“’Cause of the reenactment,” the fifth motel clerk told them.
Finally they found a room at an inn where everyone dressed in period costumes: women in long dresses and bonnets, the men in blue and gray uniforms. It depressed Martha. Their canopy bed and braided rug and the pitcher on the bureau, all of it made her sad.
“No HBO,” she told the Reverend as she flicked through the channels. She settled on the Weather Channel and watched the heat spread across the country, relentless.
The Reverend came up behind her and hugged her around the waist. Outside they could hear cannons being fired, and muskets.
“Why do you do it?” he asked her. It was the first time since she’d walked into his office at the church back in May that he asked her that.
“I can’t remember,” she’d said, which was the truth. “But I love it more than anything. It is what I love.”
“I don’t believe it’s all you will ever love.” He turned her around to face him, but she averted her eyes. “I think you could love a person,” he said. “The right person.”
Martha looked up at him and laughed. The smell of gunpowder filled the room. “Like a reverend? Like someone practically a decade younger than me?”
“Yes,” he said simply. Then he kissed her full on the lips.
Later, naked in the canopy bed, Martha propped herself on one elbow to look down at him. That day she’d walked into his office he’d had on khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. She had studied him closely then too, like she was now. His face was round, boyish. That day in his office she’d said, “You’re the reverend here?” And then she had burst into tears. Later, she had told him about those missing days, days when she could have run over someone, gotten AIDS, done anything—” God knows what,” she’d said, and he’d burst out laughing. “Sorry,” he told her, “me being a minister and all, the God thing struck me as funny.” She wasn’t sure what to make of him. Not then nor weeks later when he took her to a corny Italian restaurant and paid the roaming accordian player to sing “That’s Amore” to her.
“You courted me,” Martha whispered from her side of the canopy bed.
Even though his eyes were closed he smiled.
“I came in every day just so I wouldn’t drink, and you let me sit there in your office week after week until one day you said—”
Reverend Dave opened his eyes. “‘Let me buy you dinner.’ And you said yes.” He was playing with her hair, wrapping pieces of it in his fingers, then letting it fall free. “I never did that before. Asked out someone who came to me for help.”
“Sure. I bet that’s what you say to all the drunk forty-year-olds who’ve fucked up their lives. It helps to make them feel special.”
The Reverend pulled her close to him by the hair.
“Hey,” Martha said.
“Shut up,” he told her. “You don’t know anything.”
He had told her that he was supposed to visit his family in Grand Rapids during his three weeks off.
“For all you care I could have gone to Michigan and left you behind.”
“I know this,” Martha said, keeping her hair tangled in his hand. “I know I hate this town and all this morbid history. I know I want to go downstairs to Ye Olde Tavern and have a drink. I know more than you think I do.”
“Shut up,” he said again. He was kissing her, leaving her no choice.
THEIR TOUR GUIDE is a teenager named Stuart. He has Buddy Holly glasses pus-filled pimples and a deep voice that Martha is certain belongs to someone else. Every time he talks he startles her. Reverend Dave keeps asking questions about oxygen and bats and spelunking, but Martha is having trouble listening. The cave looks fake, like the backdrop for a movie or the re-created environments at zoos. When no one is looking, Martha touches the stalagmites, knocks them with her knuckles as if she can prove them false.
“We’re in the cut-rate cavern,” Martha whispers to the Reverend. “We missed all the good ones.”
He steps away from her. He has not forgiven her for what she said back in the parking lot. All it would take is a touch or a kiss, and she would have him back again. Martha stays away. She pretends she is part of a family from Georgia who knows all the answers to Stuart’s stupid questions. She is certain the family has been here before and so technically they are cheating when they shout out the answers. Still, they act smug.
“Have you been to Luray?” Martha asks the mother. They are making their way through a long tunnel. The Reverend’s red-flowered shirt disappears around a corner.
“They’re really commercial,” the mother tells Martha. “We like Endless best.”
Up close Martha sees that the woman is probably the same age as the Reverend.
“Your husband’s real cute,” the woman whispers. “Is he really a minister?”
Husband? Martha thinks. Her heart is beating too fast and all she can do is nod.
“Golly, our minister is an old fart with a gut out to here.”