In the April morning sunlight even the gravestones look cheerful. The churchyard sits on a rise alongside the little brick church, the ground sloping toward the highway where Sunday traffic is light. In the distance, on the north side of the road, black Angus cattle graze. The service is over. People linger, coming outside, soaking up fellowship and warmth. What church is all about, Angie is sure to say if he gives her half a chance. But Jude is restless, holding the girls by the hand as his wife visits with the minister. Rev. Beverly Babcock looks holy in her white robe, which covers her roly-poly shape with dignity. Jude feels bad for spacing out during her sermon. You’re not supposed to think about sex at church, especially not sex across the way. He promises himself he will do better next Sunday. He means it. He’s an impostor in this congregation but not by choice. He would like to be the man Angie thinks he is.
Brylee tugs his arm. “I want to go with Pawpaw.”
Not far off from Angie, Boyd Cousins stands guard. He has no use for the man who married his only daughter. They started off on the wrong foot, Jude having said a couple of stupid things he regrets. Now, since he lost the job at CenVa Modular and Angie started cleaning houses, the man can scarcely tolerate his son-in-law. Jude wishes he could find something straight to say to Boyd, something true that would cause Boyd to respect him.
Jude sends the girls running over to their granddaddy, Cricket racing to keep up with Brylee who is almost five and sets the pace. Looking like a man who just won first prize, Boyd scoops them up and kisses their cheeks. He is brawny, has a weathered face, likes to be in charge. The girls’ delight is loud, and everybody in earshot beams. A happy family picture.
Shit.
Here’s the basic problem: Jude Johnson is on the outside of his own life. People see a man who is tender and attentive to his wife and daughters. A man whose baritone holds up the middle pillar of the hymns on Sunday. A man you can call to come help you get your tractor engine to turn over on a cold morning when it doesn’t want to. And he is all of those things. The problem is the rest of him.
Angie waits until they’re driving home to give Jude the little slip of paper.
“What’s that?”
“Rev. Beverly knows a lady over in Elam, she’s looking for a carpenter to build her some cabinets. This is her name and number.”
“What kind of cabinets?”
“I don’t know, Jude. You’ll have to call and ask her.”
Jude is good with tools. A skilled woodworker, in fact, which made losing the CenVa job worse because it was work that called on his talents. Angie is always at him to go into business for himself, be a carpenter or a cabinet-maker or even just a handyman. There is money to be made, she insists. Maybe. But the contempt of Boyd Cousins rankles. Somehow he tumbled to this cabinet job and expects Jude to blow it off.
“Mighty nice, I suppose,” said his father-in-law as they were leaving the church.
Vernell, Angie’s mother, dislikes conflict and has gone ahead to the parking lot. She is plump and worries about her appearance, always making a joke at her own expense. The jokes drive Angie nuts.
Because he has to, Jude asks him, “What’s mighty nice, Boyd?”
“Having all that free time to spend with the girls.”
As it happens, Jude feels a deep shame about the situation. Not about looking after his daughters while their mother is out cleaning other folks’ houses. That’s a good thing. In fact it’s pretty damn cool. He knows Brylee and Cricket, and they know him, better than he did when he was punching a clock, and way better than he used to know his own daddy. But there are times when he feels like a deadbeat dad. Those times come every day. Worst is watching Angie go cheerfully out the door with her vacuum cleaner, the girls clamoring for their goodbye kiss.
Behind the wheel of the minivan, Jude sticks the slip of paper with the cabinet woman’s info into his shirt pocket. The contrary part of him, the part that makes no sense, bridles at Boyd’s skepticism. It makes him less likely to call the woman. Angie understands all of this, knows better than to say any more about it.
The situation is still more complicated by the fact that they are living on the Cousins’ land in a double-wide that sits on the edge of a cow pasture. Angie’s big dream is to have a home of her own. She loves driving around the county looking at places that are up for sale, imagining what she would do to the house, how she would fix it up to suit her. Someday; someday. She has faith in the power of prayer and believes that one day they will sleep under their own roof. Meantime, her parents charge them no rent, which helps. All they have to do is cover the electric bill.
The money they had been putting away when Jude was working has leached away. Everything costs more than you thought it was going to.
Vernell and Boyd have invited them for Sunday dinner, which the girls love because their grandmother gets out Angie’s old dolls and toys for them to play with. Boyd is a surveyor – like George Washington, he likes to say – but has always run a few head of beef cows, too. Vernell’s roast beef is worth the price of admission, which is putting up with his father-in-law’s digs and jabs, but Jude has to work himself up to the ordeal, every time.
