Jake Aloft Read online

water that never made you thirsty again. Stan thought again and thought that was the point. Unless it wasn’t. He stood with the congregation and thought hard about the Gospel. The Samaritan woman, what with her five husbands, I bet she wouldn’t be too welcome here. Or maybe she would. He just couldn’t be sure.

  Stan was a parts mechanic for the Garber Company, a large German company that had built a factory just north of the town. He spent his work days sliding a door handle assembly into the innards of a car door and then sliding the heavy door down the line to Carl, who took the door innards and swung it on to a hook that carried it down the line where it would be mated with the skin. He did this nine hours a day, sometimes more, lately less. The whole line had slowed down and their hours were being cut and the overtime pay Stan and his wife Karen used for the kids’ rec. league fees was going away. They’d managed this season, sending the boy and the girl to basketball and gymnastics, but Karen was running numbers every week and softball and baseball were looking tricky.

  Stan worried about this while he worked. The girl could tumble like crazy and her coach was already talking about special camps. The boy was small and thin and he didn’t show a lot of promise, but he liked playing on the teams and drove himself harder than Stan liked. Stan had been a pretty good athlete himself, playing three sports while making his way (barely) through high school, but he remembered the kids like his boy, how they drove themselves on the practice field and how they stood silently on the sidelines during games, watching the starters and hoping for a blow-out either way and a minute or two at the end of the game. Stan worried about this while he recited the Profession of Faith and he looked down his pew at the boy, who stood swaying a little with his lips closed tightly. And Stan prayed that more people would buy the Korean cars that held the doors that held the handle than Stan inserted less and less each week.

  Stan’s boss was three rows back, standing with his wife and two daughters, and thinking about Monday. On the Wednesday before, he’d gotten an e-mail from Germany directing him to a conference call on Thursday when the production manager from Korea had shared the sales forecasts for the upcoming quarter and the Americans around the conference table stared at the black box in the center that told them to cut the workforce another 15 percent immediately.

  Stan’s boss was named Kevin and Kevin had already sat down with his foremen on Friday and reviewed the line workers one by one and had made a list that would be the basis of his schedule on Monday. Fifteen percent of 300 line workers meant that 45 men and women would go home early Monday. Forty-five man and women would go out into the parking lot and sit at the wheel and stare out through the windshield and try to figure out how they were going to go home and tell their spouses not to plan on going to the shore this summer.

  Some would drive right home and sit at the kitchen table with their wives or husbands looking at figures scratched in straight columns on the back of homework assignments and hold their heads in their hands. Some would drive straight to a bar and drink down this mess, at least until they stumbled out into the dark cold night to their cars to sit and stare at the steering wheel again. And some would quit for the last time and just retreat to their trailers sitting on a gravel drive back up against a hill and stare out the window at the setting sun and say “fuckit, just fuckit all.” Kevin knew their names and he knew them well enough to guess who would do what. And he prayed, he prayed for them all as the ushers passed the basket.

  Everyone knelt for the Eucharistic Prayer. Jake was, of course, already kneeling.

  Joe prayed, reciting from a well-worn list of his father and mother, his sisters and brothers and their children, his uncles and aunts, and the souls of his grandparents. It took quite some time to make his way through every name when he added “for their health and safety and happiness” after every name. Jesus faced his mortal hour, and divided the bread and wine among his friends, and told them of his impending death before Joe was through with his nieces and nephews. The congregation proclaimed the Mysteries of Faith while Joe worked his way through his father and mother’s brothers and sisters. The bishop and pope and the saints of the day, and the person for whom the Mass was offered were all covered while Joe made it through the last of his dead relatives and he finished just as all rose. He stood feeling refreshed and completed.

