James shrugged. “I wanted to be a chef, before I decided to go to seminary.”
“Maybe you should’ve stuck with the chef plan. Surely God wants His people well-fed.”
“Well,” James smiled. “There’s always time for a second chance, isn’t there?”
“I’m hungry,” said a small, crisp voice, startling them both.
Nathan was standing in the doorframe, toeing the line between the dining room and the kitchen, scrawny arms folded against his chest. Howie was standing behind him, waiting to see what his little brother’s demand might yield.
“I think it’s a few more minutes until dinner’ll be ready—” Lila started, and then her young son cut her off, aiming his next statement at the interloper in their home.
“Tell me what you made.”
A command, not an inquiry.
James was unfazed. “Wasn’t sure what you’d like. So I made roasted chicken and seasoned vegetables, and also some batter for pancakes, which you can have tonight or save ’til tomorrow or—”
“Cereal,” Nathan interrupted, defiant and definitive.
Lila felt trapped by her petulant child, as always. She knew he needed discipline, but he’d had such a hard life. Born sick. Father died. He was so easily upset, and who could blame him? So she said nothing when he spoke rudely to their guest; she just guiltily watched James’ face fall. To his credit, the clergyman quickly recovered.
“Sure, Nathan. Cereal, coming right up. Howie, how about you? What do you want for dinner?”
Lila felt Howie pressing into the back of her legs, peeking around her to look up at James and the various pots and pans deployed for the first time in months. Lila knew Howie was torn. His loyalty would make him want to take his brother’s side. But he also loved chicken.
“I’ll have some chicken,” Howie whispered at last. And then, louder: “And some cereal.”
James’ resigned smile became a genuine one, and he winked at Lila.
“Chicken and cereal,” he said. “Sounds great to me.”
“Thank you,” mouthed Lila.
The evening’s feast of chicken and cereal, with vegetables enjoyed by the adults (their praises loudly sung by Lila, in a fruitless attempt to coax her children into taking a bite), became the first of a series of dinners.
The next week, James called Lila before coming by; week after that, he simply arrived with a bag of groceries—featuring a prominent box of Cheerios poking from the top of the grocery sack. Proving that “tradition” could be defined as “doing the same thing more than three times,” the fourth Sunday evening when James arrived Lila had already set the table.
At some point, a few months in to the arrangement, Lila started calling James each Saturday to ask if there was anything he wanted her to pick up at the grocery. But he insisted on bringing his own ingredients. Howie and Nathan grudgingly accepted the weekly dinner. Nathan hated James on principle, from day one, and never relented—despite the fact that Reverend James brought a weekly offering of Nathan’s prized cereal. Nathan ate the cereal. He just didn’t award the preacher any brownie points.
Howie, on the other hand, liked James. He began looking forward to the Sunday dinners. Although he did feel the need to periodically remind his mother that the reverend was not as good or smart or interesting as his father had been.
“He doesn’t want to replace your dad,” Lila assured her son, wondering if he did.
She couldn’t tell if James was interested in that scenario—in being the boys’ father; in being her husband, or lover, or anything beyond friend. He was so respectful, so unassuming. He just showed up and cooked. Not just that, though; he showed up and talked. Listened. Made her feel, for the first time in two years, both interesting and interested. She was relieved to have someone who saw her as more than That Poor Widow. It was a balm, soothing her crone-fears, smoothing some of the imagined wrinkles from her skin.
“You were a reporter?” James asked, over a dinner of grilled salmon and asparagus.
The first course had been cereal for the boys, and one glass of good red wine for each of the grown-ups. Then both boys turned up their noses at the fish and went off to read and play. Alone, with real food and real conversation and a second glass of wine in-hand, Lila felt dangerously close to being on a date.
A pseudo-date, at least.
“Yes,” Lila said. “Until we had Howie. I worked right up until the day I had him, in fact. He was just about born in the newsroom.”
“Really?”
“I was on a deadline.”
“Overlapping deadlines, huh?”
“Met ’em both,” she said, proud.
He smiled, warmly. “What got you into it?”
“Oh,” Lila said, enjoying the memory as she unpacked it, carefully, gently. “Our local newspaper had a competition when I was in the seventh grade. An essay contest, ‘Why Newspapers Matter.’ I wrote the essay that would win, got a youth-voice column in the paper, and from there—”
“You said ‘you wrote the essay that would win,’” James interrupted. “Don’t you mean you wrote the essay that won?”
“Well, it won,” Lila admitted. “But it won because I wrote the essay that would win. It was strategic. I wrote what the judges would want to read. I didn’t write what I believed, I wrote what they wanted to read.”
“Clever little girl.”
“Clever enough.”
“And it worked.”
“It worked,” Lila agreed. “I got my fifty-dollar savings bond. I got my column. Kept it up until I graduated from high school. Parlayed that into a spot on the editorial team for my college newspaper. Majored in journalism. Applied for any newspaper job I could find. Wound up at the Ann Arbor Gazette.”
She’d been Lila Golden then, and seeing her name—LILA GOLDEN—credited with a byline was thrilling. Her first assignments were basic and dues-paying, but not altogether boring. She enjoyed researching and writing obituaries, though they were often uncredited. She enjoyed attending city meetings, interviewing politicians, elbowing her way around the old boys’ clubs at the papers, staking out her own spot in the ground upon which to press her ear.
“So I guess you liked it.”
“I loved it,” she said, the clacking of a typewriter singing in her ears, her nose recalling the smell of ink. She knew she was romanticizing her newspaper days, overplaying the good moments and downplaying the stress, the misogyny, the pressure to perform. Despite her love for the work, she was an unreliable witness when it came to the details of its downsides.
“Do you miss it?”
She knew she should have said no, not really, being a mother is so fulfilling, I’ve never really looked back. That’s what the other mothers of Ann Arbor would expect her to say, and certainly what their husbands would assume. It’s what everyone wanted to believe, to validate their own choices and pay homage to the world as they understand it. But losing her husband also helped Lila lose any ambition she had of fitting in with the successful wives, the ones who decorated cakes and kept their children in matching socks and had husbands who were still breathing. And anyway, James wasn’t like them. So she told him the truth, unfiltered.