The Churchgoer Read online

  Dedication

  To my sister and brothers and our parents

  Epigraph

  And what remains when disbelief has gone?

  Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky

  A shape less recognisable each week,

  A purpose more obscure. . . .

  —Philip Larkin, “Church Going”

  San Diego? One of the most beautiful harbors in the world and nothing in it but navy and a few fishing boats. At night it is fairyland. The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns.

  —Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick Coleman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  WHEN I FIRST SAW CINDY LIU STANDING ON A STREET CORNER IN Oceanside, trying to thumb a ride out of town, I wondered why a young woman like her was hitchhiking, but I didn’t think it was any great mystery—bad boyfriend, bad drugs, bad job, bad upbringing, bad decision making, bad luck, or maybe a misguided optimism, a romantic attraction to the sixties or some other brief bohemian flowering that rose up between the paving stones of greed or progress or those other more direct forms of bloodletting. A few facts between not-knowing and knowing, that’s all. A puzzle. But this isn’t about puzzles.

  It was morning. The sky was mottled gray like a well-used rag. The day was threatening rain but only in that imprecise, Southern Californian way: the cloud cover could be fog off the sea, a marine layer set to burn off in the afternoon, or an honest-to-God rain cloud—a rare-enough prospect that most of us don’t believe in them until the first drop hits our face. It was impossible to know whether the overcast would evaporate with the day or not. As the heavy traffic to the beach attested, everyone hoped—everyone demanded—that it would.

  I’d gone to Angelo’s for breakfast after an early morning surf at North Jetty. The floor and counters in Angelo’s were red-and-white ceramic tile, or had been before the white had yellowed and the red browned. In the kitchen, visible beyond the counter, a loose piece of lettuce skittered on the griddle. A man wearing a red T-shirt and a white apron sang “Cocino dos hamburguesas en la mañana, yo cocino dos hamburguesas en la noche” to the steady slap and sizzle of flipped, flaring meats. It smelled like fry oil and oregano. I liked their self-serve coffeepot, something you don’t see much anymore, one of those industrial ones with the brown-rimmed glass for regular. If asked for decaf, they’d send you down the block and question your dignity as you left, as was only right.

  I ordered a breakfast burrito and coffee, filled the chipped mug, and made my way to a window booth that looked out over Pacific Coast Highway. On my way in I’d noticed the woman across the street, and she was still there by the pitched roof of the Wienerschnitzel. Between us was stalled traffic heading in both directions, one hers and the other not. Behind her, the ketchup-and-mustard umbrellas looked like a clutch of cocktails abandoned by a party of friends. I didn’t know what that made her. Stray olive, maybe. She wore a yellow T-shirt and cutoffs, and her hair was short and black. A cardboard sign I couldn’t read was wedged into her hip.

  There’s a person with a cardboard sign for every block of Coast Highway, but that was especially true here, by the freeway on-ramp and off-ramp. People were always coming and going from downtown Oceanside. It was the first southbound pit stop after the long, dusty expanse of the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, a place for those new recruits to let off steam, the most directly accessible beach on which the inland invasion from Temecula, Murrieta, and Hemet could mount their temporary assault, an easy town to hop a train (in one of the cars or on one) and ride south toward the border or north to Los Angeles. It was a good place to get a tattoo, if you didn’t care about spelling or aesthetics. A good place to find a motel that charged by the hour. Or it was one of the places where you lived if you worked in San Diego and couldn’t afford other options. It wasn’t a place many people stayed if they could help it. I liked that about it. Maybe like is too strong a word. Anyway, I was one of those broke people, in more ways than one. So a hitchhiker with a sign taking in some lungfuls of exhaust and the tepid, sickly smell of hot-dog water was unremarkable enough. She was attractive, though, and I wasn’t against looking.

  The voice of the Greek woman behind the counter called out that my order was ready. The way she said it, without a pause, made it sound like my first name was the food I was about to eat: “Breakfast burrito Mark. Breakfast burrito Mark.” It made me glad I hadn’t ordered Tony’s Special.

  I got up, took my tray, and snagged a napkin and a bottle of Tapatío on my way back to the booth. Across the street, the woman tapped the sign against her calf. She was probably twenty-two or so, I guessed. I peeled back the paper on my burrito, took two shallow bites, and filled the hole with hot sauce. A car full of young men pulled off in front of her, and she leaned into the passenger window. With the red sedan in the way, I couldn’t see much until it lurched back into the traffic, which was suddenly moving again. There she was, in the flashes between the passing cars, a fountain drink exploded at her feet, raising a middle finger to taillights. She craned her back, lifting the bird on high to make sure they saw it, and said some words that I couldn’t hear but that were, in a more elemental way, intelligible enough.

  She took a black hoodie from her backpack and wiped at her feet. She kicked the cup away, cursed some more, cleaned her kicking foot again, and lost her balance, falling onto one hip and flinging an arm up as overcompensating counterbalance. She talked to herself, seated on the concrete, stuffing the hoodie back in her bag. The traffic ground to a halt once more, and she vanished behind one of the beach-bound cars. Bad drugs or bad booze, I decided. Poor kid. I went back to my food.

