“Your folks wouldn’t have let that happen,” he said. “Besides, it was the right thing to do. How’s your friend?”
“Gretchen,” Abby said. “She’s good. It . . . worked. Not the way I thought it would, but it worked.”
“That’s good,” he said.
The exorcist took a long pull on his straw.
“I don’t think you’ll be too happy though,” Abby said, filling the pause. “She doesn’t go to church or anything. I don’t either, really.”
“Who cares where you sit on Sunday mornings?” Brother Lemon said, and smiled. “I tried to come see you, after I got out, but I heard you’d moved. And with everything that went on, it didn’t seem like a good idea to write you. But it’s a blessing to see you again. To see that you’ve moved on, grown up. Where do you live now?”
“New York,” she said.
“My life partner can’t get enough of that Broadway,” he said. “We saw Phantom when it came through here, and The Lion King. They’re only the road companies, but they’re still pretty good. Still waiting for Mamma Mia! Have you seen it?”
“The music’s great,” Abby said, not quite sure why she was sitting here talking about ABBA with Chris Lemon.
“Well,” he said. “Maybe Barbara and I will get up there someday.”
“I’m sorry,” Abby said. “I’m so sorry you went to jail. I’m sorry I never said thank-you.”
Brother Lemon met her eyes for a moment, then bowed his head, took a long sad drag of his juice, and lifted his face to hers.
“The reason it’s a blessing to see you again,” he said, “is that I owe you an apology. I am sorry for what I did, what I said to you, how I acted, the choices I made. . . . I’m sorry for all of it. I think about us in that house, and the way I lost control and laid hands on your friend. I trained for two years to place third at the Myrtle Beach Perfect Muscle competition, and I can’t even remember what song was playing when I posed. But I close my eyes and I can remember exactly how it felt, standing over that bed, hurling salt at that girl like I was some kind of tough guy, thinking I was a vessel of God’s wrath. Those six months I spent in Sheriff Al Cannon’s detention center were no man’s idea of a party, but they were my atonement for being possessed by the demons of pride, and vanity, and egotism. And seeing you now, sitting here, I know I did the right thing.”
“How did it happen?” Abby asked. “I’m a nice girl, you’re into musicals, Gretchen ran our school’s recycling club. So how did we all end up in that room? How did we end up almost killing one another? How did that happen?”
“I honestly don’t know,” he said. “But what I do know is that we don’t get to choose our lives. I’ve got Aqua Dynamics in fifteen; let me give you a ride back to your car.”
They wheeled out in his pickup truck, and on the way back he made banal chitchat about New York and Abby gave banal answers. As they stood saying their goodbyes in the Franke Home parking lot, Abby tried one last time.
“You don’t hate me?” she asked. “For getting you sent to jail?”
“If you forgive me, I forgive you,” he said.
“That’s it?” she asked. “It’s kind of . . . anticlimactic. I was hoping you’d yell at me or something.”
Brother Lemon stepped in close, his shadow blocking the sun.
“Abby,” he said, “it wasn’t a coinicidence that my brothers and I performed at your school that day. It is no coincidence that you and Gretchen love each other. And it was no coincidence that my daddy and I chose the moment we did to turn myself in at the city courthouse. The devil is loud and brash and full of drama. God, he’s like a sparrow.”
They stood for a minute in the early afternoon sun.
“You go on home now,” Brother Lemon said. “They dock my pay if my students drown. I’ll see you in New York sometime.”
Abby watched him go, and when she turned around she saw a brown VW Rabbit parked at the end of the row of cars. Her heart didn’t leap, she didn’t scream excitedly, she just had a single practical thought:
“The poor Dust Bunny really needs a bath.”
Then sunlight flashed off the rearview mirror of a closing car door, and it wasn’t the Dust Bunny after all. It was just somebody’s Subaru. She never told Gretchen about the trip.
Abby and Gretchen still kept up, but it was phone calls and letters, then postcards and voicemail, and finally emails and Facebook likes. There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.
But there were moments when they had no time for distance. When Gretchen’s dad had a stroke and she got the call to come home. When Abby’s daughter was born and she named her Mary after her mom, and Abby’s dad and Gretchen were the only two people who knew that whatever war the two of them had been fighting had finally ended in surrender. When Gretchen had her first solo exhibition. When Glee reappeared in their lives and things got messy for a while. When Abby filed for divorce. When those things happened, they learned that although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.
After Abby’s divorce, no matter how hard she tried to hold everything together, it all kept falling apart. Mary wouldn’t sleep and kept pulling out her hair and Abby couldn’t get her to stop, and in the middle of everything Gretchen showed up at her front door a couple weeks before Christmas and moved in. That didn’t fix everything, but now there were two of them, and Abby thought it was better to be miserable together than to be miserable alone.
On Christmas Eve, after Mary had screamed herself to sleep yet again, Gretchen poured them water glasses of wine and they sat in the living room feeling broken, knowing they had to wrap Mary’s presents, lacking the energy to move.
“I hope you don’t take this personally,” Gretchen said after a while, “but I really hate your kid.”
Abby was too exhausted even to turn her head. “Will you call the police if I murder her?”
“I’ve been saving something for you,” Gretchen said.
Abby sat watching the Christmas tree lights while Gretchen went into the kitchen and came back with a can of Coke and two glasses.
“You left it in your gym bag,” Gretchen said. “At the beach house way back when. My parents threw it out, but I snagged it from the trash. It’s the one Tommy Cox gave you, isn’t it?”
Abby’s eyes focused on the red and white can, frosted with condensation, sitting on her coffee table—an artifact washed up from some ancient shipwreck.
“I can’t believe it,” Abby said. “You’ve been saving it?”
“Merry Christmas,” Gretchen said, and popped the top.
It gave a crisp hiss and she poured it into two glasses, raising hers in a toast.
“To 1982,” she said.
Abby picked up her glass and they clinked them together. She took a sip and was a little disappointed. She’d expected it to taste like magic, but it only tasted like Coke.
“Sometimes I wonder what keeps us together,” said Gretchen, considering her glass. “Do you? Like when it got hard, there were times we didn’t talk, and I always wondered why we kept on trying.”
Abby took a long sip from her glass. She didn’t want to say anything, but she had thought the same thing, too.
“I think for me,” Gretchen said, “it’s Max.”
Her comment caught Abby off guard.
“The dog?” she asked. “Good Dog Max?”