VIII – When Jesse and Randy Found Out (but Only One of Them Got Pancakes)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 8

For the previous installment of this serial novel, visit here.

Two things happened next, and the first one involves two voice mails.

6:23 PM – “Jesse, it’s Greg. Listen, man, call me when you get a minute. I could get in real trouble for telling you this, but I think I owe it to you. Just call me when you’re able.”

4:10 AM – “Jesse, Chris. Call me back as soon as you get this. Urgent. It’s about Dad.”

He listened to the first on his front porch, after Randy had dropped him off. He didn’t feel like answering Janie’s inevitable “Where’s your car?” anyway, so it gave him a legitimate enough reason to stall. His blood went cold when he heard the third sentence. He listened three times, then played it over in his mind a few times before dialing Greg.

“Look, I hate being the one to have to tell you this, Jesse, and I’m only telling you because I know it’s true and because I think I owe it to you-”

This intro could not be any longer, Greg, get to the point before I ignite.

“but they brought Dave in on a conference call about restructuring and he’s going to have to let you go. I hate it, Jesse, and it’s not fair and-”

But Jesse’s foot hit the little stone wall surrounding their decorative front yard pond (why did they have a pond!), and he hadn’t expected it to, and his hand had been particularly loose on the phone since most of the electricity in his body was being dedicated to keeping himself conscious. And so he heard three more words being said after “and” but couldn’t make them out since his phone was falling in impossibly slow motion towards the surface of the little pond. He didn’t even move. He was in that same sort of fragile state you find yourself in when you’re right at the top of that hill leads downward to vomiting, and you’re making the final still, quiet effort to avoid it.

The phone plopped into the water. The sound somehow snapped Jesse into action mode, and he swooped his hands down into the water and clutched the LG flip phone (if it hasn’t become obvious yet, this story’s happening in about 2009) and sprung it open and shook it. It was frozen, and had somehow opened his most recent picture and wouldn’t come off it, wouldn’t respond to any buttons he pushed.

And now he ran into his house.

He had to get this phone working.

People rarely ask the questions we think they will. Janie did not ask Jesse, who rushed into the house in a panic, where his car was, even after he had told her nothing was wrong and retreated into silence, having already tried a hair dryer and having now left the flip phone standing up vertically in front of the small fan on his desk. Instead, she asked, “What’s wrong?” twice, and got the answer “Nothing” both times. But there was no “Where’s your car?” after them, even though she had noticed it wasn’t out there in the driveway. Not even a “Where have you been?” despite the fact that it was already dark.

She sat down across from him in the family room and leaned forward, her hands clasped together. He was biting his lip, and looked back at her, and merely raised his left eyebrow.

“Why are we even married?”

His blood stirred a bit, but stayed room temperature. A man’s body doesn’t lie about what he loves.

He looked back at her for what seemed to be an hour. Her brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her blue eyes were tired, but also fiercely- fiercely something. Not angry, not exactly. But she wanted to talk, obviously. And she wanted an answer. And so he gave her one.

“I don’t know,” he said.

And so while his phone did eventually dry out as it stood on his desk in front of that little black fan, Jesse didn’t listen to the voice mail from his younger brother Chris.

He slept in the van that night.

The second thing that happened is that Randy’s sister Linda told him what she hadn’t the night he’d moved in and she’d given him the pocket knife she’d found, the one from when they were kids. The pocket knife had originally been a birthday present to him from their grandfather, and he’d carried it everywhere for those few years before middle school and high school and adulthood. She’d simply come across it when cleaning out their garage, and immediately she’d known what it was. And her first thought was to do something to it and give it to him as a birthday present or Christmas present, maybe have something engraved on it. But then Randy’s wife Margaret had called her, a labored and desperate phone call to the sister of the man she no longer loved and no longer wanted to be married to.

The morning Bruce Henderson entered glory in no small part because Randy was willing to unlock a door and walk into a hospital, Linda made coffee and breakfast for the two of them. Bo was at the office he maintained for his various businesses, and Randy was off from the coffee shop that day. The skies were clear again, and when he came into the kitchen and saw sunlight streaming in through Bo’s and Linda’s big dining room windows and two plates in the middle of the table with blueberry pancakes and bacon and smelled good coffee (not coffee from a can like the one Jesse would find later that day in his dad’s closet) and thought about what Bruce’s life might look like now and how grateful he was for the easy fastball God had thrown him yesterday, he was as happy as he’d ever been. And he had to tell Linda about meeting Jesse and what had happened.