  Lost to my thoughts, meager as they were, and the bundle of grease and chilies I was eating, I hadn’t noticed the young woman cross the street until she came through the door to Angelo’s. The counter was unmanned, and she propped one arm against it and pivoted, swinging her hips back and forth. I tried not to look—women can feel old eyes on them, and I didn’t like being reminded of what I’d become—but then I would come to, wondering something not exactly ineffable about the frayed denim of her cutoffs. I poured more Tapatío on my burrito and bit.

  She dropped her backpack on the ground and gave it a swift kick. Her worn T-shirt was more a vague impression of yellow over a black bra. Scowling at the menu, she mouthed the different options, squinted at off-putting items, debated her possibilities for an audience of one. She reminded me of someone
, but I couldn’t place it. I had a feeling she was never not conscious of being watched. Little did I know.

  It’s hard not to think of her as I would later: hair dyed, living under a different name. Those two versions of her phase in and out of each other, like the picture on my garbage television. It’s hard not to wonder about the negative space between them, the lines of static, to ask what was real there. Everything else is a puzzle. That’s the mystery.

  2.

  THE GREEK WOMAN EMERGED FROM THE KITCHEN TO ATTEND TO THE customer. There was a bit of back-and-forth that I wasn’t trying to hear, but then a pleading note emerged in the younger woman’s voice. The woman behind the counter had her hands up, saying, “I can’t, I can’t.”

  The hitchhiker gestured with her open wallet. “I had money—I don’t—someone must have swiped it,” she said. “I’m just trying to get a little something to eat. Please.”

  Then it came back, an impression from what felt like another life: Hannah Trout, one of the small-group leaders from the church I had led, and the way she would move from social circle to social circle, a kind word here, a prompting question there, a little shared anecdote about how prayer had helped her settle on her summer plans or pursue musical theater. And the look she’d given me when I’d taken her aside and questioned whether she was acting out of love for God or for the admiration of her peers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she had said, looking at me in horror. I asked her if she was too focused on trying to perform for everyone in this perfect way, said that I wondered if she knew the envy it was creating in the other girls, how it was seen as flirting with the boys, how she might be putting personal motivations ahead of God’s. “What would you do,” I had asked her, “if no one was watching? Only God.” Her expression went cold, tears just held in reserve. “I was wrong,” she said. “You don’t know what you are talking about. There’s always someone watching.” Then she left, found another leader to work with. I know what she meant now, the impossible contortionist act asked of young evangelical women. But this was toward the end of my pastoral career. A precursor, a warning sign, a kind of imprecation. Before everything went dark.

  “No, I just can’t,” the Greek woman said again to the hitchhiker. I hated these memories, their insidious tentacles, and forced them down someplace deep and dark. Memories never did any good. I needed them as much as watered-down Tabasco.

  The hitchhiker needed a burger, didn’t have the cash. Fine. Her legs were thin and pale, I could see plainly. She probably could use the calories. The cardboard sign rested against the white backpack she’d set below the counter. In a blocky but still somehow fanciful hand were the words SEATTLE? TAKE ME. GOING NORTH? TAKE ME.

  I’d like to say it wasn’t the Wienerschnitzel-strength whiff of suggestiveness that got me to my feet. That wasn’t all of it, of course. Caritas and cupiditas, charity and cupidity, make nasty but satisfied bedmates all the time. There’s a lot going on inside a person in a given moment, but I hadn’t made a habit of helping people for a long time, and there was plenty down in there to be suspicious of, along with the one or two better impulses that had adapted to the lack of light and air, like a couple ghost crabs warming their claws on a deep-sea thermal vent. Maybe it was that memory of Hannah, the servant-leader, the look on her face, a history of disappointment there, working under the surface of my mind. It was my first mistake.

  I stood and walked toward the counter, trying to keep my gait slow, disinterested. I knew how to approach someone like this. When I was halfway there, I called out, “I need a little guac, Cass.” Cass, the Greek woman behind the counter, told me without a glance to hold on a minute. Then she told the girl she was out of luck. I studied the menu board, pretended I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about.

  “I’m not normally like this,” the hitchhiker said. In the slight shift in how her voice projected—a little bump in decibels and a new clarity in the sandpapered tone—I knew she’d turned and was speaking toward me, that her words were making a more direct route to my ear.

  “Huh?” I said, looking at her and then back to Cass. “Sorry, Cass, can you just give me the guac and I’ll come back and pay later? My hash browns are turning to asphalt over there.” The woman behind the counter mustered a look of complete disinterest, which was a step up from her usual expression of couldn’t-give-a-rat’s-ass.

