thinking: “The old man wants me to set an ‘A’ average as a goal; he’ll say he wants me to get a real job over Christmas vacation, not dish out soup to derelicts.” But that’s not what the old man is going to say. He’s had a flash of insight. What’s the kid really telling me with this list? That he doesn’t want to be the prize in a war between Mom and Dad. That he wants to please both of us because he belongs to us both.
“You misspelled ‘Massachusetts,’ ” Weldon says. “Look it up.”
“Okay.”
“Make you a deal. If you really do one through five, you’ll get six next summer.”
“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” Douglas pleads after several moments of silence.
“Solemn promise. You’ll be in the air when you’re sixteen.”
Douglas is there already.
Redeemer
WHILE THEY WAITED for a boat to be brought up, in a heat like none she’d known back home, even on the stillest, muggiest days her mother called “dog days” (Quinette in her childhood wondering what hot weather and dogs had to do with each other), she remembered how wide the Mississippi had looked the first time she saw it from the Dubuque levee, near the foot of the bridge arching like a steel rainbow into another state, the trees on the Illinois side and the hills beyond appearing so distant she felt as if she were looking across a lake rather than a river, her idea of a river being the Cedar or the Shell Rock or the Little Cedar, slender enough that two people on opposite banks could talk to each other.
The Mississippi lived up to the way she’d pictured it in sixth-grade geography period. Mrs. Hoge told the class that Mississippi was an Indian word meaning “Father of Waters,” because it was the longest river in North America. Not, however, the longest in the world. That honor belonged to the Nile, she said, moving her pointer to the world map pulled down over the blackboard like a window shade: more than four thousand miles from here—the rubber tip stabbed at a country called Uganda—to here in Egypt—the tip moving to the river’s mouth, opening onto the Mediterranean Sea.
As Mrs. Hoge went on, Quinette recalled the story of Moses from Sunday school—how he had drifted in a reed basket coated with pitch until he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter and spared from her father’s cruel edict to have all firstborn Hebrew boys killed. Her thoughts ran from there to an old movie she’d seen about Moses, starring Charlton Heston. Because the subject matter met with her mother’s approval (unlike her father, who’d gone to church only at Christmas and Easter, her mother was a devout Lutheran), she allowed Quinette to stay up late to watch it on TV. Nicole and Kristen weren’t interested and went upstairs to listen to Kristen’s new Pat Benatar tape. How small and vulnerable Moses’ basket looked, how miraculous that it stayed afloat on the immense river. Her mother, sitting beside Quinette on the old sofa with its brown and gold pattern like late autumn leaves, looked at her out of the corner of her eye and smiled gently, the smile telling her that there was good in everyone, even in heathen Egyptian women, and that God’s hand was everywhere. He had guided the basket into the arms of Pharaoh’s daughter so the baby inside could grow up to be Charlton Heston and lead his people out of bondage.
All those memories, of Mrs. Hoge’s class, of the day on the levee, and of the Nile as it appeared in the movie, rushed at Quinette as she sat with her companions under a wide-spreading tree, hot sunlight slivering through the branches as through pinpricks in a worn awning, and gazed at the real Nile. Colored like mud mixed with wet cement, and sluggish and less than half as wide as the Mississippi, it was not the mighty, awesome river that had surged in her imagination, and she felt cheated. She usually did when things turned out to be less beautiful or exciting or inspiring than she’d hoped—as if she were the victim of an intentional fraud.
It had been that way when she was born again. Most of the congregation at Family Evangelical Church had described their salvation as a rapturous experience—the Holy Spirit moving through them like a wind, and nothing the same afterward. Like they were all Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. Quinette had been stopped