“I’ll catch up in a minute,” he tells Angie.
She and the girls cross the pasture in the springing up April green to the Cousins’ house, an old white clapboard farmhouse kept in perfect loving repair by Boyd. It’s like he’s trying to make Jude feel even worse. Angie is hoping that Jude will call the Elam woman, he only wants a little quiet space to do so. Well, maybe he will.
Except here’s a text from Savannah. Savannah Bowden is the bookkeeper at CenVa Modular. She is friendly with management and says she has been told they intend to bring Jude back to work when they can. Jude wants to believe her, but not every last word that comes out of the woman’s mouth is as true as you would like it to be. He can testify to that.
Back in high school they both thought the other one was the future. They were together off and on for a couple of years after they graduated until Jude signed up for the Navy. That didn’t go as well as he’d hoped, but by the time he came home from Norfolk, Savannah’s attention had migrated elsewhere, her affection bestowed on a lowlife piece of garbage named Jason who wound up in the Buckingham Correctional Center for selling meth in commercial quantities.
You wouldn’t think a bookkeeper would have the wild side that Savannah still does.
They can’t help finding each other attractive. Jude remembers watching her get out of her car at work, the week they laid him off, how it made his hands ache, the desire to touch her was so strong.
Can you get away? I’m lonely y dont u come see me.
Savannah has an apartment in Briery, the county seat. It’s a place of danger.
Can’t, he texts her back.
He waits for the teary little yellow face she sends in acknowledgement before deleting the texts. Jude is careful. Evil, he heard somewhere, is generally careful, hiding its dirty tracks.
To make up for the surge of sexual desire that just went through him, he calls the woman in Elam and arranges to go see her the next morning. They will talk about what she wants in the way of cabinets, and Jude will measure the space. This gives him something to say to Angie and her parents that makes all of them feel hopeful. Angie and Vernell chalk it up to the Lord’s agency. Boyd can’t go quite that far, but he summons enough generosity to be pleased. The happiness communicates itself to the girls, and the afternoon they spend in each other’s company matches the fine weather.
That evening after the girls are in bed Jude sits next to Angie on the couch where she is designing a business card for him. She draws real well, has an eye for design. And she is an optimist. All it took was one phone call for her to jump from his measuring for cabinets to Jude Johnson, Carpentry, under a crossed hammer and saw. He puts a hand on her thigh. He loves the feel of her warm flesh. She is on the tall side, wears her dark hair long. The careless look it sometimes gets is highly appealing. Her face, an oval of perfect minute proportions, turns to him.
“What you got on your mind, Mr. Johnson?”
She’s in the mood. So is he. But there is in fact something else on his mind he would like her help in thinking through.
“You think Jesus ever sleeps?”
She finds the question hilarious.
“I’m serious.”
She shakes her head. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?”
“Come on, girl. You know I’m no good with the quotes.”
“Matthew ten twenty nine. Look it up.”
“How ‘bout you just tell me what it says?”
“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”
“Meaning?”
“Jesus don’t sleep.”
Maybe, Jude thinks, but he has found an explanation for his problems. Isn’t it possible, just possible, that Jesus takes a nap now and then? That he quits thinking about him, Jude Johnson, laid off from his job and with a tendency to make bad decisions? He values the thought but keeps it to himself. Angie is strict when it comes to her religion. Besides, he doesn’t want to spoil the sexy mood that has come over both of them. Soon enough they are in the sack, and gratitude descends on him like grace.
Next day he discovers that the Elam woman is bony and old and particular. She will be a taskmaster, but she is clear about what she wants – cherry cabinets that will fit in her old non-standard kitchen, where the walls are not quite plumb – and she accepts the estimate Jude writes her up. She offers to give him some money down so he can buy the wood he wants. No way can he turn down this job.
There is no denying, it feels good to have work. He knows better than to feel virtuous but still savors, a little, the task that lies ahead. His father, whose shortcomings would fill up a page if anybody bothered to write them down, was a skilled carpenter. He passed on to Jude the feel for working with wood, along with a certain respect for tools.
There’s a lumberyard where he knows they will have the cherry wood he wants. It feels good to be out and about. The sun falls in a shower like bright rain, soaking his skin. The only problem is, the lumberyard is on Drinkard Road, just a mile from CenVa Modular, so when he gets a text from Savannah he can’t help mentioning he’s nearby. Which leads as it must to her driving over to see him.
