XV - When Jessie Really Heard a Sermon (and Went with the BLT)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 15

For the previous installment of this serial novel, visit here.

Melanie and her dad were walking along the sidewalk about a block from Redeemer’s building.

“And she won’t talk to you now?” Her dad was looking straight ahead as they walked up the hill, heading north towards Chipotle. Walking on a sunny day to an old shopping district with a dozen restaurants was one of the benefits of having a church building close to the heart of the city.

He looked straight ahead because he knew that would help her talk. She couldn’t think while making eye contact, not clearly anyway. He’d studied his daughter for eighteen years, and he knew her the way he knew the feel of where Psalms was in his favorite Bible or the feel of the clutch in his first car.

“No,” Melanie said plainly. It was clear from that quick answer that she was bearing up, which fueled her father’s affection for her. Melanie felt pain as deeply as any other breathing, bleeding human being. It just didn’t destroy her. “I’ve called her twice, the second time she ignored the call.”

Thankfully, David was technically literate enough, his nearly five decades of life and quarter of a million hours of parenting notwithstanding, to understand Melanie meant hitting the red button on your cell phone while it was ringing. He was pretty sure, anyway. 80% sure. He nodded knowingly as he kicked a stick off the sidewalk and into the road to their left.

“She might just need some time,” David said, squinting as he looked up the street into the Sunday afternoon sunlight. They were coming up to that wood-fired pizza place. Suddenly that sounded much better than Chipotle.

“Yeah,” Melanie said, honoring her dad with her lips and her heart (not in that order), but then disagreeing. “I thought so at first, but I don’t now.”

“Why?” David asked, genuinely curious. Melanie’s thought processes always fascinated him.

“I just had more time to consider it. She’s said too many things that show how angry she is at God. It’s not something she’ll come around to on her own with just a little time. I think if she talks to me now it’ll be because a miracle happened. And I don’t have a right to expect a miracle in the next day or two.”

He stopped her by gently grabbing her shoulder with his right hand and kissed her quickly on the head. He knew it might change the moment, something he didn’t want to do, but he couldn’t help himself. She squinted and looked up at him, way up, and smiled the simple, understated half-smile she’d had since she was five years old.

“Pizza instead?”

“I smelled it, too,” she said, and laughed.

They turned and kept closing the gap, hungrier every five yards.

David knew things weren’t going to get any easier for Melanie when it came to Bobbie Jo. No matter how much love had been in Melanie’s letter, Bobbie Jo didn’t want to hear that lesbianism was sinful. And she ran their social circle. He could easily picture her poisoning all Melanie’s friendships out of spite. And Melanie wasn’t as gifted at forming friendships. The damage from this could go deep and last long.

But right now he’d buy her a pineapple pizza, and they’d eat on the patio at Pomodori’s Wood-Fired Pizzas, and he’d enjoy and love the daughter who’d spent the last eighteen years captivating his heart.

Randy was smiling like a man who’d just seen his son hit a walk-off home run. His face there in the seat in between Joe Granger and Jesse Henderson at First Baptist Jackson was all pleasure and wonder.

Jesse Henderson had no memory of any sermon in his life, and this one hit him hard, much like it did Randy. He liked it, the way I first liked Scotch or playing guitar, a way that surprises and that you can tell will last.

The pastor’s name was Matt. He was a big guy, probably 6″2 and 250 pounds, and he had dirty blonde hair long enough to cover the tops of his ears, and simple reading glasses. But Jesse noticed those things in the first few moments of his sermon (he had picked up on the fact that it wasn’t called a “speech”) and then hadn’t thought about them again the whole morning. This man did not reference himself or seem to give much thought about himself. He was thrilled by the book on his little stand, the book he’d read from before praying and then spent the better part of an hour explaining the meaning and implication of to Jesse and the other two hundred or so people in the audience. (Was audience the right word? Probably not. It didn’t feel right.)

Jesse was as drawn to natural passion as much as the next guy. But the difference between Jesse and that next guy was that Jesse had a better than average ability to distinguish feigned passion from natural passion. “Cynical” is probably not the right word for Jesse, because it wasn’t that he took an unrealistically pessimistic stance towards any person’s claims to being excited about a good cause or a good idea. He was just better at spotting counterfeit excitement than most of us. At his increasingly former job he’d once sat in a board room with seventeen other people who’d heard a presentation from the CFO on how the new profit-sharing initiative was going to change their company for the better. There had been immaculate PowerPoint slides and personalized binders and the CFO had delivered it all with as much winsome personality as Ryan Seacrest. After the pep rally was over, only two of the seventeen people had left that board room without smiling:  Jesse and Mary from accounting, who only smiled on Friday afternoons or when she saw pictures of cats. Jesse wasn’t easily taken in.

