bad. It was the job. I got sucked in and I never came up for breath. I’ll tell you what—” He breaks off. “Well, who do we have here?”
Much to my surprise, Jed is standing in the doorway. He takes a step forward. Jim flings his arms wide to embrace my son, then backs up for a good look at him. “You must be, what? Seven feet tall?”
“Six three.”
I haven’t seen Jed like this, so boyish and bashful, in a long time. I feel something in my chest, fluttery and warm. A mommy thing. Hard to put into words.
“Just look at you,” Jim says. “And I bet you’re still the brain, aren’t you? I remember how sharp you always were. Sharper than me, and that’s saying something!”
Down the hallway, I hear Rick saying something about the history of the house. Whenever he walks people through, I have to stop myself from interrupting, from correcting the little details he inevitably gets wrong. The death of a thousand cuts, that’s what he calls it, the way I harp on every little thing he says. It’s not that he hates to be corrected. He just hates to be corrected by me.
“I saw that car outside,” Jed is saying, wonder in his voice. “What is that?”
“That is a Maserati. You wanna take a spin? We could go out later, if your mom says it’s all right.”
I nod absently, still listening for Rick’s voice. I can’t make out the words, but the pride comes through loud and clear. You’d think he’d inherited the place and not swindled it out of a little old lady. No, that’s not fair. That’s my own guilt talking. I’ve been in a funk all day, and even this strange reunion can’t seem to cut through it.
Kathie’s heels tap their way into the kitchen, leaving Rick behind in midsentence.
“Is that Jed?” she says. “I can’t believe it.”
While the Shaws fawn over our son, I catch Rick in the corner of my eye. He leans against the door frame, arms crossed, a strange expression on his face. My irritation melts away. After nearly twenty years of marriage, I can read that man’s face. Only I can’t, not now. The downward curl of the lip isn’t a frown exactly. It’s more of a flat line of anxiety, like he’s holding his breath, waiting for something terrible to happen. For a moment, I feel as if I’m seeing something I’m not meant to, something he’s hidden for as long as I’ve known him.
I walk over and graze his hand with mine. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”
“What?” He looks down at me blankly, then pulls away. “No, nothing.”
When I look up, Kathie is glancing my way. She tries to smile, but there it is again: that microscopic wince of suppressed pain.
After dinner, Rick takes Jim out to the shed for a man-to-man.
“That’s what he calls it,” I explain to Kathie. “That’s his job these days, having man-to-mans.”
“That’s his job?”
“Yeah,” Jed says. “Dad’s the Men’s Pastor at church now.”
“The what?”
“The Men’s Pastor.”
She shakes her head. “And what’s that, exactly?”
“Don’t get him started,” I say.
“What they should call him is the Sports Pastor,” Jed says, “because that’s all it is. He goes to a Ravens game with some men from the church, plays some tennis, some handball, whatever. Golf every weekend, pretty much. But if they came out and called him the Sports Pastor, that would be too much. It’s like the dude selling indulgences in the Reformation. People would flip out if they knew what was going on, so they call it being a Men’s Pastor.”
To her credit, Kathie takes all this in with a placid smile, choosing to interpret Jed’s speech as an attempt at humor from an affectionate son. The reality is more complicated, as she probably realizes. The change in Rick’s job description happened three years ago. The senior pastor, a Promise Keeper from way back, returned from a conference convinced that the church wasn’t doing enough to meet the needs of men. We were in danger of losing them, he said, because the church had become too feminized, too therapeutic, too soft and mushy. Rick went along with the diagnosis just to humor his boss. From time to time, the senior pastor would drop hints about the succession, implying that he was grooming Rick to take over, so whenever he latched onto a new trend, Rick did whatever he could to appear supportive. Only this time, he miscalculated.