Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction by Grif Stockley

I given her?
    She doesn’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to figure out that this country’s culture is long on form and short on substance. An attention span of thirty minutes is more than enough to get you by. If you’re lucky, you can make a nice living and worship the free enterprise system but Sarah better not get too excited about it because it’ll make her sick at her stomach when she really sees how much humanity has fallen between the cracks.
    The truth is, I haven’t got anything to offer her but my own anxieties. Death and taxes, you can count on them, Sarah. Wow, Dad, did you make that up? My love for Sarah will be worth at least a couple of lines on a Hall mark card at Christmas when she’s grown up and got a family of her own but is pretty cold comfort right now to a seventeen-year-old girl who admits to lying awake at three o’clock in the morning wondering why she’s alive and her mother is dead. Down front there must be twenty-five men, women, and children. Norman says a prayer, and asks them to remain after the service for a while.
    “If you want to go on home,” Rainey says kindly, “I’ll wait for her and get us a ride.”
    “What is he going to do?” I ask, feeling more morose by the moment. We are on our feet for the last song.
    “She’ll probably come home with a cross branded on her forehead,” I say pathetically.
    Rainey giggles at such nonsense.
    “He’ll ask if they want to begin participating in a family that meets here a couple of times a week. If she does, one of his assistants will take some information from her, and they’ll match her up by Monday and give her a call.”
    I strain to catch a glimpse of Sarah, who has been moved off to the side with the rest of the group. They’ll probably want her to turn over her paycheck from her part-time job.
    “Maybe I should wait, too. I need to introduce myself to Norman, anyway.”
    As Norman gives the benediction, Rainey shakes her head.
    “I wouldn’t try to approach him now. Call him to morrow.”
    Why? I wonder. It seems to me he would be more accessible in the afterglow of bagging converts, especially the child of one of his daughter’s lawyers. Still, Rainey has a better feel than I do for the way business is done around here, so I nod, glumly resigned to seeing Sarah only a couple of more times the rest of her life. I stare down the aisle again trying to find her, but with the service over, my view is blocked by the hundreds of people heading for the exits.
    “Gideon!”
    In the parking lot I look up and squint in the direction of the bright noon sun. I can’t believe it.
    “What are you doing here, Amy?” I ask, dumbfounded.
    “What are you doing here?” Amy Gilchrist asks, a smirk on her elfin face. Amy is an old friend from law school who made it into the prosecutor’s office and was on her way to trying major cases when she became pregnant and had an abortion, incurring the disfavor of her boss. She is now in private practice with a group of lawyers almost as motley as our crew in the Layman Building. Lively, sarcastic, and humorous, Amy is scrapping for clients as hard as I am.
    “God only knows,” I say, surveying Amy’s figure.
    “I’m really just visiting because a friend invited me.” I am embarrassed to admit I came with Rainey and that my daughter is still inside getting hot boxed by the head cheese. Amy seems always on the verge of carrying too much weight for her compact frame. Still, perhaps because she is so likable, the total effect is pleasing to the eyes. Dressed in a knee-length black-and-white-checked skirt and a long-sleeved white blouse, she seems more chaste and modest than usual.
    “Being seen at Christian Life isn’t an indictable offense,” she says, giving me a frank once-over, too.
    “As you can see, some of the best people in town are members.”
    From time to time, I had thought about violating my self-imposed pledge not to date women so much younger than myself and asking Amy