Mourning Becomes Cassandra (20 page)

I grinned. “You’re right. Maybe I should have said He sent his Son to come after us. We ran away from God, so he sent Jesus to ask us to come back and hang out with Him. I guess that makes knowing God the destination, and Jesus the car that gets me there. If God loved me and went to all that trouble, I wanted to see what He was about.”

“And you think that’s what Jesus was about? God trying to get us to come back to him? That sounds totally lame and desperate to me, Cass. If you’re God, why wouldn’t you just be cool kicking it in heaven with a bunch of angels and blowing things up when you felt like it? Why would you care if a few billion little ant-people don’t want to hang out with you?”

“I guess because you can’t help who you love.”

Nadina ate another cookie, breaking it in quarters. “So now what? You decided you wanted to hang out with Him, so you got in your little ant-person car and headed off, but it broke down and now you don’t know if you want to get back in?”

“Oh, I’ll get back in eventually. I just want to get out and kick the tires and slam the doors and pound on the hood and cuss for a while. I don’t really have a choice.”

She sighed. “I changed my mind. You’re even more of a Jesus Freak than Louella, and you’re worse because you’re trying to be sneaky about it. I don’t even buy all that Jesus-loves-you crock, and you’ve got me wanting you to get back in the car.” When I put an arm around her shoulders to squeeze her, she shrugged me off casually, adding, “I don’t want to be the only one with the lame mentor who doesn’t pray for her.”

“Look at me, Nadina,” I commanded. Her blue eyes met mine skeptically. “If you would like me to pray for you, I will pray for you. What do you want me to pray?”

She was done with our almost heart-to-heart, however. “Use your imagination.”

After Nadina had gone, I spread out my Amundsen research materials at the kitchen table but ended up staring out the bay window for an hour or so, lost in thought until I heard the front door slam.

“Cass! Oh, Cass, guess what?” Phyl rushed in, her wavy brown hair flying and her eyes snapping with excitement.

“What on earth, Phyl? Are you okay?”

She flung herself down on the cushioned bench opposite me and grabbed my hands. “The tackiest—you are never going to believe—” Out of breath, she nevertheless managed to succumb to a giggling fit.

“For the love of Mike, Phyl, spill the beans!” I urged, giving her hands a squeeze.

“Okay, okay. Wayne proposed to me!” She enjoyed my dumbfounded expression for a second before barreling on. “He proposed to me today at lunch
at a hot dog stand.”

Recovering my voice I said, “There are so many things wrong with that sentence I don’t know where to start.”

“I know,” Phyl laughed. “When I called Joanie, I could barely get her to understand. I tried to call you, but your phone was dead, as usual. Wayne proposed! At lunch! At a hot dog stand!”

“You’ve only known him a couple months,” I wondered aloud. “He even beat Roy to the punch. Did he bring his mom along? And what did you say to him? No, or hell no? Give me details.”

“To make a long story short, I said no,” Phyl began.

“Come on, Phyl. Make a long story long—start at the beginning,” I insisted.

“Well, okay. He messaged me at about ten o’clock and asked if I could have lunch today at Seastar, but I had a meeting at 11:00 and another one at 1:00, so I didn’t think it could happen. But he must have promised himself he was going to ask me today because he wouldn’t let me beg off. All we had time for was the hot dog stand on the corner by my office. So there I am, loading up on the Gulden’s Spicy Brown, when all of a sudden he grabs my hand off the dispenser pump and says, ‘Phyl, I’m in love with you. You’re the girl I’ve been waiting for. Will you marry me?’”

I clapped my hands, thrilled. “Go, Wayne! Imagine—he couldn’t even wait till you were spooning on the onions. Is it too late to change your mind? Lesser men would have aborted the mission when it got moved to the hot dog stand, but not our man Wayne.”

Phyl giggled. “I’m not sure he even noticed. Probably his mom told him to ask me at a nice restaurant, but when he had to go to Plan B he probably didn’t think it would matter.”

“Nor did it, in the event,” I pointed out. “Were you sorry to say no? Even the littlest bit?”

She weighed this for a moment. “You know, Cass, I was! You know how I’ve been kind of lukewarm on him all along—lukewarm at best. He’s nice-looking and employed and kind and even interesting, once you get him talking—did I tell you he’s a World War II buff?”

