Free The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

little bizarre. Could the abbot really believe that?
    â€œGo to bed now,” Dom Anthony said.
    Thomas lifted himself from the floor and walked out of the church into a night that was heaving about in the wind. He flipped his cowl over his head and crossed the central cloister, headed toward the duplex cottages scattered under the whorled oaks near the marsh.
    He followed the path toward the cottage he shared with Father Dominic. Dominic was the abbey librarian and also the monastery prankster (“Every court has its jester,” Dominic liked to say). He had aspirations of being a writer and kept Thomas up nights with his typing. Thomas had no idea what Dominic was working on, on the other side of the cottage, but he had a feeling it might be a murder mystery—an Irish abbot who turns up dead in the refectory, strangled with his own rosary. Something like that.
    The path was lined with cement plaques announcing the stations of the cross, and Thomas moved past them through spiky bits of fog that had blown in from the ocean, thinking now of Dominic, who’d once drawn smiley faces on several of them. Of course Dom Anthony had made him scrub the plaques and then the choir stalls, while the rest of them got to watch The Sound of Music on television. Why couldn’t he get into trouble the way Dominic did, for something droll and comic? Why did it have to be for the existential bullshit he wrote in his notebook?
    He’d thought for a while he might get into trouble over the baseball card that he used to mark pages in his prayer book, but apparently no one, including the abbot, seemed to care. It surprised Thomas how much he missed simple things like baseball. Once in a while he got to watch a game on television, but it wasn’t the same. Dale Murphy had hit forty-four home runs last year, and he’d seen only one of them.
    Linda had given him the baseball card their last Christmas together. Eddie Matthews, 1953—there was no telling what she’d paid for it.
    He envied Dominic, who had to be eighty at least and went about in a tattered straw hat everywhere except choir. He’d been the one who’d convinced the abbot to put a television in the music-listening room. Once Dominic had tapped on Thomas’s door after the Great Silence and tried to convince him to sneak over and watch a special program about shooting the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Thomas had not gone. He regretted it to this day.
    He was nearly at his cottage when he stopped abruptly, thinking he heard a voice, a woman’s voice calling in the distance. He looked east toward the rookery, his robe beating around his legs.
    A whip-poor-will sang out. The Gullah woman on the island, Hepzibah Postell, the one who kept up the slave cemetery, had told him once that whip-poor-wills were the departed spirits of loved ones. Of course he didn’t believe this, and he was pretty sure she didn’t either, but he liked to think it was Linda out there singing. That it was her voice calling in the distance.
    Thomas pictured his wife—or was it merely the generic woman?—posing in a swimsuit. He imagined the place inside her thigh, just above her knees, the softness there. He thought about kissing that place.
    He stood beneath a bent tree in the Great Silence, and he thought about falling into life and then about flying far above it. Then he heard it again—a woman’s voice calling out. Not a bird singing or the wind moaning but a woman.

CHAPTER Seven
    T he smell of gumbo hung inside the house in thick green ropes, like something you could swing on to get across the kitchen. I set my suitcase on the beige rug and walked down the hallway to Mother’s bedroom. I called out, “Mother? It’s me, Jessie,” and my voice sounded grainy and tired.
    She was not in her bed. The blanket was thrown back, and the white sheets were wadded up in a mess, as if children had gone berserk jumping up and down on