Come Sunday Morning Read online

  Under normal circumstances Samantha would also have provided him with a better cover story for his unusual behavior. However, this morning she just sat and continued looking out the window. She no longer had the desire or strength to use her well-honed skills of deception.

  “Sammy. Open the door, honey. It’s me, Sandra,” Sandra Kelly said, ringing the bell and pounding on the front door.

  Sandra Kelly was one of Samantha’s closest confidantes. They had gone to college together and over the years had remained friends and mutually supportive. Samantha had comforted Sandra through her first and second divorces, a series of abusive boyfriends, and the meteoric rise of her law career. In turn, Sandra had nursed Samantha through Hezekiah’s many affairs and coached her through the political and social labyrinth that was the lot of every powerful pastor’s wife.

  Sandra was one of the most sought-after attorneys in California and represented only high-profile clients who could guarantee her prime-time coverage on CNN, or an interview with Anderson Cooper. They were sisters, but the only common blood they shared was the pain endured at the hands of the men they loved.

  Samantha looked through the beveled-glass window-pane of the double front door to ensure that Sandra was alone, and then hurriedly unlatched the locks.

  Sandra was an attractive woman with a slight masculine air about her. She frequently wore navy blue pant-suits with the lapel of a white silk blouse framing her full and deep cleavage. Today was no exception. “Sammy, are you okay? I came as soon as I got your message. Is he still here? Did he hurt you, honey?”

  Samantha collapsed sobbing into Sandra’s arms. The silk robe draped off her bare shoulder. “Oh, Sandra,” she cried. “I thought he was going to kill me. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

  “Where is Etta?” Sandra asked.

  “I don’t know. As usual she disappeared after Hezekiah left.”

  “Stop crying, honey, and tell me what happened.”

  Sandra led her to the living-room sofa. As Sandra sat, she saw drops of blood on Samantha’s face.

  “Oh my God, Samantha. You’re bleeding. What did that son-of-a-bitch do to you?”

  Samantha wiped the blood from her cheek with a shaking hand.

  “This isn’t my blood. It’s Hezekiah’s. I confronted him about having another affair. We got into an argument and he went berserk. He attacked me. He jumped on top of me, choking me, and I scratched his face.” She began to sob again. “It was horrible, Sandra. I swear he was trying to kill me.”

  Sandra retrieved a hand towel from a powder room off the entry hall and handed it to Samantha.

  “All right, honey, it’s over now. Everything is going to be fine. That cheating bastard will get what’s coming to him one day, I promise you. When are you going to wise up and leave that asshole?”

  The question registered slowly. I won’t have to leave him, Samantha thought. Soon Hezekiah Cleaveland would be out of her life for good. She would be free from the man whom she now loathed. A smile, ever so slight, crept across her blood-smeared face.

  The telephone on a side table rang and Samantha jumped. “I don’t want to answer that. It might be him. Would you get it, Sandra?”

  “Hello,” Sandra said calmly. “Cleaveland residence.”

  “Who is this?” Hezekiah growled from the rear of the limousine.

  “Oh, hello, Hezekiah. This is Sandra. Samantha can’t come to the phone right now. She’s busy wiping your blood off her face.”

  Sandra sat on the sofa and crossed her legs. Her face contorted into that of an attorney preparing for a fierce courtroom battle.

  As Dino maneuvered the winding hills away from the Cleaveland estate, Hezekiah pressed the button to raise the window that separated the rear cabin of the car from the driver’s section. He put the phone on speaker and calmly replied, “Don’t start with me this morning, Sandra. I’m not in the mood. Put her on the phone.”

  “Hezekiah, do you need a building to fall on you to realize how much you’re hurting Samantha?”

  “This is none of your business. This is between me and my wife.”

  “It becomes my business when you hurt someone I love. If you’re not careful, she might accidentally talk to the media about how you physically assaulted your loving wife and have been cheating on her since the day you married. You’d be a laughingstock, the butt of every joke on late-night talk shows.”

