Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [65]
Trina longed to talk to any of her friends. She almost didn’t care that they would say they told her so. She wished she had a cell phone and could dial the numbers of people who didn’t care if she was impulsive or spent too much money on lipstick and would call her Trina Lou or Trinie or Sweetie the way they used to. She wished that she could call and tell them what had happened, how she had discovered that Conroe was married, how she walked outside of their motel room and heard his voice from below, heard him laughing and chatting, so animated and fatherly, so different than she had ever heard him. She had gone out to find him, to bring him back to bed and stay past checkout time, and she stood out on the walkway, listening to him as he talked just beneath her, thinking she was asleep and wouldn’t hear.
She listened as he talked to children, listened as he talked to his children, heard him tell his sons that he would be home soon and that they were to take care of their mom until he could get back and be the man of the house. She listened, her fingers gripping the rails, her robe hanging open so that the guy next door, watching from the window, could see her breasts, while Conroe promised them gifts from his trip and his presence at their fall baseball games, and then even a few minutes later when he talked to his wife, saying to her that he missed her and that she was the reason he was able to keep going. He said he was almost done with his work in Iraq and knew that what he was doing was good for the country and would give them some much-needed income. He would be home soon, he promised, and he was hopeful that there would be no more long-hauls, no more work overseas.
Trina stood a floor above Conroe Jasper, two months after leaving Amarillo and falling in love, and could not believe the words that drifted up from below her. When he finished his call and came back to the room with a paper bag with two sausage biscuits, the bottom stained with grease, Trina had started walking. She took some money, packed her things, and never went back to talk to him, and he never went looking. She had walked to Salt River Canyon and then on to Pie Town, and now she was pregnant and alone, and she just wished she had a friend or somebody to talk to.
Trina got up from her sofa, put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, brushed her hair, and decided to do the most unlikely thing she would ever think to do. She figured that where she was going somebody would be there to listen, if not to talk. She hoped that when she got to where she was going she would find a friend, or at least a listening ear. Trina, pregnant and lost and alone, put on her shoes, the ones the Indian woman had given her, the buckskin moccasins, and walked to church.
Chapter Twenty-four
Father George was restless and thought about going to bed early. He had given Mass and greeted the group as they gathered in the education classroom, the women making prayer shawls, before changing out of his robe and going back to the rectory. He had eaten the dinner prepared for him by the women of the church, pork enchiladas with rice and beans, a dish that he had not expected to enjoy since he preferred a blander diet but had discovered he had actually come to favor, and after making a few phone calls, he had started looking ahead at the next week’s sermon text.
It was a gospel story, a healing miracle performed by Jesus. George had studied it in his New Testament class in seminary. In the story Jesus is approached by a Gentile, a Syrophoenician woman who wants healing for her daughter. Jesus explains that he is there for the Jewish people, quotes to her a Jewish proverb that says something like food should not be taken from children and given to the dogs. And then this woman, this nonperson who shouldn’t even be speaking to a Jewish man, responds that even the dogs get crumbs from the table. And then, just like