They sit in her car, a black Camaro with a red stripe, and talk a while in the lumberyard lot. Is that a crime? The woman he used to think he’d marry is still highly blonde, with small, high breasts and a tinkly laugh. She takes great care with her clothes, never looks less than put together. She tells him she’s bored.
“So go out and find yourself a new job. You got skills, Savannah. Use ‘em.”
She shakes her head. She’s wearing a skirt and blouse combo that have an Eastery look, if you can think about Easter without thinking about church. He studies her legs. The straps of her sandals intrigue him.
“It ain’t the job,” she tells him.
“Then what is it?”
She shrugs. “Let’s do something.”
“What’d you have in mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever it is, I can’t.”
“You’re no fun.”
“You used to think I was fun.”
“’Cuz you were.”
She puts a hand on his knee. That’s all it takes for him to snap to attention. She’s waiting for him to say, let’s go to your place. Then she’ll call the office and make some sort of excuse. She gets away with whatever she wants to get away with at CenVa because she is so good at her job. All the bosses love her. Well, they’re all men, and Savannah knows how to talk to men.
But he doesn’t say it. He’ll feel like shit if he goes with her and they make love at her apartment. Clouds will blow up and cover his private sky. He’ll beat himself up and have the urge to tell Angie. Boyd Cousins will look at him like he knows, he knows every evil thing Jude has done or contemplated doing since walking down the aisle with his daughter six years ago. And when Brylee and Cricket climb onto his lap and hug him he will feel like, what’s that old-time word? He’ll feel like a reprobate.
So he disappoints Savannah and watches her drive back to work in a funk, gunning the Camaro’s engine as she goes through the gears. He drops off the wood at the Elam woman’s, then heads home to watch the girls because Angie has a cleaning job that afternoon.
He makes mac & cheese for the family that night. He enjoys cooking for them, enjoys Angie’s grateful look when she comes home tired and knows she doesn’t have to think about making dinner on top of everything else. And the girls love their father’s cooking. He draws a ketchup smiley face on their plates, a touch Angie considers brilliant
Having turned Savannah down he thinks he should feel better than he does. Maybe coming as close as he did to another bad decision, sitting next to her in her sexy car and looking at her legs, counts against him even though they didn’t go to her apartment. There’s a theological explanation for that, there must be, but he is in no position to inquire of anybody who might know what it is. When the girls are asleep Angie shows him her revised design for his business card. It’s handsome.
She’s ready to order a hundred cards. She has ideas about advertising online.
The next few days they find a rhythm. Jude works mornings, building the cabinets in Elam. Afternoons, Angie goes out to clean. He cooks. They clean up the kitchen together after Brylee and Cricket go to bed. Go ahead, he tells her one evening, order me them cards. They’re standing at the sink. The long and leisurely way she leans into him, he could go blind.
He feels strong. This is notable because he does not always feel strong. The next morning when Savannah texts him he is sure he can handle whatever she throws at him. Which turns out to be just a favor. Her kitchen sink is clogged. If she leaves the door unlocked would he stop by and unclog it on his way to Elam? Sure. He can do that. She’ll be at work.
He clears the clog. He eats the cookies she has left for him on a plate, drinks the coffee from a thermos, studies for a moment the familiar looping handwriting of her thank you note. And then she’s there.
He feels caught out. “Thought you was at work.”
She runs water in the sink. It drains clean. “I put in all kinds of hours,” she tells him. “They got no call to criticize me. How’s them cabinets coming along?”
“Pretty fair.”
“What about Angie?”
“What about her?”
The two women know each other. Angie was a year behind Savannah and Jude in high school. Savannah always says she admires Angie for her grit, and she does, but there is resentment stirred into the mix, which puts a point on every comment. Sometimes the point is pretty sharp.
“She’s fine,” says Jude.
“How many houses is she cleaning?”
“Christ, Savannah, what do you care how many houses my wife cleans?”
She’s wearing a dark blue skirt, a gray blouse with a scooped collar. Her shoes gleam. There must be some kind of meeting later in the day. She only dresses up like that when headquarters people show up from Richmond.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I wish me and Angie could trade places.”
“No you don’t.”
She shakes her head. “You want me to make more coffee?”
“I gotta go.”
“Where is Angie cleaning today?”
