Chapter 5
Ruth
I am in love, and it is blowing the doors clean off my carefully constructed life.
It starts small. I speak up at the church committee meeting about the spring festival budget, voicing an opinion that isn't my father's — a real one, my own, about allocating funds toward the shelter instead of new choir robes — and the room goes briefly, startledly silent before Mrs. Petraki says, "Well.
That's a fresh thought," in a tone that could go either way.
"The robes are three years old," someone protests, gently.
"The robes are fine," I say. "The shelter roof was actively raining indoors two weeks ago."
Nobody has a good counterargument to that, and the vote goes my way by a narrow but real margin, and I drive home afterward feeling strangely, unreasonably proud of myself over a discussion about choir robes, which tells you exactly how low the bar has been set for most of my adult life.
It keeps going. I find the magazine page I tore out two years ago, the one about the summer art intensive in the city, and instead of putting it back in the drawer where it's lived since, I sit down at my desk and fill out the application.
My hands shake through the entire process.
I don't tell my father. I don't tell anyone but Gabriel, who reads over my shoulder and says, "About time," like it was never actually a question.
"What if I don't get in?"
"Then you apply again next year. What if you do get in?"
I don't have an answer for that one. The possibility is too large to hold yet.
"You're supposed to say something encouraging here," I tell him, licking the envelope closed with hands that won't quite stop trembling.
"I did say something encouraging."
"You said 'about time.' That's not encouraging, that's mild judgment."
"It's encouraging judgment. Very supportive tone. You just have to listen closely."
I throw a balled-up scrap of paper at him, and he catches it out of the air without looking, which is somehow the single most irritating thing he's done all week.
The Iron Thorn women have started including me in a way I don't entirely know what to do with.
Briar invites me to help paint the spring window display at Petal & Thorn, and I spend an entire glorious Saturday afternoon with a paintbrush and a woman who runs her own business and speaks her mind and has never once, in my hearing, apologized for either.
"You've got a good eye," Briar says, stepping back to look at the dogwood branches I've sketched along the glass. "Ever thought about doing this for a living?"
"I think about it every day," I admit, and it's the first time I've said it to anyone besides Gabriel.
"Well, when you're famous and living in the city, remember this shop gave you your first gallery wall."
"It's a window display, Briar, not a gallery."
"Everybody starts somewhere. Mine started with a bucket of tulips and a stubborn streak. Yours can start with dogwood branches and a preacher's daughter's guilty conscience."
Harper feeds me — an enormous, unnecessary amount of food, insisting I'm too thin, which nobody has ever said to me before, my father being the sort of man who doesn't notice what's on my plate as long as grace has been said over it.
Nadia tells me stories that would make my Sunday school class faint dead away, and I laugh until I snort, an undignified, honking sound I have never once made in twenty-five years of careful composure, and Nadia laughs even harder at the sound itself.
"There she is," Nadia says, delighted. "I knew there was a person under all that Sunday-best."
"That sound was a mistake. I'd like it stricken from the record."
"Absolutely not. I'm telling Gemma. She's going to want a reenactment."
I am discovering a world that exists entirely outside the church steps, and I am, quite frankly, intoxicated by it — the easy profanity, the loud, generous laughter, the way these women hand out compliments and criticism with equal, unbothered honesty, never once wrapping either in the careful diplomatic tissue paper I was raised on.
But secrets have a way of running out of room to hide, and mine is getting harder to keep by the day.
Gabriel and I have taken to meeting most evenings — the community garden, the back steps of the shelter, once, memorably, the empty choir loft after Wednesday practice, where he sat in the front pew and let me play him three hymns badly on the old upright piano and told me, with a completely straight face, that I had a real future in demolition.
"I'm not that bad."
"Ruthie. You hit a note so wrong just now I think a window cracked."
"That was the wind."
"There is no wind. We're indoors."
"Play me something you actually wrote," he says, that night in the choir loft, after I've mangled a fourth hymn beyond recognition.
"I don't write music."
"You paint places you've never been. I refuse to believe you don't have a song hiding somewhere in that piano bench."
