Heavens to Betsy Read online

  The Judge steeples his fingers under his chin. “Perhaps you’d best begin work on next Sunday’s sermon, Miss Blessing.” He always calls me “miss,” even though he knows my correct title is “reverend.”

  “Perhaps I should.” I stand up, and my spine finally locks into place. Maybe I’m not a victim here. Maybe these people have just handed me my golden opportunity to prove myself. I’ll give them the best senior minister they ever had. I might not be in it for the long haul, but at least I can leave for law school in a blaze of glory.

  On the other hand, it could be one last chance to make a fool of myself in every possible way.

  “If I can assist in the search process, let me know.” With as much dignity and professionalism as I can muster, I turn toward the door.

  “Oh, Betsy,” Mrs. Tompkins calls as I leave, “would you be a dear and brew us some coffee before you go?”

  I slowly turn. I know what I should say. I should point out they’d never ask Dr. Black to make coffee. I should rail against patriarchal practices that treat women as capable of little more than fixing refreshments. But I don’t want to lose my golden opportunity before I climb into the pulpit next Sunday. I’m going to preach the steeple off this church.

  “Regular or decaf?” I choke out, and Mrs. Tompkins glows with triumph.

  “Decaf, please, dear. And perhaps some of those little cookies left from coffee fellowship.”

  Hello, my name is Betsy, and I’ll be your server this evening.

  “Of course.”

  Somehow I make it out of that room and to the church kitchen. And while the coffee brews, I try to figure out how my life got so complicated so quickly.

  You see, in the ministry there’s a fine line between leader and servant. The minute you stand up for yourself, a parishioner is quick to remind you that Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. But nowhere in the scripture does it say the disciples asked him for a pedicure while he was down there.

  While the coffee slowly drips, I replay how I struggled for five years in my previous church to find the right balance. In a small congregation with fewer than one hundred people in worship and a tight budget, everyone pitched in wherever there was a need. So I didn’t mind when I wound up cooking the fellowship meal or running the vacuum in the sanctuary after a wedding late on a Saturday night.

  At Church of the Shepherd, though, where we’re staff heavy and cash poor, lots of members never lift a finger. That makes Mrs. Tompkins’s passive-aggressive command for coffee all the more irritating. I’m tired of feeling like a hired hand who’s supposed to be grateful for a bed in the bunkhouse.

  And as the Bunn-O-Matic spits out the last few drops of brown goop, it occurs to me that when I take the coffee and cookies into the boardroom, I don’t have to leave. As the new interim senior minister, I could simply sit down and stay.

  Do I want to fight that battle? A scene from my previous church flashes through my mind—the chair of the board and the chair of the elders sitting down in front of me after the service one Sunday.

  “It’s for the best,” they said.

  “If you leave today, we’ll pay you for four weeks.…”

  It hurt so much I was sure I must be bleeding. Their message was clear. I wasn’t good enough.

  No, I wasn’t male enough. Or was it the same thing?

  I might have thrown in the ministerial towel right then if, when we stood up to leave my office, I hadn’t noticed the chair of the board go beet red. His fly was unzipped.

  They were human. Wrong, but still human. And Jesus would have loved them anyway. Just as he kept on loving the disciples, clueless wonders that they were. I hate that part about being a minister. That compassion you feel for parishioners even when you’d like to run them over with your car.

  So now, armed with a thermal carafe of coffee and a tray of stale cookies, I gird my loins—emotionally, not literally, because the taupe pantyhose have taken care of that—and march toward the boardroom. I open the door, and the first thing I hear is The Judge saying, “We have her over a barrel after the way she was run out of her last church. You know we’d never have hired her in the first place if it hadn’t been for the regional office insisting.”

  The tray of cookies rattles in my hand. “Coffee, anyone?” My smile tastes like the paste it must be stuck on with.

  Kind Marjorie has the grace to blush. Ed coughs and shuffles some papers. Gus won’t meet my gaze. Edna looks as if she’s just feasted on canary. Meow.

