drinking a glass of wine.” She held up her glass.
“When you really wanted a margarita.”
“How could you tell?”
“By how quickly you ran over the server when she tried to describe all the possibilities. You didn’t want to hear them.”
“Is that why you got wine, too?”
“I got wine because that’s what I wanted.”
She abruptly ran out of small talk. Now that she had reassured him, she knew she could sit quietly with Ethan for the rest of the evening and both of them would be perfectly comfortable. But she didn’t want to be quiet. She decided to tell him what was really on her mind.
“It’s not just that today was an unusually bad day of ministry...”
“Let’s not forget being knocked to the ground by someone you wanted to help.”
“That, too. But actually that’s what I’ve been playing over and over in my mind.” She sipped her wine and thought about what to say and what not to.
He filled in the gap. “An attack like that would upset anybody, but you did everything right. Except maybe believing anybody that drunk could be reasonable.”
“I haven’t been thinking about the man who pushed me. I’ve been wondering about the one who helped me off the ground. Or at least the man I thought he was. For a moment, at least.”
She could see that Ethan didn’t understand, but why should he? She wasn’t being purposely obtuse; she was just trying to find a way into the story.
She started again. “The crowd surged in around me. For a moment I thought I was going to be run over.”
“You nearly were.”
“I saw a hand extended so I grabbed it. A man helped me up. The crowd pressed in, and I only got a glimpse of him. Before I could say anything he was swallowed by people, and by the time I got away, he was gone.”
“Are you worried because you didn’t have a chance to thank him?”
“I’m sure he wasn’t expecting anything. Not under those circumstances. The thing is...” She took another sip. “I thought he was someone I knew, someone I haven’t seen in a long time. I was almost certain, but it makes no sense, not really. Because I can’t imagine why he would be in Asheville.”
“But if it was somebody who knows you, wouldn’t he have stayed to say hello?”
“You would think so.” She realized she was toying with her wineglass, rolling it back and forth between her palms the way her mother used to roll dough for the sweet rolls she had made nearly every day of Analiese’s childhood. She set it down before she spoke again. “Did I ever tell you how I came to be a minister?”
“Just that it wasn’t your original career choice. I know you started in television news.”
“I actually started in theater, but along the way I found television and switched my major. I got married right out of college. Greg was a producer at a local network affiliate, and I did my internship under his supervision. After we tied the knot he moved us to California to a larger station, and I was hired as a reporter.”
“I knew you’d been married. Divorced?”
She shook her head. “Greg was quite a bit older, a catch and a charmer from head to toe. Unfortunately, as I learned, he was also an unrepentant womanizer, a daredevil and a bully. His favorite pastime, other than one-night stands, was to ride his Harley at high speeds on dangerous roads. In a rare moment of candor—after one of our many fights—he told me that the only time he really felt alive was when he was facing death.”
“You were very young.”
She smiled a little, because it was true. “But not an idiot. I was gathering my resources to divorce him when he went over a cliff on his motorcycle. He didn’t live to report the story. As horrible and unministerial as this sounds, dying was the only nice thing he’d done for me since the early months of our marriage. I didn’t have to go through a divorce. I had his life insurance and pension, plus I was able to stay on at the station. Because not only would Greg have fired me, he would have blacklisted me once he got the divorce papers, so I never found another television gig.”
“A charmer for sure.”
She pictured her ex, something she rarely did. “Indeed he was.”
“And he’s the reason you left television?”
“I left because of Isaiah Colburn.” She paused. “Father Isaiah Colburn, the man I thought I saw today.”
“You knew him from California?”
“Two years after Greg died I was considering a better job at another station farther north in Los Angeles. I was sent to report a house fire in a poor Latino neighborhood. It was one of those awful, awful moments, Ethan. Children trapped inside with no way to get out. Grieving, wailing parents. The fire department carried out the bodies, and my job was to try to get people to talk to me about what they were feeling. Hopefully people intimately connected, of course, the more intimately the better. A real coup would have been the parents.”
He winced. She went on.
“My strength was empathy, and I wanted to go to them and help somehow, but, of course, I couldn’t. For the first time I realized I would always be at a distance, that I might be first on the scene, reporting what I saw, but I’d never be truly a part of it. That my job, like the police and fire personnel, was to stay on the outside, to remain objective, to move on to the next tragedy. If Greg only felt alive defying the odds, I only seemed to feel alive when I was witnessing and documenting the lives of others. Only at that moment I didn’t feel alive. I felt like a voyeur.”
“Epiphanies come in all shapes and sizes, huh?”
She looked away. “Thank God the parents were behind the police line and I couldn’t get near them, or I might have tried. I ask myself that sometimes. Would I have?”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Ethan said.
She would never be sure. “Anyway, while I was scurrying around for a story, my heart silently breaking, a car pulled up and a man got out. Thirtyish, dog collar and clerical shirt. Clearly a priest. They let him through to be with the family. Nobody questioned how important he was. I glimpsed the way he greeted them, the long hug of mutual sorrow, the tears, the hands held, the heads bowed. Then their exodus together, him protecting them from people like me who wanted a small piece of their tragedy to increase ratings. I saw the way he shielded them, dealt quickly and succinctly with questions from the police, helped them into the car that would take them to the hospital where the deaths of their children would be confirmed and plans made for burial.”
“And your life changed.”
“In an instant. My personal road to Damascus. I saw the future I was pursuing and, beside it, a different path. Not one lived in the spotlight, but one lived in a smaller, more intimate place, where my actions would only be recorded on hearts and souls. I wanted to be where the smallest acts of kindness and comfort make all the difference. I saw myself