And he did, and as they drank coffee and ate the wonderful food she’d made and Linda steeled herself for what she had to tell him, what Bo, last night, had lovingly but firmly told her she had to tell him, she loved her brother all the more. She had never seen a man change more than Randy had in the last two-plus years.

Bo had already been a Christian when Linda had met him, a real Christian who loved and followed the Lord, not a Christian like so many of her friends and friends’ parents claimed to be when she was growing up. Who was she kidding? Like she claimed to be growing up. She knew within a few months of falling for Bo that he was different. He had certainly grown in the decades since they met, become an even better and stronger and more humble man, but he had always had a different true north. His life was pointed somewhere else on the map. Somewhere she was intrigued by. And now her brother Randy loved the same God. Had been saved by the same God, been transformed by the same Holy Spirit. Here he was laughing, giggling almost, about love he felt for two strangers, and how amazed he was by God’s grace in reclaiming one of them last night. Randy used to be a manipulator, plain and simple. Shrewd and always looking for the angle in a situation that he could use to get what he wanted. And she had also known that he had always been concealing that hurricane of anger, knowing what revealing it to the wrong person could cost him.

Now how would she describe him? Sitting right here in her dining room laughing as he took a bite of her blueberry pancakes, how would she explain who he’d become? If Margaret could be here, if she would listen, or if Linda could go back to that day and beg her to hold on and just listen to what her husband would soon become, what words would she use?

Loving. Joyful. Hopeful.

Not perfect, but more changed than any human has any right to expect.

“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” Linda said, and it was obvious she meant it. But it was equally obvious that wasn’t all she was going to say.

“Ther’s somehting I need to tell you.”

Randy knew it was going to be bad; he could tell from the sad shape of her smile and the fact that she was looking down at the table now. But he had trouble shaking off the mirth from reliving the night before. He furrowed his brow and tried to focus on the fact that his sister was troubled. For a second he felt his heart jolt when he had the thought that she might be telling him about cancer or some terminal disease she’d just found out she had, but she went on too quickly for that thought to marinate.

“A couple of years ago-” she smiled sadly again and corrected herself. Don’t try to justify it by emphasizing how long ago it was, she thought. That’s not an apology and that’s not making it right.

“A few months before you moved in-” she paused only for a second, enough to bite her lip and brace herself for the pain of confession- “Margaret called me.” She tried not to notice the confusion and surprise on Randy’s face. She looked into the coffee she was no longer drinking, did her best to not let herself make any guesses about his thoughts.

“She was distraught and-” No, don’t mention that. It has no bearing, and you would only be trying to point out her moral failures. Whether she was drunk or not has no bearing on what you’re about to tell him. “She was distraught. She wasn’t crying at first, but very upset. And she said she needed to tell me some things. I don’t know why me, Randy. I’ve never known, and we’ve really never had a one-on-one conversation since. Maybe it was just that I’m your sister. Maybe it was-” She waited a second to consider whether she really believed it- “Maybe it was that I’m a Christian. I’ll never know Randy, but she confessed some things to me. And they’re hard to hear.” She stretched out her hand, beautiful in the morning sun that washed the dining room with summer light through those big windows to their side. She grabbed his, like a sister, tenderness and memory and a desire to make the pain not come. And he nodded, trying to hide his hurt, but failing.

“She said she was sorry about one of them. Not the other. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

He nodded again, imagining Margaret’s voice, trying to remember what she looked like when she was upset. He blanked.

“She told me she’d had an affair-” Randy felt a stab in the center of his chest- “but she didn’t tell me anything about the man except that she hadn’t known him long. She said it was over, and that it had only really lasted, that’s how she said it, three months. But I remember not talking at all and that must have made her uncomfortable, because that’s when she blurted out, ‘I’m sorry, Linda.’ And I think she really might have been, Randy. But before I could say anything she told me the second thing.” Linda felt like she was falling, and that when she hit it would be her brother who died, not her. And she wanted to take it all away and to tell him back then and to apologize to him like she’d apologized to God, on the floor and crying and pleading only the blood of the Savior to make the relationship whole. But she had to do this.

“She said she’d gotten an abortion. It had been before the affair.”

The room wasn’t stable anymore. Randy was sure he’d fall out if his chair. They’d never wanted children. But that Randy was dead, and this one in Linda’s dining room would very much like to have children, and to have his ex-wife forgive him and take him back and join him in following Jesus. And this Randy was blown back by that word. What did it really mean? It meant he’d had a son or daughter, and that someone in a lab coat had poisoned or sucked the baby out of Margaret. And that whatever evils others had committed in the act, his own were great. He knew it. He had made Margaret’s life miserable, had never been what a husband should be, and she would rather murder their baby than raise him or her with him.

