Ties That Bind Read online

  No one was listening.

  Deirdre Camp was making a grocery list. Pat Boyd was holding her BlackBerry, surreptitiously checking her e-mail. Waldo Smitherton, who is ninety-six, was dozing, but there was nothing new about that. He sleeps through most board meetings. The only person who appeared to be listening was Miranda Wyatt; her eyes were glued to Ted.

  Abigail, obviously irritated, was drumming the table with her fingers. I wondered how much longer she’d be able to control her temper. I looked at my watch.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Ted! Get on with it!”

  Seventy-eight seconds. Pretty impressive. For Abigail.

  Ted sputtered like a jowly bulldog and glared at Abigail. “Excuse me,” he said. “Were you wishing to address the chair or the board? I believe there needs to be a motion before you can do either.”

  Ted likes to invoke Robert’s Rules of Order—usually incorrectly. It makes Abigail crazy.

  “No! There doesn’t! This isn’t a formal meeting and we’re not ready to take a vote, so we don’t need to make a motion! What we need to do is find a pastor before Christmas. So, do you have any résumés for us to consider or not?”

  Abigail’s outburst elicited stirring among the benumbed board. People sat up and stopped their doodling. Pat powered down her BlackBerry. Adam Kingsbury elbowed Waldo, who woke with a start and shouted, “Aye!” thinking it was time to vote.

  Scowling, Ted pulled a small stack of papers out of a weathered brown briefcase.

  “Is this all we’ve got to choose from?” Pat asked. “Two résumés?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Ted replied apologetically. “And they aren’t résumés so much as information sheets. I typed them up myself. The pool of candidates available in time for Christmas is very small and I wasn’t able to reach either of them on the phone. One is flying to Europe and the other is on a backcountry ski trip. However, I did put in a call to Reverend Oswald, head of the Eastern Conference, who is on a mission trip to Malawi. Before we were cut off, he told me a little bit about the candidates. They’re fresh from seminary, but Reverend Oswald said either would be an excellent choice.”

  Abigail leaned close to my ear and hissed, “If we’ve only got a choice between one embryo parson and another, then why did he subject us to that endless lecture?”

  Miranda raised her hand before speaking, as usual. Miranda is a third-grade teacher. Ted smiled and yielded the floor. Abigail rolled her eyes.

  “Pardon me, but might it be a good idea to find a guest preacher for Christmas and fill the position later when there are more available candidates? Ted’s inspired comments on the qualities of a true minister made me think we shouldn’t rush this.” Miranda smiled sweetly. Ted ducked his head in a sort of “oh, it was nothing” way.

  Abigail’s eyes darted from Miranda’s face, to Ted’s, and back to Miranda’s. “Is she flirting with him?” she whispered.

  I shrugged. It was possible. Ted was a widower and Miranda was divorced. It was hard for me to imagine anyone being attracted to Ted romantically, but they say everybody is right for somebody—a rule that seems to apply to everyone but me.

  “Miranda makes a good point,” Ted said, flashing a wide smile in her direction. “We could bring in a guest pastor over the holidays. Reverend Flatwell is avail—”

  Ted was interrupted by a collective groan.

  Floyd Flatwell is a retired minister who is always willing to fill in for a pastor who is sick or away on vacation. Before he’d retired from ministry, Floyd had retired from a career as a golfer. He never won a major tournament, but he had played on the professional circuit. If you’re looking for someone to preach for one Sunday, possibly two, Reverend Flatwell is a fine choice. But more than that? Uh-uh.

  Four years previously the church gave Reverend Tucker a two-week trip to Israel as a gift to celebrate his fortieth year in ministry. He caught pneumonia on the flight home, so the congregation got to listen to Floyd Flatwell preach sermons about spiritual insights he’d gained on the links—lots of references to following through, keeping your eye on the ball, and heaven as the ultimate nineteenth hole—for four weeks in a row.

  Abigail said what everyone else was thinking. “Absolutely not. We have more visitors on Christmas than on any other day of the year. Do you think a sermon comparing the journey of the three wise men to the rigors of tackling the back nine at Augusta—with descriptions of every hole—is going to convince them to come back?”