  There was a brief pause; then, “Are you threatening me? It all makes sense to me now. You’re a lesbian. I always thought you were after Samantha, but I never figured you’d stoop this low. You would encourage her to do something stupid so you could run to her rescue and…”

  Sandra put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered to Samantha, “He’s saying he’s going to kick my ass the next time he sees me.”

  Hezekiah continued on the other end. “Does she know, Sandra? Have you told Samantha you’re in love with her yet?”

  Sandra looked stunned for a brief moment, and then whispered again to Samantha, “He’s saying you’re lying and that he never touched you. He said you attacked him.”

  “Well, I’ve got news for you,” Hezekiah continued. “Samantha likes dick—the bigger the better.”

  Sandra laughed into the telephone. “Speaking of dicks,” she said sarcastically, “you should try keeping yours in your pants.”

  Hezekiah slammed the leather car seat with three rapid strikes, and then yelled, “You can’t talk to me that way!”

  “He said I can’t talk to him like that,” Sandra said, mimicking Hezekiah’s baritone indignation. “He’s Hezekiah Cleaveland.”

  Hezekiah could hear Samantha’s familiar laugh in the background. It was the same laugh he had heard when he told a bad joke on the night of their first date. The same laugh that teased him when he fell off the bed the night they made love in their first apartment together.

  Sandra quickly grew impatient. She held the receiver away from her ear as Hezekiah spewed a flurry of accusations.

  “Hezekiah,” she interjected, “you’re fucking with the wrong person. I’m not impressed or intimidated by your holier-than-thou bullshit. If you don’t watch your step, I will take matters into my own hands and believe me, I have more than enough shit on you to make your life a living hell.”

  Hezekiah stopped mid-insult when he heard the words.

  “Shit? What are you talking about? You don’t know anything about me. I told you, Sandra, I didn’t touch her. Now stay out of this. Samantha and I will work this out without your interference.”

  “I know more than you think, and you’ll find out soon enough. Brace yourself. Things are about to get even worse for you.”

  Sandra hung up the telephone. Within seconds the telephone rang again. “Don’t answer it, Sammy,” she said. “He’s livid and screaming like a madman.”

  Samantha looked at Sandra with a puzzled expression. “What dirt are you talking about?”

  “Nothing for you to concern yourself about right now, Sammy.”

  Samantha stepped dripping from the shower when she heard a knock on her bathroom door.

  “Are you all right in there?” Sandra called out.

  “I’m fine,” she responded, startled by the intrusion. “I’ll be out in a minute. Wait for me downstairs.”

  When Samantha came downstairs, Sandra greeted her in the living room with a steaming cup of chamomile tea.

  “I feel much better now,” Samantha said, sitting on the sofa. “I don’t know if I could have got through this without you. I’m so lucky to have a friend like you.”

  “I’m the lucky one, Samantha. You’ve helped me through so much bullshit in my life. This is the least I can do for you. Sammy, can I ask you a question? Why do you stay with him? He ignores you unless the cameras are rolling. He’s never cared about your career, or even acknowledged that you have one apart from him.”

  Samantha was silent for a moment. She laid her head on the back of the sofa. “I’ve asked myself the sa
me question a thousand times,” she finally said. “He used to make me so happy. But the larger the church grew, and the more famous we became, he seemed to change. The only time I think he notices me is when he thinks someone was watching. I honestly don’t believe that he loves me anymore.”

  Samantha took a sip of the tea. “Now it’s your turn. Why do you hate Hezekiah? You’ve never said it to me, but I can tell by the way you look at him sometimes. He has always been so good to you. He got you your first job out of law school. Loaned you money to set up your law practice.”

  Without hesitation Sandra responded, “It’s because of you.”

  “But—”

  “Wait a minute, Samantha. Let me finish.” Sandra set her cup on the table and turned to Samantha.

