“Did he know you were sixteen?”
“Oh, yeah. He used to call in to school for me. You know, like, ‘This is Ian’s father, he won’t be in school today because he has the flu’.”
“That didn’t seem… wrong to you?”
“It was exciting,” Ian said. He was clearly enjoying the memory—or shocking Paul. It was hard to tell which. “I couldn’t believe someone like that would be interested in me,” Ian continued. “He’d take me to parties with all these dancers and actors. We’d get drunk together. He liked cocktails, mixed drinks. He taught me to mix martinis, Tom Collins, Long Island ice tea.”
“So he was a good influence all around.”
“He taught me valuable life skills.”
“I hate this guy.”
Ian laughed. “I was head over heels for him. ‘This is the one’, you know? Happily ever after.”
“Happily ever after at sixteen?”
“What did I know?”
“You’re a romantic.”
“I was.”
“Not anymore?”
“I don’t know. I’m smarter. Sometimes I wish I could still just completely fall head over heels like a teenager, you know? I still like the idea that maybe there’s this one right guy. That it can last forever. Like soul mates. Is that… I don’t know. Kind of sappy?”
“No. I don’t think so. I believe in soul mates.”
“So you’re a romantic too.”
“What happened with the dancer?”
“Oh, he got a job with a ballet company in Texas and went away. I sent him these e-mails, like, ‘I love you’, ‘I miss you’, ‘I think about you all the time’—pretty much every day, but he never wrote back. Then finally, on my birthday, I called him. I couldn’t wait to hear his voice. He was just completely cold. He said, ‘You’re not relevant to my life anymore. You should cool it with the e-mail.’”
“Wow, that’s…. Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s his loss.”
“Uh-huh. They always say that.”
“You’re only twenty-four. I can’t believe how much you’ve experienced.”
“I haven’t experienced anything. Nothing worth experiencing, anyway. What about you? Do you think you’ll fall in love again?”
“You know, I couldn’t imagine myself loving anyone else for a long time. But now, I’m starting to feel like I’m ready. I think I could fall in love again.”
“Happily ever after?”
“Maybe, with the right person.”
Holy Communion
In 1916, the historian and critic John Charles Van Dyke wrote a book devoted to the meaning of mountains. “How often that feeling in the presence of the great elements has expressed itself in a mist of tears and a choking in the throat!” he wrote. “The high-blown pride of the human breaks under him just here. His reason deserts him and the religion of the Garden comes back to him. There in the high mountains, which were God’s first temples more truly than the groves, he forgets to pray for himself, but has rapturous praise for the Power that planned and the Hand that wrought. He is back to a primitive faith from which he never should have wandered.”
Paul held out the silver tray with the little cups full of grape juice and the plate with bite-sized chunks of Selma Mead’s home-baked bread. The parishioners inched up the aisle, each silently taking a sample, then turning and circling back to the pews. As the members in the middle pews filed into the aisle, Ian stood and walked with them, two places in line behind Frank the usher.