He liked this thing he saw because the man’s thrill was genuine. This man named Matt was delighted about this God in this book. About what that God’s kindness and his goodness meant for the people in that room. Jesse didn’t believe a word of it, but he believed this man did, and that drew him in and gladdened his soul as much as Sesamee Street did the same for his son. Jesse obviously liked the sermon. Which is why Randy was smiling. Which was why Joe Granger had narrowed his eyes and sniffed a few times, as close as he got to a smile these days.

“There is no one here who does not need this.” The man said this and dropped it in front of them like it weighed three hundred pounds. He looked at them all for four tense seconds, then he prayed. Jesse didn’t close his eyes during this prayer. He wanted to see what this man looked like when he prayed while he thought no one was looking.

As a kid, Jesse had had a book with a cover of a drawing of a soldier climbing a hill. He’d been fascinated with that picture, the man’s eyes serious but not sad, his arms forward holding his gun, the speed of his walk obvious from the shape his body had taken. Something about the fire in the man arrested Jesse as a boy, and there had been two or three times he’d stared at that picture on that book, intrigued and confused and wonderstruck, feeling unable to look away or put it out of his mind, biting his tongue absentmindedly as he drunk it in.

He was biting his tongue now.

“Y’all want to get something to eat?”

It’s evidence of the subtle power of Joe Granger, sixty-seven-year-old retired widower of Jackson, Ohio (population 6,198, birthplace of Frank Crumit, writer of The Ohio State University fight song “Buckeye Battle Cry”) that neither Randy nor Jesse considered any answer but “sure.” Joe made the whispery throat clearing sound that his neighbors knew was a sign of approval, and turned to the aisle to the left of their row as Pastor Matt came up to say hello.

Randy looked like a kid who just saw Tom Brady walking his dog, but Joe and Jesse were more reserved. Joe looked like he always did, which is to say like George Washington on Mount Rushmore: calmly surveying everyone and everything in case any wrong needed to be made right. Jesse was aware of a tingling at the back of his neck but was juggling so many thoughts about whether God might be real, whether his father had been a monster, and whether Janie would beat him to the divorce lawyer that his face was registering a 1 on the Richter Scale. The tectonic movement in his head was happening in so many different directions that it just canceled out the vibrations, and so he looked merely emotionless, like the bored gardener of a cemetery posing for an oil painting.

“Hey, Joe,” Pastor Matt said, smiling warmly under his simple glasses.

“Pastor,” Joe said nodding and actually stepping out into the aisle so he could shake hands with Randy and Jesse. “These are Randy and Jesse.” He left it there, entrusting Pastor Matt to ask for, or Randy and Jesse to give, any more.

“Hey, Pastor,” Randy said as he extended his hand excitedly. “Great sermon.”

Matt shook Randy’s hand and smiled again, nodded, and then reached over to shake Jesse’s. Jesse had a mild heart attack as he returned the shake and tried to discern what to say.

After eleven awkward seconds of silence, Randy stirred the social drink, as was his way.

“Jesse and I are passing through on our way to West Virginia to visit his dad’s childhood home.” He raised his bushy black eyebrows and gave a friendly grin as he rocked back on his heels. Matt listened intently, expecting a little more. Randy was about to say, “We’re from Cincinnati,” when Jesse said, “My dad was a liar who ran away from home after doing something terrible he kept a secret his whole life. He just died and I want to know what it was so I can never think about him again. Plus, I just got fired and my wife and I are getting divorced.” He felt the blood flush to his cheeks and scalp, and he was still conscious enough to know that that was the first time in his life he’d strung that many words together about what was inside him at any given moment. It felt terrible. But he wasn’t sorry he’d done it. He was less suicidal than four days ago when he’d met Randy on the curb in front of Bo’s Coffee, but he was just as ambivalent about what the next week or month or decade held.

His mouth was laying out all his despair to a stranger. So what? Go for it mouth. I don’t care anymore.