  My knees wobble so hard I’m sure they’re going to start knocking together. To cover the surge of adrenaline flashing through my body, I scurry to the cabinet at the end of the room and retrieve some Styrofoam cups. Church of the Shepherd may be edging toward political correctness by hiring a woman minister, but they’ve not made much progress on the environmental front.

  Cup by cup I move around the table pouring coffee. The committee doesn’t say much. At least they’re able to pass the cookie tray by themselves. Refined carbohydrates are a great motivator in the mainline church.

  When I’m done, I pour myself a cup and pull my chair up to the table. Apparently The Judge’s faux pas is big enough that no one’s going to ask me to leave again. Shame is another great motivator in your average congregation.

  “I’ll oversee the custodial staff,” Gus, the chair of the property committee, offers into the silence.

  “Isn’t that Dr. Black’s responsibility?” My voice sounds unnaturally loud, but I’m afraid I won’t be heard from down here halfway under the table. “I can see to that.”

  The Judge splutters a protest, but Ed waves him off. “That’s great. I’m sure you can manage to see the building is kept clean.”

  “Thank you.” I beam at him.

  “Yes, dear,” Mrs. Tompkins adds. “After all, housekeeping is a woman’s province, isn’t it?”

  I have two choices here. I can challenge her or ignore her. Since my hands are shaking in my lap, I choose the latter. Because what I really want out of this meeting is not a fight, but every ounce of authority I can extract from these people to see me through the next six months.

  A preemptive strike might be more effective than a defensive challenge. “I’ll also oversee the administrative assistant. And I can supervise the interns from the divinity school. The stewardship committee can meet next week as planned. I’ll make sure the bookkeeper has the end-of-the-month statement done. And, Gus,” I turn to the property chair, “if you’ll follow up on the estimates for the new carpet in the sanctuary, we can make a decision before the end of the month. Also, we’re hosting the Middle Tennessee Ministers’ Conference in a few weeks, so we’ll need to ask the ladies auxiliary to bring baked goods for the coffee break. Mrs. Tompkins?” I smile with all the sweetness of battery acid. “Can you arrange that with the ladies?”

  I’ll give her “a woman’s province.”

  All of them look bamboozled. Well, good. They’ll collect their wits soon enough and pile some more obstacles in my path. But for this moment, I’m in the driver’s seat.

  Have I made the congregants of Church of the Shepherd sound more like a coven of devil worshipers than a group of faithful Christians? That’s the problem with an inside view. You’re likely to focus on the flaws and miss the good. And there’s plenty of good here. Elderly ladies like Marjorie hug my neck at every possible turn. Little notes of encouragement show up in my staff mailbox in the office on a fairly regular basis. Folks are willing to spend their Friday nights hosting a group of homeless men overnight in the church basement during cold weather. Love and grace live here, too, at Church of the Shepherd, but like all human institutions, it has its share of greed, pride, and power-mongering.

  Now, for the next six months, it’s my institution to serve and to lead. For good or for ill. If nothing else, perhaps this sudden turn of events will take my mind off David. And that telltale moment when his hand moved across my thigh.

  I’m going to have to call him, of course, and let him know
what’s happened. If I don’t call, he’ll know my denial about being upset with him is as false as my new hair color.

  The complications just keep on coming!

  By Monday morning I’ve discovered that as the new interim senior minister, I’m going to be too busy to take my regular day off. Because when you’re trying to be all things to all people, you can’t afford to lose a whole day on frivolities like grocery shopping and having a personal life.

  By Monday morning I’ve also worked up the nerve to call David again.

  “Yo, Blessing. What’s up?” David sounds reassuringly nonchalant, which means my nervous dialing of his number at the church didn’t transmit itself through the phone lines.

  Remember to breathe. In and out. In and out.

  “You’ll never guess.”

  “Aliens have invaded?”

  “No.”

  “They found WMD in Iraq?”

