Free Heavens to Betsy by Beth Pattillo

what if this is the best I’m going to get?”
    And that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? This may be my only chance. This belittling offer to lie down so the congregation can wipe their feet on me. This rare chance to do the thing I have the gift of doing.
    LaRonda makes an irritated noise, somewhere between a growl and a groan. “We need to strategize.”
    “I’m meeting David at 12th and Porter. Want to join us?”
    LaRonda’s nobody’s fool. “Did you call me for advice or because you wanted a third party at lunch?”
    I have the grace to feel ashamed. “All of the above.”
    “You have to face him, Betsy, without help from me or anyone else.”
    “Please, Ronnie.”
    “Nope. You’re a big girl. Go deal with it.”
    Some friend. There are two things girls should always do together. One is going to the restroom. The second is providing backup for awkward lunch dates.
    So I’m having lunch with David, alone, and I have no idea what I’m going to say to him. Except that it probably won’t be even a reasonable facsimile of the truth.

 

     
    Five minutes after I hang up with LaRonda, my first Serious Crisis as interim senior minister erupts. I should have anticipated this showdown because I’ve known for a while now that Dr. Black was not the most powerful man in the congregation. No, that tide belongs to another member of the church staff.
    The head custodian.
    “The dang fool thing is leaking something fierce,” Jed Linker drawls as he sags against the door frame of my office and shoots me a challenging gaze, as if he’s Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral. Jed is the longtime custodian of Church of the Shepherd, rising through the ranks to become the building manager and supervisor of three other custodial workers. In fact, he predates every other employee and most of the members. If you want to know the truth about anything around Church of the Shepherd, Jed’s your man. And if you want to be history yourself, then you only have to get in his way.
    I know Jed’s none too happy with having a woman for a boss, especially since he and Edna Tompkins have been thick as thieves since the Nixon administration. It briefly occurs to me that he might have sabotaged the baptistery himself, just to test me.
    “Can’t you patch it?” I ask in the vain, foolish way of a woman who has little actual knowledge of plumbing.
    “Nothin’ left to patch,” Jed says around the toothpick protruding from the side of his mouth.
    “So what do we do?” I know what he’s going to say, but I want him to be the one to say it. A new baptistery. The size of a couple of hot tubs stacked on top of each other. For a brief moment I wish that when it came to baptism, we were “sprinklers” instead of “dunkers.” It’d be far more cost-effective if we just needed a pitcher and a bowl instead of a tank that holds several hundred gallons.
    “New one’s gonna run in the thousands,” Jeb says without inflection, but we both know the church budget is stretched as tight as Mrs. Kenton’s new face-lift.
    I straighten my spine, not willing to let Jed see me wilt in the face of a challenge. “Do we have any baptisms on the calendar?” Since the normal age for baptism by immersion is eleven or twelve, we haven’t had much call to fire up the baptistery of late. In fact, I’m not sure it’s been used in the six months I’ve been here.
    “Nothing on the calendar.”
    Then a question occurs to me. “If we haven’t done any baptisms, how do we know it’s leaking?”
    “Oh, we haven’t done any baptisms.” Jed looks at me as if this is my personal failing. “It was some folks from that new church in Williamson County,” Jed says, referring to the affluent southern suburb of Nashville. “They’re meeting in a school, and it’s too cold to use somebody’s swimming pool this time of year. Dr. Black told them they could have the service here.”
    And there’s the sad truth slapping me in the face. The farther away