Every evening before her bath and bed, Caroline and I cover the half-mile loop of our street lined with towering Loblolly pines and small, neat single-story brick houses. Caroline rides her tiny bike a few yards ahead of me, alternating between steadying taps of her sneakers on the gummy pavement and wobbly pedaling as her sundress flutters over the mosquito bites on her shins and ankles. A few mosquitoes hover around Caroline’s brown curls.
We’d been living in Rome, Georgia for less than two months. I had a three month contract to provide technical support and training for a new cath lab at the local hospital. Caroline and I had kept moving–this was our fourth contract in three different time zones–until we were ready to settle into the next part of our lives, the gray stretch ahead without Leah. Her thirty-seventh birthday would have been in one month.
As Caroline pedals, the cicadas buzz like a thousand poorly wired space heaters and the damp pine needles smell slightly sour. Footsteps approach from behind. The jangle of keys or change in pockets. “Excuse me, sir. Excuse me.” Huffing. A few steps of jogging as the voice comes closer. “Excuse me. Sir?”
I turn around. A middle-aged man wearing a dark single button suit with notched lapels holds up his right index finger. “May I ask you one thing?” A lawn mower starts up somewhere behind him. “Just one thing.”
I just stare at the man, which must be his cue.
“Are you one hundred percent sure that you’re going to heaven?” Each word occupies its own distinct space. An actor’s overrehearsed single line in a threadbare community theater production. The man’s histrionic question hangs in the air with the first fireflies of the evening.
Over his shoulder I spy a white van–“West Rome Baptist Church”– two wheels on the curb, the engine fan still whirring against the heat. A woman sitting in the passenger’s seat gets out and starts walking slowly toward us. I call out to Caroline to come back to me.
I don’t want her to see me get upset at this man for his strange, invasive, irrelevant question, so I just say, “No, I’m not.”
He turns to the woman now right behind him, and she passes him something. “I have a brochure right here about our Church, about the rewards of heaven through our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. You are most welcome to join us. Sunday services are at 10:15am, Bible study every Wednesday at 6:45pm.”
I take his ridiculous brochure from his outstretched hand.
When the man sees that I have no intention of opening the brochure, he smiles and says, “You have a good evening, sir, and God bless you both.” He turns and walks with the woman back toward the van. Maybe she is his wife. I can imagine them sitting together later at dinner, after they have finished their canvassing, recounting their quota of saved souls. Caroline wobbles a little as she steers around the curve of the loop.
After the church van roars by us crunching over pine cones, our neighbor Harriet, a septuagenarian who has lived in the same house since her husband died thirty years earlier, approaches with her banana leaf umbrella and tiny white poodle flitting around in the gloaming. “Hello there, precious,” she croons, looking down at Caroline who giggles, reaching out to pet Harriet’s poodle, Jasper, sniffing around the front tire of her bike.
“Aren’t you going to say hello to Mrs. Rodgers, Caroline?”
“Hi, Mrs. Rodgers,” says Caroline, still looking down at Jasper. Jasper licks Caroline’s hand that is sticky with barbecue sauce from another KFC dinner.
“When will Caroline be starting kindergarten?” Harriet asks.
“In the fall,” I answer but where is still unknown. Leah’s parents have already been hinting that Caroline would be better off staying with them in Amherst until I am ready to take a longer-term position somewhere. We can’t go back there, not yet.
An SUV full of teenagers passes us from behind. I call out for Caroline to stay closer to the side of the road. The canvassers’ absurd, accusatory question slides under my skin. He thinks I’ve turned my eyes away from heaven. I hate him.
Once we complete the loop and arrive back at our rental, Caroline and I have one more piece of our evening routine to complete before her bath and bed. We put the bike away, and I grab my old tennis racquet from the garage, handing it to her and carrying two tennis balls in our green plastic recycling box to the bottom of the sloped driveway.
“The game,” as she calls it, won’t be over until she has landed both balls in the box. It is our eclectic, steadying, secular ritual, both sorely needed and not enough. After Caroline accidentally hits a ball over my head, she frowns as I scamper, reaching out with my right foot to knock the ball away at the last second before it falls into a dark storm drain.
“How long is kindergarten?” Caroline wants to know as we walk back up the driveway. She’s so young that memories of her mother could slip away, leaving only stories and photos.
“Do you mean when does it start?” I ask my daughter.
“No, how long, Daddy?”
I open the door and a moth flies out, darting above our heads. Caroline races ahead to change into her pajamas.
“Kindergarten lasts a whole year, Caroline,” I call out to her, “and I think you are really going to like it.”
Image: Clouds lit from inside in a blue sky from Pixabay.com
literally stories 
Daniel
All roads lead to Rome, which means that all roads lead out of Rome. Lots going on–one’s certainty of Heaven can be considered blaspheme–for it assumes to know the mind of God.
Everything is up for grabs, and we try to control it all–the proper location of tennis balls is as valid as anything else. But they serve snacks at kindergarten, which improves the experience. I hope it all works out well for these people.
