12. 12
12
The home’s facade was made up of varying shades of slate-colored stone that stood out against the afternoon’s dark clouds. After a flash of light, Barrett heard the faint rumble of thunder and pursed his lips. He was grateful he was going inside, where the rare spring rain could pour down to its heart’s content. It seemed like it never rained in Wyoming anymore.
We need the moisture, he could hear Gam-Gam say in his head, something she uttered every time there was precipitation without fail.
He carefully pulled onto the grass near the mailbox. The driveway was full and carefully edged despite the dead, yellow grass in the yard. It would be at least another week or two before it was warm enough to sprout anew.
His dirty Jeep felt inadequate compared to the other seven high-end sedans parked bumper-to-bumper on the concrete drive leading to the house.
The property looked expensive, especially with its nearly unimpeded view of the Grand Tetons in the distance. Neat junipers sat next to columns flanking a black front door. To either side were floor-to-ceiling patterned windows that blended seamlessly into one another. The building was positioned on an expansive plot of land featuring acre-upon-acre of natural perfection. The place was nicer than he’d imagined for a pious pastor. He’d expected something… more modest. Even humble, perhaps.
Barrett killed his truck and rushed straight across the grass to the door, eager to get inside before the sky opened up and soaked his formal attire. He pressed the doorbell and rocked on his heels, hands tapping a cheap pen against a legal pad.
Moments later, Maggie tugged the door open. Her hair was curled into waves, and light makeup accentuated her classic features. She wore a silk blouse tucked into tweed trousers, punctuated by a pair of sensible Mary Janes.
“I’m sorry,” Barrett pointed to the double rows of cars to his right, “Are you hosting right now? I could have sworn Stella said we were meeting this morning.”
“Oh shoot, I forgot that was today ,” she said, pounding the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Well, come on in...”
She looked at him, trying to recall his name.
“Barrett. Barrett Andrews,” he offered.
“That’s right. I do apologize. Our flock has grown, and I have gotten the regulars down pat, but I still struggle with some of the more sporadic attendees.”
He followed her in, whacking the pad against his slacks nervously.
“Come. I’ll introduce you to all the ladies.” Maggie chuckled, leading him down a long hall toward a towering archway that led into a spacious room.
As they neared the end of the hall, a stained-glass door to his right swung open wide.
As soon as he saw the face beyond, he was floored, frozen in place. At first, he thought his mind was playing tricks by showing him the breathtaking face he’d been daydreaming about all week. But the longer he stood, trying to bat away the hallucination with rapidly fluttering eyes, the more he realized…
She was really there.
In the flesh.
That oh-so-smooth flesh burned into his mind.
She emerged from the bathroom in a plume of steam and jasmine perfume, body wrapped in a cotton bathrobe, slit open between her thighs almost enough to catch a glimpse of Heaven’s entrance.
She was stunned, too, still like an animal facing a predator with no way out. Her vibrant, rainbow ringlets dripped onto the tile. Her eyes never blinked.
“Hi.”
The second she uttered the single syllable, Barrett’s heart began to pound.
He assumed that she, like so many others, had simply been passing through town, a tourist on her way to see Yellowstone, a vacationer passing through toward Devils Tower.
But she lived here .
She lived in Jackson .
The thought of her being within arms reach made Barrett feel lightheaded.
“Uh… hi.”
Okay, so he wasn’t Shakespeare.
“It’s good to see you, Barrett.”
“Pleasure’s all mine, Aphrodite .” He smiled wide and bit his lip sensually while eyeing her up and down. “I tried to call you, but it was the darnedest thing. Kept ringing through to a Chinese restaurant.”
“Best Asian buffet in Northwestern Wyoming.” Chastity smiled smugly. “The crab rangoons’ll change your life.”
Maggie groaned. “Um, excuse me, young lady, we have guests !”
“ So ?”
“So?!” Maggie’s voice was high and annoyed. “So, why are you washing up on this side of the house? What is wrong with your shower?”