  “It’s because I see how miserable your life is in his shadow. My heart aches every time I see you smiling dutifully behind him while people heap praise on him. I see how he went chasing after his dreams and left you to struggle through seminary alone.

  “I didn’t tell you this earlier, but when I spoke to Hezekiah, he accused me of…Well, I won’t say exactly what he accused me of…but in essence he said I was in love with you. At first I was shocked and embarrassed. But the more I thought about it the more I knew he was right.”

  Samantha showed no reaction.

  “I am in love with you,” Sandra continued. “But, not in the way he meant it. I love you like a sister. He accused me of being a lesbian. That’s where his bruised ego caused him to miss the point completely. He’ll be disappointed to learn that I’m just your average run-of-the-mill heterosexual. But I’m a woman who’s blessed enough to have another woman in my life whose friendship, happiness, and well-being are as important to me as my own. If that makes me a lesbian, then fine…call me a dyke and sign me up for the standard-issue blue flannel shirt and Birkenstocks. At least I won’t have to shave my legs anymore.

  “I won’t apologize or be ashamed of caring for you and for doing anything in my power to ensure that you have every opportunity to realize your dreams. The same thing you’ve always done for me.”

  A tear fell from Samantha’s eye. For moments the two sat in silence.

  Samantha turned to her with a smile and said, “So, does that mean you don’t want to sleep with me?”

  They laughed out loud together, and Sandra replied, “Sorry, girlfriend, but I like dick way too much.”

  Hattie Williams sat down in her favorite floral-print wing-back chair in her living room. She placed a round wicker sewing kit, which had belonged to her mother, on the tea table next to her. Hattie had raised three children in the house. Her husband died four years earlier and she now lived alone. The newest piece of furniture in the entire house was a small ottoman her husband had purchased twenty years earlier so she could elevate her leg and take the pressure off her arthritic knee.

  Every other piece of furniture in the house had decades of stories to tell. There was the coffee table, which her youngest son hit his head on when he was four, and to this day he still had the scar. She recalled entertaining her in-laws for the first time on the tufted peach Barker Bros. sofa, which she and her husband had purchased when they first married. They took the bus to the high-end furniture store downtown and paid ten dollars a week to get the mahogany dining-room set and hutch with curved legs and claw feet out of layaway.

  A pot of greens simmered on the stove, filling the small house with the smell of smoked neck bones and onions. Hattie turned on a ceramic lamp, which was shaped like a bird standing on one leg and covered with a frilly Victorian lamp shade, to provide the extra light she would need to mend the tear in her favorite housecoat.

  As she searched the sewing kit for just the right thread, the image of a man in flight flashed before her.

  It is Pastor Cleaveland. Hattie leans back in the chair with a look of cautious curiosity and watches Hezekiah, wearing a meticulously tailored suit that flaps with each twist of his flailing limbs, as he plummets through the air in the sanctuary at New Testament Cathedral.

  Hattie drops the sewing basket in her lap and it tumbles to the floor, spreading bobbins, pins, and needles over the thick green carpet. She gasps and covers her mouth in disbelief. Hezekiah is falling and she cannot save him. Hideous flying gargoyles accompany him as he spirals downward. They dance rhapsodically in the air around him, cheering him on to his final destination below. Their wings flap in delight as Hezekiah tries in vain to find some hint of sympathy in their grotesque faces.

  “Oh Lord, please don’t let him fall,” Hattie cries out loud. “Please catch him.” But the harder she prays, the faster he falls. Then their eyes meet for a brief moment. Although he does not speak, she knows what he is saying to her. “Help me, Hattie. I can’t stop. Help me.”

  She hears a chorus of screams echoing through the sanctuary as he continues his glide like a hawk toward its prey on the canyon floor below.

  “Oh my God,” comes as a howl from the balcony. Other shrieks of horror reverberate through the chamber. “It’s the pastor. He’s falling!”

  Women in fashionable heels drop helplessly to their knees, unable to fathom the event unfolding before them. Men leave skid marks on the balcony floors, from rubber on their soles, as they dash in disbelief toward the rail for a clearer view.