“If he’d have died one day later he could have saved Randy the gas and me the Holiday Inn bill. But he acted like he’d finally tell me who he was and where he’d come from for the first time in his life and then died of an infection from his hip replacement that night. So now I have to figure out where he lived and whatever he was and dig up whatever’s under his old house.” He paused, thinking he was done, then deciding he wasn’t. “It was a good sermon.”

Matt stared at him, a kind of care in his eyes Jesse was only beginning to have a category for.

“Do you like Cracker Barrel?”

Joe and Jesse had sweet tea, Pastor Matt had Coke, and Randy had black coffee and water. Randy was also playing the little brain teaser peg game on the table. He didn’t love the idea of touching these little germ warehouses, but he could wash his hands after he’d beaten it and still have time before the food arrived.

They’d ridden over together in Pastor Matt’s white Honda CR-V, and in the fourteen minute drive they’d talked about (thanks to Randy’s ability to make conversation grow even when the soil was as dry as Joe Granger and Jesse Henderson made it) Cincinnati, Jackson High School football, the history of First Baptist Jackson, Nashville, Tennessee (Matt’s home town), divorce, and the dry summer they’d had. But now that Randy’s attention was diverted to the wooden triangle with colored pegs to whom he was trying to prove that he was a genius, the word flow had slowed and Jesse himself picked up a menu so he could avoid the burden of relieving any awkward silences. BLT sounded good. But then again he still had that nausea. Salad?

“Boom!” Randy looked up with an electric joy on his face and held up the peg game with its one orange peg to show Jesse.

“You’re an idiot,” Jesse said.

“Not according to this thing, man. One left means your a genius.”

“The breakfast food here is great,” Pastor Matt said, looking at his own menu. Randy took the cue and looked at a menu himself, giving the interesting visual of a table of three men staring thoughtfully at menus while a fourth looked straight ahead, hands folded on his lap, face as composed as the Lincoln Monument’s. Joe Granger always got pancakes and bacon at Cracker Barrel. No need to consult a menu.

When Jennifer, their server, came to take their orders, Jesse ordered the BLT and then excused himself. He walked out to the gift shop just outside the dining area and went straight to the big toy fire truck he’d seen on the way in. He walked up to the cash register and pulled out his wallet, hoping Jeremiah would like it as much as he’d thought when he’d first seen it and imagined pulling it out from behind his back and seeing Jeremiah run up to him shouting. He looked at it sitting on the countertop next to the cash register, hoping Jeremiah understood that his grandfather was dead, and hating his father in the most tired way he knew how.

“That’ll be $31.04.”

“You only live once,” he muttered to himself.

“I love her, Dad.” Melanie took her last bite of pineapple and set the crust down on the ceramic plate. She brushed her hair behind her ear and thought for a second about how glad she was that they were outside because of how good the sun felt on her face when she was sad, how good a medicine that was, and how much she loved having Sunday lunch with her father.

“And that’s a good thing,” David said, with a seriousness that seemed at odds with the words. “That’s His doing, Melanie.”

He looked at her for a moment as she looked at that plate and the crust on it, as she accepted what he’d said and tried to determine what it meant about what was next.

“But you were right earlier. It will take a miracle. You can’t change what someone loves. We’re born dead in our sins and trespasses, we love all the wrong things, and all the things that kill us and destroy us come right out of that.” He prayed a two second prayer for his daughter, and then smiled because he trusted that it was heard. “Only God can make you love God.”

She put her head in her right hand and tried not to cry, desperate to save Bobbie Jo. The image flashing behind her eyes so bright it made her forget where she was for a second was the two of them in Bobbie Jo’s hatchback Geo singing “Don’t Stop Believin'” so loud she thought they’d get arrested. They were at a red light up in West Chester, and Bobbie Jo was making those silly faces she made that grabbed Melanie’s heart and wouldn’t let go until she laughed so hard that she felt it down in her toes and the tears were soaking her cheeks. She loved Bobbie Jo like a sister.

Save her, God. Bring her home.

“Hey.”

Melanie looked up at the person she needed most in the world.

“Ice cream?”

She laughed, and he laughed, and then she found she couldn’t stop, and he left the money on the table and took her out the patio gate. They made their way to Coldstone, his arm over her shoulder and her head against his side, and she couldn’t stop laughing until they got to McMicken Avenue.