Read Online The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel - Free Book Online Page B

thought. You know, the people in this church didn’t really have anyone to talk to for years.”
    “I’ve gathered that.”
    “Pastor Schaeffer didn’t, it wasn’t that he didn’t care about people, it’s just that he didn’t see how anything was going to be solved with talking. He believed you just found the piece of Scripture that applied to the situation, applied it, and went on living a righteous life.”
    “I’m starting to feel the same way myself,” Jack said, surprising both Amos and Alice.
    Amos tilted his head at Jack as if Jack had said a puzzling thing, something that required examination, hoping Jack might say more, but he didn’t. He looked down at his boots, squeezing the back of his own neck as if he were developing a migraine.
    “Do I understand that you’re asking me to provide you with marriage counseling? Or additional marriage counseling, something like that?”
    “Well, yes, I guess so. I, for one, would just like to hear what you have to say about a life, about our life. Marital problems are often religious problems, aren’t they?”
    “How so?” This was actually a thought Amos himself had entertained on occasion, without knowing how to articulate it.
    Alice shrugged. “A life well lived, a life badly lived. General confusion. Despair, regret, failures of sympathy or empathy. Kindness, good humor. Those are all religious issues. And in a marriage, too.”
    Amos nodded, pushed up his glasses, tapped his finger against his nose. He was just about to lean against the pew, to settle in comfortably and discuss it more, when Jack cleared his throat and put his arm around Alice. “We need to go. The girls are waiting for us,” he said, without room for discussion.
    Alice didn’t seem offended. “Thanks for your time, Pastor Townsend,” she said, extending her hand.
    “Amos. Call me Amos, please.” He shook her hand a second time. “Could you come in on Wednesdays, early evening? After work, Jack?”
    Alice looked up at Jack, who gave his assent. “Thanks,” she said. “That would be fine. And thank you for agreeing to talk to us. I know it’s probably strange to be approached by people unfamiliar to you, but who do you know, finally, in this life, right?” Alice asked it in a lighthearted way, her face tipped up toward Amos’s, not expecting an answer.
    I know you,
Amos could have said, but didn’t.
    *
    The parsonage Amos occupied in Haddington seemed modest from the outside; a two-story rectangle, built in the 1930 s on a long, narrow lot. The exterior was covered with gray asbestos shingles, the roof was gray, and the small front porch was painted a blue that might as well have been gray, as if the church had decided, long ago, to make the house invisible to everyone but its occupants. Inside, the house was tasteful and spacious. The living room ran the width of the front of the house, with hardwood floors and aging wallpaper patterned in reckless peonies. In the dining room a chandelier hung in elegant torpor over the oak dining table (which sat eight); the wallpaper in that room was cream with a pattern of maroon velvet pheasants. The railing on the walnut staircase had been rubbed smooth by sixty years of hands. Upstairs there were three large bedrooms, each fully furnished and comfortable (preachers almost always have families), and the study facing Plum Street. The kitchen was Amos’s favorite room, although when he first moved into the house he thought he’d enter it only to keep from starving to death, so intimidating was the design: white tile floor, white tile halfway up the white walls, glass-fronted cabinets. Someone in the past twenty years had replaced the sink and countertops with stainless steel. The room was a single, continuous, hard-bright surface, except for the old, butcher-block table at which Amos took his meals with a book. (The most intractable aspect of his bachelorhood was that Amos was uncomfortable eating without reading; he felt as if he were