Leila
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A wonderful piece with which to start the week! Left me wanting to know more, past and future which is always a good sign.
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This feels like a sort of very interesting slice-of-life piece. The most vivid scene is when the religious guy talks to him. It feels so invasive…like the grandparents (right?) who want to take the child. It’s a very precarious situation. Thank you!
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This feels like a sort of very interesting slice-of-life piece. The most vivid scene is when the religious guy talks to him. It feels so invasive…like the grandparents (right?) who want to take the child. It’s a very precarious situation. Thank you!
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A gentle story of a man just doing the right thing and a little girl who you can’t help but wish all good things. As for the religious sales people, well I guess we all just have to do what we have to do but I really wish they wouldn’t. I think the majority of people are like me and just think ‘you do you’ and let me do me. A good story to start the new week. Thank you – Diane
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One of the early passage from this story is so very profoundly descriptive: “As Caroline pedals, the cicadas buzz like a thousand poorly wired space heaters and the damp pine needles smell slightly sour.” This sentence puts you squarely into the drama of Caroline and her father, newly bereaved daughter and father. And the juxtaposition of the feckless interloper from the church, who is trying to garner his “quota” of souls, puts everything in sharp relief. Brevity once again will out, and this fiction is keenly, wonderfully brief, yet says everything it has to. Superb story.
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Daniel
This narrative reminded me very much of an Anton Chekhov story (in a good way) in the way it begins in the middle, and doesn’t have an ending; or ends in an unresolved way. These two techniques, not so easy to pull off, when done well can lend a story an enormous sense of real life. Very well done in your piece. Chekhov, the doctor, also had an enormous sense of compassion for ordinary people and ordinary life (including all life, not just people). Your story communicated compassion and all the things that were left out were there beneath the surface. Finally, Chekhov also considered himself a Christian: but one who never attended any kind of services and couldn’t believe in an afterlife (or at least not be sure of it). As for the antagonist in your story who seems to think he knows who will get to heaven, he should look for the log in his own eye before pointing out the mote in his neighbor’s. Grief seemed to be the most important theme in this story: someone getting over their grief (that’s why they’re traveling) and knowing that life must (and does) go on. Thanks for writing.
Dale
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Poignant and so believable the reader can practically feel the heartache. Is he going to heaven? Is there a heaven? Who knows, but sometimes we have to muddle through a bit of hell on earth.
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Daniel
Most of us seem to have unanswerable questions. Like the Jesus-worker in the story. Apparently, only 100% certainty was sufficient. I had a relative who asked me at a funeral if the first ‘person’ we saw after death was Jesus? ‘Why ask me?’ I was thinking, but I think I said, ‘Why do you need to know?’
Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ got him nowhere. Leopold Bloom spent his day fretting. Best not to know. Get about the business of life, like the girl hitting tennis balls into the box [“. . . needed but not enough.]
It’s never enough, but it’s something. Nice job! — Gerry
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Reading these terrific comments brought to mind two incidents which to me marked the conceit of the “surely saved.” The first occurred five years ago, days after my mother died. My cousin called me to commiserate over my loss and out of the blue told me that “unless you accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, Bill” (said all in one hushed breath) you’ll never see your mom again. Do you really want that?” She was all in earnest and is otherwise a really wonderful person, mind you. The second incident occurred when I was discussing with an ardent Roman Catholic, the “special place in hell for LGBTQ persons.” She told me that it’s not a sin “to BE gay,” but only “to act on it.” That is, one can dwell in the loneliness of being the hapless sinner, but as soon as he/she acts in accordance with what they believe in their heart; i.e., have sex, then they’re bound for hell. When I asked how a “loving God” could condemn those who were simply born different from the majority, she shrugged insouciantly and remarked, “I didn’t write the Bible.” She attributed her special knowledge to the insights of per parissh priest. Yikes!
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There’s not beginning, there is no end and so are the Days Of Our Live or Wives. Much like life, questions continue, but there may be no answers, at least not immediately or permanently.
This story illustrates that reality expertly.
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Great title….what exactly can we be sure of? The narrator projects his anger at Leah’s death (the mother of the child) onto the too eager Christians…who are very sure there’s a heaven…. then he lets that go, focusses on hope for his daughter Caroline, her whole life ahead of her.
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This was a huge gut punch that was set up so carefully. A seemingly random incident that is later revealed to cut to the core of someone in extreme pain. I walk past a church near my house which is always plastered with these emotional blackmail type statements, sometimes admiring the boldness of the copy. But coupling that with grief, the innocence of a child, and it’s a scenario where these tactics become way more personal and inappropriate to someone who is just struggling to get by. Great story.
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Hi Daniel,
An absolute masterclass on subtlety.
Even the clumsy (As it always is) intrusion from the religious folks, is dealt with quiet but seething subtlety. But what is wonderful about that section is that feeling of empathy mainly comes from the reader.
Excellent.
Hugh
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A superbly crafted vignette of the everyday, quotidian life of a small town, but also a tale of life’s deepest questions. Excellent writing and would happily see this story this continue into something longer.
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