“I like this tub.” Chastity’s eyes flashed to Barrett’s. “The Jacuzzi has some really powerful jets that you can aim if you know what I’m sayin’.” She flashed him a filthy smile and winked. All of the blood in his upper half drained to his cock in an instant. All traces of the English language evaporated momentarily from his brain.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, and I am sure we do not want to know.” Maggie shooed her daughter down the hall. “Go! Now! Get dressed! Stop walking around half-naked like a hussy.”
“Mary Magdalene was a hussy, and she—”
“Go!” Maggie interrupted, angrier now.
Chastity started down the hall with a satisfied smile, waltzing backward so she could keep her eyes locked on Barrett.
Maggie turned at the end of the hall and walked off, muttering, “Kids. I swear she is trying to turn me prematurely gray .”
Just before Chastity was out of sight, she opened her towel, flashing Barrett the entire front of her tattooed body, naked and dripping. She was freshly shaven and even more perfect than he remembered.
At that moment, Barrett thought he might faint.
Chastity disappeared into a room, and Barrett finally found the nerve to move again, covering his crotch with the notepad. He followed Maggie’s direction and turned into a living room full of older women in earth tones, all somewhere between forty-five and ancient , seated on couches and dining chairs in a casual circle. Susan Glenecky was among them.
“Susan,” he said with a cordial wave.
“Glad you could make it,” Susan said joyfully.
“Please, Barrett, have a seat,” Maggie said, setting a dining room chair next to one of the women for him.
Confused, he nodded politely and sat.
“Now ladies, I hope I’m not here to judge a Miss Wyoming contest because, in my book, you’d all be winners,” he said in an attempt to charm them. Being so close to his grandmother for years, he knew how to get along swimmingly with women in their age bracket.
Lie out your ass, lay on the charm, and don’t ever fuckin’ cuss. That, in Barrett’s mind, was the key to success with anyone with varicose veins.
Several women giggled and nudged one another before falling quiet again.
Barrett cleared his throat and chuckled. “I think I must have gotten my dates mixed up. I came over to clean. I feel like I’m interrupting something.”
“Not at all!” crooned the woman beside him. She patted him on the thigh with a delicate age-spotted hand.
Another held up a gold-plated book. “We just finished up Bible study, and we were gabbing about our family troubles. We’d talk all day and night if you’d let us.” She started to reach for her purse when Barrett spoke, addressing the group.
“You know,” he tapped his pen nervously, thinking about their gathering as an opportunity, “You ladies seem like you know a thing or two. Maybe while I’ve got you all here, I could ask you all a couple of questions.”
“Well… sure! Ask away,” Susan said, volunteering their help.
Barrett looked around at the women. “Well, you see, I just got this new gig cleaning houses, and I thought I’d be really good at it. Like it’d be instinctual to know how to clean and all. But,” he laughed, “turns out I don’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. I never really learned how to do this stuff. My parents died when I was nine. My grandmother, Stella, she took me in—”
“Oh, Stella! I adore Stella,” another woman said.
“She’s a doll-baby,” Susan chirped loudly.
“I’m sure she’d be glad to hear that.” Barrett smiled. “See, when she took my brother and me on, she really had her hands full. I guess we were too busy makin’ messes to ever learn how to clean ’em up.”
The ladies giggled.
“Stella’s a good woman,” Maggie said. “I imagine most boys don’t get taught those things, especially if there’s a woman around to cook and clean for them. My mother had me making dinners for the whole family by the age of twelve.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Barrett said reverently. “I’d just really appreciate any tips or tricks you fine ladies could give me. I really would like to keep this job. I’m already on thin ice. I nearly got fired on my first day for exploding a lady’s rug in her fancy dryer and melting a hole through some towels that were about the same price as the down payment on my Jeep out there.”
The woman on his other side piped up. “I’d be happy to teach you what I know. I owned a dry-cleaning business with my husband, God rest his soul, for twenty-some-odd years.” She patted his thigh, and her expression changed as she cackled. “Oh my, feels like you’re made of marble !”
The woman blushed and laughed as she removed her hand. Barrett could see traces of Pepto-pink lipstick on her dentures. “Are you single, Barrett?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded.