  “You were closer with the alien thing.”

  “Spill.”

  “Dr. Black resigned yesterday. Effective immediately.”

  “No kidding? So what sucker are they getting for an interim pastor?”

  There’s what you might call a pregnant pause.

  “Betz?”

  “Well, they’re getting me, actually.”

  The pause gestates, gives birth, and cuddles its offspring.

  “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much are they paying you?”

  I swallow. “The same.”

  David sighs. “Did it hurt?”

  “Did what hurt?”

  “When they tattooed welcome on your forehead?”

  Tears prick my eyes. “I’m not a doormat. C’mon, David, I need some support here.”

  “No, what you need is an intervention. What were you thinking?”

  I feel the blood rushing to my head. One long deep breath to center my energy, and I let him have it.

  “I’ll tell you what I was thinking. I was thinking that for once I’d like to have the privileges you take for granted every day. I’d like to be the one in the pulpit. I’d like to be the one who gets called when someone important dies, instead of doing the funerals for the hangers-on.” My throat tightens, and I have to swallow hard. “For once I’d like a starring role instead of being a bit player.”

  “Whoa.” I could picture David making a staying motion with his hand. “Down girl.”

  “Don’t ‘down girl’ me! I’m not a dog. And I don’t need to be judged. I need advice. Can you do that for me? Can you be helpful instead of judgmental?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He was quiet for a moment. “Why don’t we meet for lunch?”

  “Okay. Where?”

  “At 12th and Porter?” To appease me, he suggests one of our favorite haunts.

  “Noon?”

  “Yeah. And Betz?”

  “What?”

  “Just because I said I’d help doesn’t mean I think this is a good idea.”

  “I know. Bye.”

  LaRonda’s response is less tempered than David’s, once she’s finished castigating me for losing my nerve about asking him out.

  “You are the biggest fool in Christendom.”

  I laugh. “Are you sure you want to award that honor so hastily? There’s a lot of competition out there.”

  “You know they’re using you, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “You know they’ll never consider you for the permanent position?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You deserve better.”

  “Yeah, but what if this is the best I’m going to get?”

  And that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? This may be my only chance. This belittling offer to lie down so the congregation can wipe their feet on me. This rare chance to do the thing I have the gift of doing.

  LaRonda makes an irritated noise, somewhere between a growl and a groan. “We need to strategize.”

  “I’m meeting David at 12th and Porter. Want to join us?”

  LaRonda’s nobody’s fool. “Did you call me for advice or because you wanted a third party at lunch?”

  I have the grace to feel ashamed. “All of the above.”

  “You have to face him, Betsy, without help from me or anyone else.”

  “Please, Ronnie.”

  “Nope. You’re a big girl. Go deal with it.”

  Some friend. There are two things girls should always do together. One is going to the restroom. The second is providing backup for awkward lunch dates.

  So I’m having lunch with David, alone, and I have no idea what I’m going to say to him. Except that it probably won’t be even a reasonable facsimile of the truth.

  Five minutes after I hang up with LaRonda, my first Serious Crisis as interim senior minister erupts. I should have anticipated this showdown because I’ve known for a while now that Dr. Black was not the most powerful man in the congregation. No, that tide belongs to another member of the church staff.

  The head custodian.

  “The dang fool thing is leaking something fierce,” Jed Linker drawls as he sags against the door frame of my office and shoots me a challenging gaze, as if he’s Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral. Jed is the longtime custodian of Church of the Shepherd, rising through the ranks to become the building manager and supervisor of three other custodial workers. In fact, he predates every other employee and most of the members. If you want to know the truth about anything around Church of the Shepherd, Jed’s your man. And if you want to be history yourself, then you only have to get in his way.

  I know Jed’s none too happy with having a woman for a boss, especially since he and Edna Tompkins have been thick as thieves since the Nixon administration. It briefly occurs to me that he might have sabotaged the baptistery himself, just to test me.

