Comfort and Joy Read online

  “Robin,” Joanna said sternly. “I happen to make the best roast turkey this side of Chicago. You know that—you’ve had a few Thanksgiving dinners at our house. Now what do you think Jeff is trying to tell me when he colors his turkey green? That my turkey is rotten? That it’s going bad? I mean—green!”

  “I think he’s trying to tell you that green was the first crayon he pulled out of the box. Don’t take it personally.”

  Joanna started to laugh. Then her attention shifted past Robin and she fell momentarily silent. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Robin bailed her out with a smile and an introduction. “Joanna, this is Jesse Lawson. Jesse, Joanna Calloway.”

  Joanna shook Jesse’s hand, then shot Robin a quizzical glance. “Lawson? I didn’t know there was someone named Lawson in the class.”

  “There isn’t,” Jesse corrected her. His gaze shuttled between Robin and Joanna and he nodded. “It was a pleasure meeting you both,” he said. “Green is great, but—” his eyes lingered on Robin for a split-second longer “—purple hands are exceptional. You must be quite a mother, Robin Greer.”

  With an economy of motion Robin found hypnotic, he pivoted on his heel and strolled out the door.

  Robin and Joanna stared for a wordless minute at the empty doorway through which he’d vanished. Then they simultaneously turned to each other. “So?” Joanna asked. “I’m all ears.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Robin declared truthfully. “We talked for a few minutes. That’s all.”

  “If he isn’t someone’s daddy, what was he doing here?”

  “He’s a neighbor of Ms. Becker’s,” Robin informed her. “He had to bring her some—some documents she wanted.” Sworn to secrecy about the teacher’s divorce, she wasn’t about to say anything more.

  “Is he single?”

  “How should I know?” The question irked Robin, mostly because she had failed to find out that vital piece of information. “All we did was talk about the hands on Philip’s turkey.”

  Joanna assessed Robin dubiously. “He approached you,” she pointed out. “I was watching.”

  “You were supposed to be looking at the snake.”

  “Which would you rather look at, a comatose snake or that magnificent man? I hope for your sake he is single,” Joanna said, zipping her jacket. “I’m all done here if you are. Let’s go home and rescue Glenn.”

  Rummaging in her purse for her car keys, Robin followed Joanna from the classroom. As they walked through the building to the parking lot out front, she listened with half her brain to Joanna’s report on what Matthew Florio’s mother had said about the gym teacher and the gossip about Emily Gelb’s father’s transfer to Dallas. With the other half of her brain, Robin mulled over Joanna’s remark about how she hoped Jesse Lawson was single.

  Why should Robin care whether he was? They’d talked for a few minutes, that was all. She would never see him again. If she ever started dating—when she started dating, she silently corrected herself—she would be wise to stick with safe men for her first few outings. Her definition of “safe” was not too affluent, not too good looking, not too smooth. Not possessed of a voice that could tame wild lions and croon colicky babies to sleep, that could cause a woman to suffer heart palpitations merely by saying, “You must be quite a mother, Robin Greer.”

  His voice had sounded so sweet when he’d uttered her name. Sweet, velvety, seductive, as if those bland words contained intimate secrets. Robin fleetingly wondered what Jesse Lawson would sound like sharing real intimacies, whispering erotic ideas, caressing Robin’s soul with seductive murmurs.

  Starting the station wagon’s engine, she clicked on the radio. The car filled with a buoyant rendition of “Deck the Halls,” its rousing melody effectively erasing the memory of the man’s voice.

  Indeed, Robin concluded with a wry smile, someone like Jesse would sound absolutely foolish singing “Fa-la-la-la-la.”

  Chapter Two

  LOOSENING THE KNOT of the knit scarf at his throat, Jesse climbed the stairs to Martha Selby’s third-floor apartment. The elevator still hadn’t been fixed, which was both good and bad. Good, because the broken elevator was a major item on the list of grievances that Jesse had filed with the court on the tenants’ behalf, and the more items were on that list, the more likely the city was to smack down the building’s owner. Bad, because women like Martha Selby shouldn’t have to trudge up and down several flights of stairs every time they wanted to run an errand or visit a friend.

