A Perfect SEAL

He smiles at me, for real. Teeth and dimples and everything. I see some of the tension leave his shoulders.

“That's right, girl. I'll take care of this.”

We back out and ride off down the street. After just a few minutes is another motel, strikingly similar to the first but this one's sort of blue. He rolls just past it and parks by the hamburger restaurant next door.

“Now, you just stay here, for just a minute. Just wait for me and I'll be right back, all right?”

“Yes, all right,” I agree.

He trots off, out of the restaurant parking lot and across to the motel parking lot. I just make out the shape of his back in the fluorescent glow of the corner office. He's talking to someone, shifting from foot to foot. Something about watching him from afar, when he can't see me, from behind a pane of glass, feels so interesting. Like I'm watching this all on television. Like it's not even real.

But it is real. In just a few minutes he reappears from the office and holds something in his hand over his head. A room key. He's done it, just like he said he would.

The motel room is at the very far end, up the stairs and just out of sight of the office. His eyes dart around suspiciously as he unlocks the door. He peers in first, flipping on the lights and checking all around before he motions me to enter.

“It's not fancy. But it will work.”

I think it's marvelous. I've never seen anything like this. There are two beds — two! — in the middle of the room. The floor is covered in brown shag carpeting. The walls are covered in some kind of paper that's shiny in spots, with a squiggly pattern that's a little bit hard to look at. There's a machine under the window, buzzing and hammering frightfully.

“What's that?”

“Well, I think it's supposed be an air-conditioner,” he smirks playfully. “Go on and feel it, why don't you?”

I’m not sure what he means, so I walk over to it and put out a hand. It's blowing air at me, but the air is cold, almost ice cold.

“Air-conditioning! I've heard of this!”

He squeezes his eyes shut tight and tips his chin back to stretch. The groan rumbles deep in his chest, something that sounds like a combination of sadness, regret, and maybe a little embarrassment.

“I never get us air-conditioning, did I?” he says, almost to himself. “There's so many things I never got done, Angel. You'll never know.”

I walk over to the first bed. It's huge. Three people could sleep in it. Crawling up on top I sit directly in the middle, crossing my legs pretzel style and just grinning at him. I can't help it. This is really sort of marvelous.

“Like what?”

“Like what?” he repeats.

“Yeah, what you want to do that you couldn’t do?”

He squints at me for a long time, then sits down on the other bed. He leans his forearms on his knees and slumps over slightly. I see the weariness in his posture.

“Well, in the beginning… I had plans. A clear vision of Eden. It was all supposed to be this great idea. No boozing, no drugs, none of the nasty stuff people do. We were just gonna live a simple kind of life. People could pray together, eat together, work together, so everybody would be okay. That was the plan.”

I shrug. “Well that's exactly what Kingdom Come has already been. You did it. You should be happy.”

“But there was so much more. We were going to have a farm stand. We were gonna bring in foster children from the county, give them the kind of life they wouldn’t be able to have anywhere else. Values. Faith. We were going to do good things for everybody, but it go

t to be so hard to just keep living, we could never get that started.”

“Foster kids? Like orphans?”

“Yeah, wouldn’t that have been nice? Our Family could just grow and grow and grow. That was the dream.”

“But you made a lot of dreams come true anyway, Father Daddy. You kept us all safe.”

“I think the experience that we just had would contradict that, don't you?” he asks me, looking at me directly. “I mean… aren’t you mad?”

“How can I be mad at you? You told me what I needed to do… I would do anything for you. Anything for the Family.”