Chapter 29
SLOANE
The choir is doing its best. It’s not, by any reasonable measure, good.
There are eight of them, arranged in a loose semicircle at the front of the room, four women in matching pale blue blouses, three men in pale blue shirts and ties, and a tall thin man at the end with two enormous front teeth that emerge whenever he opens his mouth.
Ruthie has already whispered to me that the tall one is Dennis Hurley and I’m trying very hard not to stare at Dennis Hurley.
The hymn is How Great Thou Art. Ruthie has put a hymnbook in my hands open to the right page so I can read along to the lyrics.
The choir is two beats behind the organist and the relationship between the two parties is collaborative in name only.
One of the women is singing with great feeling but also in a slightly different key from the others.
Pastor Wendell is sitting in a wooden chair behind the lectern with his hands folded in his lap and an expression of patient endurance.
Ruthie told me he's been ministering here for decades and I don't know how he hasn't lost his faith just from listening to the choir.
He's wearing, as Ruthie warned me, sandals.
The church itself is one rectangular room with a pitched ceiling and ten rows of wooden pews on either side of a central aisle.
At the front is a low wooden platform with the lectern and the choir and a small, defeated upright piano.
There are six narrow windows along the long walls, plain glass, slightly tinted amber so that the light coming through them gives the whole room the dim, butterscotch glow of a 1970s living room.
There's a wooden cross above the lectern and a faded fabric banner to the left of it that reads HE IS RISEN in stitched letters that have started to come away at the H.
The whole room smells faintly of mothballs.
I have been to a few churches in my life and all of them were the kind of church one goes to for a wedding.
Stone, vaulted, echoing. Hundreds of years old, with carved choir stalls, stained glass and painted ceilings.
The kind of churches that are on the cover of guidebooks.
A twelfth-century cathedral in Tuscany, a Renaissance chapel in the Loire Valley, and a twelfth-century church on a hill in Provence where the bride and groom rode away in a horse-drawn carriage.
Those churches were beautiful masterpieces, steeped in history, designed to lift the eye and quiet the mind. The Baptist church in Duster does neither.
I look around. The pews are almost full.
There are families and elderly couples and a few people on their own.
A baby is asleep on its mother's shoulder, and two teenage boys look immensely bored.
About half of the room is looking at me, either stealing glances or openly staring.
The big man from the diner is here too with his wife and teenage daughter.
I can only hope she wouldn't dare to take a picture of me in church.
I make myself look at the choir while avoiding Dennis Hurley.
It's been a long ninety minutes. I've stood up when everyone else stood up, I've sat down when everyone else sat down, and I've listened to a sermon from Pastor Wendell about, as far as I could follow, the importance of being patient with people who are not as far along in their faith as you are.
He kept glancing at his notes and lost his place twice.
Once he repeated a paragraph word for word and then carried on as if he hadn't.
Then there was a long passage involving readings and a prayer that the entire congregation seemed to know.
I managed to stay awake through all of it.
Although that's only because my thoughts kept drifting to Maggie.
I don't know why she's set up camp in my head and it's given me a lot to be confused about.
Surely I can't be physically attracted to her?
Surely not. She's a woman and I've always dated men.
My brain offers me the image of kissing her and a sudden jolt shoots through me.
Fuck. What was that? Did I just get aroused?
I sit up straighter and try to think about something else.
The choir. Pastor Wendell's sandals. The peeling H on the banner. Anything.
I let out a sigh of relief when the final hymn is announced. Blessed Assurance. The organist starts, the choir starts, and Dennis Hurley's teeth come out again. They're singing with more conviction now. It's the last one and they can smell the muffins.
Pastor Wendell gives a short blessing. He says "go in peace" and people start moving. I've never felt so much in agreement with a religious instruction. Go in peace. Yes. Out. Now. I'd be very happy to walk back to the motel alone in this heat, but Ruthie pats my arm.
"Coffee," she says. "And muffins. Come on."
"Oh, Ruthie. I think I might just —"
"Five minutes. You've come this far."
Even if I tried, I couldn't leave. There's a tide of bodies moving toward the back of the church and Ruthie has me by the elbow, steering me.
The coffee station is set up by the entrance on a folding trestle table with Styrofoam cups, a tin of powdered creamer, sugar packets, and five plates of muffins under plastic wrap, being unwrapped by a small woman with white hair.
"Doris," Ruthie says to the woman behind the muffins. "Doris. Look who I brought."
Doris looks up and smiles. "Oh," she says. "Oh, my. Hello. Welcome. Welcome, welcome."
"This is Sloane," Ruthie says.
"I know who it is, Ruthie. Hello, dear. Have a muffin. Have two." She presses a muffin into my hand. "Cinnamon's the specialty but these are the blueberry. The cinnamons go faster so I made extras. You can have a cinnamon too."
"Thank you. One is — one is plenty."
"You're so thin, dear. Have a cinnamon too." She presses a second muffin into my other hand. "Frank!" she calls. "Frank, come and meet Sloane. She's the woman who drove into Dawson's Sanctuary!"
I feel heat rise in my face all the way to my hairline. Several people in nearby clusters fall silent and then deliberately resume their conversations at slightly higher volumes. I stare down at my shoes.
A man appears at my right. "Hello, young lady. I'm Frank Hurley, Dennis's brother."
Frank Hurley doesn't have the teeth.
"Hello," I say. "It's nice to meet you."
"Frank does the books for the church," Ruthie says. "Frank, Sloane's been reading her Genesis."
"Oh, I heard about that." Frank smiles. "Well, that's a fine place to start."
I bite my lip and wince. "Yes. I — yes."
"You let me know if you have any questions," he says.
"Frank's a Bible scholar," Ruthie tells me while she hands me a coffee. "He runs the Wednesday study group. You'd be very welcome, dear."
Pastor Wendell comes over, pats me on the arm, and tells me how glad he is that I came and that the door is always open.
"Did you enjoy it?" he asks.
"Very much."
"See?" Ruthie says. "I told you. I told you it would be lovely. Cream?"
I shake my head and stand there with my muffins and my coffee and a frozen smile, and I have the distinct sense that I've stepped out of my own life and into someone else's.
Not that long ago I was dating Tyler Ashworth and worrying about whether to summer in Mykonos or the Hamptons.
Now I'm in a Baptist church in Duster, having just been introduced to the congregation as the drunk who drove into Dawson's Sanctuary, and I can't stop thinking about the woman who runs it.
Nothing about my life is currently real. None of it.