  In my peripheral vision, the hitchhiker turned her body to face me more fully. She was making no secret of looking at me, was waiting for me to turn. I could see what was happening. She’d made a mark. It was like watching a tiger hunt meat in the zoo, which made me both the meat and the keeper with the meat on his fishing pole. I turned.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, man,” she said. There was a jangliness to how she spoke. Up close she was pretty, young. There was a scatter of freckles across her nose, and her features made me think she was part Chinese, maybe. Her hair was swept across her forehead. It was dark and smooth, save the cowlick in the back that almost made her look like a hungover teenage boy but not quite. “I don’t know what happened,” she said, “but I must have got robbed. I had money and it’s gone. Can you believe it?”

  I shrugged. “Easy enough to believe in an empty wallet in Oceanside.”

  She was turning on the ball of her hand so that her elbow kinked out, and she let her head fall to the side just a fraction, not quite doing the sad, cute ingenue thing but doing just enough to suggest the idea. She was good. “I guess you’re right. I was just trying to get a little bite to eat, you know?” She laughed but didn’t drop that note of sadness. It might have been phony, but she looked so pitiful doing it, it didn’t matter.

  “And what,” I said to Cass, “you can’t spare one of those B-grade frozen Frisbees you’ve got in the back?”

  Cass looked about as moved as the Rock of Gibraltar. “Now it’s one, then it’s twenty. So many bums around here, and if people start figuring out we’re a soup kitchen—”

  “Burger kitchen,” I said.

  “Whatever kitchen, free kitchen,” she said. “Then we got a problem.”

  “If it’ll move this show along faster,” I said, reaching for my wallet, “let me pay for the thing.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to do that,” the hitchhiker said, but her voice was as thin as spider’s silk and as sincere as a celebrity’s lavender marriage. I just made a noise and passed some money over. She folded her arms and smiled sweetly. “Man, that’s incredible. You don’t meet enough people like you, you know? Any way I can get a Coke, too? I’m thirsty as hell.”

  I nodded and gave Cass some more money. “Never understood that one. ‘Thirsty as hell.’ I’d be thirsty in hell.”

  Maybe it was that I’d already paid, maybe it was the joke, but the girl picked up her bag and backed away, and the ingenue vanished. Those sad eyes turned opaque, the way shop windows late in the day become mirrors reflecting Main Street. She looked like any teenager now. “Yeah. Good point. Thanks, man,” she said tonelessly. She took her cup and made to go around me. Beneath the scent of cigarettes that wafted off her, I caught a slight sour note of alcohol. I’m always proud when I can sniff out my own kind.

  “Being thirsty in hell,” she said as she passed, “is a little like achieving nirvana and then having to go to the bathroom, isn’t it?” She punctuated the comment with a brief, indescribable noise and kept walking.

  Cass gave me my guacamole and change. I passed the hitchhiker at the soda dispenser. “If you want someone to bore you, I’m sitting over there,” I said, pointing.

  Most of the charm was already shaken out of her disposition. She said “Uh-huh” tonelessly. Then there was a terse smile, a quick glance that was more at my feet. “Thanks again.”

  But I hadn’t stopped, was still walking back to my seat like I didn’t even care to hear her reply. I didn’t like these kinds of theatrics. They felt cheap, like a bargain suit off the rack, and I’d worn that costume too often in my old life to enjoy its feel on my shoulder
s. But I didn’t know another way, and all interactions are more or less a self-gratifying manipulation anyway. Maybe I was bored. Obviously a little hard up. But she seemed like a girl who needed a hand, and deep in my brain some coming together of boredom and desire found a route into the memories of what it felt like to actually give one. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get me to trot out this cheap routine. Maybe she needed help, it was possible, though I admitted to myself how unsure of my own motives I was and always am. I thought of my younger self, never once skeptical of what he wanted and why. It made me shudder, that stranger.

  A few minutes later, the girl was tossing her things across from me in the booth. She slouched into the seat and leaned back, head tilted down slightly, watching me with a gaze that had a canine quality—not the alpha but not willing to be kicked—cautious, paying a cautious attention. She was waiting for me to reveal myself as some kind of asshole, like she’d just sat through the trailers for three movies about assholes and now the animated studio logo for the feature was fading to black. There might have been a sullen smirk tucked into her mouth. I didn’t know whether to tell her she was beautiful or call her parents to come pick her up.

  “Are you a creep?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You buy a girl a burger. Maybe you’re a do-gooder, maybe you’re a creep. I don’t want to sit here with a creep. So which is it?”

  “Not a creep. Not really a do-gooder either. I’m nothing.”

  “Nobody’s nothing.”

  “You can get pretty close.”

  “Not without a lot of help.”

  She seemed to know something about it. I stewed on that for a minute.

  “So,” I said. “Seattle, eh?”

  She looked startled a moment but then glanced at her sign and covered it well. “Yup. Seattle. So?”

  I wiped my hands on a paper napkin. “What’s in Seattle?”

  She leaned forward on her elbows, hands pressed together against one cheek in a gesture of sloppy prayer. “The Space Needle.”