Free The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel Page A

the kitchen and brought out two plates, napkins, and a knife. “In fact, I only became a minister because of the alleged Sunday dinners I would be invited to. I thought I had a whole lifetime of baked ham and fried chicken ahead of me. Glass of wine?”
    “No, thanks. Did it work, your food plan?”
    “Alas. Now almost every time I’m invited to Sunday dinner by a church member, I’m taken to the café attached to the motel at the edge of Hopwood. It’s no sort of life. Oh Lord, this is good. It’s still
warm
.”
    “Thanks. I thought you became a minister because of Kierkegaard.”
    “That’s just a vicious rumor. I saw your daughter out walking her dog the other night.”
    “Langston.”
    “Langston. Yes. How’s it going?”
    AnnaLee made a noncommittal sound and looked out at the garden a moment, chewing a piece of bread and considering her answer.
    In the two years Amos had known AnnaLee, her children had been nothing more than shadows on her face. There were things he knew; some he heard from AnnaLee herself and some he picked up from people in the church. He knew there was a son, and legal troubles? what was it? and that he’d been gone a long time, ten years or longer. Amos hadn’t paid close enough attention to the gossip. He knew Langston had suffered a breakdown of sorts her senior year in high school. There were no pictures of the children in the house; Taos was virtually never mentioned. While Langston was still away, in school, her relationship with her parents seemed undefined. Amos suspected that AnnaLee’s public distance from her daughter actually belied something unmanageable, and so he never pushed her.
    “I don’t know how it’s going,” AnnaLee said. “We still don’t know why she left school, and I don’t dare ask. I’m amazed she made it as long as she did, honestly. When she first left for college I told Walt, could you hand me a napkin, Amos? she’d be back within the year, and there were some touch-and-go moments, but mostly she just breezed right through. Then when she started graduate school I knew the pressure would be too much. I was really afraid for her those first two years. And it seems like I’d just gotten good and worked up about getting her some help and keeping her together and the next thing I knew she’d finished her M.A. and was going straight on for her Ph.D. She had a setback a couple of years ago, but we thought she’d bounced back just fine, and now this. And she was so close. She walked out of her
orals,
Amos.”
    “I heard. What do you suppose happened?”
    AnnaLee blew a strand of hair off her forehead. “God only knows. She’s bright enough, but unbelievably fragile. She looks, I don’t know. She appears to be sort of tensile, but in fact she’s made of eggshells. And
maddening
. She’s the most maddening child, and yet I can’t possibly confront her or go head-to-head with her, because I’m afraid every moment, Amos, that she might break. Which makes me furious with her, because I feel like she has this tremendous hold over me. I’ve already lost one child, and so she’s allowed to misbehave or withdraw or refuse to get a job, whatever, and I have no options. She’s standing there in front of me, defiant, a know-it-all, quoting depth psychiatry and change philosophers, and I can’t say a word about the contradictions in her own life. Because I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt her. I couldn’t live if anyone hurt her. Listen to me.”
    Amos sat up straighter. “I am listening to you.”
    “No, I mean listen to me. I brought this bread over because I wanted to check on
you
. I didn’t mean to deliver the Langston treatise. Not yet, anyway.”
    “No, no, it’s interesting, really. Has she ever seen a—anyone?”
    “Just that first year, after. But I’ve always thought that what was . . . I don’t know. Fixed in her? Her temperament was decided at the very beginning. Delicate. When you have a child like that you just pray