  The elevator was broken, and bags of garbage were heaped along the curb outside. The corridors were strewn with more garbage, and the front door lock had been broken for nearly a year. A couple of the windows were veined with cracks. Most of the tenants had already moved away, but Mrs. Selby and a few others were staying on because they had no place else to go.

  The exposed lightbulb on the ceiling of the third floor hallway had burned out, Jesse noticed. He pulled his smart phone from an inner pocket of his jacket and texted a note to himself about that. One more grievance. He hoped there wouldn’t be too many more before the landlord felt compelled to rehabilitate the building. It was too close to being condemned—and if it was, Mrs. Selby and the others would have no choice but to move. George Cabot—the sonofabitch landlord—was probably hoping for condemnation. He’d made little secret of his desire to remove the rest of the tenants, raze the building, and sell the land. Even in this rundown neighborhood of New Haven, a person could turn a tidy profit on the sale of a double-size lot like the one this building occupied.

  Jesse knocked on Mrs. Selby’s door—the doorbell had stopped functioning ages ago—and listened to her plodding footsteps approaching the door from the other side. He heard the click of the peephole lid opening, and then the slip of the bolt being released. “Mr. Lawson,” she greeted him, smiling and stepping aside so he could enter the apartment. “You’re early. I was just making some lunch. You hungry?”

  “No, thank you.” He closed the door behind him. His polite smile faded as soon as he heard the orchestrated melody emerging from the television set in the living room. Blessings at Noon. The show’s theme music was as familiar to him as his own name.

  He walked briskly into the living room, where he found Mrs. Selby’s one-year-old grandson asleep on the floor in front of the television set, a yellow fleece blanket covering him and a pacifier protruding from his mouth. I don’t blame you for wanting to sleep through this, Jesse thought, stepping over the baby to turn off the television.

  “I was just watching that,” said Mrs. Selby, squatting down to tuck the blanket more snugly around the baby. “I just love Blessings at Noon.”

  “It’s a stupid show,” Jesse snapped, then bit his lip. Martha Selby was free to love Blessings at Noon if she wanted. Lots of people loved it. Its ratings remained strong, year after year.

  “The choir, they sing so nice,” Mrs. Selby explained. “And today, the Reverend Robert Shepherd had on this amazing girl. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr. Lawson. Paralyzed from the neck down in a ski accident, and then she prayed and prayed and the Lord saw fit to let her regain the use of her hands. It was a miracle, and I saw it with my own eyes, right there on the show. I saw that girl write her name and throw a baseball from her wheelchair.”

  “It wasn’t a miracle,” Jesse muttered, unable to temper his annoyance. “The girl’s spinal damage probably wasn’t as severe as the doctors originally thought. When people recover like that, it isn’t because of divine intervention. It’s because of excellent medical care and physical therapy. And hard work.”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Selby argued. “She and the Reverend said, right there on the show, they said they prayed together and the Lord saw fit to make this girl’s hands work again. And right now, I’m just praying and praying that the Lord see fit to fix up this apartment before it falls down on our heads.”

  Jesse permitted himself a dry laugh. Prayer wasn’t going to fix the apartment buil
ding. Even if the Reverend Robert Shepherd, his enormous staff and the entire Grace Cathedral Choir prayed for the building’s repair, it wouldn’t do any good. The only way to save Mrs. Selby’s home was through legal maneuvers, the lawsuit Jesse had just initiated, and a lot of pressure on the recalcitrant landlord. In other words, hard work.

  “Come on,” Mrs. Selby said, urging him into the tiny kitchen, where a couple of frankfurters were boiling in a pot on the dilapidated gas stove. She waved Jesse to one of the vinyl chairs by the table, then busied herself pulling two hot dog buns from a plastic bag. “You sure I can’t feed you one of these?” she asked as he took a seat.

  “I’m sure. But thanks, anyway.”

  “Some coffee, then,” she decided, filling a kettle with water and setting it on another burner. “You must be hungry, a big man like you. I know my boy Gerald, when he’s home on leave, he’d as soon clean out the refrigerator with his bare hands.”