He looked at Linda. She was crying.

He wanted to reach over to her, kiss her on the cheek. Tell her it was all right.

So he did.

That night Pastor David and his wife and all six of their children came over for dinner. Lasagna and salad and breadsticks. Linda was a great and willing cook, and the food was fantastic.

Pastor David’s five younger kids were now watching a movie in the family room with Bo’s and Linda’s kids. Pastor David and Bo were laughing about something Pastor Terry had apparently said after service about a member’s complaint about parking. Melanie, his oldest daughter, was quietly listening and smiling. Pastor David’s wife Nancy was clearing away some of the dishes with Linda. Randy was trying to listen to the two men, but he couldn’t grab the sentences. He loved Pastor Terry stories, the guy’s cool, deadpan wit was like good wine, but his mind kept asking questions he couldn’t answer. Boy or girl? What if he’d become a Christian a year earlier? Was it possible Margaret had been lying?

Well, he actually did settle on an answer for the last one. No. Even if Margaret was drunk (Randy was a good guesser), she wouldn’t make something like that up. Margaret told a dry story: all facts and no flavor. She would have been a terrible car salesman.

It was true. Which meant he had a son or a daughter he’d never meet. Because, or at least due in no small part to, his lovelessness towards Margaret.

Christ. He made me clean. He paid what I can’t. For all of it.

But the grief was still just too much. He wanted to fall to the floor and let the room go dark as he wept it all out. He couldn’t stop picturing tiny fingers and toes. A little baby. What did it feel like for him or her? Did the baby struggle against it?

“Are you okay?” It was Melanie, Pastor David’s daughter. Just a whisper, really. Bo only barely noticed, but then continued to listen to Pastor David’s second Pastor Terry Story.

She smiled so gently, so compassionately, Randy was able to hide his thoughts for a second and smile back. But he wasn’t able to lie. Or at least he wasn’t going to. So no nod. No, “Yeah.” Just the smile. And then as he was about to ask her whether she’d decided on college, “All right, let’s check out that you know what,” Pastor David said, standing up.

He looked down, way down from up there on his 6″4 perch, at Melanie. “You want to come? Bo’s going to show me their d-i-r-t-b-i-k-e. I might get one for your brother for his birthday.”

Melanie laughed. “He can spell, Dad.”

“His language arts teacher disagrees,” Pastor David said, and winked. Randy felt another stab. Even corny dad jokes hurt.

“I think I’ll stay, but thanks,” Melanie said.

“Randy?” Bo asked, but Randy just barely shook his head and forced a smile. The two men walked out the front door and passed by the dining room window from outside on their walk to Bo’s garage. Randy felt the urge to go help Linda and Nancy with the dishes, but before he knew it he looked back at Melanie and said, “No.”

“Anything my dad could help with?” she asked. Randy nodded, honestly enough. “We could give you guys a chance to talk,” she suggested, and Randy got chills from the warmth and mercy of this young sister in Christ. “I have a problem, too. Would it help to hear someone else’s?” Randy gave a silent laugh and nodded, honestly enough.

“My best friend from school has been acting differently.” Melanie, like her five younger siblings, had attended a Cincinnati Christian K-12 school. “She’s starting at UC. Well, she actually took a couple of classes there our senior year last year. And I didn’t really notice anything back then. But I think I should have.” Melanie frowned a little, and her lightly freckled cheeks reddened a bit, and she looked at the floor. Shame. Randy was familiar with the aftertaste.

“She- I guess it doesn’t mater all the little clues. But I’m pretty sure she’s starting to consider herself a lesbian. Or bisexual. Or something like that.”

Randy marveled, not for the first time, at his pastor’s parenting. His children were not embarrassed or timid about sin, even sexual sins. They knew what sin was and talked about it as it was. And the thought of parenting, of crafting and gardening and keeping watch over a soul for decades, of the joy he would never have, made him have to close his eyes and breathe deep and will himself to listen to Melanie closely.

“I need to talk to her. I need to tell her it’s sin. And that I love her. I just don’t know how.”

She looked at Randy with genuine confusion. None of the wistfulness, of musing about lost chances that older folks get when talking about a problem. She was a good but still raw nerve. There was a bad thing that needed to stop; how do I make it stop? But maybe that wasn’t an old/young thing. Maybe Melanie was just wiser than him.