“Dr. Webb’s.”
Savannah’s eyebrows go up. Dr. Webb is famous in Broadhope County, a surgeon who has so much money, he built a wing of the Briery hospital for cancer patients. You see him on TV all the time. He and his wife live in the country at Still Waters, a mansion that looks like the Old South, with white pillars and rolling fields around which run expensive fences.
“I’m impressed,” says Savannah. “Does she talk to the doc much?”
“He ain’t around all that often. Right now him and the wife are on vacation in Italy. A month, the whole friggin’ month.”
“They give Angie the key?”
He nods. Can’t help feeling proud of the trust the doctor and his wife have in her.
“Hmm,” says Savannah.
“Don’t go there, girl. Don’t even think about it.”
“Who said I was going anywhere? You want to lay down a little while, Jude?”
“Can’t. Got to get to Elam.”
She does not try to entice him any more than that. He leaves her apartment with the sensation of having escaped complication. It’s only natural to congratulate yourself when that happens.
He should have known better. It was a mistake, telling Savannah about Angie cleaning the Webbs’. The next few days she is at him constantly by text. Where’s the harm, she wants to know. It would be a kick. Swipe the key, we’ll go in, have a drink take a picture in that famous living room with the high ceiling, we’ll leave. Didn’t you say they’re gone all month?
This is not the kind of conversation he can have by text. As soon as he reads one, he deletes it. He resolves more than once to delete them without reading, but that doesn’t happen. Why things happen the way they do, for the reasons they seem to, is something he doesn’t understand. It has to do, he thinks, with sleepy Jesus. However that may be, it’s the damn business cards that change the situation. One night Angie hands him a little cardboard box. On the cover is pasted one of the cards she has had printed; inside, there are more stiff cream-colored cards with Jude Johnson, Carpentry on them than he is likely to hand out in a year. He kisses her with gratitude that is real. And in the moment of the kiss, he knows he is going to do what Savannah has challenged him to do.
Turns out, the wrong thing is ridiculously easy to do. Next morning he calls the cabinet lady in Elam to tell her he’ll be late. He palms the key to the Webbs’ house, which is in the kitchen junk drawer. On the keychain is a little plastic tab with the alarm code. He texts Savannah, meet me there, and she does.
The house sits on its own little hill, as grand as a house in Southside, Virginia, gets. They’re in the Camaro, Jude driving. They go up the blacktopped driveway. Get out. Admire the landscaping. They go in the back door, Jude turns off the alarm, and thirty seconds later they are standing in the grand living room where every piece of furniture looks like it came out of a magazine, and the top of the grand piano is up.
“Holy shit,” says Savannah. She is snapping pictures left and right with her phone.
“All right. We done it. Let’s get out of here.”
“What’s your hurry? You scared?”
“Yeah. I’m scared.”
“Fix me a drink first.”
Now he wishes they had driven separately. If he had wheels, he could just turn around and leave. As it is, Savannah will extract some sort of price from him. That’s how she is. Strangely, it now seems too him, he admires that about her. You could call it a fault, but really, it’s only who she is.
He finds the liquor cabinet, mixes her a gin and tonic over crushed ice.
“No lime?”
“There ain’t any.”
“What about you? Ain’t you gonna have one with me?”
He shakes his head.
“Drink your drink and let’s get the fuck outta here.”
But she wants more than a drink. She wants to have sex upstairs in the Webbs’ big king bed. Maybe, it occurs to him, being a bookkeeper is so boring, she has to compensate by doing outrageous things.
Later, he is grateful that he got no farther than taking off his pants before they hear people coming in downstairs. Feet shuffle, voices go back and forth. They must be talking about the strange car in the drive. Savannah giggles. She has folded her clothes neatly on a fancy chair in a corner of the enormous elegant bedroom.
In the half minute before everything blows up, there is time for Jude to take in and appreciate the scene. Sunlight beating in twin windows lights the stately bed, on which Savannah has turned down the creamy covers. In that flash he understands with perfect clarity the appeal this transgression has for her, and while he does not crave it for himself he likes being in on her moment.
Savannah dresses deliberately, as if she’s getting ready to go to work. Then, as they go down the stairs up comes Dr. Webb with a pistol in his hand. A Glock nine, Jude notices. Nine gun.
Some things, you don’t even try to explain them.
The doctor is a handsome man of fifty, trim, with a close-cropped silver beard and pale purple eyeglasses. In one ear, an ebony stud. Behind him, three stairs down, stands a woman who matches him in every regard. Her hair is platinum, her earrings diamond.
