Read Online Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon - Free Book Online Page B

the Methodist church went around calling me That Damned Used-Car Salesman. That got a good laugh in the vestry. We were selling the Good News, and people were buying.
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    Monica Faithful Being the rector’s wife is different from being the curate’s. The parish feels entitled to you. They’d invite me to ladies’ lunches and it was all I could do to sit there. There was a group of widows and never-marrieds who ran a Circle Supper we were supposed to attend. Twice I “forgot” to go. Well, truth: once I really forgot and once I couldn’t face it. Norman didn’t mind, he does fine with a bevy of hens all clucking over him, but the circle minded, trust me. But I couldn’t help it. For them, comfort was an evening of chatter; for me it was a silent house and a Trollope novel I hadn’t read before. Then when the circle met at our house I tried to do something fancy out of Julia Child, but I hadn’t thawed the chicken enough first, and it was all bloody; no one could eat it.
    It didn’t help that the previous rector’s wife was a saint, a well-known fact. She had twin daughters who’d grown up in the town, both married now with children. One of the daughters came to worship one Sunday unannounced—she and her husband were driving through and made a point to be in Sand Hills for the eleven o’clock. During the Peace, half the congregation left their seats to go hug and kiss pretty little Nettie and her children. After the coffee hour on Sundays, I led a book club with bag lunch; I’d inherited it from Nettie’s sainted mother. I’d spent that week reading Quo Vadis . Have you read that? It’s 561 pages long. I sat there in the parish hall with my big fat book and my list of discussion points and my tuna fish sandwich in a brown bag and not one person came. Not one. They were all down the street at the Coffee Bean having a high old time with Nettie and her family. Even Norman went!
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    Jeannie Israel I didn’t know how depressed Nika was after the miscarriage until she told me on the phone she’d asked her mother to visit her. Sending Sydney to see Monica in a wounded state would have been like asking a tiger to nurse a rabbit with its foot in a trap. Fortunately, Sydney begged off. She must have known she’d be found alone in the house with blood and fur in her whiskers. She did sometimes know her own weaknesses. Not that Monica read it that way.
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    Monica Faithful Jeannie came out to spend a week with me. God bless her. All you really need is one friend. I told her I hated Sand Hills and it would never come right. We took long hikes, and we laughed, and she helped me see that I’d lost friends and a baby and that was what was wrong, not the fact that Trinny Biggs played by ear instead of reading the music, so if you tried to read the alto line and sing harmony, you couldn’t. Actually Trinny wasn’t even an organist; it was good of her to fill in. She could play piano, but the only way she could play the organ was if her ex-husband arranged the stops for her.
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    Kendra Brayton Nicky Faithful went to work in the elementary school in the fall, and I understand she did better there. She was a sub and a tutor and she made great friends with the fourth-grade teacher, Evan Angle, who I always thought was light in his loafers. They were both lonely and they say there’s a lid for every pot. You’d see them down at the Coffee Bean laughing away many evenings. You might have thought she’d be home cooking her husband’s dinner or starting a family but I suppose she was a women’slibber. I wonder what happened to Evan Angle. After the Faithfuls left he moved away too. Went to San Francisco, probably. Isn’t that where those people go?
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    Trinny Biggs Norman was a sweet, sweet man. People went to him for counseling. There was a psychologist in the next town, but people preferred to go to Norman, even