Now and Again Read Online Free PDF

excellent. But I was hoping you could talk to Fitch.”
    Winslow showed no signs of leaving, so the pastor said, “Call me tomorrow. We can talk about it then.” Panic was gathering in his bowels in spite of the fact that another thing he was known for was what Tiffany called his grace under fire.
    She must have been detained. The women of the parish were always coming up to her with ideas for the ladies’ outreach, and the men were always coming up to her because even standing next to Tiff was its own reward. With less than sixty seconds left, he’d have to oust all bodily concerns himself. He could do it—Tiffany hadn’t always been there to help him. They hadn’t even celebrated their three-year anniversary.
    Winslow finally said, “Okay, okay,” and backed out the door, leaving the pastor with the troublesome notion that his talk with Maggie hadn’t seemed to resolve things. He had forty-five seconds to clear his mind. He closed his eyes. He kept a mental box for occasions like this. In his imagination, the box was made of inlaid precious materials like lapis lazuli and ivory and rare endangered woods from the Brazilian rain forest. Now he put his earthly concerns into the box so he could take them out again later. It was a beautiful box, but strong as steel, and once a worry had been locked inside, nothing could let it out again except the pastor himself. He was ready. The crescendo came. The flash of lights.
    He didn’t remember August Winslow or Maggie Rayburn until that evening over hot compote and potpie. “What does it mean,” he asked his wife, “that some of my own parishioners have heard the Truth and rejected it? What does it say about them, but more importantly, what does it say about me?”
    “Not everything is about you, baby,” said Tiffany, and she was right. Hubris was an occupational hazard, and the pastor vowed to guard against it. But first, he had to reconnect his body to his spirit, and he needed Tiffany for that.
    1.7 Lyle
    I t was the information age, but Lyle Rayburn had been left behind by it. He had dropped out of school just before his fifteenth birthday, which had left him with deep insecurities about his ability to know or understand.
    “I won’t try to convince you,” Maggie told him. “I have my reasons, that’s all.”
    Lyle was happy to let silence do the work of words, to stare open-mouthed through the windshield and express his injury by lingering at the Main Street intersection long after the light had changed and the cars behind them had started to honk. It was Will who piped up from where he was pressed against the passenger-side door. “If you really wanted to make a difference, Mom, you’d have to convince other people. That’s what they tell us in church. That we have to witness to other people if we want to be saved.”
    “This isn’t about saving myself,” said Maggie. “This is about saving other people. This is about doing the right thing.”
    “But what makes you right and everybody else wrong? What if other people know something you don’t?”
    “Those are good questions. But if I had to have answers to everything, I’d never even get out of bed.”
    “Are you sure you won’t change your mind?” asked Lyle over the efficient sound of the turn signal and the crunch of gravel under the tires as they made the final turn toward the high school. “We can’t afford to buy another car, and we’ll need one if you’re going off in some completely different direction every day.”
    “I have the bicycle, and if I get the job at the prison, I can take the bus.”
    “What if it rains?” Lyle wanted to know. And then he added gravely, “What if it snows?”
    “I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” said Maggie.
    “Well, don’t you think you should?” The closest Lyle ever came to getting angry was to suggest there was something that was not being done. He liked things to be squared away and he counted on Maggie to square them, even