Douglas Wood

❇

Seated on the scratchy waiting room couch, Marilyn poufs and redistributes her hair for the twentieth time before she puts her hands in her lap. In seconds though, her fingers take flight and are off on mission number twenty-one. Why did she cut it last week? Why?

From behind his computer screen, the balding assistant sighs. “Really, Mrs. Donohue. I promise. His Excellency will be out in a few minutes.”

No need to be snotty, Marilyn thinks inside, but smiles outside. She may die of nerves. They’ve reached a decision. Why else would Bishop Reilly have called?

Next to her David is grinning into his phone, checking on sports scores or something. His long legs stretch out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. Besides a little bit of a tummy and a few faint lines, he could be a carefree teenager. After all his studying, taking test after test, and the TV appearances, here he is: fine and dandy, cool as a cucumber. It must be nice.

One of his sand-colored cowlicks has escaped. She reaches over to corral it and he brushes her away. But as consolation he gives her hand a calming little squeeze, which works like a marvel. Or so she thinks. Without warning, the gigantic wooden door swooshes open and Marilyn nearly jumps out of her skin.

“Dr. Donohue, Mrs. Donohue, good to see you. Come on in.” Bishop Reilly says. David follows the bishop’s gesture and Marilyn follows her husband. “No calls, Ted.”

Up close, he looks much larger than from the women’s balcony. With his short bristly hair and broad chest, he looks like a trained grizzly, one she doesn’t dare look in the eyes.

The bishop swings the door closed behind them, sealing them inside the chambers. She isn’t sure what she expected it to look like, but it wasn’t this. Narrow and windowless with high ceilings, it even smells pious. And look at all the books on the shelves. No, don’t look.

“Still coming down outside, is it? Please, sit, sit…” The bishop’s lovely robes—cappuccino brown cassock with gold and cream vestments—sway around him until he plants a large thigh on the front of his oiled, black desk. “David, you tell your dad that golf is still on tomorrow. He won’t get out of it because of a little rain.”

“He told me to tell you it’s divine intervention, Excellency.”

David laughs his breezy laugh and relaxes back into the tufted chair. Marilyn takes a posture-perfect seat on the edge of her chair. She smooths her toast and sienna-colored skirt across her lap and switches on her automatic smile as the men talk.

She has only seen the bishop face-to-face once: a year ago, just months after the family converted. After the service, the bishop was shaking the congregants’ hands as they left. After much deliberation, Marilyn got up her nerve to tell him how moved she was by his message. But when her turn came, he took her elbow and whispered in her ear, “Perhaps you weren’t aware, daughter, in the Bookist Orthodox reading, clip-on earrings are considered adornment with jewels. We take the Eleventh Commandment seriously.”

She was too ashamed to tell him the truth—she’d worn the clip-ons to hide her piercing holes. When they were Bookist Reform, ear piercing wasn’t slutty at all. Now she knows.

She shifts in her seat and her diligent fingers reassign some golden brown hair from the back of her head forward over her once-sinful lobes.

The bishop laughs. “What’s your dad’s take on the bribery scandal? The president can’t seem to keep his foot out of it, can he?”

“Dad says President Hahn had better rein his boys in. His poll numbers are dropping…”

Like a good wife, Marilyn ignores the political talk, focusing instead on the four equal arms of the Bookist Cross on the wall behind, on the fuzzy pictures of the Reilly grandchildren on the desk. Then she spots a thick, khaki-colored envelope lying on the blotter. The flap is sealed with ivory wax and an embossed insignia. His Sacred Council. David’s fate—her family’s fate—is pressed under the bishop’s thick leg.

Oh, no. David didn’t make it into the Redeemed, is her first reaction. The chitchat continues as dread wells up inside her, but Marilyn makes an effort to laugh in the right places. He’s going to be crushed, she thinks. Open it and get it over with.

Then, she looks up at the cross and considers a new possibility. An almost impossible possibility. What if the letter contains good news? It might. She’s got a good feeling about this—her intuition is almost never wrong. All her attention is on that letter now. Open it. Open it!