Chapter 35
CHAPTER 35
E lijah. Saturday
Corinne and Leanna were doing “girl stuff” this morning, leaving me to go to the gym, to work out and then hang out with Ben. The two of us were at the juice bar in the gym, talking about how things were going with him and Leanna, which sounded very promising. I’d gotten my phone out of the locker room in case Corinne left messages during my workout or in case she called now. There was nothing from Corinne, but when the phone rang I expected it would be her.
It wasn’t.
Ben asked, “Leanna? Corinne?”
“No,” I said. “ My sister.”
“Okay,” said Ben. “I’ll be over there.” He went to assist another gym member on one of the machines.
I picked up for Sarah. “Morning. How’s everything?”
The way she sounded made my back stiffen. There were tears in her voice. “Elijah…oh, Elijah,” she began, her voice quivering. “You and Dad…”
That gave me a cold, anxious feeling, remembering once again how my father was when I went to the house, and recalling what I’d thought when he came to my office. What if Dad actually was sick and hadn’t told me?
“Sarah, what about Dad?” I asked, dreading the answer. “Is Dad…”
“He told me he went to your office,” she said. “He told me what the two of you said. His whole mood was so light. It was like there was all this dead weight he’d been carrying around, and it was off his shoulders finally. I’ve never seen him like that.”
My nerves settled down and it felt good to hear this news from my sister. “Yeah,” I said, “it was a really rare moment. I don’t think Dad and I have ever been like that together. It was…special, I guess.” My words were not doing justice to the way it actually felt. I felt a lightness in my own heart, recalling it as I spoke to Sarah.
“And, Leo tells me you seem to be much happier at work these days,” she mentioned. “Elijah, I’m so glad.”
“I was never really miserable at work,” I said. “I like our business. But, well, I guess it’s not much of a secret now. There’s also Corinne.”
“Everything is okay with her, too?”
Chuckling at the feeling in my heart, I said, “Better than okay.”
_______________
Ben, Leanna, Corinne, and I met for lunch at a little steak and seafood place that I knew. It was over shrimp appetizers that I learned about a detail that I’d been missing all this time.
It started innocently enough. Corinne had gotten an idea in her head and was being as tenacious with it as a dog with a chew toy. “You have to move here, Leanna. It’ll be great,” she said.
“I don’t even have a job here. You came here because you had a job. What, am I supposed to just pull up stakes and move?” she argued.
“Oh, a job. You can get a job,” Corinne argued back. “And, you can stay with me while you’re looking.”
“You only have the one bedroom.”
“My couch folds out. Come on, it won’t be bad. You’ll get a job in nothing flat.” She turned to me. “You could find her something, couldn’t you, Elijah?”
Not completely sure about that, I began, “Well, actually-”
Corinne didn’t even wait for me. Back to Leanna, she said, “You see, he can come up with something for you. Then, we could even commute to work together! Won’t that be fun?”
I wanted to remind her that there would be a lot of mornings when she would not be commuting with her sister because she would be spending the night before with me, or so I hoped. But before I had the chance, Leanna got to her next point, which was actually well-taken.
“Being together all the time, won’t we start getting on each other’s nerves?” she said. “Don’t you remember when we were living under the same roof, we’d get on each other’s nerves?”
“We were kids!” Corinne argued.
“And, speaking of being kids,” said Leanna, “what would Dad say if I moved here too. That would leave just him in Youngstown by himself. I don’t think he’d be too happy. Did you think about that?”
That was the argument that derailed Corinne’s train for a moment. She stopped and sighed, “Darn. I hate thinking of Daddy being alone too. If only there were someone nice we could set him up with.”
Ben and I traded a bemused look. Ben hadn’t said anything ( smart man ), but I could tell he and I were both thinking the same thing. Corinne was really working all the angles with this problem.
A bit wistfully, stabbing at a shrimp with her fork, Corinne thought out loud, “I didn’t think about how hard it must be to date when you’re the pastor of your own church.”
That caught me totally unprepared. Suddenly, things added up in my mind. The Sunday sermon online, the one that Corinne logged in for every week, the one that she’d asked me over to watch with her. The pastor — all at once I was hit with the realization of how very familiar he was. I was sitting at a table with two women who reminded me a lot of him.
I stopped Corinne’s next thought with an upraised palm. “Wait a minute. What did I just hear? Pastor of your own church? What was that?”
Plainly, Leanna said, “Oh yes. Our father is a pastor. He puts his Sunday service on the Internet. Has Corinne shown it to you?”
Gazing almost dumbfounded at Corinne, I said, “She did have me over to watch a sermon with her. But, she didn’t mention who was preaching.”
Leanna looked over at her sister, and I could see in her expression some old childhood memory of when one of them had caught the other in doing something they ought not to be doing. “Addie! You never told him?”
Corinne gritted her teeth, embarrassed, and didn’t look directly at me. “Well…” she began, sheepishly.
“Yes, well…” I repeated at her.
Sighing, she said, “I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t know what you’d think, after…” And she didn’t continue the thought out loud, but I could tell that she meant, what you’d think after the way you screwed me. Instead, she said, “Sometimes people look at you a little differently when they find out that your father is a pastor.”
“All I thought at the time,” I said, “was how nice it was that you wanted to share something with me that was so important to you. If you want me to watch your father with you, I will. I just feel like kind of a jerk now, especially after what I told you about my relationship with religion, when I didn’t know whose sermon we were watching.”
“You’re not the biggest jerk,” said Corinne, contritely. “I really should have been up front about it. I’m proud of Daddy. I’m proud of you, too.”
It was the second time lately that someone important to me had told me they were proud of me. And for that reason, we got past it and were okay.
It made me think, however, of what else there might be about Corinne that I didn’t know about. I couldn’t guess what other surprises our relationship might still have in store.