Composing Amelia (7 page)

He’d left that morning for his interview, and while Amelia felt much better about everything given the promise he’d made her, she was still nervous about his trip. She didn’t think it was right to interview for a job he obviously wasn’t going to take. It felt like tempting fate.

Amelia swept powder over her nose and examined herself in the mirror. Her new hairstyle still took her by surprise now and then, but she was glad she’d done it. Her copper hair now rested on her shoulders, and the loss of the extra weight made the natural curl more pronounced. Marcus had been shocked at the unplanned change but loved it. Amelia had no memory of her mother’s hair being any shorter than her triceps, and she’d always worn it down. She’d never had bangs, either. Amelia hadn’t realized how stressful those sightings in the mirror had been until she knew she wouldn’t have them anymore. She’d almost completely stopped flinching when she looked in the mirror.

She arrived at the sushi bar just as Jill was emerging from the ladies’ room. “I swear I go to the bathroom every ten minutes,” she said as they slipped onto stools at the bar. “And I drink, like, five gallons of water a day. Am I pregnant with a baby or a fish?”

Amelia eyed Jill’s middle. “Don’t ask me.”

“Dane said Marcus did an admirable job of trying to cheer him up about the baby. I had no idea he was so into having kids.”

Amelia tilted her head. “Who—Marcus?”

“Yeah.” She looked concerned. “You didn’t know that?”

Amelia shifted uneasily on her seat. “No, I did. We talked about it before we got married. Once or twice, anyway. I told him I didn’t want any kids, at least not for a long time, and he was cool with it.” But what if he wasn’t anymore? Amelia didn’t know if she could handle any more life-changing surprises from Marcus.
He’d better not come back from Nebraska with some dream to start having babies.

“So, speaking of which, Marcus is in Nebraska now, right?” Amelia had texted Jill about her conversation with Marcus the morning after their fight, to which Jill had replied with the famous quote from
My Big Fat Greek Wedding:
“The man is the head, but the woman is the neck …”

Amelia looked at the time on her cell phone. “Yep, he should be there. The weather’s miserable there right now; you should see the weekend forecast.”

“Aw, poor guy.”

“No—this is good. He’s such a California boy. The man still surfs, for Pete’s sake. Can you imagine Marcus shoveling snow and scraping ice off the windshield? I know it’s a little evil of me to think this, but I’m hoping he realizes he doesn’t want to live through those winters. It’d be nice if he comes to realize that he doesn’t want this job, versus me having to cash in on his promise.”

Jill gave her an admonishing look. Amelia’s chin raised a bit. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Jill said, focusing her gaze on the dragon roll on her plate. “Never mind, it’s none of my business anyway.”

“No, seriously. What?”

Jill shifted on her stool, her eyes only briefly meeting Amelia’s. “I guess it just seems a little … cold … that you’re not even considering the possibility. Isn’t there any room to be at least a little open-minded?”

Amelia sat up straighter. “Why? The odds are against him, and I got the job I wanted here. Would God have set me up with that if His plan also included us moving? That doesn’t make sense.”

Jill’s gaze flickered back and forth between her plate and Amelia. “Yeah, but it seems you and Marcus have conflicting ideas of what God wants right now. I just wonder if it’s good to believe that when something happens the way you want it to, God won’t mess with it. What if God really does want this job for Marcus?”

“What are you saying—that God is going to rip my success away from me just to teach me a lesson?”

Jill gave Amelia an imploring look. “Come on, that’s not what I mean. It’s just … God does what’s best for us, and if we carve in stone our idea of how things should be, then it’s really painful when God’s will trumps ours. Isn’t it better to recognize that we can’t see how or why God orchestrates things the way He does? That His plans have a greater purpose?”

Amelia clenched her jaw and focused on her sushi in silence. Why couldn’t Jill just support her, or at least play along?

The noise of the restaurant filled the space between them as they ate their dinners in silence. When it started to get awkward, Jill was the first to speak. “I’m sorry, Amelia, I know that’s probably not what you wanted to hear.”

Amelia chased a grain of rice with her chopsticks. “Not really, no.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Ames, but I guess … I just worry sometimes that your faith is still so … young. I mean it wasn’t that long ago that we were at Juilliard and you were committing your life to the Lord, and campus ministry isn’t exactly the ‘real world.’ Living as a Christian is complicated.”

Amelia felt the weight of those words. “I know … But I feel like it’s harder for me than it should be. It certainly seems harder for me than it does for you, or Dane, or Marcus. Especially Marcus. I never hear God like you guys do, or feel Him. And when Marcus gets all preacher on me and launches into some theology lesson out of nowhere, it just annoys me. I mean, if I wanted to be a theologian, I’d have gone to seminary, right? But then I feel guilty, because if I’m a Christian, shouldn’t I want to know that stuff?”

“Well …” Jill ducked her head, trying to look Amelia in the eyes. “I can’t tell you if you are or aren’t a Christian, Ames. That’s between you and God. What does your gut tell you?”

This turn in the conversation was making Amelia uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you think you are a Christian?”

Amelia answered quickly. “Of course I am.”

“I’m not trying to say you’re not,” Jill said. “I just—”

“But if you didn’t question it, you wouldn’t be asking. Right?” When Jill’s words seemed to get stuck in her throat, Amelia felt her face flush as the heat rose in her cheeks. She could feel herself overreacting, but she couldn’t help it. “You never struck me as the judgmental type, Jill.”

“I’m not—”

“Never mind.” Amelia pulled her wallet from her purse and opened it. “Dinner’s on me. Enjoy.” She threw down a twenty and shoved the wallet back into her purse, then slid off the stool and headed for the street.

