like everyone else. All of the other houses on their street had had sand or gravel with rearrangements of existing vegetation: cactus, sagebrush, succulents. Her father had planted a yard--grass, flowers, and two ludicrous willow trees which flanked the sides of the driveway.
Even now, she still wasn't quite sure how she felt about her family.
For years she had not wanted to be seen in public with her parents, avoiding shopping trips, dreading open houses and back-to-school nights. She'd seen the smirks on the faces of her classmates, heard the snickers, when her mother had come to pick her up from school and called out to her in Cantonese. For a whole year, third grade, the year that the schoolyard rhyme 'Chinese .. .
Japanese .. . Dirty knees .. . Look at these[' had made the rounds, and Cal Notting had teased her unmercifully by pulling taut the corners of his eyes and sticking out his front teeth in imitation of a stereotypical 'Chinaman,' she'd prayed each night before going to bed that her parents would wake up in the morning and speak perfect English. She had never been to church in her life and did not really understand the concept of God, but she'd heard enough about praying from her friends and from television to have gotten a general idea of what she was sup posed to do. So she'd folded her hands, closed her eyes, started off with 'Dear God,' followed that with her wish list, and signed off with 'Amen.' It hadn't worked, though, and she'd given up the prayers when she'd graduated to fourth grade.
That embarrassment had ended somewhere along the line, but those years had taken their toll.
John was still stuck at that hypersensitive stage, and she was a little worded about him. By the time she was his age, she had already started growing out of it and coming to terms with her family and her background.
She wondered if that was something John would ever be able to reconcile within himself.
It was hell living in two cultures. 'Okay,' she said. 'I'll trade.'
'If mother says anything, tell her it was your idea.' She was about to argue with him, then changed her mind. 'All right,' she agreed. She caught her father's eye, and he gave her an approving nod .... He understood.
Her mother wouldn't understand, and Sue was glad that she had not been in the kitchen with them. It would only have resulted in an argument.
Her parents were so dissimilar in so many ways that Sue often wondered whether their marriage had been arranged-although she'd never been brave enough to ask. She realized as she picked up a completed order from the low shelf next to her father that she did not really know how her parents met. All she knew was that they had been living in Hong Kong and had married there. That was it. Her friends all seemed to know the intimate details of their parents' courtships and were able to recite specifics the way they would the plot of a movie. She and John knew no such stories of their parents' past.
Her mother came in through the door to the dining room. 'Hurry up, John. Customers are waiting.' 'That's okay, John,' Sue said. 'I'll get it.'
He looked at her gratefully as she handed her mother the plates and followed her out to the front.
'You owe me,' Sue said over her shoulder as she walked into the dining room.
John nodded. 'Deal.'
Corrie watched through the window as Pastor Wheeler got into his car, backed up, and pulled onto the street.
She put down the pen she'd been writing with and flexed her fingers.
Being a church secretary was different than she'd envisioned. She'd thought it would be a leisurely, slow- paced job: writing Thank-you notes to little old ladies, scheduling appointments with parishioners, calling people during the holidays and asking them to donate food for the poor. But she seemed to spend most of her time filling out permit applications, making out invoices, and filing requisition forms.
/
Not that she minded.
Just as the subdued pastel light of the chUrch office in which she worked stood in sharp contrast to the harsh fluorescents of the paper office, the simple unstructured demands of her new position were a welcome change from the rigid deadlines of the Gazette. She might have a lot of work to do right now, but the labor was not mentally taxing, and she felt as though she finally had time to think, to sort things through in her mind.
She had also grown to like Pastor Wheeler, although she knew that the mere thought of that drove Rich crazy
The pastor could be a little aloof, a little preoccupied, but he was a good man, with good ideas, and he really was dedicated to serving God.
I have seen Jesus Christ.
She pushed the thought from her mind and looked down at the paper on which she'd been writing. There was going to be a big church fund-raiser a few weeks from now, a picnic, and it was her responsibility to make sure that the event was publicized in the Gazette. Rich would cynically suggest that that was the reason she'd been hired, her close ties to the paper and the publicity which that relationship could provide. But he knew as well as she did that, in Rio Verde, anyone who wanted publicity got it. There simply wasn't enough real news to take up the slack. '
At least not until recently.
She added a line to the description of the fundraiser she'd been preparing, and glanced up at the clock on the bookshelf. Three-thirty.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the darkened doorway that led down the hall to the chapel, and she quickly focused her attention back on her paper.
She didn't like being left alone in the church. Itwas a strange thing to admit, but it was true. She felt comfortable and at ease when the pastor was around, but as soon as he left, the whole tenor of the place seemed to change. Noises that had been unobtrusive became disconcertingly loud. The hallway and chapel seemed darker, the locked doors to the vestibule and storage room appeared to be hiding something. Her office remained unchanged, but the atmosphere in the rest of the church altered palpably, and the empty hulk of that new addition seemed downright threatening.
He has spoken to me.
Corrie reached over and turned on the desk radio, found the faint rhythmic stade of a powerful Top Forty station out of Phoenix. She shifted her chair so that in her peripheral vision she saw the window facing the street rather than the doorway opening onto the hall.
She focused her attention once again on her work and began writing. c The spider was still there when she got home. Corrie stared at the hairy black body in the upper right corner of the living room as she took off her shoes. She knew Rich had seen the spider that morning, and she'd watched him studiously avoid that entire section of the room as he prepared for work. She had purposely not touched the spider, had waited for him to take care of the creature, though she'd known that he wouldn't kill it.
Sure enough, he'd left it there for her to deal with.: : A grown man afraid of a bug.
She heard Rich talking to Anna in the kitchen, and she felt suddenly annoyed with him. Why did she always have to be the one to take responsibility in this relationship? Whether it was their finances, their domestic arrangements, or even a simple spider, she always had to make the decisions, she always had to take action. Anything outside of the precious newspaper automatically became her responsibility. If he worked as hard on their marriage as he did on that damn paper, they might be able to have a fairly decent relationship.
She heard Anna laugh, heard Rich say something to her. His voice was light, happy, relaxed. As always, he was acting as though nothing was wrong. That annoyed her too. It was fine to behave that way around your daughter; children needed their parents to be strong. But it was quite another thing to put on that same happy face in front of your wife. Part of her felt guilty for resenting his behavior. It wasn't up to her to tell him how to deal with his feelings, how to cope with his grief. But then again, maybe it was. She'd been sympathetic with him. She'd been there for him. She knew how he must feel having the graves of his parents desecrated--she knew how she'd feel if her parents died and their bodies were dug up--but he had not shared his feelings with her, had not opened up to her the way she'd expected.
The way he should have. The way, at one time, he would have. That angered her. What made her even angrier was that she knew he wasn't even discussing it with Robert. She knew that the two of them, when together, would tiptoe around the subject, talk about it like reporter and cop, not talk about it like brothers, not talk about the way they felt inside. What the hell was wrong with that family?
She picked up one of her shoes and, standing on her tiptoes, smacked it against the spider. The black body
