Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

But Tula jumped right up again and said, “Why isn’t the room made up? The rooms are always made up as soon as the guest leaves.”

“He could have left too late.”

“What if he hasn’t left yet? He could be back at any minute!” Her eyes darted from the tangled coverlet to the door. “I wanted it to be so romantic, but look at it. It’s a mess.”

Will was willing to take the risk that a stranger would walk in on them, but Tula wasn’t, so he spent a few minutes trying to convince her that the room had been abandoned. “If someone was staying here, he would have left his personal belongings lying around, and there aren’t any. You said you and your mother left the motel early. If the guest left late, you wouldn’t have been there to clean the room.”

Tula’s expression said he was missing something obvious, but he didn’t know what it might be. She rushed around the room opening and closing dresser drawers and poking her head into the closet before scooping the dirty linen off the bed and into a pile on the floor. After replacing the coverlet, she took a towel and wiped at the surfaces in the bathroom before getting on her knees to swab behind the toilet. “Leave it, Tula. It doesn’t matter to me what the bathroom looks like. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”

“Of course it matters!” Tula’s eyes were glassy, and she was clutching at the porcelain fixture and gesticulating with the towel and nearly choking, all at once. Then her eyes caught and focused and she threw down the towel and jumped to her feet. With a great anguished howl, she pushed past Will, shouting, “What was I thinking? I should have known it would be like this!”

Will could only stand in a stupor and stare after her as she ran out of the room and across the parking lot to where she had nestled the car in behind a supply shed. He heard the car door slam and the engine sputter to life, and then the tires skidded on the icy asphalt and the car roared off, leaving him to walk the two miles back to town.

The diner was about to close, but when Lucas Enright saw Will at the door, he ushered him inside and set a steaming plate of spaghetti on the table along with a tall glass of Dr Pepper with crushed ice. “We’re always open for you,” he said.

“Good,” said Will. “Because I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”

The girl who had laughed at him in the women’s shop was sitting in a booth with her friends. When she saw Will, she came over and sat down across from him. “Remember me?” she said.

“Of course I do.”

“My name is Dylan. I know yours is Will.”

Everything about the girl was casual and put him at ease, so before he knew what he was doing, Will found himself pouring out the story of what had happened at the motel.

“I’ll give you a ride home,” said Dylan. “But you don’t mind if we stop by my place first, do you?”

Will said he didn’t mind.

“Tula likes things to be tidy and clean, but I’m afraid I like things a little on the dirty side. That won’t bother you, will it?”

Will felt his mouth drop open, but he managed to say, “No, that won’t bother me one little bit.”

Will made a point of stopping by the diner every day after that, partly because he was killing time until the day of his departure and partly because he wanted to experience the hush when he entered, but mostly because he wanted witnesses to the fact that his life was finally unzipping and letting its possibilities out. One of the men always said, “Hey, there’s Will,” and Will had the strange sense that it was thirty years down the road and he was watching his own son swing through the door on his way to wherever life would take him. It reminded him of a movie he’d seen where a visitor to the past stepped off the walkway and killed a butterfly, which altered the entire course of evolution until he journeyed back through time again so he could make sure to stay on the walkway and change everything back.

Sometimes one of the patrons would call out, “Let’s ask Will.” Then Will had to be careful not to disappoint them, careful not to answer what he was thinking, which was that he did better with multiple choice questions, questions where he could apply answer elimination techniques before making an educated guess. So mostly he replied, “That’s a good question. What do you folks think?”

“Funny you should ask,” his interlocutor might say, and then the conversation would start back up again, for they all had opinions on just about everything. Even the quiet ones had opinions, and this was the place they dared to share them. Even the ones who were older than Lyle and Will put together had opinions, even the ones who were older than the folded sandstone hills.

11.2 Pastor Price

God hadn’t talked to Pastor Price in a long time. When he mentioned it to Tiffany, she tousled his hair and said, “Maybe that’s because you’re the one doing all of the talking.”

“Only on Sundays,” replied the pastor. “Most days, all I do is listen. Just this morning, I learned more than I wanted to know about sub-prime mortgages from Jack Baker and counseled a family whose son was killed in Iraq. And when have I ever said no to one of Mrs. Farnsworth’s tales of woe?” He tried to sound good-natured about it, but his wife’s words stayed with him and he vowed to redouble his efforts in the listening department. Lately, things had been moving very fast for the pastor, which was precisely Tiffany’s point.

The April meeting of the pastoral council gave Price a chance to test whether he was listening or not. As he stood underneath a banner that proclaimed GROW TOWARD TOMORROW and greeted the council members as they arrived, it dawned on him that tomorrow was already here. The ambitious goals of the steering committee had been met or exceeded, and it wasn’t lost on him that the Red Bud elite who were filing into the meeting hall were there because of him. He was the prime mover when it came to the Church of the New Incarnation’s astonishing growth and success.

Congratulations on the pastor’s recent performances eddied around more general talk of the television show — of whether or not it would bring the people of the parish together or drive them apart, of whether someone should tell the choir director not to preen so blatantly in front of the cameras, of whether the money it brought in should be used for local issues or national ones, and whether the parish should take a stand in the upcoming mayoral primary or stay out of that sort of thing.

Buddy Hutchinson arrived and said, “Did you see that editorial about term limits?”

“I did,” said the pastor.

“It’s got some people talking about throwing their hats into the ring.”

“A man would have to be a damn fool to run against you,” said the pastor. “Anyway, talk is cheap. Sometimes it’s better to bide your time.” No one could say he wasn’t listening!

But there was one issue that wasn’t being talked about. It wasn’t being talked about because most of the council members didn’t know about it even though it was probably the most pressing issue of all. A few days before, Winslow had called to say that the top-secret document calling for a cover-up regarding toxic munitions had surfaced on an anti-war website. That would have been bad enough, but then Lex Lexington had reported the same sort of thing — his missing draft legislation had shown up on a website called wartruth.com.

“What do prisons have to do with war?” the pastor had asked.

“Apparently there’s a war on poor people,” said Lexington. “Hell, how would I know what a bunch of crazy people are thinking?”

“The prison provides labor to the plant,” said Winslow when they conferenced him in. “It’s perfectly legal, though.”