The Solace of Leaving Early Read Online Free PDF

on the corner and walk her mother home, and at the corner she thought she’d just step on into the vestibule and wait for her there.
    She could hear the last strains of the last song, but didn’t recognize it. Someone, a woman, was weeping with abandon. The vestibule felt pressurized—what was that pressure?—such that she held her fingers against her temples and closed her eyes, waiting for it to pass. She decided to open one of the swinging doors between the vestibule and the sanctuary, just a crack, just enough to see her mama. Instead she slipped inside, finding herself in the midst of a standing-room-only affair. The man standing next to her, middle-aged with a black pompadour and a blue polyester suit, smiled at her kindly even though his face was streaked with tears. Langston had never seen him before.
    Robbie Ballenger, the owner of the local funeral home, and one of his assistants were just beginning to escort the family out of the church and into the waiting coach. Langston saw Beulah, Alice’s mother, stand, sway, nearly fall. Robbie caught her under the elbow, solidly, and led her down the aisle. Beulah seemed to have aged fifteen years since Langston was home last Christmas. Her hair had gone completely white, and the dark circles under her eyes made her look like her own mother, Alice’s grandmother, who died the year before. Just as Beulah reached her, Langston stepped back and out of the way, but Beulah saw her anyway.
    “Thank you for coming, sweetheart,” Beulah said, but her gaze was so unsteady Langston was unsure if Beulah was talking to her. She glanced behind her at the blue-suited man, but he just nodded as if he were thanking her, too.
    “Me?” she mouthed to him.
But I didn’t come,
she wanted to say.
I’m not really here.
    Then other people were streaming past, the stunned, the shuddering, the sober, and for just a moment Langston caught sight of the man who was surely the new preacher, but he was out the door quickly. He was tall and thin, with dark, unruly hair and a gauntness, a bone structure that reminded her of Ichabod Crane, and the look on his face was so unbridled, his pain was so evident that she had to look away.
    AnnaLee saw her from across the church. She had changed into a dark dress and all of her hair was in place, for once. Her eyes were bright with tears, and when she saw Langston in the doorway she pressed three fingers against her lips and kissed them, and Langston did the same.

Chapter 3
    GENIUSES
    “God is of two minds about the world,” Amos wrote, trying to prepare the sermon for the coming Sunday. He scratched it out, filing it in the category of pure projection, and started again. “God has two minds.” “God
is
two minds.” He dropped his pen and rested his forehead in his hands. Every week was the same; he began writing his sermon in faith he would be able to say what he meant—or more importantly, say what he believed, and what he felt should be said—and every week the whole enterprise fell apart, and early on. The desk chair, an old wooden captain’s chair that both rocked and swiveled, groaned as he leaned back. Amos worked at his father’s desk, which had been
his
father’s desk, as befitted a succession of preachers. When he was a young man Amos had been moved by such things as heirlooms, and by continuity, the march of certain objects or inclinations across time, but now he wished, as he always wished while sitting at this desk trying to write, that if continuity were something truly to be desired, his father had been a miner or a stonemason or a grocer.
Anything
but a minister. It was a
dreadful
profession.
    He recalled an evening at dinner when he was twelve or thirteen; his father had seen a nature program on herding dogs the night before. “There are two varieties, apparently,” his father said, while Amos’s mother sat tucked in and enthralled, and Samuel, already half-gone from their lives, moved his peas around on his plate. “One