Parable of the Talents

think I'll introduce Allie to Isis. I have the feeling they'll hit it off.'

'The Elfords have all but seduced themselves for you,' Len said.

I nodded. 'Think about all the other people we've met who've given us nothing but trouble. I'm glad to meet eager, enthusiastic people now and then.'

And of course, I've found my brother again. I find that I've not wanted to talk about that.

Marc has been preaching at one of the big Portland shel­ters, helping out with shelter maintenance, and attending a Christian American seminary. He wants to be an ordained minister. He was not happy to see me. I kept showing up to hear him and leaving notes that I wanted a meeting. It took him two weeks to give in.

'I suppose if I moved to Michigan, you'd turn up there,' he said by way of greeting.

We were meeting in his apartment building—which was more like a big dormitory. Because he wasn't permitted to have guests in his apartment, we met in the large dining room just off the lobby. It was a clean, dim, plain room crowded with mismatched wooden tables and chairs and nothing else. Its walls were a dim gray-green and the floor was gray tile worn through to the wood in spots. We were alone there, drinking what I was told would be hot cinnamon-apple tea. When I bought a cup from the machine, I found that it tasted like tepid, slightly sweet water. The lights in the room were few, weak, and far apart, and the place worked hard at being as dreary and cheerless as could be managed.

'Service to God is what's important,' my brother said, and I realized that I had been looking around and making my unspoken criticism obvious.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'If you want to be here, then you should be here. I wish, though ... I wish you could spare a little concern for your niece.'

'Don't be so condescending! And I've told you what you should do to find her!'

Join CA. I shuddered. 'I can't. I just can't. If Cougar were here, could you enlist with him again—just as a job, you know? Could you become one of his helpers?'

'It's not the same!'

'It's the same to me. What Cougar did to you, CA's Cru­saders did to me. The only difference is they did it to me longer. And don't tell me the Crusaders are just renegades. They're not. They're as much part of CA as the shelters are.  I spotted one of the men who raped and lashed us at Acorn. He was working as an armed guard at the Eureka shelter.'

Marc stood up. He all but pushed his chair over in his ea­gerness to get away from me. 'I've finally got a chance to have what I want,' he said. 'You're not going to wreck it for me!'

'This isn't about you,' I said, still seated. 'I wish you had a child, Marc. If you did, you might be able to understand what it's like not to know where she is, whether she's being well treated, or even ... even whether she's still alive. If I could only know!'

He stood over me for a very long time, looking down at me as though he hated me. 'I don't believe you feel any­thing,' he said.

I stared back at him amazed. 'Marc, my daughter—'

'You think you're supposed to care, so you pretend to. Maybe you even want to, but you don't.'

I think I preferred it when he hit me. I couldn't react ex­cept to sit staring at him. Tears spilled from my eyes, but I didn't realize it at the time. I just sat frozen, staring.

After a while, my brother turned and walked away, tears glistening on his own face.

By then, I wanted to hate him. I couldn't quite, but I wanted to.

'Brothers!' Len muttered when I told her what had hap­pened. She had waited for me at the Elford guesthouse. She listened to what I told her and, I suppose, heard it according to her own experience.

'He needs to make everything my fault,' I said. 'He still can't let himself admit what Christian America did to me. He couldn't stay with them if they did such things, so he's decided that they're innocent, and somehow everything is my fault.'

'Why are you making excuses for him?' Len