  “Can’t you patch it?” I ask in the vain, foolish way of a woman who has little actual knowledge of plumbing.

  “Nothin’ left to patch,” Jed says around the toothpick protruding from the side of his mouth.

  “So what do we do?” I know what he’s going to say, but I want him to be the one to say it. A new baptistery. The size of a couple of hot tubs stacked on top of each other. For a brief moment I wish that when it came to baptism, we were “sprinklers” instead of “dunkers.” It’d be far more cost-effective if we just needed a pitcher and a bowl instead of a tank that holds several hundred gallons.

  “New one’s gonna run in the thousands,” Jeb says without inflection, but we both know the church budget is stretched as tight as Mrs. Kenton’s new face-lift.

  I straighten my spine, not willing to let Jed see me wilt in the face of a challenge. “Do we have any baptisms on the calendar?” Since the normal age for baptism by immersion is eleven or twelve, we haven’t had much call to fire up the baptistery of late. In fact, I’m not sure it’s been used in the six months I’ve been here.

  “Nothing on the calendar.”

  Then a question occurs to me. “If we haven’t done any baptisms, how do we know it’s leaking?”

  “Oh, we haven’t done any baptisms.” Jed looks at me as if this is my personal failing. “It was some folks from that new church in Williamson County,” Jed says, referring to the affluent southern suburb of Nashville. “They’re meeting in a school, and it’s too cold to use somebody’s swimming pool this time of year. Dr. Black told them they could have the service here.”

  And there’s the sad truth slapping me in the face. The farther away prospective church members move, the grimmer the future for Church of the Shepherd. People would rather worship in a school cafeteria than drive the thirty minutes to downtown to enjoy the Gothic arches of our sanctuary. And I can’t really blame them.

  “I’ll have to call Gus and get the property division working on it,” I tell Jed, hoping this is the right answer. There goes the new sanctuary carpet we’d all been dreaming of since a deacon fell down the chancel steps while carrying a tray of communion cups brimming with Welch’s Grape J
uice.

  “If you think that’s best,” Jed drawls around his toothpick. He knows I’m passing the buck, and he doesn’t approve.

  “On second thought, I guess I’d better take a look for myself,” I say and stand up to follow Jed from my office to the sanctuary.

  I’ve learned in the past few years that I missed a few necessary courses in divinity school. Plumbing 101. Introduction to Catering. Basic Accounting. I thought that all I was going to need was a working knowledge of the Bible and systematic theology. Turns out there’s a lot more call for the ability to make meatloaf for a hundred or to replace PVC pipe.

  Jed leads me through the baptismal dressing-room area and then down behind the baptistery. It’s a large tiled tank at the back of the chancel with steps leading down into it from both sides. If you were sitting in the pews, you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s there. Behind the baptistery is a small passageway that allows the ministers and the organist to move from one side of the chancel to the other without being seen. A small door in the passage wall leads to the baptistery’s innards, so to speak.

  Jed opens the door, hands me a flashlight, and motions for me to crawl inside. “You can see for yourself.”

  I’m sorry now I took his bait. At least he has the good grace not to smile. With a grimace, I survey my clothes. I made something of an effort to keep up the makeover this morning—black pants, high heels, even a blazer. I run the flashlight around the crawlspace and shudder at the dust-and-cobwebs interior decor.

  “Um, I bet I could just take your word for it.”

  “No, no,” Jed says with false politeness. “I wouldn’t want you to doubt me.”

  So I’m caught. With a sigh, I sink to my knees and crawl inside. Quick as I can, I run my flashlight around the plumbing, and that’s when I see the problem, big as day. Everything around the drainpipe is crumbling. Jed’s right. There’s no way to patch something to nothing.

  With a resigned sigh, I switch off the flashlight and attempt to inch my way out of the crawlspace. Only I keep getting stuck. First my blazer gets hung up on a pipe. Then my hair gets caught in some wire mesh. By the time I finally extricate myself, I know I look as if I’ve been dragged backward through a hedge.