Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Harrison
I had written the sentence four times, and four times it had died on the page.
The cursor blinked at me from the half-finished line—the nation does not have a political problem, it has a spiritual one—and I sat back in the leather chair and let the silence of my office press in.
It was a beautiful room. Everyone said so.
Floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves filled with mine and my father’s books, a Persian rug that cost more than the cars most of my congregation drove, tall windows looking out over six manicured acres of River Oaks that the Houston sun gilded every evening into something that looked, if you squinted, like the grace of God.
It was a beautiful room, and I’d come to hate the man who worked in it.
The speech was for Lincoln. Crossroads America National Summit, Saturday's keynote, the slot they gave the man they wanted the cameras on. Three thousand delegates, a dozen lawmakers, and somewhere in the back a wall of press my mother had personally vetted for friendliness. I’d given a hundred versions of this speech and could give it in my sleep.
I had, in fact, given it in my sleep, woken up reciting the part about the family as the first church, the cornerstone of a righteous nation.
The words came easily. They always did. That was the trouble with them.
I typed a fifth version of the sentence and deleted it too.
Something was wrong. Not with the speech—the speech would write itself, it always did.
Something underneath the day, low and persistent, like a sound you can't hear but can feel in your teeth.
I'd woken with it before dawn, surfacing out of sleep into a dread that had no shape, only weight.
I'd lain there in the dark of the master bedroom—the bed I'd slept in alone for a decade and called widowhood—and waited for it to resolve into something I could pray over, and it hadn't.
I'd carried it through my coffee and my morning correspondence and a forty-minute conference call with the political consultants in Northern Virginia. Those men spoke about souls the way bankers speak about collateral, and the whole time the wrongness sat with me at the desk like a second presence in the room. A draft moving through rooms I kept locked, stirring things I had long ago laid to rest and trusted to stay buried. I was a man who’d built his entire existence on control—of the message, of the image, of the careful distance between what I was and what I performed—and control was precisely the thing I could feel slipping away, like sand going out under the tide.
A soft knock, and the door eased open.
“Pastor Cole?” Marisol stood in the gap with her hands folded, the way she always did, as though she were sorry to exist in my line of sight.
She'd kept this house for nine years and still apologized for interrupting me.
“I've finished your bags. Both cases are in the foyer. And your mother—” a small, careful breath, “Mrs. Cole asked me to tell you she's waiting in the car. For the airport.”
“Thank you, Marisol.” I didn't look up from the screen. “Tell her five more minutes.”
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated—there was always something she wanted to say and never did, some kindness she'd been trained out of offering a man like me—and then the door clicked shut and I was alone again with the cursor and the feeling of dread.
Five minutes. I saved the file, closed the laptop, and slid it into the briefcase, the good Italian leather my mother had given me the Christmas after Father died.
As if a briefcase were the thing a son needed in the season of grief.
I gathered my phone, my pen, the leather folio.
And then I stood, turned toward the door, and the photograph on the far wall caught me the way it had caught me ten thousand times before and never once landed until that exact moment.
Kimberly.
She was smiling in the picture, the both of us were, in front of the church on a spring morning the year we married.
She wore yellow. She'd liked yellow. I remembered almost nothing else about what she liked—and that was the thought that stopped me cold in the middle of my own office, briefcase in hand, because the date had been sitting under the whole day like a stone under still water, and only now did it surface.
Ten years ago. Today. A brain hemorrhage on an ordinary Tuesday, no warning, no mercy, twenty-five years old and gone between one breakfast and the next.
I waited for the grief, the way you brace for a wave you can hear coming.
It didn't come. What came instead—what always came, what I had stopped pretending wouldn't—was the guilt, and it tore through me, because I was not grieving my dead wife. I was grieving the fact that I had so little to grieve. I’d married her at twenty-two because my parents arranged it.
It had been expected of me, because a young pastor needed a wife the way a young pastor needed a good suit.
I’d been kind to her, and faithful, in the only way the world could see.
And I had never once loved her, or wanted her, never lain beside her without a wall of merciful dark between us.
When she died my first feeling—my first, before the funeral and the casseroles and the three thousand cards—had been a relief so enormous and so shameful that I’d gone into the garden at midnight and been sick into my mother's roses.
Because dead, Kimberly could do for me what living she never could.
Dead, she was my alibi. The grieving widower.
Ten years a monument to a love that had never existed, and the world looked at my empty bed and called it devotion.
No one asked why I never remarried. No one had to.
She was the most useful thing in my life, my poor sweet wife, and she had to die to become it.
“I'm sorry,” I whispered to the photograph, and I wasn't sure which of the two of us I truly meant it for.
* * *
The jet leveled off somewhere over Arkansas and my mother had already moved on to her second glass of champagne and her fourth complaint.
“I simply don't see,” Floris Mae said, holding the flute up to the window so the diamonds at her wrist could catch the light, “why a man of your stature has to fly into the middle of a cornfield to shake hands with people who buy their suits at a warehouse. Lincoln. Honestly, Harrison. Lincoln.”
She said the name of the city the way other people said the name of a disease.
My mother at fifty-nine was a triumph of money over time—the blond helmet of hair lacquered into permanence, the face pulled smooth and tight as a drum, the ice-blue eyes that had never in my memory held a degree of actual warmth.