“You don’t have to sell me on Wayne, Phyl. As Elizabeth Bennett said to her sister Jane, ‘You’ve liked many a stupider person.’ Jason, for instance. And Daniel, for another.” She looked sheepish, and I asked hesitantly, “If you think he’s not so bad after all, do you think you could learn to love him? We really don’t know him very well, at this point, but he seems to be a quality guy.” She grimaced and shrugged her shoulders. “You didn’t turn him down because of…of Daniel, did you?”

“No-o-o,” Phyl answered unwillingly. “I still like Daniel—I can’t help that—but he’s clearly not interested in me, and I’m not just going to pine over him the rest of my life. I just wish Wayne were a little more exciting. The whole engineer thing, and the dutiful son thing just don’t do it for me. I can always guess what he’s going to do or say.”

“That is total bunk, Phyl,” I protested. “You had no idea he was going to propose to you so soon—today—and the hot dog stand was pure bonus unpredictability.”

“Good point,” she amended. After a pause Phyl asked, “Troy did engineering, didn’t he? But you didn’t think he was boring.”

“He could be vastly boring, if he was talking about one of his work projects,” I said encouragingly, “but I could bore him right back when I talked about my dull days staying home with a baby. For every exciting milestone Min hit, there were lots more hours spent talking about what brand of diapers I liked, or what my friends had read about baby food, or Min’s sleeping habits. Life has a lot of boring in it. Maybe the trick is marrying someone with your sense of humor, so that even when you hit all the boring, you can joke about it. Troy and I could. Didn’t you find with Jason that marriage was at least 85% companionship?”

“Not really. Being married to Jason was about 85% fighting and 10% sex and 5% companionship.”

I winced. “Ooh, that’s bad. And I bet if you married Daniel it’d be 85% sex, 10% fighting, and 5% companionship, until he dumped you.”

“I could go for those ratios,” Phyl grinned incorrigibly. “Until he dumped me, that is.”

“So did Wayne go away completely demoralized, and you’ve seen the last of him, or is he asking to keep seeing you?”

“To keep seeing me,” Phyl answered slowly. “And—I didn’t even tell Joanie this—after I said no, and he said he was going to keep trying, if I didn’t mind, he grabbed me, hot dog and all, and kissed me in front of everyone.”

I whistled appreciatively. “Wow! I’ll hardly be able to look at him this Thursday without blushing.” I teased. “And think—next time you see Jason, you’ll have some bragging rights. When’s the last time Jessica kissed
him
over a hot dog?”

When Joanie got home we hashed through it once more.

“Cass thinks I shouldn’t rule him out until I get to know him better,” Phyl concluded. “What do you think?”

“Quality people improve on acquaintance,” I explained. “Flashy people like Jason get worse the longer you know them. I think Wayne falls in the first bucket.”

Joanie considered. “Well, dear Wayne is probably never gonna set the Thames on fire, even if you know him for years—”

“Who wants a husband who sets the Thames on fire?” I insisted. “Thrill-seeking guys do not make good husbands. They dump you right off, like Jason, or they dump you when they hit their mid-life crisis and run off with the first aerobics instructor who compliments their receding hairline.” Joanie and Phyl didn’t look entirely convinced. Flustered, I continued, “I’m not saying boring is beautiful—I’m just saying that thrilling is overrated. Troy and I had humor and mutual respect and compatible outlooks on life…If he hadn’t up and died on me, I think we could have gone the distance.”

Hearing my voice tighten up a little, Joanie put a hand over mine. “Aw, Cass…”

“It’s okay, Joanie,” I said quickly. “All I mean to say is that Wayne is a good man, and he has serious long-distance potential, Phyl. Don’t rule him out.”

My conversation with Nadina and Wayne’s proposal made it difficult to fall asleep that night. After an hour or two of staring up at the ceiling, I found myself praying before I realized it. When it did hit me what I was doing, I stiffened and tacked on a surly,
Don’t think I’ve forgotten about what You did to me—I’m just praying because I told Nadina I would.
But after a space of time I even dropped that.
Fine. I’m praying. Who else am I going to ask?
And there was so much to ask for Nadina: I prayed she would dump Mike and move back in with her mom; I prayed she would be able to stand up to him and keep off the hard drugs; I prayed for the people around her to make good choices; I prayed for wisdom and self-control when I spoke to her; I prayed she might begin to think about her life and what she was doing on earth.

