The Color of Ordinary Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

me to stay anyway. She promised me that if I waited a year we’d go to college together, but she was not ready to abandon her mother just yet. I was not willing to risk my scholarships for Susan’s sake. So I bolted, and she stayed, and filled her role as a woman of virtue in my father’s congregation. David Sexton married a girl he met at the U of I. Where Susan’s full ride of scholarships would have taken her if she’d left with me.
    The only person who could ever have gotten me to Kentucky to try and help my father was Susan. I’m sure she knew it when she called. I’m sure that‘s why she was the one that called. My father had nothing to do with that call. That was all her, and I knew it when I headed south out of Charity. My guilt at leaving her behind for college guaranteed my cooperation. I didn’t even mind that she was trading on my remorse, although I had no idea what she thought I could do about the situation.
    In fact, I was just as likely to make the situation worse. Susan and I both knew that. Riding to his rescue was the not my proper place in my father’s world. He was the one who was to save me, not the other way around. Who did I think I was anyway? God? I always was arrogant and unbending. Willful. Shameless. One day I would come to know my place; I would come to see the depravity of my life, and the depth of the hell I had led myself to, and I would wail for my father’s help. Would he help me? Perhaps, perhaps not.
    Behind me that day in Charity I left Ivy’s towering rage. She would not believe that I could walk out on her in her hour of need. John chided Ivy gently, and so had Linus, when she yelled at me for going to see my father. They did not understand her apparently excessive reaction to my news. Soon though, they would understand her reaction, and at least Linus would wish he didn’t, I think.
    John offered to come with me. I turned him down. I simply couldn’t imagine dragging John into the middle of my personal life. Even as I couldn’t really imagine being there when Ivy finally talked with Dory about Dylan Morris. I wasn’t family. No matter what they would have said. It wasn’t about me, and I surely did not need to be there.
    Besides, showing up to see my father in jail with a young man more or less unknown to him was just asking for yet another layer of sermon. It would simply seem to confirm what my father would claim he had always known was true of me: I was a fallen woman.
    So I set out alone, my little brown hatchback humming over the miles that stretched out in front of me. Soon the hypnotic sameness of rolling cornfields soothed me. Out on the road, under miles of sky, they couldn’t touch me. My smallness was safety, my unimportance sanity. I almost allowed the serenity to sweep me right past the Dresden, Kentucky turnoff. But only almost.

Four
    Dresden, Kentucky was high on the rustic and low on the charm. The buildings were mostly grey; large and square, the rawboned remains of a building boom in the sixties. Low slung and brown, the police station wasn’t hard to find. There were only two major roads in town; the station stood on the northeast corner of their intersection.
    As I pulled into the parking lot I glanced down at the jeans and t-shirt I had changed into before leaving Charity. They would be high on my father’s disapproval scale. I almost hadn’t worn them. But a survey of my available wardrobe quickly convinced me they were the least offensive. Better to take the hit for wearing men’s clothing and immodesty, than to take the hit for immodesty, vanity, and tempting men. My dresses were too short, and too pretty to wear in front of my father. Shorts were out of the question.
    I don’t know anymore entirely what I was expecting when I got out of my car and headed into the station. I would find no respect there. Even if I was able to pay the fines and defray the damages, my money would not buy me respect. They’d take it. They’d use it. My money