  Glancing at Miranda, who was looking at her lap, Ted shifted his shoulders. “If that’s how everyone feels, we’d better look at the candidates on hand.” Ted picked up the first résumé and started telling us what we could have read for ourselves.

  “Anthony Ferrari graduated from seminary last spring. He’s done volunteer work with at-risk youth and served as a chaplain for a police department in Worcester—”

  Waldo Smitherton interrupted with a raspy bark. “Ferrari! Sounds like a pricey sports car. We don’t want a minister who drives a fancy car. Wouldn’t look right.”

  “He doesn’t drive a Ferrari,” Ted said. “It’s his name. He’s of Italian descent.”

  “What?” Waldo cupped his hand to his ear. “He climbed the Martian Crescent?”

  Ted raised his voice a couple of notches. “He’s Italian!”

  Waldo frowned. “I don’t know about that. My brother’s wife was Eye-talian. Nice girl, but too fertile. They had nine kids. Drove my brother to the poorhouse.”

  Squinting his birdlike eyes, Waldo addressed the group. “We just spent good money repainting the parsonage. If some family with a buncha kids moves in there, we’ll have to redo the whole job. Is this fella married? How many children they got?”

  “Four,” Ted admitted. “With another due to arrive in April.”

  There was a murmuring among the group.

  “Moving on,” Ted said wearily. “Philip A. Clarkson also graduated from seminary in the spring. He is forty and unmarried.”

  Abigail kicked me under the table. “Unmarried,” she mouthed.

  “Stop it,” I mouthed back, just as clearly.

  “In addition to a Divinity degree,” Ted continued, “Reverend Clarkson has a Master of Social Work. He spent sixteen years working in the field, first in a home for senior citizens, then a rural hospital, and finally in a large metropolitan high school.”

  “Philip A. Clarkson,” Deirdre mused. “He wouldn’t happen to be related to Philip R. Clarkson, would he? My sister is a member of his congregation in Boston, one of the largest churches in the denomination. He’s a wonderful speaker!”

  Ted beamed. “Yes, I believe this is his son. My phone connection to Reverend Oswald was poor, but before we were cut off he said this is Reverend Clarkson’s only child. If he’s half the orator his father is, we’d be very fortunate to hire him.”

  There were murmurs of approval as the board took in this information.

  “It’s too bad we don’t have time to bring him in for an interview,” Miranda said. “But imagine! Having the son of such a famous pastor here in New Bern! I think Ted did an amazing job, finding such a well-qualified candidate in less than a day.”

  Adam Kingsbury, who is in his fourth year of what was to be a two-year term as church treasurer, no one else being willing to take on the job, was chewing nervously on his thumbnail.

  “Ted, we haven’t discussed finances. How are we going to get money to pay an additional salary? What about insurance?”

  Ted held up his hands. “It’s all going to work out. We’ll be able to put our new pastor on the Conference’s insurance plan. As far as his salary,” Ted drew his bushy gray eyebrows together, “I think we’re going to have to put off plans for a new furnace.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Not again! We barely got through last winter.”

  “I know, but I don’t see another alternative. Do you?” Ted let his gaze rest on Abigail, who ignored him.

  “That’s it, then. We’ll just have to mak
e do with the old furnace and pray that God makes it last another year. Now,” he said, clasping his hands together, “it sounds like we’ve settled on our candidate. We just need someone to make a motion. Margot?”

  I looked around at the others, surprised that Ted would call on me to make the motion and more than a little annoyed to see the wide smile on Abigail’s face. I knew what she was thinking, and I was having none of it. Single I am and single I will remain. I have accepted this, so why can’t everybody else?

  I felt a kick under the table and jumped. Abigail, still smiling that irritating smile, tipped her head to one side, urging me to get on with it.

  “I move that we call the Reverend Philip A. Clarkson as interim pastor of the New Bern Community Church.”

  “Second!” Abigail chirped so loudly that she startled the again-dozing Waldo, who jerked his head up and shouted, “Aye!”

