The Mammoth Cheese by Sheri Holman

Author:Sheri Holman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781555846527
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The night of Pastor Vaughn’s doctor’s appointment, the sky let forth a fantastic autumn thunderstorm. Maybe it was the sycamore tree lashing his bedroom window that woke him, or the clatter of hail on the tin roof. Maybe it was easier to blame the weather than the black cat of his own mortality hunkering on his chest, stealing away his very breath. Whatever the reason, Pastor Vaughn started awake at four in the morning, rigid beside his dreaming wife, acknowledging for the first time since he saw the doctor that he was going to die.

As a man of the cloth, he knew he would have to be a terrible hypocrite to dread his own passing. He had a hundred pious illustrations and a thousand theological expectations of what he might find on the Other Side, and yet all he could think of, lying there in his bed, was that the intersection of Life and Death was nothing but a sort of celestial abacus, waiting for the businesslike flick of the Divine Finger. How horrible it was to realize that upon his passing all of his family’s beads would be stacked in the column of the dead, with only a single remaining soul left among the living. And when August was slid over to join them—with that final, fatal click—the Vaughn strand would be null, a zero, a holding place in the great heavenly equation.

He rolled over and looked at Evelyn, her face slack against the pillow, just barely visible by the light of the digital clock. She had done a lot of crying in the bathroom after lunch, carefully reapplying her powder so that he wouldn’t be able to tell, but he always knew. Evelyn’s default was laughter, and anything short of that meant serious depression. He never realized how much he counted on her good mood until something snatched it away, and he’d spent the day trying to joke her back to herself. How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb? he’d asked. Ten—one to screw it in, and nine to say how much they liked the old one. But it was no use: She’d snuck off to the bathroom several more times before bed.

Now he looked at his beloved wife, her curls tucked beneath their net like a school of silvery minnows, her lips still pink with traces of lipstick, and wondered how they had gotten to this point. He remembered their years of trying and miscarrying, before and after August, Evelyn’s cautious early optimism and her stricken face when eight to ten weeks later yet another child bid them farewell on its journey to eternal rest. After a while the cycle became too hard on her body, and after that it didn’t matter anymore, she had grown too old. And yet looking at her now, her face smooth in sleep, could he not be forgiven for wishing her another Saint Elizabeth, blessed with a child in her blameless old age? Was she not, in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.