Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [93]
Jeannie said, “I’m really glad to hear you’re doing this, Ian.”
“Well, it’s only so we can get straight,” he told her. “I certainly don’t plan to hand the three of them over to strangers or anything like that.”
“What are you, crazy?” she asked. “You’ve got a life to live! You can’t drag them around with you forever.”
“But I’m responsible for them. I worry I’d be, um, sinning, so to speak, to walk away from them.”
“You want to know what I think?” Jeannie asked. She leaned forward. Her face seemed sharper now, more pointed. The hollow between her collarbones could have held a teaspoon of salt. “I think you’re sinning not to walk away,” she said.
“How do you figure that?”
“I think we’re each allowed one single life to live on this planet. We’ll never get another chance in all eternity,” she said. “And if you let it go to waste—now, that is sinning.”
“Yes,” he said, “but what if I’m honor bound to waste it? What if I have an obligation?”
He worried she would make him explain, but she was too caught up in proving her point. “Even then!” she said triumphantly. “You put your regrets behind you. You move on past them. You do not commit the sin of squandering your only life.”
“Well, it sounds good,” he said.
It did sound good. He really had no argument to offer against it.
At Prayer Meeting the following night he looked for Eli Everjohn but didn’t find him, or the strawberry blonde either. He spotted Sister Bertha’s dark red pompadour and he sat down next to her and asked, “Where’s your daughter this evening?”
“She went home.”
“Home?”
“Her and Eli both, home to Caro Mill. Eli said to give you a message, though. What was it now he said? He said not to think you had slipped his mind and he would be in touch.”
“Thanks,” Ian told her.
Then Reverend Emmett announced the opening hymn: “Work for the Night Is Coming.”
Every time Ian attended Prayer Meeting, he thought of his first visit here. He remembered how he had felt welcomed by the loving voices of the singers; he remembered the sensation of prayers flowing heavenward. Coming here had saved him, he knew. Without the Church of the Second Chance he would have struggled alone forever, sunk in hopelessness.
So when Prayer Meeting seemed long-winded or inconsequential, when the petitions had to do with minor health complaints and personal disputes, he controlled his impatience. Tonight he prayed for Brother Kenneth’s colon to grow less irritable, for Sister Myra’s husband to appreciate her more fully. He listened to a recitation from Sister Nell that seemed not so much a request for prayers as an autobiography. “I learned to stop blaming myself for everything that went wrong,” one of her paragraphs went. “I had all the time been blaming myself. But really, you know, when you think about it, mostly it’s other people to blame, the godless and the self-centered, and so I said to this gal on my shift, I said, ‘Now listen here, Miss Maggie. You may think I was the one in charge of the …’ ”
Till Reverend Emmett broke in. “Ah, Sister Nell?”
“What?”
“What would you like us to pray for, exactly?”
“Pray for me to have strength,” she said, “in the face of fools and sinners.”
Ian prayed for Sister Nell to have strength.
The closing hymn was “Softly and Tenderly,” and when they sang, “Come home! Come home!” Ian felt he was the one they were calling.
“Go ye now into the world and bear witness to His teachings,” Reverend Emmett said, raising his arms. Almost before his “Amen,” people were stirring and preparing to leave. Several spoke to Ian as they passed. “Good to