“Anything my dad can help with?” Randy asked.

And they both burst out laughing.

Melanie and her dad were outside, sitting in the same comfortable porch swing Randy had sat in two years earlier, the night he’d moved in. Bo had actually only just installed it a few months before that. Randy’s were some of the first prayers ever prayed in it.

They had come out front on the pretext of talking about something for his and Nancy’s anniversary, Pastor David giving a flirtatious wink at his wife as they walked out. But really David just wanted to sit with his daughter for a second, see what was wrong, let her rest her head on his chest for a moment while they swung and listened to the crickets together.

“You want to tell me what it is, Little Fish?” he asked her as the swing made a gentle, rhythmic creaking around them. She smiled, her head lying near his heart.

Little Fish. It went back to her favorite Dr. Seuss book as a kid. “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish…” Then he would point at her and she’d crinkle up her nose and giggle and say, “Little Fish,” and point back at him. He’d give a cartoonishly overacted confused look, turn his head left and right as though he were wondering who this child could be pointing at, then say, “Big Fish!” and wrap her up, nibble on her neck and tickle her under her arms. She was five or six when they did that, but the nicknames stuck.

It was easier for her when they weren’t looking at each other. She gazed over the handful of fireflies floating over the Washingtons’ quiet lawn and across the cul-de-sac at the pretty blue house with the Spanish tile roof

“It’s Bobbie Jo,” she said, ashamed about how long it took her to do anything but still just simply wanting to talk to her dad. And David, who had eyes in his head, knew what the problem was, but waited for his daughter to speak.

She told him about the things she’d noticed, about Bobbie Jo inexplicably holding another girl’s hand while outside the mall a few weeks back, about her making an over-the-top explicit remark about an actress when they were at the movies as a group during last Christmas break, and about a dozen other little moments like that that collaged to tell a story that scared her for her friend. Bobbie Jo was still attending her Methodist church, but she’d been newly combative about it, rolling her eyes a couple of times when talking about what her pastor or youth pastor said. She was pushing against home, against God. Fighting all the things that would help her, make her whole. It was hard for Melanie to articulate all of this to her dad, but he was able to fill in the white spaces anyway. Doing what he did for a living, he had seen it dozens of times.

And then, because she trusted her dad (with good reason), came the question: “What should I do, Dad?” She looked up at him, at his impossibly tall frame, as he played with her hair at the back of her head and they moved slowly back and forth on the swing. He was staring straight ahead. Maybe at the fireflies, maybe at nothing.

She studied his eyes underneath his black framed glasses. They were serious, but they were glad, too. His sharp nose, his thinning black hair that she could only just make out from down here. She felt she had never needed another person as much as she needed him right now. And while that wasn’t true, it wasn’t far from the truth.

She was scared for her best friend, the girl she’d shared and infield with for two years of high school softball and been lab partners with in chemistry and shared a dozen birthdays between them with. Bobbie Jo, with the curly blonde hair and ocean blue eyes and a spark and twitch to her humor and heart that Melanie would die for, would do anything to keep safe. She was afraid and ashamed that her fear of being laughed at or rejected may have done harm. And she needed her dad.

“Why don’t we start by praying,” he finally said, looking down at her. And she smiled. And they did. David prayed out loud, and Melanie glided behind him silently, pleading her heart out for her friend, and confessing to her Lord her fear and her doubt and her missed chances.

When her dad said, “Amen,” he kissed the top of her head, and Melanie suddenly had a thought that flew off her lips before she had time to consider it.

“Randy’s a good man.”

“Oh, you know Randy?” He looked down at her with the same half-smile he always had when he made some lame dad joke. And she gave her ritual eye roll, and they both gave a laugh or two, and looked out again at the fireflies rising and falling gently in the dying sunlight.

That was, by my count, somewhere around the fortieth prayer made on that porch swing. But then Bo’s was a praying house, so I don’t know what else I should have expected. But the reason I bring it up is that Randy’s were some of the first, but not the actual maiden prayer. That was Linda’s. The day she’d found the pocket knife had been the day Bo installed that swing. And she had held it firmly in her left hand as she thought about the brother she loved. The brother God had given her. It was the end of the day, and she had she sat in the dusk and swung, back and forth, crying a bit about what Margaret had told her, and what she couldn’t figure out how to tell him. And she prayed what seemed to her to be the most unlikely prayer of her life.

She pleaded with the Father to save her brother Randy.