“You're welcome.” Gemma was delighted to have unearthed this family gold—letters, a marriage certificate, clothing from Gracie and Paul's wedding day. Yet this felt more like a first step than a final destination. “Why do you think you might have written a note concerning the whereabouts of this box in code, then locked the code in your desk?”
“I've no idea,” Gracie said.
It seemed like the type of thing a person would do if they had something to hide. Yet the box didn't appear to contain anything secret. Nothing here needed protecting from the rest of them. Or did it?
“Once you've had some time with these items,” Gemma said to Gracie, “I'd love to borrow the box so that I can go through everything one at a time. Read all the letters, etcetera.”
“Yes,” Gracie assured her. “Absolutely.”
ChapterNine
“What's your faith life like?” Gemma asked Jude over the phone on Wednesday night.
As always for their phone calls, he and Mabel had situated themselves in his home office. He had his computer open to take notes as well as a pad and pen ready.
“If I was your girlfriend,” she went on, “I'd know whether you believed in God, and I'd know whether or not you attend church.”
“It's complicated.”
“I'm listening.”
Frowning, he considered the nighttime view through the floor-to-ceiling window. No rain was falling on the trees outside, but lightning had been streaking at regular intervals across a distant corner of sky. “I grew up going to church services regularly with my family. It . . . meant a lot to me. I was the one who nagged my family members to go whenever they were on the fence.”
“Aww. I'm betting you were a kid who was too hard on himself. I can see how it must have been a relief to hear about grace week after week.”
“Yeah.” Her insight into him took him aback. He'd never thought about it exactly that way, but she was right. He was hard on himself, now and when he was young. Grace had given him a vacation from all the striving. “My dad was our church's most famous member and, I'm sure, their largest financial supporter. Keep in mind, though, that he never attended much. During the football season, he worked weekends. During the off-season, he'd only go to church for holidays or special occasions. My mom and my brother and I were the ones who were involved. We were part of the community. We had friends there.”
“I have a bad feeling about where this is going,” Gemma said.
“When it came out that my dad was Max's biological father, the church leaders and members immediately swept his actions under the rug. I could have chalked their forgiveness of Dad up to compassion and accepted it if . . .”
“If?”
“If they'd taken care of my mom and me after the scandal. We really needed them then.”
“No one called or came by?”
“At first, a few of Mom's church friends did stop by. They suggested my mom needed to pray harder and have more faith in order to feel better. They made things worse because they were basically finding Mom deficient in a situation brought on by my dad's infidelity.”
“That makes me ragey. Did you guys try to resume church services?”
“Yes. But we got the sense that our presence made everybody else uncomfortable, which made us uncomfortable. It was like they were afraid that if Dad showed up the same Sunday we were there, that might make Dad unhappy. And they didn't want to risk that. It was clear that they were okay with us disappearing and never coming back. So that’s what we did. We disappeared from their congregation.”
A few seconds went by. Jude was on the verge of saying Gemma's name to make sure she was still there when she spoke.
“So your church left you, a fourteen-year-old boy, to take care of your mom?” Anger was clear in her tone.
“To be fair, my mom's situation was messy back then. She wasn't well mentally, and it was hard to know how to be there for her. My dad also left me to take care of her. So did her so-called friends who weren't from the church. My mom's parents and siblings were the only ones who stuck close.”
“That isnothow that should have gone down, Jude. When things get messy in someone's life, that's when the church community should step in, not away. Even if it is hard to know how to be there.”
Privately, he agreed.
“I hate hearing that's what happened to you and your mom,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
No one had ever said sorry to him on behalf of the church. Gemma'd had nothing to do with it. She definitely didn't owe him a sorry, so he didn't understand why it meant so much to hear her say that. Maybe because she'd hit a nerve with this topic? He'd never made peace with the way their church had abandoned them.
“What’s the state of your faith and your mom’s faith nowadays?” she asked.