  Gerald was Mrs. Selby’s oldest child, and he was in the Navy. Lucky for him, Jesse thought as he surveyed the cramped kitchen. Mrs. Selby lived in the three-bedroom apartment with her four other children and the baby one of her daughters had given birth to at the age of fifteen. At least that daughter had returned to high school.

  The weight of Mrs. Selby’s life seemed to rest heavily on her shoulders. In her mid-forties, she looked at least ten years older. Her hair was more gray than black, and her posture was hunched, as if she were too fatigued to stand up straight. Not that Jesse could blame her. Her husband had died eight years ago, leaving her a minute widow’s pension on which she was trying to raise her huge family. And she was desperately close to joining the ranks of the homeless, thanks to the mendacity of her asshole landlord, Cabot. It was no wonder she watched idiotic shows like Blessings at Noon and looked to the Lord for help. Until Jesse and the staff of New Haven Legal Assistance had entered her life two months ago, nobody else had bothered to lend a hand to Mrs. Selby and the other few stubborn tenants.

  She handed him a cup of instant coffee and sat facing him at the table, her frankfurters rolling around on a chipped plate. Jesse took a dutiful sip of the coffee. It was weak but hot, and it thawed his chilled bones. His shirt, vee-neck sweater, blazer and scarf hadn’t succeeded in keeping out the midday chill. Jesse never wore a suit and tie when he visited his clients. If he did, they wouldn’t trust him. They’d think he was The Man.

  “Still having problems with the heat?” he asked.

  She chewed, then swallowed and shrugged. “It comes and goes,” she related. “Mostly comes, these days.”

  “That’s good.” He set his cup on the table and wrapped his hands around it to warm them. “I spent an hour this morning at the building inspector’s office, and so far, I’ve managed to persuade them not to condemn the building.”

  “Praise God,” Mrs. Selby said with a sigh, and Jesse bit his lip again to prevent himself from commenting on the uselessness of her faith. “They condemn this place, and we’ll be on the streets. Or they’ll put us in one of them hotels. You know as well as I do, there’s no room in any rent-controlled buildings.”

  “I’ve put you and the other tenants on the waiting list for public housing,” Jesse informed her. “Just in case. But you’re right—the list is long. We can’t have this building condemned. Most of the building code infractions here are inconveniences, but they don’t really constitute a risk to life or health. The light is out in the hall, by the way.”

  “Been out for four days,” Mrs. Selby lamented. “I figure, Gerald’s got leave for Christmas, I can get him to fix it.”

  “Don’t,” Jesse cautioned her. “By the time he gets home, maybe we’ll have prodded Mr. Cabot into action. I’ve begun formal proceedings against him. I filed the suit this morning.”

  “You did?” Her round brown eyes met Jesse’s, glimmering expectantly. “How much you asking for?”

  “Two hundred fifty thousand dollars per tenant.”

  Mrs. Selby dropped her hot dog. “Two hundred fifty thousand? Are you kidding?”

  “No, but—”

  “Two hundred fifty thousand dollars!” She clasped her hands to her breast, evidently transported. “I can’t hardly think that big! What we could do with money like that—”

  “Mrs. Selby, you’re not going to wind up with that much money.”

  “Well, I know, you take your cut, but—”

  “I don’t take a cut,” he explained patiently. “I’m on a salary from Legal Assistance. However, you should understand that the amount we’re asking for is only a starting point. We want to shock Cabot into action. By asking for a large amount, we hope we can drag him to the negotiating table. We’d be willing to settle for much less.”

  “How much less?” Mrs. Selby asked suspiciously

  “If we can arrange to have all the infractions taken care of—plus a settlement of, say, two years’ back rent plus interest...”

  “Two years back rent.” Mrs. Selby closed her eyes and calculated the amount. Her face fell. “That’s only twelve thousand dollars.”

  “Plus interest,” Jesse reminded her. “Maybe more, maybe twenty thousand per unit. And the repairs. It’s better than living in a hotel.”

  “I suppose it is,” she conceded, then took a delicate bite of her frankfurter. “Better than we got now, too. ’Tween you and me, Mr. Lawson, I’d settle for a working elevator.”

