Crystal Lies - Melody Carlson [76]
“I don’t know. Probably in a box in my bedroom.”
“In a box?”
“Well…”
“Go and get it.”
So I went to my bedroom and dug around in a box of books until I found my Bible. Then I brought it out and handed it to her. Sherry had taught women’s Bible studies for years and had only quit when her life got too busy with her realty work. But she knew her way around the Bible. She opened my Bible, took a purple ballpoint pen, and immediately began underlining something. “You don’t mind, do you?” She looked up at me.
I shrugged. “Not really.”
Then she grabbed an old newspaper and began tearing up markers from it and slipping them into sections that she had marked and obviously expected me to read. Finally she handed it back to me. “And tell me,” she said. “Have you been going to church at all?”
“To church?” I echoed.
“Right.” She shook her head as if the answer was clear. “So you’ve not only quit reading your Bible, but you’ve quit going to church as well.”
“But Geoffrey goes to that church,” I attempted. “It was your church too.”
“But how can I—”
“I know, I know…” She considered this. “Well, if you can’t go to that church, you can certainly come to mine. And I think you’d like it, too.”
Sherry and Rod had switched churches a few years ago. At the time I had wanted to switch with them, but Geoffrey had insisted that our church, very old and established within the community, was important for the connections he needed for his work. Naturally, I had agreed.
“I guess I could do that,” I told Sherry.
“That’s right, you can.” Then she looked at her watch. “I’m sorry I have to take off, Glennis, but I have a showing in fifteen minutes. As it is, I’ll just barely make it. Mind if I brush my teeth before I go?”
“Of course not.”
I sat and waited as Sherry hurried into my bathroom. When she emerged, she was shaking her head. “You need to clean this place up, Glennis. I’d be depressed too if I was living in this kind of mess.”
I nodded, feeling like a child who’d just been reprimanded. However, I knew she was right. Sherry was almost always right.
“Thanks,” I said and walked her to the door.
“And have you been going to Dr. Abrams?” she asked with one hand on the doorknob.
“I…uh…I missed the last—”
“Glennis,” she said sternly,“how do you expect to get through something like this if you sit around and do nothing?”
“Right.” I nodded as she blew me a kiss, then whooshed out the door.
“I’ll call you tonight,” she called over her shoulder. “Hang in there, sweetie.”
So, taking Sherry’s advice to heart, I began cleaning the apartment. But I found it was hard to think clearly. Sometimes I’d find myself putting something in a totally inappropriate place. Like my running shoes. For some reason I picked them up off the living room floor and carried them into the kitchen, where I put them into the freezer. It was as if I was getting some form of Alzheimer’s. I wondered if that was even possible at my age. Still I continued to putter. Two steps forward, one step back. And by the end of the day, I thought things had improved ever so slightly. I kept my phone turned on after six, expectantly waiting for Sherry’s call. One thing I knew about Sherry—when she promised to do something, she always followed through.
But by eleven o’clock that night, I realized that for whatever reason, Sherry was not going to call. Maybe she had given up on me too.
I looked at the Bible still sitting on the coffee table with bits of newspaper hanging out like flapping tongues—as if they were taunting me, laughing at my foolishness. Was God laughing too?
Out my window the darkened street looked unfriendly and cold. It was November now, and temperatures were steadily dropping. I wondered where Jacob was and if he was okay I imagined him sleeping on a park bench, shivering in the cold. Then in a ditch, unconscious from an overdose. Then hit by a car, bleeding in the street. Then in the morgue, covered in a white sheet with a tag that said Unknown attached to his toe.
“Stop it!” I told myself. “Just stop it.”
But it was as if my mind had gotten