How dare Jill accuse her of not being a Christian. Didn’t Jesus tell people not to judge? Jill had been the first Christian Amelia had ever known when they met as roommates their first year at Juilliard, and Amelia had been surprised at how cool she was in spite of it. Apparently Jill had been a lot more accepting of people’s differing views on spirituality back then.

Her bus was just pulling up to the corner. She hopped on and slouched into a seat just in time to see Jill power walking up the sidewalk. Amelia almost got off the bus, but then turned her back to the window and pulled her iPod from her pocket. She scrolled to Joni Mitchell’s
Court and Spark
and lost herself in the music as the bus bounced over potholes and tears burned in her eyes.

The last thing she’d expected tonight was to have her friendship with Jill upended. But how could she be vulnerable with Jill anymore, knowing her friend’s assessment of her? Maybe she’d make some new friends in the theater group. Maybe they would accept her, flaws and all.

The 757 hit a pocket of turbulence, jarring Marcus from his thoughts and sending him fumbling to keep his plastic cup of Coke upright. His neighbor in the center seat flashed him a nervous smile and gripped his bag of pretzels tighter. “Reason 243 why I hate flying.”

Marcus laughed politely. “That’s a shame. I don’t mind it, though I don’t fly often.”

“You’re lucky. I have to do it all the time.”

“For work?”

“Yeah. Salesman. How ’bout you?”

“What, my job?” Marcus chuckled. “Right now it’s anything that pays the bills. But I just did an interview about an hour outside Omaha for a job, and I think it went well.”

Really well, actually, even considering the bad weather. Before the plane had dipped, he’d been lost in daydreams about preaching his first sermon from the church’s intricately carved oak podium, Amelia and his parents beaming with pride in the front pew.

“That’s great. What’s the job?”

“Senior pastor.”

The man’s face registered surprise. “Impressive.”

“Thanks.” He couldn’t help smiling. “I’m pretty excited.”

The man glanced down at Marcus’s hand. “Married? What’s your wife do?”

“She’s a pianist.” His good mood faltered. “And she’s not quite as excited as I am about Nebraska.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

The man’s head bobbed in a slow nod. “My wife’s not crazy about my job, either. Takes me away from home too much. But in this economy you do what you can, right?”

Marcus agreed and shifted his gaze to the window, where the Rocky Mountains stretched below them in snowcapped splendor. The man was right. In this economy, you took what you could get. Even better when what you could get was your dream job. Another reason why Amelia really should just accept that this was a good thing—no, a God thing.

And it certainly wasn’t the only reason. There was the way he’d clicked with the elders, despite the disparity between his age and theirs, which averaged around sixty. The way he’d taken to quaint Wheatridge, which made him think of
It’s a Wonderful Life’
s
Bedford Falls. The way his heart had raced when they’d laid out the challenge the job would set before him—being not only a pastor but a spiritual doctor, helping the congregation heal from a decade under a toxic pastor. When Ed Donovan had given Marcus a tour of the church, they’d stopped for a moment in the pastor’s office, and Marcus had easily imagined himself sitting at the mahogany desk in conference with a parishioner. The whole feel of the place suited him perfectly. He never would have expected it, given the pull he’d felt to the trendier young churches that met in movie theaters and industrial parks and nightclubs in downtown LA. But his attraction to the small, traditional church had been surprising, and undeniable.

And when Ed had offered him the job as they drove to the airport that afternoon, Marcus had almost accepted it then and there. In fact, had Ed not followed the offer with “We know you need to talk it over with Amelia first,” he probably would have.

And now he really knew: He should never have made that promise to Amelia.

The plane touched down at LAX, and Marcus and his neighbor wished each other well as they parted ways in the terminal. Having only his carry-on, Marcus skipped baggage claim and headed straight for the exit, where his eyes scanned the shifting crowd for Amelia’s face. It was the kind of thing she’d typically do: show up to welcome him home, even though they’d already made plans to meet up at their small group’s Sunday night community dinner at Jill and Dane’s. But after a few minutes spent swiveling in place as he searched in vain, he headed for the ground transportation exit to take the light rail, alone.

It was a calculated move, and he knew it. Were he returning from any other trip she’d have been there; that’s just how she was. It hurt to know that she was still closed off to this whole thing. He took a seat in the nearest Metro car and thought over the things he’d brought back for her. He’d meant for them to be fun and enticing, to help her see that moving to Nebraska wouldn’t be the end of the world. But the locally grown popcorn, the mug from the Omaha Performing Arts Theater, a schedule of its upcoming season, and the “I’m kind of a big deal in Nebraska” T-shirt he’d seen at the airport no longer struck him as amusing souvenirs.

He stared out the window as the city came into view.
It’s clear to me what You’re doing, God,
he prayed as his eyes took in the smoggy sky and shining buildings—such a contrast from the cold, snowy, and overcast weekend he’d spent in the very flat town of Wheatridge.
But if You’re making it clear to me, why aren’t You making it clear to Amelia? I’m supposed to take this job, aren’t I? I don’t want to go back on my word. I know I shouldn’t have promised not to go if she didn’t want to, but I really thought You’d change her mind.

Though maybe He still would. He shouldn’t despair yet. God was known for His eleventh-hour saves.

The Metro pulled into his station, and Marcus filed off with a few others and headed for the street. He had to remember this wasn’t over yet. Who knew what Amelia’s response might be when he told her he’d been officially offered the job? God could make anything happen.