“Portia,” he says calmly without turning around, as if he’s asking what’s for dinner, “why don’t you go ahead and call the police?”
A nightmare, a complete and total nightmare. Inside half an hour Jude and Savannah are in the back of a county cruiser on their way to the sheriff’s office in Briery. Jude sort of knows the deputy. Earl Dellinger went to school with Jude’s older brother. He’s large, he’s kind of red, he does not seem curious about why they broke into Still Waters, or at least he doesn’t ask. Savannah tries to get him to talk.
“Do you believe in the Devil, Deputy?”
He shakes his head. “I ain’t the one you need to be talkin’ to right now.”
Jude is angry at her. He said yes, sure, but if she hadn’t pushed him he would never have gone into the big house and mixed her a gin and tonic. He closes his eyes. They ignore each other. What’s to say? Soon enough they are in the sheriff’s office where their phones are confiscated and they are separated, which is an enormous relief to Jude. As Earl leads Jude to a cell he is vaguely aware of wanted posters on a wall, the burp of a radio speaking cop code, people staring at him. They know what he’s done.
It seems to him that the hard conversation with Angie that takes place when he calls to tell her must go some of the distance to paying off his sins. Waiting for her to come get him, he is unable to think. Nor can he feel anything beyond a shame so deep, so thoroughgoing, that he disappears inside it.
She has borrowed the money from her parents to bail him out, borrowed their car to come get him. It’s shock, it must be shock that stops her mouth. She makes no recriminations. She seems tired. She seems to be listening to music he will never hear. She hums a little under her breath, hands him the key to the Chevy and tells him to drive.
He drives as directed but not toward any destination. They make slow circuits around downtown Briery. Everyone on the streets looks biblical, they’re so innocent. They know something Jude does not, and probably never will. When Angie is ready, she speaks.
“Daddy called a lawyer he knows. He took you on. A lawyer.”
Criminals need lawyers, that’s what she means. He wants to ask her what Boyd said to her when he heard but doesn’t. There will be time for all of that, there will a reckoning. He will have to say why he did what he did. As if he could. For now, it’s better just to drive. He is aware of his wife’s profound mortification. It reveals a depth in her he hadn’t known of. Her eyes are red, her face is swollen, but she is cried out. That’s not a proper thing to be relieved about, but he is.
Another ten minutes. Then she says, “The Webbs came home early because Portia’s mother got sick.”
Jude nods. There is nothing he can say about Portia Webb’s ailing mother that anybody on the planet would care to hear.
After another lag Angie tells him, “This thing with Savannah. It has to be over.”
“It is.”
In fact it is, it truly is, and for a reason that escapes his grasp they both know it.
“Jude?”
He waits. She shakes her head. He drives.
He wonders if Savannah is out of jail. Must be. She’s got plenty of money, no need for anybody to bail her out. She seems, in this moment, like a person he knew years ago. He can’t quite remember her face or any details about her.
He has an idea. They drive to the Home Depot outside town. He parks in the lot. Takes the box of business cards from the glove box, removes one of the cards. He opens the door.
“Where you going?” Angie asks him.
“They got one of those boards inside, you can post stuff. People are always looking for a carpenter, right?”
He wishes she would nod. Something like a smile that is not a smile settles on her face. He’d give anything to hear the music she’s hearing, but that’s not going to happen.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
“The lawyer Daddy called talked to Dr. Webb’s lawyer.”
“And?”
“Dr. Webb wanted you to know the gun wasn’t loaded.”
That seems important, but Jude is in no shape to figure out how. Crossing the lot with the business card in his jeans pocket he is cognizant of all that lies ahead. Being in the same room with his father-in-law. A judge, a trial, an article in the paper. The look of puzzled disappointment on Vernell’s face. His daughters’ delight when he walks into the trailer and they run to hug him. The silence, nights, of Angie lying next to him in bed. One thing is certain. With Savannah out of the picture, another way of messing up will find him before he is ready to be found. But the sun feels good on his shoulders, warm as the breath of Jesus who is wide awake.
The End
Mark Jacobs has published more than 190 stories in magazines including The Atlantic, Playboy, The Hudson Review, and The Iowa Review. His novel Silent Light, set in the Congo, is forthcoming from Evergreen Books. A complete list of publications can be found at markjacobsauthor.com
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