The Garden of Happy Endings (17 page)
Read The Garden of Happy Endings Online
Authors: Barbara O'Neal
Tamsin took a deep breath, reached for the pinks, the green. Paused, narrowing her eyes and reaching for the organza.
Elsa handed it over. “Do you need time?”
“A little.”
“There’s no hurry.”
Tamsin was already lost in the tug of memory suggested by a scrap of yellow satin, a sunny afternoon when her daughter was small. Lost in her dreams, in that other world, she tugged it out, moved on, let the voices of the patterns and colors speak her name, raise their hands.
Tell my story! Tell mine!
E
lsa rose at four on Thursday mornings, which were soup kitchen days. The alarm went off, yanking her from a surprisingly deep sleep. She climbed out of bed, stepping over her conked-out dog, who lifted his head, peered at her, then fell back asleep, his head hitting the carpet with an audible
thump
. She chuckled softly in the dark. Crazy dog.
Nestled into a warm chenille robe, Elsa padded silently into the kitchen and made a pot of tea. While it brewed, she opened her email. There was a Daily Word, which she read every morning out of long habit. This morning’s word was “healing.”
Ha-ha-ha. Very funny
.
There was also a note from the interim minister, asking for some clarification on an ongoing class she taught. At the end, he added,
There are some issues I’d like to speak with you about. Will you kindly give me a call at your earliest convenience?
Elsa typed,
Absolutely. I’m working at the soup kitchen this morning. Will call you late this afternoon.
Aside from a half-dozen advertisements and department store circulars, that was it. Elsa sipped her tea, thick with milk, and listened to the roar of silence, broken only distantly by Charlie’s intermittent snores. The lack of email was hard to get used to. In the past, it had often taken her a full hour to sort through it, morning and night.
Bored, she opened the news websites and scanned the headlines. Nothing of interest.
Except—there, in a small headline on cnn.com:
COLORADO FINANCIER SOUGHT IN
CONNECTION TO PONZI SCHEME
In the accompanying photograph were Scott and Tamsin, dressed for a formal function. Tamsin was draped in jewels and a designer dress, looking like a movie star. Beside her, Scott was a little shorter and balding, but good-looking in a Stanley Tucci kind of way, that clean Italian robustness. The photo showed his adoration of Tamsin, the pride and delight that was on his face whenever he looked at her. Always.
“Scott, Scott, Scott,” she said aloud. “Where have you gone? And what have you done to my sister? Couldn’t you have at least left her something in a secret stash?”
But of course, he couldn’t have, not if Tamsin was to escape without criminal charges.
The reporters had pretty much disappeared, but this would bring them back again. Tamsin would not be able to find a job easily with them trailing her every move.
Insane. But staring at the picture, she noticed the earrings. Emerald earrings the size of almonds, which Tamsin had worn all the time. She said it was safe because people just thought they
were fakes. She often forgot she was even wearing them. Elsa couldn’t remember seeing them since the first day Tamsin had arrived, so maybe she’d taken them off before the work in the garden. Or perhaps Elsa had grown used to them, too, a part of Tamsin like her hair or her long legs.
If not, they could probably carry Tamsin through. But who would buy such emeralds? Quietly and quickly. Someone had to know.
Her email dinged, and absurdly pleased to have a distraction, Elsa clicked back to the email program. It was from a name she didn’t recognize, but the subject seemed sincere. She opened it.
From: [email protected]
Subject: A thank you note
Dear Reverend Elsa,
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, how very much you have influenced and helped me, and I thought you should know. Even though you didn’t say so, it’s plain you’re questioning your abilities as a minister, or maybe you’re questioning your faith.
Far as the first goes, as you always say, we have the work we’re supposed to do, which is what makes God’s ways work. I would hate it if I was quiet and didn’t say what I was supposed to say and you kept feeling despair.
Wow, that’s a tangled-up sentence, but I hope you get what I mean. I’m not a good writer.
“Despair” is a good word, right? That’s where I was when I came to the church, five years ago. I was going through my second divorce, even though I got sober after the first one, and it just seemed to me that I was not a very good person if even stopping drinking couldn’t help me make my life whole. I was very down on myself, hated just about everything about me, from my crazy hair to my belly to my fingernails, which I bite. I had a lousy little job in a convenience store, which was honestly one of the only good things, not the money, but the fact that people came there in even worse shape than me
and it was good for me to be nice to them. My mom always said you should do something nice for people when you’re feeling sad or depressed or whatever. I never went to college, never had any kids, never did one single thing that would make a difference in the world, and I was already past 40, so most of that wasn’t gonna happen. There used to be this lady who came into the store before church on Sundays, and she was always really friendly and … I don’t know, glowy? And one time I heard her talking about her church, which was Unity, and I knew where it was because I lived pretty close by. Like close enough to even walk. But I worked most Sundays, so I didn’t go for a while.
And then, when I had a very bad week with my ex, who had taken pretty much everything already and wanted to take my house, which I was trying so hard to keep and keep nice, it was the one good thing in my life, and I was so mad and so lost and so sad that I was afraid I might go back to drinking if I didn’t do something, and I remembered about Unity and that lady, so I looked up the times on the computer and went that very next Sunday.