  “You’ll get that and more,” he said. “At least, I hope you will. Now, as far as December’s rent, did you write it out to the escrow account, like I told you?”

  She scowled. “I don’t see why I got to pay it at all, the way this place is falling to pieces.”

  “I understand your feelings. But you’ve got to keep paying the rent until this matter is resolved.”

  “I know you’ll resolve it,” she said confidently. “I got faith in you, Mr. Lawson.”

  That’s better than having faith in God and the Reverend Robert Shepherd, he thought as, a few minutes later, he took his leave of Martha Selby. She was typical of the sort of people who wasted their time with junk like Blessings at Noon and Shepherd’s Sunday morning show, Holy Hour. His audience comprised the poor, the benighted, people struggling under a burden they were unable to comprehend. How much easier it was to send a check to the Reverend Shepherd’s Grace Cathedral and send their prayers skyward than to raise arms against their self-serving landlords, to roll up their sleeves and exert themselves to improve their lot.

  It had taken Jesse a long time to reach this level of cynicism, to break away from the powers that had once dominated his world. He, too, had believed, at first. Like the child he had been, he hadn’t known any better, and so he’d tried his hardest to believe. Believing would be so easy. You could simply accept what people told you. You didn’t have to think, question, resist. You could just nod and say, okay, and that was that.

  But after a while, he could no longer force himself to believe what his mind and his heart rejected. Painful as it was to turn his back on the easy answers, he had.

  He’d grown up.

  He’d also discovered the truth about outfits like the Grace Cathedral and its television empire. The quantity of money that flowed in was obscene, and where did it go? Into the pockets of Shepherd and his staff, his sidekicks, his henchmen. Into the grotesque enormity of the cathedral. Into the TV studio. “The more people we reach,” Shepherd liked to preach, “the better we can do the Lord’s work. So dig deep, brothers and sisters, and send us whatever you can. Let us extend our network into every home, into every heart, so we can bring our good work to all people.”

  Jesse grimaced at the memory. He’d heard Shepherd’s sermons. He knew the hypocrisy in them as well as he knew his own name.

  He had already visited the other tenants in Martha Shelby’s building to update them on his legal action at the court and his success in stalling a condemnation of the building. Settling himself inside the trusty Honda Civic he’d bought second-hand when he had moved to Bell
eford last June, he remembered the Mercedes he’d left behind in Los Angeles. It didn’t take a luxurious, high-priced automobile to do good work, any more than it took a religious broadcasting network or a flashy cathedral. It didn’t take millions upon millions of dollars extracted from the skimpy savings of impoverished believers. All it took to do good work was a humane attitude and a willingness to skip lunch every now and then.

  Mrs. Selby’s neighborhood was dressed for Christmas, Jesse noted with another surge of cynicism. Some of the brownstones were adorned with strings of colorful lights, and a number of windows had electric candles or silver stars displayed in them. Some of the people living in those apartments were barely subsisting from one paycheck or pension check to the next, yet they wasted money on ticky-tacky Christmas decorations instead of buying themselves food, clothing, things that would truly make their lives better.

  Jesse didn’t consider himself a Scrooge. Scrooge was a miser, after all, and Jesse believed in giving. On the other hand, the hoopla attached to Christmas, the gaudiness and commercialism, set his teeth on edge. People called themselves Christians, yet they gave of themselves only one day a year. The whole thing was phony, overdone, superficial. Doing good that one day freed people to be selfish and thoughtless the other three hundred and sixty four days. The emphasis was wrong.

  Something so wonderful... For not the first time that day, Jesse heard a soft, gentle voice echoing inside his skull, counteracting his irritation about the holiday. How can there be too much emphasis on something so wonderful?

  Robin Greer.

  More than her voice had haunted him after he’d left the elementary school the previous evening after delivering Eileen’s divorce decree. At least a dozen times—hell, at least a hundred times—since he’d walked out of Eileen’s classroom, a vision of the petite blond woman with the bright hazel eyes and even brighter smile had floated across his mind. Something in the intensity of her defense of Christmas struck Jesse as almost childlike in its exuberance, childlike and innocent and immensely appealing.