  4

  Margot

  Abigail flipped down the visor and peered intently into the narrow mirror while she applied her lipstick. “Watch out for potholes, Margot. You’re making me smear it.”

  I kept driving, keeping the wheel exactly where it was, saying nothing.

  “I don’t see what you’re so upset about,” she said, running her fingernail around the edge of her lips. “All I did was suggest that you’d be the perfect person to welcome Reverend Clarkson. You’re so hospitable. Everyone knows that. Besides, you were the natural choice. Everyone else has families. They’re all busy getting ready for the holidays.”

  “And I suppose I’m not!”

  Abigail jerked in her seat, surprised by my outburst.

  “Just because I’m single doesn’t mean I have nothing to do! And I do have a family! They’re all coming for Christmas! So I’ve got plenty of things on my plate already—especially since I’m single! I don’t have a husband to help me with the preparations. And I don’t have time to be a one-woman welcome wagon! And even if I did, you only volunteered me because you’re trying to set me up with the new minister.”

  Abigail was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry, Margot. That was insensitive of me. You’re just as busy as the rest of us; I know that. Being single has nothing to do with it. It just seemed to me that … well, your faith is so important to you. I thought a nice, unmarried man of the cloth might be the perfect match for you. I was only trying to help.”

  “I don’t want that kind of help. I’m perfectly happy being single.”

  Abigail put the cap back on her tube of lipstick and closed the visor. “Of course,” she said flatly. “Anyone can see that. You positively radiate joy and contentment.”

  “I’m fine. I have a nice home, a good job, and most of my friends are lovely people. Let’s just leave well enough alone, all right?”

  Abigail looked shocked. “Why? I’ve never left well enough alone. Not when I saw the possibility of getting something better. And I want something better for you, not me. What’s so terrible about that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, feeling guilty for snapping at her. Abigail really does mean well, but she’s so … insistent. “But I believe I’ll be a lot happier if I just embrace myself and my life as it is and get over the idea that I need a man to be complete as a woman.”

  “Well, of course you don’t! What a silly idea. Is that how you’ve felt? Truly?”

  I nodded sheepishly as I turned my car onto Commerce Street.

  “Really,” Abigail said, in a slightly disbelieving tone. “Well, then I applaud your enlightenment—however recent it may be. That whole ‘you complete me’ bunk is just that, a lot of sentimental hoo-hah invented in Hollywood. Or some such place.

  “If a man alone can make you happy, then my first marriage should have made me the happiest woman on earth. Woolley Wynne was handsome, very rich, and very generous, a rare combination, and he adored me. At first. But I wasn’t happy with myself. I was forever regretting my lost love, the man who’d made me truly miserable, which, for a lot of young women, seems to be an incredibly magnetic quality in a man.

  “Why is that, do you suppose? Why should a young, attractive, intelligent, and interesting woman, as indeed I was at the time, scan a horizon thick with potential suitors only to say, ‘Aha! Another opportunity to suffer!’ and then run headlong toward the man best equipped to ruin her life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I,” Abigail said. “But that’s exactly what I did. Thank heaven I’m past that stage. You couldn’t pay me to be twenty-five again, Margot. You really couldn’t.”

  Abigail is so rich she doesn’t need anybody to pay her to be anything, but I do understand her point. There are plenty of things bothering me about this birthday, but I truly would not wish to be younger. I like knowing what I know now, the assurance and resolve that a full log of life experience brings. I only wish I’d had this … wisdom, I suppose you might call it … back before I had closed quite so many doors and wasted so much time. Maybe everyone feels this way at forty. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. If time and breath were infinite, we wouldn’t value them like we do. Looking at Abigail, beautiful and energetic and full of life in her middle sixties, a troublemaker in the best sense of the word, makes me think that there is still time for me to get it right.

  “I think the reason Franklin and I are happily married,” Abigail continued after pressing her lips onto a piece of folded tissue, leaving two mauve half-moons on the white paper, “is because we were happy before we married. We were two satisfied, fully formed individuals before we fell in love. Being married has just enhanced that. Maybe that’s what you need, Margot, to find a man who can be a friend first and a lover later.”

