Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [77]
“I thought that church of yours didn’t believe in twisting folkses’ arms.”
“It doesn’t. We don’t. This is only for fellowship.”
They were watching the evening news—Doug, Bee, and Ian. Now Bee looked away from a skyful of bomber airplanes to say, “I’ve never understood what people mean by ‘fellowship.’ ”
“Just getting together, Mom. Nothing very mysterious.”
“Then why even say it? Why not say ‘getting together’?”
Ian didn’t take offense. He said, “Reverend Emmett wants us to ask, oh, people we care about and people who wonder what we believe and people who might feel hostile to us.”
“We’re not hostile!”
“Then maybe you would qualify for one of the other groups,” Ian said mildly.
Bee looked at Doug. Doug pulled himself together (he had a sense of struggling toward the surface) and said, “Isn’t it sort of early for a picnic? We’re still getting frost at night!”
“This is an indoor picnic,” Ian told him.
“Then what’s the point?”
“Reverend Emmett’s mother, Sister Priscilla, has relatives out in the valley who own a horse farm. They’re in Jamaica for two weeks and they told her she could stay in the house.”
“Did they say she could throw a church picnic in the house?”
“We won’t do any harm.”
Bee was still looking at Doug. (She wanted him to say no, of course.) The bombers had given way to a moisturizer commercial.
“Well, it’s nice of you to think of us, son,” Doug said, “but—”
“I’ve invited Mrs. Jordan, too.”
“Mrs. Jordan?”
“Right.”
“Jessie Jordan?”
“She’s always wanting to know what Second Chance is all about.”
This put a whole different light on things. How could they refuse when a mere neighbor had accepted? Drat Jessie Jordan, with her lone-woman eagerness to go anywhere she was asked!
And then she had the nerve to make out she was being so daring, so rakish. On the way to Greenspring Valley (for they did end up attending, taking their own car which was easier on Bee’s hips than the bus), Mrs. Jordan bounced and burbled like a six-year-old. “Isn’t this exciting?” she said. She was dressed as if headed for a Buckingham Palace garden party—cartwheel hat ringed with flowers, swishy silk dress beneath her drab winter coat. “You know, there are so many alternative religions springing up these days,” she said. “I worry I’ll fall hopelessly behind.”
“And wouldn’t that be a shame,” Bee said sourly. She wore an ordinary gray sweat suit, not her snazzy warm-up suit with the complicated zippers; so her hands must be giving her trouble today. Doug himself was dressed as if for golfing, carefully color-coordinated to compensate for what might be misread as sloppiness on Bee’s part. He kept the car close behind Second Chance’s rented bus. Sometimes Daphne’s little thumbtack of a face bobbed up in the bus’s rear window, smiling hugely and mouthing elaborate messages no one could catch. “What did she say? What?” Bee asked irritably.
“Can’t quite make it out, hon.”
They traveled deeper and deeper into country that would be luxurious in the summer but was now a vast network of bare branches lightly tinged with green. Pasturelands extended for miles. The driveway they finally turned into was too long to see to the end, and the white stone house was larger than some hotels. “Oh! Would you look!” Mrs. Jordan cried, clapping her hands.
Doug didn’t like to admit it, but he felt easier about Second Chance now that he saw such a substantial piece of property connected to it. He wondered if the relatives were members themselves. Probably not, though.
They parked on the paved circle in front. Passengers poured from the bus—first the children, then the grownups. Doug fancied he could tell the members from the visitors. The members had a dowdy, worn, slumping look; the visitors were dressier and full of determined gaiety.
It occurred to him that Bee could be mistaken for a member.
Carrying baskets, coolers, and Thermos jugs, everyone followed Reverend Emmett’s mother up the flagstone walk. They entered the front hall with its slate floor and center staircase, and several people