Confession

  “Sure,” she said from behind me. “Also some Thorazine.” I walked two more steps before I really heard her, and then I started to laugh and stopped and turned around to face her.

  “Jenny, what in the world is wrong?”

  I put my hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length from me. “I’m pregnant, Ginger.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  I grinned and dropped my arms to my sides. “Just kidding.”

  Ginger stared at me, then walked past me into her kitchen.

  When I got there, she was already filling a coffee pot with fresh-ground beans, and she looked up at me, and said, “You can’t do this to me so early in the morning unless you tell me everything that’s wrong.”

  “Oh, Ginger.” I pulled up a stool to her counter to watch her. “David’s stepfather was killed last night.”

  “David?”

  “Geof’s new son.”

  “Oh! How could I forget!”

  “Well, we haven’t sent out birth announcements …”

  “Oh, no, Jenny, that poor child …”

  Bless her sweet heart, Ginger looked truly stricken for him.

  I told her as much as the law—meaning, my husband—would allow about the apparent homicide of Dennis Clemmons. I didn’t mention the videotapes or my trip to the hospital less than six hours earlier or the mutilated animals on our property or …

  While Ginger took a few minutes to comb her hair and brush her teeth, I stirred the eggs she’d put in a skillet to scramble and used the portable phone in her kitchen to call Port Frederick High School. By sweet-talking the school secretary, who’d been there when I was a student, I managed to weasel out of her the surprising information that David Mayer was in attendance that morning.

  “Uh, Jenny?” The secretary, a formidable woman who had ridden stern herd on tardy students for at least twenty-five years, sounded uncharacteristically hesitant. “You say David Mayer is a relative of yours?”

  “Sort of …” I hedged. “By marriage …”

  “Um, and, uh, you’re married to that policeman, aren’t you? The one who was such a hellion when he was here in school?”

  I smiled. “That’s the one. Geoffrey Bushfield.”

  “Hah.” A touch of her usual tone returned to her voice. “I haven’t forgotten that one, and I still find it hard to believe he’s a police officer. But since he is, and since he’s related to David, and you are by marriage, I wonder …” Her speech became halting again, her voice quieter, as if she didn’t want anybody in the school office to overhear her. “… if you and he could stop by the school some time today?”

  “I imagine so, but is it anything to do with David?”

  “Dr. Fellows will talk to you about that when you get here.”

  She sounded just like her old self, terrifying a student with a threatened interview with the principal. I hung up, having added unease to the surprise I felt over the news of David’s presence at school that day. I don’t know where I expected him to be instead—on the highway, I guess, driving on his motorcycle, putting miles between himself and the latest death in his “family.”

  Ginger and I were sharing a repast that consisted of the eggs mixed with chopped everything, from bacon to scallions to mushrooms to peppers; a stack of buttered toast; and vast cups of cappuccino made in her own machine when her doorbell rang again.

  “Strange morning,” she muttered.

  “You’re tellin’ me,” I said, seconding the emotion.

  This time, when Ginger went to answer it, she returned from the front door with my husband in tow. When I looked at him, he shook his head behind Ginger’s back as if to say to me, “Don’t ask.”

  “Have you got any more of that feast?” he said to her.

  She turned, patted his arm, and smiled affectionately up at him. “Your wife and I have pretty much gone through the refrigerator like locusts, but we may have left some little bits of food hidden way back in the corners where it was too dark for us to see them.”

  “That’s where the best mold grows.” Geof put his arms around her and hugged her, baby doll pajamas and all. The pj’s looked enough like a shorts set to pass for regular daytime wear. However, suddenly seeing her through Geof’s eyes, I wished for her sake that they didn’t accentuate her increasing chubbiness quite so amply.

  “Sit down, and finish your breakfast, Ginger,” he said to her. “I can cook for myself. Did you make that call I asked you to, Jenny?”

  “Yes. He’s there.”

  Geof released Ginger and stared at me. “He is?”

  “Who is?” Ginger asked. When he didn’t answer, looking from one to the other of us, she added, “What’s going on, guys?”

  “Police business,” he growled, making a joke of it. I wanted to tell him about the school secretary’s request for us to see the principal that day, but I decided I’d better wait until he and I were alone. Feeling anxious with all the questions and news pent up inside of me, all I could do was sit and watch him loosen his tie, roll up the sleeves of his shirt, and begin to act like a chef. He said, “The Mayers did this kitchen for you, Ginger, right? It looks great. Were you happy with what they did for you?”

  “Perfection.” Ginger settled down at the counter again and crossed forks with me as we both stabbed at the scrambled eggs at the same time. I retreated my hand from harm’s way and let her have them along with the last of the bacon she’d cooked. “They do beautiful work, Geof, and like I told Jenny at lunch the other day, they are totally conscientious. Always showed up on time. Always cleaned up their mess at the end of every day. Never made a decimal more noise than they had to. Always treated me with courtesy and respect. As far as I’m concerned, they were the construction company from heaven.”

  “Jenny said they weren’t real friendly, though.”