“Maggie, this is the one I was tryin’ to get you to introduce to Chastity,” Susan said. “They would make such a lovely pair, don’t you agree? She should be so lucky to end up with a strapping young buck like Stella’s boy.”
Maggie scoffed. “They just met. She waltzed out in a towel a moment ago. No couth, that one.”
“She’s a wild one,” Susan cackled.
Maggie added, “Barrett seems like far too nice a person to do something like that to. Handsome boy like him could have any woman he wants.”
It wrenched Barrett’s soul to hear Aphrodite’s mother talking about her like that. He was a bargain-bin Chippendale’s dancer with a bleach bucket in Nowhere, Wyoming.
He didn’t deserve a woman like her .
Then, her name settled in his mind. Chastity , Maggie had called her. He wanted to laugh at the irony.
“I just love that she had the guts to do that rainbow thing to her hair,” one woman said.
“ Ombre .”
“Is that what it’s called? Ombre?”
“That’s what my beautician said.”
The women all started chatting quietly, Chastity’s vibrant rainbow curls at the center of every topical conversation at that moment.
Barrett cleared his throat, and the ladies all seemed to quiet down at once.
“I couldn’t pull off a rainbow ombre,” the woman next to Barrett said, cutting through the silence. “I’m stuck with this boring ol’ gray.”
“Proverbs chapter sixteen, verse thirty-one: ‘ Gray hair is a crown of glory ,’” a new woman’s voice said from the entrance to the kitchen.
The voice was familiar, but not Aphrodite’s. Older…
Barrett’s head turned toward it, narrowing his eyes as he spotted Sue Thompson coming from the kitchen with a tiny paper plate full of deviled eggs in her hand. His stomach flipped at the sight of her. He wanted to run, wanted to bolt straight through the wall at the sight of the woman who nearly just got him shit-canned. But he didn’t move, didn’t budge.
Sue’s tight smile met his. “Couldn’t help but overhear you needed some cleaning tips.” She laughed, a kind of laugh that advertised it was a private joke. “ Lieutenant .”
After a strange moment of silence, one of the ladies in the living room spoke. “Let’s start with laundry. How do you do your own laundry? What do you do?”
Sue laughed so hard she nearly choked on a boiled egg white.
Barrett’s eyes never left hers, suddenly feeling the intense scrutiny. “I, uh, take it to a laundromat, put the clothes in a washer with some detergent, set it to hot, and push start.”
Sue cackled and stuffed the rest of the egg in her mouth. “Explains a lot .”
“Do you separate the lights and darks?”
“Do you know what settings to use?”
“Are you using liquid or powder detergent?”
The questions were firing rapidly from the women.
“No,” Barrett said, “I didn’t know you needed to separate them. I just use normal settings, I guess. And sometimes liquid, sometimes powder. Depends on what’s cheapest at the dollar store.”
“Oh boy,” the woman next to Barrett said with a sigh, stealing another feel of his thigh, “We have a lot to teach you.”
Later, in the kitchen’s breakfast nook, Maggie and Barrett sat drinking hot tea. The house was quieter now that the Bible study group had gone home. Barrett scribbled notes down on his pad. Maggie kept tapping at the yellow paper with her French tips.
“… And another thing. Grout can be tricky. I used to clean bathrooms at a local hotel. That was always something people commented on, how nice the bathrooms always were. I left them spotless.” She smiled with more pride than Barrett thought the comment warranted.
“Take pride in the small things, and God will do the rest.”
Barrett nodded. “What kind of cleaning supplies do you recommend for that? Are there brands you like?”
“Oh yes. I’d be happy to make you a list of everything to use. I’ll have it next time you come. But don’t wear your Sunday best. You’ll be on your knees scrubbing, and what you’re wearing now is very… inappropriate .”
Oh, God… if she only knew.
Maggie smiled and patted Barrett’s hand. “It’ll be nice to have some help for once.”
“The pastor isn’t the cleaning type, I take it?”
Maggie chuckled. “No, not at all.”
Barrett smiled, then swallowed, trying to broach a subject that had been nagging at him for two hours. “What about your daughter? Chastity , is it?”