She wore couture to a regional convention the way a general wears medals into a village.
The little people, she called them, our flock, the three thousand faithful waiting in Nebraska.
The rubes. She said it without lowering her voice, because in my mother's universe the hired help and the faithful occupied the same category.
“They vote,” I said. “That's why we fly into the cornfield.”
“Mm.” She sipped. “They vote, and they tithe, and they weep when you tell them to, and I'm sure it's all very important.”
I looked out the window at the cloud cover and did not say what I was thinking, because I had learned a long time ago that the things I thought and the things I said were two separate things, and only one of them was ever audited.
What I thought was this: that without the little people there would be no private jet.
No estate in River Oaks. No couture gowns, no diamonds, no Citadel of Faith megachurch, forty feet of glass and limestone rising up over the Houston skyline.
Without the rubes in their Men’s Wearhouse suits, my mother would be the widow of a dead televangelist in a paid-off house, and I would be—
I didn't know what I would be. That was the trouble. I’d never once been allowed to find out.
The empire had been built on me, around me, the way a pearl is built around a piece of grit—and the grit, I'd come to understand, doesn't get to choose. It only gets to be smothered, layer by lustrous layer, until the thing the world admires has no resemblance left to the small ugly seed at the center. My father had laid the first layer. My mother had spent the ten years since his death laying the rest, and somewhere along the way the man named Harrison had disappeared entirely inside the thing called Pastor Cole. Most days I couldn’t tell you where one ended and the other began.
The little people made us everything we were.
They tithed our jet into the sky and the megachurch into the Houston skyline; their faith, real and trembling and decent, was the foundation under every inch of the marble we walked on.
And the woman across from me sneered at them into a glass of champagne while their money chilled it.
I said nothing, and the saying-nothing was its own small daily betrayal, one more layer over the grit.
The hollowness opened under my sternum like a trapdoor with nothing beneath it, and I smiled at my mother, because that, at least, I knew how to do.
“You've gone gray around the edges,” Floris Mae observed, studying me now instead of her wrist. “You've been off all morning. What is the matter with you?”
“It's the anniversary,” I said. “Of Kimberly's death. Ten years today.”
My mother's brow did not move, because my mother's brow no longer moved, but a flicker of pure blankness crossed the ice of her eyes. “Who?”
I turned from the window and looked at her. Pilled out again, I thought. She must be deeper into the prescriptions than usual; she had a doctor in Houston and another in Palm Beach and between them they could sedate a draft horse.
“Kimberly,” I said, and heard the edge come into it before I could stop it. “Your daughter-in-law. My wife. The girl you picked out for me yourself, at the spring gala, in 2013. Remember her?”
“There's no need to take that tone with me.” Floris Mae rolled her eyes—actually rolled them, the way a bored teenager does—and turned back to the window.
“Of course I remember Kimberly. Lovely girl.
Bad blood vessels. It was all very sad and a very long time ago, and you've made a perfectly good career out of it.
I don't know why you insist on dredging it up every spring like it's a holiday.” She drained the flute.
“You should be thanking her, not mourning her.”
And the worst of it, the thing that closed my throat, was that she wasn't wrong. Mother was monstrous, but she wasn't wrong.
The intercom chimed before I could answer.
“Pastor Cole, Mrs. Cole—this is the captain. We've begun our descent into Lincoln. Should have you on the ground in about twenty minutes. Little bit of weather moving through, nothing to worry about. Please see that you're buckled in.”
“Thank God,” my mother said, to no god in particular, and reached for the bottle one more time.
I drew the seatbelt across my lap and clicked it home.
Below the clouds, somewhere, the flat green grid of Nebraska was rising to meet us—a mid-tier city in a swing state.
Three days of handshakes, prayer breakfasts, and a speech about the sanctity of the family I would deliver flawlessly and believe, on some cold cerebral level, every word of.
That was the part no one understood about me, the part I’d never been able to confess to a living soul: that I believed all of it.
I simply could not live it, and the gap between the belief and the living was the pit I had been falling into for thirty-five years without ever reaching the bottom.
My mother shut her eyes against the descent. And under the cover of the engine noise and the dimming cabin, I did what I always did when the falling got too loud to bear.
I took out my phone, and opened the app.
It loaded slowly—the network out here was thin—and then the grid populated, square by square, and I felt the old contemptible flutter of hope.
Lincoln. A city full of strangers, none of whom had ever sat in my pews. At least there was that. At least, in the dark, in some anonymous room, I could be for an hour or two the one thing I was never permitted to be in the light.
The profiles finished loading, and hope curdled in my chest the way it always did, because I knew exactly what I was looking at and exactly what I was: a grid of headless torsos and blank gray squares, men with no faces and no names, each one of them hiding the same way I was hiding, each one of them a little locked room with a frightened man inside.
A whole quiet city of us, refreshing our blank screens, praying into the dark.
My own profile was one of them. No face.
No name. Just a torso, a lie, and the word discreet, like a password into a country where no one was ever truly let in.
I stared at the gray squares, and the pit under my sternum yawned wide. A single thought rose up clear and terrible out of the despair, the way the date had surfaced that morning out of the still water of the day:
What in God's name would it take—what would have to break, or burn, or end—for one of those faceless squares to finally, just once, look back at me with an actual face?