  She paused, fork in mouth, and slowly removed it. Her chin was greasy, so I reached over to dab it with my napkin, and she gave me an affectionate smile of thanks. “Well, I guess that’s true, although what I think I said was that they were reserved around me.”

  “What I inferred,” I interrupted, “was that you never got to know them very well in spite of the fact that they were here for months, right under your nose in your own house. I may have jumped to the wrong conclusion, but that didn’t sound friendly to me.”

  “Well.” She wasn’t agreeing with me. “Maybe not, but it was professional. I don’t need to become buddies with my builders. I just want them to do the work for the money. And they did that and more. I didn’t require them to become my new best friends. What have you guys got against the Mayers?”

  “Not a thing,” Geof said as he cracked an egg into a pan. “Did you ever see the kid? Did he ever work over here with them?”

  “The kid?” She smiled at him. “Your kid, you mean? No.”

  “His mother?”

  “No.”

  When he had finished preparing a couple of fried eggs and more bacon along with still more toast for all of us to share, I scooted over to give him room to seat himself beside me at the counter. He looked across at Ginger and said, “So what do you know about this religion they practice?”

  “A little,” she said carefully and took more toast.

  I looked at her, suddenly wondering at her hesitations.

  “Would you tell us that ‘little’?” he pressed her.

  She ate a bite and took a long time draining her coffee before she spoke. “I’m trying to recall. It’s about Jesus, but it’s not exactly Christianity. I think. I’m real vague on this. They didn’t try to convert me, please understand, in fact they hardly mentioned it, except that I guess they felt they had to tell me why they never worked on Tuesdays. It was because they had services on Monday nights, and I guess they always ran late—really late, like three or four in the morning—and then Tuesday was a kind of Sabbath family day when they took it easy.”

  “Jesus but not Christian?” I asked. “A Tuesday Sabbath?”

  She smi
led a little. “It sounds kind of simpleminded now that you make me think about it. Jesus was a carpenter, right? And they were carpenters, builders, what have you. So he and they were kind of like in the same building trade, I guess. They felt an affinity, I gather, with what he did to earn a living, with the simplicity of his tools, which were theirs as well. They make a lot of their own tools, they do all of the work themselves if they can, and I mean all of it. They prefer to make pegged hardwood floors, for instance, instead of nailing the boards down.”

  Geof looked down at her shiny floor and he whistled. “Expensive.”

  “Oh, they’re not cheap,” Ginger agreed. “But they’re worth it. High standards. Great workmanship. Top quality in everything. They don’t take on very many jobs, but then they don’t have to, because they charge so much on the jobs they do. It’s only people like me”—she made a face at us—“who can afford them, which means they do a lot of their work out of town. They’re a self-contained unit, like an air conditioner.”

  We all smiled at the unlikely analogy.

  “They didn’t subcontract a thing, which cuts down quite a bit on expenses, really, helps to make up for some of the rest of it. But, yes, it’s true, they do charge a torso.”

  “A torso?” Geof asked.

  “More than an arm and a leg,” I guessed, and she nodded. “But, Ginger, I don’t recall that Jesus only worked for rich folks.”

  “They may have conveniently overlooked that fact,” she observed with a straight face. “I’ve heard that many do.”

  Geof asked, “What about the women?”

  “Some do carpentry, like I told Jenny on Monday.” She shook her head in mock annoyance. “Really, Geof, you ought to come to lunch with us if you’re going to make us repeat everything we tell Jenny. And don’t try to pretend to me that she doesn’t tell you everything we say. As I told her, the women did all of the interior painting, some of the exterior, all of the wallpapering, and they were general dogsbodies to the men. I was impressed; I’d never seen women with that kind of expertise before, even if the men did treat them like apprentices sometimes.”

  I jumped in. “Chauvinists?”

  But she shrugged her round shoulders, which made her upper arms quiver. “Hard to say.”

  “Why? How can that be difficult to determine?”

  Ginger looked confused for a moment, and she munched on the last piece of Geof’s toast before she answered me. “Because maybe they were apprentices, at least compared to the men. The brothers grew up in the business; they probably nailed their own playpens together.”

  We all laughed.

  “But,” she added, “the women married into it.”

  I turned toward Geof and intoned, “With this hammer, I thee wed.”

  “Do you promise,” he said to me, “to drive a straight nail, lay a true plumb line, and pour a solid foundation in sickness and in health, so long as we both shall work?”

  “I do. Not.”

  “I now,” said Ginger, “pronounce you man and carpenter’s apprentice. You may nail the bride.”

  We all snickered, and her cheeks got pink.

  “Do you remember their names?” Geof asked her. “Besides Ron, I mean.”

  “Sure. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

  “Bless the bed that I sleep on,” I murmured.

  She laughed harder than my joke deserved.

  “So Matthew would be the next oldest?” Geof asked. “I guess they really are churchy.”

  “Churchy?” Ginger’s eyebrows rose. “Is the pope Catholic? Are rabbis circumcised? Do Episcopalians know which fork to use with the salad?”

  “Ron?” I said “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John … and Ronald?”