“Pfft. She’s here in body only. Her mind is somewhere far away since she came back.” Her face grew sullen. “We don’t have the best relationship.”
“Oh,” Barrett said, realizing he had taken a step onto shaky territory.
“She’s an only child, and she’s got the ego and selfishness that goes with it. She’s stubborn as a mule. Gets that from her father. If she doesn’t want to do something, ten men and an act of God couldn’t get her to do it.”
She looked out the window, staring at the retreating clouds as she continued. “There were complications with her delivery when she was born. I knew then she’d be my only child, and because of that, I suppose I coddled her too much. And now she’s sort of… adrift. She’s twenty-five and acts like she’s twelve .”
Maggie rolled her eyes and watched as a whitetail deer skittered over to her bird feeder.
“When I was her age. I had a husband and a house. Arnold and I were already starting our church, small as it was back then.” She laughed. “His first service was out of a dilapidated mobile home in the poor part of Moran if you can believe it.”
Barrett smiled. “Sure, I can.”
“Arnold and I were focused on making a real difference. But she, of course, didn’t follow suit. She is a brilliant girl, but something isn’t… quite right with her. It’s quite embarrassing, really. Between you, me, and this table, she’s only back home because she flunked out of college.”
“Oh.”
“Her last semester, mind you. Instead of dusting herself off and trying that last one over again, she just up and quit completely. Walked away. All that veterinary training for nothing. Just… a real waste, if you ask me, of money, time, and dreams. And now she’s back here acting like she can just come and go like I run a free motel.”
“Must be tough to watch someone squander that kind of potential,” Barrett said softly, trying to soothe her.
She nodded. “We’ve spent our entire adult lives helping to shepherd a flock, and now our only daughter is the one wayward sheep we can’t seem to keep with the herd.”
Just then, Barrett saw someone in his periphery, someone leaning against the kitchen’s entrance with a scowl.
It was her . His infatuating rainbow-haired beauty. Aphrodite.
No… Chastity.
“ Speak of the Devil ,” Maggie said, slapping her palms to the table.
Barrett spun and smiled at her, tapping his notepad like a drummer. “Well, hello. Chastity , was it?”
He tried to hide his smile, tried to hide the fact that he already knew her intimately in front of her mother.
Chastity crossed her arms over her tank top, one sporting a cute cartoon mushroom holding a bloodied butcher’s knife. Her jeans were snug and low, showing a delicious sliver of her abdomen that he longed to run his tongue along again.
Chastity looked past him. “Maggie, where did you put my purse? I need it.”
“Why do you insist on calling me Maggie? It’s so disrespectful. Does ‘ Honor thy Father and thy Mother ’ mean absolutely nothing to you?”
“She’s a quick one,” Chastity muttered sarcastically to Barrett.
A smirk settled on Barrett’s lips.
“Where are you going?” Maggie inquired.
“Oh, well, I was thinking of breaking into the church with a bottle of wine and a roast pig and hosting an orgy on the stage. You know, just a little good old-fashioned debauchery. Maybe even do like a Sodom and Gomorrah theme and put out a charcuterie board in case people get extra hungry from all the fellatio.”
“Stop! Just… stop!” Maggie opened her mouth and closed it several times before finally saying, “I put your purse in the coat closet.”
“Thanks,” Chastity bit out before turning back to Barrett. “Nice to meet you, Barrett.”
“See you around?” he asked, hopeful.
“Maybe.” She shrugged and walked down the hall.
“You alright, Mrs. Erikson?” Barrett asked quietly.
“The filth that comes out of that girl’s mouth sometimes!”
Barrett thought back to their night together in his apartment…
And of the filth she was willing to put in .
It made him hard just thinking about it.
“Right. Anyway, windows . Windex is kind of the standard as far as cleaners go. If you use paper towels, you’re often going to end up with streaks. There’s an old trick I use where you rub the glass with a piece of newspaper, and it’ll be so clean that birds’ll end up trying to fly right through it.”
Barrett knew whatever vulnerability he had seen from Maggie was long gone. Her face had changed back into the well-practiced expression of a cheery pastor’s wife, the only part of herself that she probably ever allowed the world to see.