  Rose looked at Joe and smiled to see him smiling. She reached out her hand and he took it and she felt his warm fingers wrap around hers as they said the Lord’s prayer together. Joe was such a nice man, Rose thought. He worked Bingo, he was on the grounds crew (he had helped her unload her peonies last spring, carrying the fiberboard flats up the hill to the church), and she hoped he’d finally find himself elected to the parish council in May. They finished the prayer and she shook his hand and said “peace be with you” and she meant it.

  Rose hoped that the Lamb of God would take away her sins. She had so many. She was jealous of her sister’s child, such a success as a lawyer. She coveted her friend Samantha’s garden arbor, and her whole garden, for goodness sakes. She had been startled to find herself warming indelicately toward Father Young last week when he had taken her hand at the end of Mass and inquired about her health. And she used marijuana.

  The last one, she wasn’t so sure of. Of course, she was breaking the law, but the law was so dicey in that regard. When her glaucoma was diagnosed two years ago, Rose had considered her seventy-three years and thought that a little pain was not too great a price to bear for her time so far. Consider the cross, she had said to her friend Sophia. My pain is nothing. Sophia, however, had a nephew who was into alternative medicine and she had brought him to dinner one summer evening and the three of them had drank a little wine and gotten quite silly. The nephew had leaned across the table after desert and had told Rose that she didn’t have to suffer and Rose had been just silly enough with the wine to listen to him.

  A week later, he had shown up at her house with what looked like a tomato plant and he had installed it on her side porch that got all that great direct sunlight. He had shown her how to cultivate the plant to produce buds and how to prepare the buds properly. Rose wasn’t about to start smoking, not now after all of her good health, so she had gone on the Internet and found a recipe for brownies that looked good enough to eat without adding any additional herbs and, when the plant was ready, she had clipped and prepared and baked her first batch.

  Which had been entirely too strong. That first night, after only a single brownie, Rose had sat on her front porch for what later turned out to be hours staring out as the sun set over the opposite lake shore and the stars had come out and the coyotes began howling. And she had howled back at them, her wails echoing off the collapsing dairy barn at the end of her driveway. And then, like waking from a dream, she had stood suddenly and shivered in the night-cold air and shook her head clear and gone inside to sleep a long, dreamless sleep. When she woke in the morning, she found herself thoughtful and careful and had none of the behind-the-eyes headache she had gotten in college after various beer parties. And so, whenever her eyes got bad, she cut the recipe in half, and quartered the herbs, and sat on her porch and thought about it all. Now, was that a sin? Rose thought not and so she went to communion.

  And so did Henry, alone. Henry had spent the morning before Mass tying and re-tying his tie and trying to convince his partner Vince to come with him. Vince was Catholic, they both were since their boyhoods, and Henry had had a long talk with Father Young and was convinced that he and Vince would be welcomed at St. Mary’s as long as they were, as Father Young had put it, “not in-your-face” about it. Henry knew that Vera and Betty were a couple and he knew that the parish was okay with them as far as they had to know and he had spent hours with Vince, convincing. But Vince was pretty sure that the lesbians were one thing, but he and Henry would be another.

  “How can you be sure?” Vince asked. “Suppose someone freaks out. You have what you want there, no one knows anything. Why chance it all to have me there?”

/>   “Because I think it would be nice if the man that I love came to church with me.”

  Vince was unconvinced, but as Henry stepped toward the altar, he felt that Vince was weakening.

  Lorie wished the man she loved would come to church with her. She herded her two sons before her as she made her way to the altar and thought about Tom, home, in bed, asleep, with the dog’s head on his chest. It was adorable the way the two of them slept Sunday mornings and Lorie kept the boys quiet while she wrestled them into sweaters and pants (not jeans) and walked them out the door. But it was getting harder each time as the boys got older and saw their Dad lying there while they had to sit and sit and sit through Mass. When the three of them got home, Lorie knew that Tom would have pancakes and sausages and juice and hash browns and good coffee waiting. But all the same, she would give all that away to have him sitting beside her in the pew, holding her hand.

  Francine Winters reached out her hand for Jake’s. It was their habit to hold