  We all three began to laugh again, it sounded so ridiculous.

  “Well, he was the oldest,” Ginger said. “Maybe they didn’t find Jesus until after he was born. Maybe he was such a difficult baby, they needed Jesus.”

  I could feel hilarity rising in me from sheer exhaustion and stress, but then I got a look at my husband’s face, which had gone grim and tired on us, as if he’d suddenly recalled himself to the reality of this day. He got up and began to clear our plates for us.

  “What a helpful man,” Ginger observed to me.

  “I’ll loan him out,” I offered, “for a fee.”

  “Really?” She brightened. “What’s included?”

  “All right, ladies! We need to get out of here,” Geof told me as he lifted my dirty napkin off my lap.

  “Well, heck,” Ginger protested. “No more coffee?”

  “We do?” I said to him. “I don’t. I need to talk to Ginger—”

  “Please,” he said again just to me. “I’m sorry,” he said just for her.

  “Oh, all right,” I groused.

  “Are you going home first?” Ginger asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, then turned to him. “Am I?”

  “No.”

  “Then you come with me for just a minute,” Ginger instructed me. “I’ll give you a T-shirt that doesn’t look as if you stopped by the Salvation Army bin on the way over here.”

  “Why not?” I asked her. “It’s probably full of your old clothes anyway.”

  “I’ll meet you outside,” Geof said to me, and then he blew Ginger a kiss on his way out of the kitchen. “Thank you for breakfast!”

  “Anytime!” she called after him. “I always have hot coffee and a doughnut ready for the local constabulary!”

  I traipsed off after my friend, down her long, lush hallways, up her stairs to the landing, and then on down to her opulent bedroom, which the Mayer Construction Company had also renovated, putting in such refinements as a spa/tub, a bidet, and French doors leading to a shaded deck on the back of the house.

  She opened a box of fresh dry cleaning and pulled out a pretty purple T-shirt and handed it to me to put on in place of the red and white plaid one I was wearing, which did not, I had to admit, go particularly well with the white shorts with purple pinstripes that I was also wearing.

  “I didn’t drag you up here just to talk about clothes,” she said.

  “We were supposed to be meeting this morning to talk about business, weren’t we?” I smiled at her as I started to change tops. I was taller and thinner than Ginger, but we both wore large T’s. “Did you see what that British rock star did recently? He started his own foundation to help AIDS patients. He thinks more of the money raised by foundations ought to go right to the people who need it instead of into administration and all the rest of that bullshit, and so he’s only got a couple of employees and he’s paying their salaries himself.”

  She sat down on the edge of her bed and looked up at me. “That so-called bullshit paid your salary for several years, Jenny. And I suspect that when you’ve only got a couple of employees, they’re frequently extremely overworked ones.”

  “Ah, so you’re willing to contribute as much as we need to properly adminster this … thing?”

  “I think I’ve just been manipulated by a fund-raising maestro.”

  “Well, I am supposed to discreetly inquire as to how much money you want to invest in our foundation, Ms. Culverson, and then you’re supposed to give me a figure that buys you love.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mine.”

  “Hell, I’ve already got that, can’t you offer anybody else?”

  I laughed, the sound muffled by the shirt I was pulling on.

  “I didn’t actually drag you up here to talk about the foundation either, Jenny. It’s about something else. And since you brought it up, speaking of … um … love … can I tell you something?”

  “Well, sure, but don’t think it has escaped my notice how smoothly you are attempting to divert my attention from the subject of charitable contributions.”

  “And you’ll tell Geof for me?”

  Suddenly I saw how serious her expression had become.

  “I can’t tell him myself, because I’m too embarrassed …”


  Really curious now, I asked, “About what, Ginger?”

  “Well, Jenny …” My friend’s face was very pink as if she’d rouged it. “The thing of it is, while they were working on my house, on this room specifically, I had a kind of an affair with Ron Mayer, but it was over so fast—”

  I stared at her, then blurted, “You did what?”

  “I thought Geof ought to know.”

  “But, Ginger, I thought he was supposed to be so religious!”

  “Oh, Jenny, he wasn’t a bad man.” Ginger sounded so sympathetic to him that I could have shaken her. “It wasn’t his fault that his wife was an invalid, and she couldn’t have sex. Did you know that she couldn’t?”

  I shook my head no.

  “What was he supposed to do, be celibate for the rest of his life?”

  “I hate it when people expect me to be fair-minded.”

  She smiled. “He was kind of sweet, Jenny. Not much conversation. Well, I mean he was polite, you know, and he always said thank you.” She giggled a little. “We didn’t really have anything in common except my room additions.” Another embarrassed giggle. “But he said he was lonely, and he was here and ready, and guess who else fit that description?”

  “I don’t know what to say, Ginger.”

  “I broke it off,” she told me. “Because the sex was all there was, and it wasn’t even that great except that he had this great bedroom voice. When he moaned, it was a meaningful experience, let me tell you!”

  “Ginger!”

  In spite of everything, we were both laughing. Then she said, “But I thought even I could do better than a married man.”

  “Oh, Ginger, of course you can.”