive, picking his way through the scrub around the river, surviving on rodents and birds. And then I'm wondering about the halfway house my father will go to, whether or not the people who live there are allowed to have their own pets, or if there's one pet that everyone shares, and what the best kind of pet for that home situation might be.

When the girl is finished, Mrs. Teaderman calls my name.

“What?” I say, and the class laughs like I'm making a joke. But Mrs. Teaderman gives me a troubled look, and I remember that today is the day of my extension. Then she is calling on me to stand up in front and deliver a how-to speech that I have not written or even thought about at all, since visiting my father kicked off the beginning of this horrible week.

“We're waiting, Miss Peake,” says Mrs. Teaderman in a frosty voice. “We were also waiting on Monday, and we are unprepared to wait any longer.”

Next to me, Kelly-Lynn gives me her alarmed face, which is just a barely perceptible widening of the eyes.

“You have two choices,” says Mrs. Teaderman. “You may stand in front of the class and talk about something you know how to do and receive at least partial credit for this assignment, or you may remain in your seat and accept a zero.”

My face feels hot, like it might be swelling, but I get to my feet.

“I thought so,” says Mrs. Teaderman, a woman who seems to have lost all patience for me since I elected not to confide in her. And since I stopped finishing my homework. And, this week, even participating in freewriting.

I make my way up the row of desks and stand in front of the demonstration table.

“Do you have any props for us?” Mrs. Teaderman asks, and when I shake my head she says, “No props,” as if she expected as much.

The faces of all the kids in class turn from Mrs. Teaderman to me in one motion, sunflowers following the light. I'm waiting, though I'm not sure for what.

“My speech,” I begin, but the words sound feeble. “My speech is about,” I say, too loud. I let my head fall back and scan the ceiling like there might be a good topic written there. And then it comes to me. I blink a few times, for courage, and lower my head until I can see the whole class, and I pretend-look at each of them the way Conley does in the Upper Room. “How to pray,” I say.

Someone at the back of the room titters. A boy at the front says, “Dear God, amen,” and then the rest of the class cracks up.

“Quiet,” says Mrs. Teaderman.

The clock over the door says ten minutes to two. How-to speeches have to last from between five and seven minutes.

“‘Dear God, amen' is what a lot of people think when they think about prayer,” I start off when the laughing dies down. “It's the start and the finish. And you can put whatever you want in between. If you have a grandmother who's sick, you can pray that she gets better; if your dad needs a job, you can pray he finds one. If you're worried about getting fat”—here I glance over at Kelly-Lynn, listening with her best detached expression—“you can ask him to help you not eat. But if you do that, if you ask for something specific, you have to take the answer you get. Maybe your dad's going to start writing bad checks instead of getting a job. Maybe your grandmother's going to die.”

Over the door, the clock says nine minutes before two.

“There's no way a five-to-seven-minute speech could cover everything you could pray about,” I say to the class.

“Topic selection is an important part of the speech-making process,” says Mrs. Teaderman.

“Okay,” I say. “That's one way to pray, the way a lot of people do it. But you don't have to pray like that. Just like you don't really have to close your eyes.” I close my eyes, point to them, then open them again and check the clock. “Or get down on your knees.” I drop to my knees, and while I'm down there, I press my palms together. “Or make praying hands.”

“This is a ‘how-not-to' speech,” says a boy in the front row. Kevin something.

I get back to my feet. The clock hands haven't moved. I take a deep breath. “Another way to pray,” I say, “a better way, is to keep yourself doing it all the time. Even when you're doing other things. My dad taught me. It's from the New Testament, and it's called ‘prayer without ceasing.'” Two of the girls who sit by the wall are smirking at each other. In the second row, another girl's mouth hangs open, like she's trying to breathe through allergies. Kelly-Lynn has lifted one skeptical eyebrow. I haven't told anyone about prayer without ceasing. It has seemed like a secret tie to my father, a rope strung between us, only he's dropped his end.

The clock reads seven minutes before two.

“So here's what you do,” I say. “First you breathe in as far as you can.” I stop and breathe in and then let it out quietly, so it will seem like I haven't let it out yet. “So when you breathe in, you think in your head,
Inhabit me
.” The word
inhabit
does a number on the smirking girls, who break out in giggles.

“Girls,” says Mrs. Teaderman. “I'm sorry, Charmaine, but would you mind repeating that?”

“You breathe in and think,
Inhabit me
. But it doesn't have to be that. You can make up your own words, as long as they're the same every time. Then you breathe out and think,
O Lord God
.”

In the front row, Kevin takes several ragged breaths in and out and tries to speak while breathing. “Inhabit me. Inhabit me!”

Kelly-Lynn has arranged her face in its finest blankness, as if she is present in body only, but her real life, her exciting one, is happening somewhere else far away.

The speech has gone on more than five minutes now, and I figure we've all had enough. I move a few steps toward my seat before Mrs. Teaderman says, “I think we're ready for your conclusion.”

I turn back to the class. I explain as quickly as I can that if they practice saying those phrases to themselves at the same time they breathe, pretty soon the words will go through their heads automatically, even if they're not thinking them on purpose. I say it like it's as easy as that. As wanting to. “And in conclusion,” I say, “that means you're praying without ceasing”—
thatmeansyou'reprayingwithoutceasing
.

“And so?” asks Mrs. Teaderman from somewhere behind me. “Can you bring us to the final result?”

If there's a difference between the conclusion and the final result, I don't remember it, but I keep talking. “The final result is an attitude of reception,” I say. “Which means you're always ready for the Lord to draw near.”