You won’t remember, of course, but you talked that day about love. How could God love me less than I love my dog? Which I don’t have a dog, but I have a cat and he is my best friend in the world. (His name is Jordan and he’s a giant creamy tabby with blue eyes. The prettiest cat you ever saw.) And you talked about animals and how they love us and something in me just gave way, like I never thought of loving myself the way Jordan loves me, which is a lot, you should see the way he looks at me, and he comes running when I get home from work, and purrs on my chest. I’m his favorite thing and he’s mine, but I’d never thought about it the way you said it that day, how God loves us like that. Always I thought about God being this big judgmental president kind of guy, and what you said made me imagine that if I could see him, he’d give me a hug. Because no matter what, he’d love me like I love Jordan and Jordan loves me. I started to cry right then, and I knew I’d come back. I loved the way you looked up there on the stage or altar or whatever it’s called, with your hair all curly and your pretty scarves and your
bracelets rattling on your wrists. You have a voice that’s easy to listen to, too. Like music.
And I guess I’m getting embarrassed now, that you’ll think I’m a crazy stalker person, but I wanted to let you know that. And I know I’m just an ordinary person without any skills or whatever, but if you ever want to talk, I’m sure willing to listen.
Your friend,
Maggie Reims
Elsa didn’t recognize the name Margaret, but she knew who Maggie was, a time-worn woman in her forties. She volunteered with the cleaning committee and the library and, just before Elsa had taken her sabbatical, she had stepped forward to be an usher for the coming year. It would be good for her to greet the congregants as they came in, giving hugs or handshakes.
Abruptly, Elsa exited the program, stinging.
The work we are meant to do
. If she wasn’t going to be a minister anymore, what would she do?
Who would she even be?
No time to worry about it now. She had to take a shower and get over to the church. It was the end of the month and the soup kitchen would be busy.
She left a note for her sister.
Don’t forget! Come to the church by 8:30 and there’s wine in it for you tonight. We really, really need your help today, so please come.
When she peeked out of the front windows, there were no reporters, thank heaven. She leashed Charlie and zipped her coat, pulling on a wool cap and gloves. It wasn’t light out yet. Not unusual—she often walked to the church before dawn on soup kitchen days—but something lingered from her forgotten dreams, something dark and bloody and evil. For a moment, she paused
on the step, listening. Charlie waited with her, looking up with a puzzled expression on his snout, his tail sweeping slowly side to side behind him.
“I know, you’re right. Let’s go.”
She walked briskly, only realizing after several repetitions that she was chanting the rosary under her breath, a very old habit.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee …”
How she had loved Mary as a teenager! It made her feel slightly foolish to chant the rosary now, but—even so—she imagined a capsule of blue light falling down around her, making her invisible to those who would cause her harm, keeping her warm and safe. Just as she had when she was a child.
What could it hurt? She highly doubted Mary was there, either, but if the image of blue light made her feel better, that was fine, too. On the far distant eastern horizon, the sky had begun to lighten, and just the promise of light made her feel less anxious.
Maybe the encounter with the gang boys had unsettled her more than she realized.
As she and Charlie approached from the back of San Roque, she saw that Joaquin’s lights were on. Maybe they could have a cup of coffee before the day began. With that in mind, she cut in a diagonal across the internal courtyard, and startled a white cat at the base of the statue of San Roque. It dashed away, and Charlie made a small yip of yearning.
There were lights in the field, or at first she thought there were, soft little balls of blue light bobbing along the ground. When she took a step toward the field, peering into the darkness, they disappeared, and she heard the distant sound of laughter.
“Must be fairies,” she said to Charlie, who looked up at her with his head cocked, perplexed. Elsa rubbed one uplifted ear. “Don’t look at me. I have no idea where it went.”
As she passed the statue of the saint, she touched his foot. “Bless the dogs,” she said, and brushed the head of his dog, “and those who love them.”
She unlocked the kitchen door, let Charlie off his leash to go see Joaquin, and turned on the lights. Grocery bags sat on the counter, and she peeked into them, finding day-old cinnamon rolls and cookies and bags of clementines that would be very cheerful to look at. Someone had donated carrots that had gone a little soft and she pulled them out to be washed. The soup today was one of her favorites, a split pea with barley, which stuck to the ribs and had a great solidness in the mouth from the grain.
The thing that took the most time every soup kitchen morning was the bread, which they made from scratch, always the same seven-grain, which volunteers started the day before. She pulled the loaves out of the fridge and lined them up on tables to begin to warm to room temperature and rise a final time. There were three ovens in the room, and she turned them all on to 350°.
She glanced at the clock. The first volunteers would arrive around seven, another hour and a half. She started a pot of coffee in the little pot, not the giant-sized one they would use at lunch, and pulled the dishwasher open. It was full of clean dishes, so she put them away, checking the stores of spoons and bowls.
All routine. As she worked, the email echoed through her, earnest and so kind. Impossible not to think about her little church tucked away from the street in its grove of firs and monkey trees. The first time she’d seen it, Elsa had fallen in love. It looked like a chapel at church camp, cozy and welcoming, never judgmental. The sanctuary always smelled of cedar and old carpet and the candles that were part of the altar table. They changed colors through the seasons, replaced by the women who kept the altar beautiful.
Arms crossed, she stared absently through the window at the predawn sky, letting it in. Letting
them
in, all the people who filed in on Sunday mornings to the upbeat sound of piano or flute or whatever the musicians were playing that morning. The church was blessed with musicians—a cellist from the local symphony,
a blues singer from Mississippi, a classically trained opera singer who could blow the windows out of the place when she was on full power. Elsa smiled, remembering the high drama that could erupt over music when so many talented people were involved.
The woman who had sent the email, Maggie, had begun by slinking into a seat next to the wall at the back, but as time went by, she claimed a spot near the middle, on the aisle, where fingers of sunlight sometimes touched her hair. She was as ordinary as grass, with her dishwater hair and round figure. Before Elsa left, Maggie had begun to wear a red jacket to church, or sometimes a bright blue sweater that made her look like a piece of stained glass.