"That's a very generous assumption about my talents."
"I contain multitudes. So do you. You just haven't gotten around to cataloguing all of yours yet."
I try anyway, picking out a few notes that don't belong to any hymn I know, something slower, sadder, entirely made up on the spot, and he sits in the front pew with his boots up on the seat in front of him — which would scandalize half the congregation — listening like it's the finest thing he's ever heard, even though I know, objectively, it's clumsy and unfinished and probably terrible.
"See," he says, when I finally stop. "Multitudes."
"That was two minutes of nonsense."
"That was the truest two minutes you've played all night. Everything before it was you performing competence. That was you actually feeling something out loud."
I don't have a response to that, so I just close the piano lid, quiet, and he doesn't push, just watches me with that same steady attention that's started to feel less like being observed and more like being understood, and we sit there a while longer in the half-dark of the empty sanctuary, talking about nothing important, until the sexton's footsteps in the hall remind us both that we're not exactly supposed to be here after hours, alone, in a church, and we slip out the side door laughing like teenagers who've gotten away with something.
We are, by any honest account, in the early stages of something neither of us has bothered to name out loud, and I've been telling myself that as long as it stays unnamed, it stays safe. Contained. Something I can still choose to step back from if I have to.
I am wrong about that, and I find out exactly how wrong on a Tuesday evening in the garden, when my father's truck pulls into the church lot forty minutes earlier than his Tuesday deacons' meeting usually lets out.
We're not doing anything scandalous. I want that understood, even now, even in the retelling.
We're sitting close on the garden bench, Gabriel's arm along the back of it, not quite touching my shoulders, and I'm talking — about the art program, about a painting I'm working on, about nothing and everything — and he's listening the way he always listens, fully, like there's nowhere else in the world he'd rather be.
The intimacy of it is unmistakable even from a distance. I know this because I watch my father's face change as he crosses the lot toward us, from mild confusion to something sharper, something that makes my stomach drop straight through the garden bench.
"Ruth," he says. Just my name. Not Ruthie. He hasn't called me Ruth in a decade.
Gabriel stands immediately, puts a careful, respectful distance between us, extends a hand my father doesn't take.
"Reverend Calloway—"
"I think you should go," my father says, not raising his voice, which is somehow so much worse than shouting would have been.
Gabriel looks at me. I nod, once, a silent promise — I'll be fine, I'll handle this — and he goes, though I can see it costs him, the way he looks back twice before he's out of the lot.
My father waits until Gabriel's bike has pulled away before he speaks again.
"How long," he says.
"Father—"
"How long has this been going on, Ruthie."
The old name again, but there's no warmth left in it now, just a demand.
"We've been friends since the shelter project," I say, which is true, and also nowhere near the whole truth.
"Friends." He says the word like it tastes wrong. "I have watched that man's reputation precede him through this town for a decade. Fights. Arrests as a young man. A revolving door of women, or so I've heard, though I'll admit I don't put much stock in gossip as a rule."
"Then don't put stock in it now."
"I put stock in what I saw with my own eyes ten minutes ago, sitting on that bench.
" His voice cracks, just slightly, and underneath the anger I hear something else — real fear, real grief, a father watching something he thought was solid start to move.
"I raised you to be better than this, Ruthie.
Smarter than this. Men like that ruin women like you. It's a story as old as this town."
"You don't know him."
"I don't need to know him. I know what he is."
Something in me, some door that's been slowly creaking open for weeks, finally swings wide.
"You don't," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. "You know what you've decided he is. That's not the same thing."
My father stares at me like I've slapped him. In twenty-five years I don't believe I have ever once spoken to him this way, and the silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.
"We're going home," he says finally. "Now."
The rest of the evening unfolds like a slow, quiet catastrophe. He confronts me properly once we're inside, the door shut, the safe theater of the church lot replaced by the much less safe theater of our own kitchen table.
"I forbid you from seeing him," he says. "I mean that, Ruth. This ends tonight."
"I'm twenty-five years old."
"You're my daughter, living in my house, and while you are, you will conduct yourself with—"