  “Tell me who did this, Pastor,” Hattie says out loud to the falling man. “Tell me what to do.”

  But it’s too late. The falling man becomes dimmer and dimmer until the image fades away.

  Hattie cupped her hand to her mouth and sobbed into the housecoat she had planned to mend and said one last time, “Tell me what you need, Pastor. Lord, please tell me what to do.”

  Hezekiah tried calling Samantha again but still there was no answer. He struggled helplessly in an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and guilt as Dino drove the limousine along the now flat city streets. He had dealt the ultimate blow to the woman he once loved so deeply. She wouldn’t leave him, but what dismal part of her soul would survive such a devastating assault? He resisted the urge to go back and comfort her, like he had done so many times before. How could I put my family through this? he questioned silently.

  As he rode in the rear of the limousine through the city, he painfully navigated the emotional debris that accompanied infidelity, being caught, and confession. However, at the end of his silent process, there was no trace of the remorse he thought would greet him. Instead, he felt a sense of relief that he could not explain, although at times he ached at the thought of what Samantha must have been feeling at the moment. His breath seemed to pass freely through every organ in his body and then flow out the pores of his skin. The images he saw on the street seemed more vivid than they ever had before. Streams of energy rose from his belly, up his spine, and lifted an oppressive smoky haze from his shoulders and then flowed out the top of his head. He could feel the fog leave his body and evaporate into the light.

  The car turned into the construction site across the street from his church and parked next to a pickup truck. He had been sitting for a moment when a tap on the window commanded his attention.

  “Good morning, Reverend,” said a jolly red-cheeked man wearing a plaid shirt and baggy denim jeans. “I didn’t think you were going to make it. I was just about to leave.”

  “Good morning, Benny. Sorry I’m late. I had a little problem at home. The building is looking great.”

  Benny Winters was the general contractor for the cathedral that would soon be the new home of New Testament Cathedral and Media Center. Hezekiah never trusted the round little man, but he had a reputation for building some of the most impressive edifices in the country. As a result of his concerns, Hezekiah insisted on approving every construction change order, regardless of how small, and visited the construction site as frequently as he could.

  “Thank you. We’re right on schedule too. Come with me. I’ve got a few things to show you,” Benny replied.

  The two men put on hard hats and began a tour of the groun
ds and skeletal tower. Trucks drove on unpaved roads and dust filled the air. Men in hard hats and construction boots waved good morning as they passed. To their left a cement truck churned as a wet gray substance poured from its bowels.

  “There is where we decided to put the satellite dish. Now everyone in the world will be able to see your pretty face live every Sunday morning,” Benny said with a hearty laugh and pointed to a leveled piece of ground in the distance.

  Hezekiah followed Benny into the cathedral and along corridors with exposed metal beams and wires. Workers were busy drilling and moving items through the halls. Benny pointed to a series of metal brackets along the corridor and said, “Those are where we’re installing the smoke detectors and alarms. The fire inspector came by yesterday and approved the distance between each unit. He went over the building with a fine-tooth comb and said everything looked to be in order.”

  Images of Danny flashed through Hezekiah’s mind as he walked and made him smile. He remembered bringing him to the construction site on several occasions. He always wanted Danny, more than anyone else in his world, to be proud of him. He often wondered what Danny would think of a decision he had made or a project he was considering. He never hesitated to call and ask his opinion.

  Hezekiah suppressed a smile and asked, “Have you got the final bids in for the carpet and tile work yet?”

  “They’re in, and I think you’ll be very pleased. Most of them came in under what we budgeted. It’s tough out there now and all these contractors are desperate to get a job as big as this.”

  “I never understood the point of hiring the cost estimator. It sounds like he overestimated the market. Maybe I should underestimate his fee,” Hezekiah said without humor.

  Ben smiled only to appease Hezekiah. “I don’t think it was his fault. No one knew the economy would end up in the toilet like this.”