Prayers for Nadina drifted into other prayers, for Phyl, for Perry and Betsy, for Kyle, for myself. Maybe what I had told Nadina was no longer relevant: sometime in the past few months I had gotten back in the car. My Bible still sat gathering dust on the shelf, but I occasionally flipped through Joanie’s or Phyl’s, if they left it lying around.

In church, too, I had begun to invest again. I now recognized many faces at the early service and even made chitchat with those who regularly sat around me. This group included Louella Murphy, whose bright appliqué jacket I had spied one Sunday from up in the balcony and whom I gravitated toward thereafter. Along with the faces, the hymns had grown familiar, and I began to sing again because I had always loved to sing. There were still the services where I was out of sorts and would spend the hour trying not to burst into tears, but they were getting less frequent. If Louella would catch me on one of those mornings, she would reach over and squeeze my hand encouragingly. Once when she did this she whispered, “I miss my Frank, too.”

“How—how did you know?” I gasped under my breath.

“Nadina told Sonya, and Sonya told me,” she said simply. “I’m sorry about your little girl, too—oh! Shhh…it’s okay.”

Really, though, those days were getting fewer and farther between. As I drifted off to sleep, one final prayer flitted across my mind:
You’re still there, I guess. Thank you.

“You want to try it again, Cass? You’re getting that hitch in your voice.”

Murray’s own hitch-less, dry voice came over the headphones, and despite his long-suffering tone I knew he was impatient with me. I was perched on a stool, the script on a towel-draped music stand in front of me, surrounded on three sides by jury-rigged walls covered in geometric, acoustical foam. A microphone hovered in my face, covered by a pop filter to catch any overexuberant “p” or “b” or “s” sounds. When I had jokingly recited “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” to test it out, Murray didn’t even give a perfunctory laugh. But it wasn’t Murray or my strange setting that was throwing me.

After one more unsuccessful take, I pulled off my headphones and said, “James, you’ve got to go. You’re throwing me off.”

“Who, me?” he protested, grinning. “I’m not doing a thing.” Murray and I had been doing just fine getting some of the one-off lines down, including that ridiculous, “Die, Varlet!” But then James had let himself into Lockdown, cup of coffee and clipboard in hand, drawn up another stool not ten feet from me, and proceeded to observe, a half-smile playing about his lips.

“These lines are corny enough. I absolutely can’t say them when someone is watching me,” I insisted. “So buzz off, or at least go sit by Murray where I can’t see you.”

Instead, he pulled his stool closer. “Cass, where’s your professionalism? Pretend I’m not here.”

“If you wanted a professional, you should have forked out the money to hire one,” I retorted. “You hired someone who’s only been in high school plays, so go away.”

James laughed but threw up his arms in surrender. “Fine, fine, I’ll go away. But I thought you invited Kyle to come and watch. What are you doing to do when he gets here?”

“I’ll tell him he has to sit by Murray.”

“Speaking of Murray,” said Murray loudly, “Can we respect Murray’s time here and get back to recording?”

James and I smiled sheepishly at each other, and he shot Murray a Cub Scout salute. “Need anything?” he whispered before he left. “Drink of water? Snack?” Shaking my head, I watched him slip out. His movements were always so quick and precise; he reminded me of one of Lewis’ animated characters in
Tolt
—the Elf Archer, maybe. Not that I would ever say that to him, though, men not generally liking to be compared with elves.

With James gone and only the dour Murray’s voice in my ears we made more progress, and when I finally emerged from the recording booth, it was to find that Kyle had been there quite some time. He was sitting beside Murray, wearing identical goofy headphones and responding to Murray’s murmured comments monosyllabically. Trust Kyle to cotton on to all things technical instantly. He pointed to one of the thousand knobs on what looked like a black dashboard in front of Murray and asked a question I couldn’t hear. Given how unexcited Murray had been at the prospect of having an observer, I was astonished to see him nod and launch into a lengthy explanation. The two of them reminded me of the Sorcerer and his apprentice brewing up some dark magic together.