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By Root 709 0

lean against him while they watched TV and artlessly confide her secrets and gossip about her classmates and recount her hair-raising adventures that he had had no inkling of, thank heaven, while she was undergoing them. (She knew the city inside out, and slipped without a thought through neighborhoods that Ian himself avoided.) But if he showed any concern she would say, “I knew I shouldn’t have told you! I should never tell you anything!” And when her friends came over she grew visibly remote from him, referring to him as “my uncle” as if he had no name and rolling her eyes when her girlfriends tried to make small talk or (on occasion) flirt with him. When he said he was off to Prayer Meeting, she told her friends he was “speaking metaphorically.” When he enforced her curfew, she announced she was running away to live with her mother’s people, who—she claimed—were worldly-wise and cosmopolitan and wouldn’t think of making her return to their mansion at the dot of any set time. Ian had laughed, and then felt a deep, sad ache.

That was what Daphne brought out in him, generally. Laughter and an ache.

Reverend Emmett invited him to supper. “Just the two of us,” he said on the phone, “to talk about the matter of your vocation.” Ian gulped, but of course he accepted.

Reverend Emmett warned him that he wasn’t much of a cook (his mother had died the previous fall) and so Ian asked if he could bring something. “Well,” Reverend Emmett said, “you know that cold white sauce that people serve with potato chips?”

“Sauce? You mean dip?”

“It has little bits of dried onion scattered through it.”

“You mean onion soup dip?”

“That must be it,” Reverend Emmett said. “Mother used to make it whenever we had guests, but I haven’t been able to find her recipe. I thought maybe you could ask your mother if she might fix it for us.”

“Shoot, I’ll fix it myself,” Ian said. “I’ll bring over the ingredients and show you how it’s done.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Reverend Emmett told him.

So Tuesday evening, when Ian rang the doorbell, he was carrying a pint of sour cream and an envelope of the only brand of onion soup mix on the market that didn’t contain any sugar. He had washed up after work but (mindful of the sin of superficiality) kept on his everyday clothes, and Reverend Emmett answered the door in jeans and one of his incongruously jaunty polo shirts. “Come in!” he said.

Ian said, “Thanks.”

To tell the truth, he felt a bit apprehensive. He worried that Reverend Emmett labored under some false impression of him, for how else to explain his plans for Ian’s future?

The living room was small but formal, slightly fussy—the mother’s doing, Ian guessed. He had seen it on several occasions but had never gone beyond it, and now he looked about him curiously as he followed Reverend Emmett through a dim, flowered dining room to a kitchen that seemed to have been turned on end and shaken. “I thought I would make us a roast of beef,” Reverend Emmett told him, and Ian said, “Sounds good.” He wondered how a roast could have required all these pans and utensils. Maybe they’d been used for some side dish. “Would you like an apron to work in?” Reverend Emmett asked.

“It’s not that complicated,” Ian said. “Just a mixing bowl and a spoon will do.”

He emptied the sour cream into the bowl Reverend Emmett brought him and then stirred in the soup mix, with Reverend Emmett hovering over the whole operation. “Why, there’s really nothing to it,” he said at the end.

“A veritable snap,” Ian told him.

“Would you mind very much if we ate this in the kitchen? I’ll need to keep an eye on the roast.”

“That’s fine with me.”

They pulled two stools up to the counter, which was puddled with several different colors of liquids, and started on the chips and dip. Reverend Emmett gobbled chips wolfishly, a vein standing out in his temple as he chewed. (Had his doctor not warned him off fats?) He told Ian to call him Emmett. “Oh. All right … Emmett,” Ian said. But he could force the name out only by imagining a “Reverend” in the gap, and he thought, from the way Reverend