The Beautiful Ashes of Gomez Gomez by Buck Storm

Author:Buck Storm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kregel Publications
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

JAKE TOSSED HIS COWBOY HAT onto the hat rack next to his office door. Three hospital visits, a turn in the confessional, and a catechism class so far, and it was only two in the afternoon. He dropped into his chair and opened his laptop. He had a few hours before he was expected at evening Mass. Might as well spend the time studying. His eyes scanned a passage from the apostle Paul’s two-thousand-year-old epistle to the believers in Ephesus, but his mind wandered more recent roads.

Two days now since he’d seen Honey. He’d filled them with busyness, a useless attempt to distract himself. Was she doing the same? Or had Matthias stepped in and rescued her damaged heart? At night, in the quiet of his quarters, Jake prayed deeply for hours, trying without success to summon sleep. All this time—years now—he and Honey had an unspoken truce. At times it had even come close to friendship. Now he’d told her the things he kept buried. Opened the door and spilled it all. She’d accused him of hiding behind his collar. Early had essentially said it too. And it hurt. Why? Maybe, if he was honest with himself, because he’d thought the same more often than he liked to admit. He looked at the ceiling. “Are you still here? Because I’m starting to wonder.”

Nada. Maybe heaven was closed for Miracle Days.

He pulled his attention back to Paul’s words: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

Is that what I’m doing? Trying to save myself?

He snapped the laptop shut, stood, and headed for the door, grabbing his hat off the rack on the way out. Fresh air always helped clear his head. Stepping out onto the sidewalk in front of the mission he took a deep breath. Across the street the square beneath the huge oak thrummed with activity. Booths in various states of completion formed an imperfect grid, transforming the few acres of grass from a peaceful park into a small city. Jake checked for cars then crossed the road. On the grass he passed a shiny silver food trailer topped with a multicolored sign advertising American Indian fry bread. Next to it, a plywood booth, the cheerful banner above it asking, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’LL GO WHEN YOU DIE? Candles, food, jewelry, T-shirts, baby blankets, knives … You name it, you could get it at Miracle Days. Without any directive from Jake’s brain, his feet found their way to the trunk of the oak at the square’s center. A bronze plaque at the base claimed the trunk’s circumference measured over thirty feet around. Jake touched the rough bark, something he’d been doing since childhood.

“Quit being an addlepate, please.” Father Enzo’s voice found him from the other side of the tree.

Jake walked around. Father Enzo and Lucille sat at a folding card table, a chessboard between them.

“Addlepate?” Jake said.

“Simpleton, knucklehead, dimwit—someone who hugs trees in public,” Lucille said.

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