  “I’ve had men friends, Abbie. Lots of them. Every time I develop a romantic interest in a man, he backs off and tells me that he just wants to be friends.”

  “And then you never see them again?”

  “Usually,” I said, thinking of Arnie. New Bern is a small town so, of course, we run into each other. But it’s always awkward.

  “Well, then those men weren’t really your friends, were they? ‘Let’s be friends’ is one of those things people say to get themselves out of a relationship without looking bad. What they really meant is that they’d assessed the possibility of a romantic relationship with you, thought better of it, and decided to move on, getting as far away from you as fast as possible without breaking your heart,” Abigail said matter-of-factly.

  “Which they managed to do anyway.”

  Abigail patted my shoulder sympathetically. “I know. They were stupid. Complete idiots. I’ve so often heard you jest that you’re not looking for Mr. Right anymore, that you’d be willing to settle for Mr. Good Enough. But Mr. Good Enough isn’t good enough. Not for someone as special as you.”

  “Oh, Abbie. You’re sweet.”

  “Ha! Well, we both know that’s not true. But I do admire you, Margot, and I’d like to see you happy. I did have matchmaking on my mind when I volunteered you to welcome the new minister, but now I think romance may not be the best thing for you, not just now. At the moment, I think you’d be better off to find a friend. A real friend, someone whose interests and passions match your own, who understands how you think, who can offer you sound advice and take it too, is one of the greatest gifts on earth. That’s what Franklin and I have. And that, more than anything, is what holds us together.”

  I pulled the car into Abigail’s driveway. All the lights were off.

  “So,” she inquired, “do you have time to go over to the parsonage and greet Reverend Clarkson? If you’re too busy with your family, I can …”

  “No. That’s all right. I’ll do it. I don’t mind.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You and Franklin are lucky.”

  “We are. And,” she said, reaching into the depths of her purse and pulling out a blue box tied with white satin ribbon, “my birthday wish for you is that, someday, you will be just as fortunate.”

  “You didn’t buy me a present from Tiff
any’s, did you? Oh, Abbie. You shouldn’t have.” I turned the key in the ignition and the engine stopped.

  “Open it! You didn’t suppose I’d forgotten, did you?”

  Inside the box, on a bed of pale blue satin, was a necklace, a sterling silver key pendant decorated with a pink enamel heart, hung on a long silver chain. “Oh, Abigail! Oh, it’s beautiful! I just love it. Thank you.”

  “Take good care of that. It’s the key to your heart and very precious. Mustn’t be given to anybody who is anything less than your soul mate. Oh, I almost forgot. There’s a card that goes with your present.” She rustled through her handbag. “Hmm. I must have left it in the house. Come inside and I’ll give it to you.” She opened the car door.

  “That’s all right, Abbie. Give it to me at the quilt circle.”

  “It’s a very funny card,” she said, climbing out of the car. “I spent a lot of time picking it out. Come along, Margot. I insist.”

  She started walking toward the house, not looking back because it would never occur to Abigail that anyone, particularly me, would fail to follow her instructions once she insists upon something.

  I got out of the car. Abigail knows me too well.

  5

  Margot

  We went in the side door. Abigail snapped on a light and we walked through an orderly anteroom with winter coats and hats hung on pegs and boots—garden boots, hiking boots, riding boots, snow boots—standing at the ready in tidy pairs on grooved trays designed to catch mud or melting snow. Three open cupboards on the opposite wall held an assortment of sports equipment—tennis rackets, golf clubs, and cross-country skis. Abigail is very athletic.

  The kitchen was just as well organized, with gleaming copper pots hung on a rack over the stove, a long wall of cream-colored cabinets with dishes lined up like museum collectibles behind doors of beveled glass. Of course, Abigail has much more storage space than I do, and a full-time housekeeper, but I couldn’t help but feel a little twinge of self-reproach when I compared Abigail’s tidy kitchen to mine.