It Happened on Maple Street

“Sure.” Everyone on my floor had dates. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to spend the next year dateless.

I was done being the undated girl in school.

James accompanied me to church the rest of that semester. We went to movies on campus and ate together sometimes on Sundays. We hung in the same groups.

And one night, when he walked me back to my dorm, he stopped just before we moved from the darkness of the shadows into the light shining above the front door of the all-girl habitat, and I knew what was coming.

This was it. The moment I’d been dreading. And yet . . . I liked him. He was kind. Nice looking. He really liked me. Enough not to choose someone else over me. And I didn’t want to be alone.

The thoughts chased themselves around in my brain.

James didn’t say a word. With his hands on my shoulders he pulled me closer until there was only a foot of distance between us. I saw him lower his head. Saw his lips coming closer. And I waited.

They were a little bit cold. We’d just had soda.

And then they were gone. With a smile on his face, James took my hand and walked me to the door.

r /> I’d survived.

Twelve

I DIDN’T SEE OR TALK TO JAMES THAT SUMMER. I didn’t see or hear from Tim, either. It was the summer of 1979. The worst summer of my life.

My father took exception to my newly formed allegiance with the church I’d joined. James’s church, though I’d joined before I met James. It was Armstrong’s church. The church where I’d found the God who’d filled my gaping heart.

My instructors at school had warned me that I’d probably get some resistance from my parents when I got home. They’d given me the mental and emotional tools to stay strong.

Scriptures. Words of love. Students from school were set up to write to me every day that summer to help me stay strong in a nonmember family.

“You have a church home,” my father told me my first week home, on a Friday afternoon in July.

I’d spent the month of June in an Armstrong summer intensive—a graduate-level class that toured New England literary historical sites. I’d been to Louisa Mae Alcott’s home. Seen hundred–year-old etchings that were referred to in a classic I’d loved as a child. I’d stood in Longfellow’s home and stared at the staircase that was the central point in a poem my mother had recited to me from the time I was a toddler. I’d been to Yale. Seen Hawthorne’s home. I’d walked the streets where the Scarlet Woman had walked. Imagined how she’d felt.

Because I’d been scarlet, too. But I’d been forgiven. My new faith assured me of that.

And my father thought I was going to turn my back on that?

“I want you to come back to church with us.”

“I can’t.”

His lips tightened. I tensed. And I stood my ground. I wasn’t a little girl anymore. I’d made mistakes. I’d lived through a broken heart. Broken dreams. But I was redeemed.

“You’re hurting your mother.”

I couldn’t help that. This was my soul we were talking about. My mother, in her seeming refusal to allow me the freedom of religion that my country allowed, was hurting me.

My father didn’t stand. He didn’t even sit up straight. In a quiet but very determined voice, he said, “Your mother and I have talked, and it’s either your church or your home, young lady.”

I’d already lost my heart. My love. I couldn’t lose my God.

“Then I choose my church.”

James was the first person I saw when I got back to Alabama that summer. I was early. I’d flown in instead of catching a ride. I was the first of the girls I was rooming with to show up. We had an apartment, campus housing for seniors, out by the railroad tracks.

Running from the silence, from the fact that I’d spent the summer staying with the woman I worked for, from the fact that my mother and father were still estranged from me, I went for a walk along the railroad tracks.

“Hi!” The lilt in James’s voice was nice. Familiar. Welcoming. Here was someone who was glad to see me.