Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

A hand-painted cross, given to him by a Latin American missionary, hung above the spy hole of the door to her father's room at the welfare hotel. She heard his old black shoes moving around the room, murmuring on the thin carpet. Oystery pigeon poops covered the window ledge to her left. Across the street, on the steps of the old stone church, a bearded man slept below the arch of headless angels. So much happened so fast that Ginger felt disoriented.

The congregation voted for expansion and to add another pastor. Mulhoffer, her father said, delivered this information as if the decision was as important to the church's history as the signing of the Declaration of Independence was to America's. He'd actually made the last grandiose comparison and her father giggled nervously in a way that sounded, even to his own ears, a little bit satanic. A severance was arranged and he volunteered to vacate the parsonage immediately as long as his daughter could stay in the basement until the end of the month.

A door opened down the hall and a man, the one she'd seen weeks earlier in the hotel window, poked his head out. If people drank steadily and long enough they mutated into another species: frogish bleary eyes, noses like raw hamburger, a swimmy countenance brimming with longing and dread. He examined her jeans, her oversized jacket, her stringy hairdo and, deciding she was not altogether untrustworthy, smiled shyly.

“We already know all about Jesus,” he said in a friendly, cheerful voice, cynicism edging only the last word. “You tell him that.”

“Okay,” Ginger said as the man turned back to his room and raised the volume on his TV set.

Her father opened the door wearing a white T-shirt pulled out over a pair of black preacher pants, his arms thin and white as a child's.

“Are the old guys harassing you?” he asked in a forced tone meant to dispel their mutual embarrassment.

Ginger shook her head. “The man with the brush cut wants me to tell you he knows all about Jesus.”

Her father laughed, “He sure does. That guy's son died in Vietnam and his wife gave the family savings to a bounty hunter who said he'd bring the boy back alive.” Ginger remembered him telling the story to her mother over dinner one night. Her father knew something secret about almost everyone in town. To hear these narratives was mesmerizing, but she worried that their accumulation had pushed her father over the edge.

He shook his head. “I gave the poor guy ten dollars, which your mother ridiculed me about for months.”

Her mother loved to tell stories of how her father had been tricked; the guy who said he had sleeping sickness, the man selling electric flashlights, the woman who came to the church office saying she needed money because her baby was sick.

He moved a pile of books so she could sit on the bed. Ginger forgot that the furniture in the house all belonged to the church and she was shocked by how little he had, a few boxes of theology books — one marked sermons contained thousands of legal pad pages. The folded blanket from the church office sat neatly at the end of the bed. On the card table by the window he set up an altar. Both his paintings, the ark in the gloomy canal and the dark forest topped by celebratory lilies, leaned up against the glass. Before them he arranged his round-faced bust of Martin Luther, the bronze praying hands, his Oxford Bible, and a set of silver candleholders he'd given her mother one year for Christmas. Leaning against the tarnished metal was a curling snapshot of Sandy Patrick in her brownie uniform, a big goofy smile spread over her face.

Ginger knew he and Ruth Patrick had become good friends. He used her minivan to move and last week Ginger saw them eating together at a fast-food place along the highway. She knew the tinfoil-covered paper plates of star-shaped sugar cookies and lemon squares came from Mrs. Patrick's kitchen. Even now, an open Tupperware container of brownies sat on top of the muted TV.

“What's going on at the house?” her father asked as if the energy of his delivery could distract her from the half-eaten food and the room's general dinginess.

“They steamed off the wallpaper in the dining room yesterday and today they're tearing up all the carpet.”

Her father's pupils dilated and he got that spacey, nostalgic look. The ranch house had always been an embarrassment to him, the fake-wood paneling and hokey intercom system. Her mother had wanted to fix it up, but there was never any money to do it right, have drapes made, buy a proper couch. So the living room stood empty, just a ficus plant in one corner beside her father's pile of old New York Times.

“What about my room? Your mother had that shade of blue mixed especially.”

“The minister's wife is going to paint the whole house beige. She wants to give the place a country look.”

Her father looked confused.

“Dollies, quilts, silk flower arrangements in antique flour mills.” Ginger remembered the petite woman with the teddy bear on her cotton sweater, her features set in a stagy display of empathy as she asked questions about the water stain under the kitchen sink.

“Oh dear,” her father grimaced. “God does work in mysterious ways.”

Ginger laughed sharp and flat as a gunshot. She was so relieved he could still joke that her shoulders slipped down and she let a long breath up from her lungs.

“Best to get out of there as soon as you can,” he continued. She hadn't told her father yet, but she'd been thinking of moving in with Ted. Since he disappeared, she thought of him like a delicate and slightly demented prince. She missed their late-night talks about time travel and getting his navel pierced. Distance gave him a narcotic and slightly saintly appeal.

“So have you decided what you're going to do?” Ginger asked. The night of the news, his emphatic, wild-eyed ideas frightened her. He was going to Haiti to work with the poor; he was going to minister to the homeless and live among them on the streets.

His neck flushed a prickly nervous pink, and his face grew even paler. “Well, you know the economy is not what it used to be,” he glanced at the picture of a beach put into a dime-store frame and hung over the sagging twin bed, “and I'm not a young man either.”

Ginger nodded as he brought the Oxford Bible onto his lap and pulled out a glossy pamphlet. “I'm thinking of something along these lines, where my experience would come in handy.” He passed her the rectangle of slick-colored paper.

PEACE OF MIND, the pamphlet spelled out in soft blue pastel letters, the typeface cursive and feminine. Inside was a photograph of a synthetic stone gate with two azalea bushes on either side of a newly paved asphalt drive. Above hung an iron sign with gold letters: Forest Rest Cemetery. Opposite the photo was a checklist, reasons why a cemetery plot was a good investment.

“I don't get it. You're going to work at the cemetery?”

Her father leaned back on the folding chair, one she knew he'd taken from the church basement. “No. No. I'll be selling plots door to door.”

He was tired. He was not himself. “You're kidding, right?” Ginger asked.

“Not at all.” A smile bit into his cheeks, its rigid architecture all that held him up. Instead of moving into one of the condos on the highway, he moved to this monkish room in a sleazy hotel and decided to do the job that most made his skin crawl. Grief sent her father into this alternate reality.

Ginger handed the pamphlet back. “You have gone completely nuts,” she said, spacing out each word for effect.

“Maybe so.” He looked down at the photo as if considering the possibility. Yellow stains were burned under the arms of his T-shirt and his eyes looked wet and confused, their expression not unlike those of the hotel's other shell-shocked residents.