The congregation reacted and the sound of their voices almost drowned out Aunt Lucy’s next bombshell. “I know you don’t like him, honey, but Jake’s the only one who listens to me.” She smiled. “It was just a lucky break for us—he’s an ordained minister.”
I looked up at Jake and saw him staring back at me, no doubt slack-jawed at the new and improved version of my former self. Blond hair, spiky stiletto heels and Nina’s miniskirt definitely wasn’t the old mousy me. No, I was a good ten pounds lighter and four inches taller in heels. Between the makeup and the attitude, I was surprised he recognized me at all.
I stared right back at him. He hadn’t changed in all the time I’d been gone. He had the same dark eyes, same killer good looks and probably the same smart-assed attitude. I watched as his gaze shifted to Aunt Lucy. When he smiled gently at her and then winked, I could’ve thrown up. He was wearing faded tight jeans, cowboy boots and a black leather Harley-Davidson jacket. Where was his respect for the dead? And for that matter, if Jake Carpenter had somehow found Jesus, which I seriously doubted, where were his robe and collar?
I leaned over and touched my aunt’s arm. “Aunt Lucy, the last time I checked, Jake was a bartender, not a priest.”
She smiled. “Well now, honey, except for those little two-day Christmas trips of yours, you’ve been gone almost eleven years. A lot happens, especially around here. Jake’s got his own auto body shop. He’s really changed, Stella. He settled down after he got out of the service. He’s found himself.
“He sent off for one of them mail-order certificates. He’s a minister in some nondenominational church, you know, the kind that doesn’t meet and doesn’t have a building.” She held up her hand to cut off my protest. “I know, it sounds funny but, well, he’s here and Father Mark isn’t.”
Aunt Lucy lifted her head defiantly, nodded toward Jake and the service began again.
“Brothers and sisters,” Jake said, his voice rising above the crowd’s murmuring, “let us pray!”
I didn’t even bother to bow my head. Jake Carpenter might be fooling my aunt, but I wasn’t going to fall for his tricks again. Nope. One trip to the altar with Jake Carpenter had been more than enough for me.
Chapter 4
In one short hour, Jake Carpenter managed to take every feeling I’d been harboring about him for eleven years and twist it into a molten mass of confusion and regret. In some ways, he was the same as he’d always been, but with a twist, a difference that was both charismatic and unfathomable.
We were assembled at the graveside when Jake decided it was time to speak. Up until then, he had functioned mainly as an emcee, letting Uncle Benny’s friends tell the stories of his many kindnesses and good deeds. But as we stood around the AstroTurfed grave site, contemplating this final rest stop for my uncle, Jake seemed to take charge. It was time to say goodbye, and Jake was there to ease the transition.
“A priest, in this case me,” he began, “a Lutheran pastor, who shall go nameless for the sake of protecting his sterling reputation, and our Benny were all out fishing in Benny’s boat over on Kerr Park Lake one day. It was hot and we had consumed a fair quantity of Benny’s favorite brew when the pastor felt the call of nature.”
Everyone was smiling at Jake. Even my jaded cousin Nina beamed up at him benevolently.
“So the pastor gets out of the boat, walks across the water, steps ashore and visits the Porta-John.” Jake’s eyes twinkled. “Then he walks back across the top of the water and steps into the boat, not a drop of moisture on him. A little time goes by, and then it’s my turn. I hop out of Benny’s skiff, walk across the water and return the same way.”
I scanned the group of mourners and found they were all smiling, wrapped up in Jake’s tale and seeing their old friend through familiar eyes.
“Well now, Benny, he can’t stand it. He says, ‘Youse guys ain’t the only ones with faith. I can do that, too!’ So he hops out of the boat…and sinks like a rock! He comes up sputtering, mad as hell. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘how’s come youse guys can walk on water and I can’t?’” Jake chuckled. “I looked at the Lutheran pastor. He looked at me and says, ‘Reckon we shoulda shown him where the stepping stones were, huh, Jake?’ he says.”
The congregation laughed. Jake laughed, too, but his eyes were warm as he looked over at Aunt Lucy and the rest of us who stood by her. “Yeah, we all loved Benny. He was a good man, but he was only serious about a few things—his family, his friends and fishing.”
Jake moved to stand beside the open grave site, resting a hand on the closed casket. “Benny’s hooked the big one now. He’s moved up to fish with the pros, and us amateurs, well, we’re gonna miss the hell out of him.” Jake smiled at Aunt Lucy. “But we can all take comfort in this certainty,” he said. “Benny’s with the big guy himself, fishing that vast and comforting expanse they call eternal life. And one day, we’ll all be together again, because that’s how it works. No one is ever lost to us, not really. They’ve just gone on ahead to scout the territory.”
Jake looked out at the congregation. “All right,” he said. “You guys on the left of the casket are group one. You people over there are group two. And you people in the back, you’re group three. Now, when I point to you, start singing. I think you all know the words…. ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.’”
With that, Jake smiled gently, raised his arms in the air like a band conductor and motioned. Like sheep we began to sing, right on cue. And as the casket was slowly lowered into the ground, we filed past the grave, tossing pink carnations in on top of Uncle Benny and singing the simple, sweet song we’d known as children. But that was not why I felt such an urge to escape from everyone and everything. What sent me over the edge was the fact that Jake Carpenter had taken me in once again.
He had managed, with his goofy joke and his stupid song, to lull me into an unguarded moment in which every happy memory I’d ever shared with Uncle Benny came flooding back with a suddenness that took my breath away. Jake had forced me to feel the vast emptiness of losing the one man who’d ever truly understood me.
This new pain melted into all the feelings I’d so carefully sealed away, leaving me stranded in my old hometown and feeling like a shipwreck survivor. I was home, but I was a stranger. I’d expected to find things just as they’d always been, only better, softened by the pink glow of my very selective memory. But now, when I needed to come home and feel safe, I found myself trapped in a nightmare.
I stared out of the funeral home limo as we drove home, watching the familiar neighborhood pass by the rain-streaked window. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Benny lived in a blue-collar Italian neighborhood that even on the best of days smelled like the nearby paper mill. The brick row homes and postage-stamp backyards were coated in a thin layer of grimy ash that descended like smog over everything and everybody, until gray became the standard color and a hacking cough our constant companion in the wintertime.
But once you set foot in the house, the black-and-white TV screen of our lives changed into a vibrant Technicolor. The kitchen was yellow, the air warm and fragrant with baking bread and everywhere you turned there was some picture or reminder of all the important events or occasions in Benny’s and Lucy’s full-to-overflowing lives. It was a home with love to spare, a home that had taken me in when my parents died and tried, with some success, to raise me into a healed and whole person.
People were packed into every corner of the downstairs by the time I arrived. They sat on the steps leading up to the second-floor bedrooms and peeked through the banisters at the others sitting in the living room below them. They laughed and shouted, hugged and drank, and some cried, not for long, but with earnest emotion that was no longer concealed by convention or etiquette. It was as much home to me as it was foreign. It was too much to return to, and still, it had