The Truth About Celia Read Online Free PDF Page B

these last few months, ever since his father died. He feels sometimes that he has become one of the damned, those to whom prayer is forbidden. He slips his shoes on and opens the vestry door and steps out into the sanctuary. His father spent his entire life trying to read the Bible from cover to cover, and when he died, at sixty, of a heart attack, the Reverend Gautreaux found his bookmark six pages from the last amen, at the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation. He does not understand how a life could end so abruptly, so close to its natural completion.
    The Reverend hears a premonitory cough in the pews and turns to see Kimson Perry, the police chief, standing there with his arms crossed. Kimson asks him how his smoke was and then laughs at the way his face blanches. The Reverend is so easy to rattle that Kimson can’t help himself sometimes. The sun shining through the stained-glass window casts an arrowhead of red and yellow light down the aisle, and Kimson follows it to the chancel. He likes to call the Reverend
Rev,
filling the smile that always spreads out from his lips with the sound of a revving engine. He was the first officer to investigate the disappearance of the little girl, the Brookses’ daughter. The Reverend looks at his watch and tells Kimson that he’s about an hour early for the noon mass, which is a joke. Kimson is a determined agnostic. The Reverend likes to tell him that this is exactly right, he is downright
determined
not to know, to which Kimson always answers, No, I’m determined not to
pretend
that I know. Kimson says that he has come to ask the Reverend if he wants to catch an early lunch, before the flock comes calling, and the Reverend nods and feels behind him for his wallet. He calls out to Miss Unwer that he is leaving for half an hour, then tells Kimson to lead the way. Kimson knows that the Reverend considers his agnosticism a form of intellectual laziness, and he likes to debate the matter with him once or twice a week over lunch. It is Kimson’s thought that the Reverend thinks of life as a dart, which is to say that what matters to him is where it will land, while Kimson himself thinks of life as a paper airplane, which is to say that what matters is the fact that it’s flying. He has been waiting to use this metaphor for almost a month, but the Reverend has seemed dispirited lately, as if Kimson could poke right through their banter and find him shriveled to his bones with anxiety. He has had to ease away from the debate. A ruff of clouds hangs just around the sun, like a tire. On their way to the diner, Kimson and the Reverend have to step off the sidewalk to weave past Enid Embry, who is carrying a swaying tower of Tupperware to her car—meat loaf tubs and picnic hampers and soup tureens.
    Enid Embry lifts the door handle with the very tips of her fingers, probing blindly, and totters around the edge of the door as she opens it, allowing the Tupperware to tumble willynilly into her backseat. Ever since her husband retired and passed away—God rest his soul—she has spent her days baking for her friends and neighbors and listening to broadcasts of
The
Art Bell Show.
One thing she has discovered is that even her dearest friends often do not return her Tupperware, so once a year she orders a completely new set, picking it up from Belinda Kuperman, her Tupperware agent, in four separate shipments. Enid lives directly across the street from the Brooks family— though can she really call them a family anymore, now that it is just the two of them? She doesn’t know. After she has driven home, she bakes a pan of Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise and waits for it to cool on the counter. Art Bell is discussing time travel with his callers: Is time travel possible? How would a time traveler avoid the infamous temporal paradoxes popularized by
Star Trek
and the
Back to the Future
movies? The air in Enid’s kitchen is thickening with the scent of cheese and hot dogs and a hint of