The Humper Game Pt. 05 Ch. 08

I repeated it, adding, "The other two were from Pastor Bill Billings." I named the church and town, and he nodded. "In August, when I was waiting to be able to move in here, I stayed with a good friend, Samantha Bruja, and that's where her aunt and uncle attend. They're her guardians, John and Sally Goodfriend. You may have heard of him, as he was a professor of history until he retired." I named the college, which he of course was familiar with.

"At any rate, for lots of reasons, I was already pretty sure Samantha—Sam—is going to become a Christian within a few years, and now I think a few months is more likely. Then the Goodfriends invited Ellen and me to visit them for Thanksgiving weekend, and the sermon could hardly have been more directly aimed at me had he planned it for me—which of course he hadn't and couldn't have. But I know the applicability of those sermons to Sam—Samantha—and me, that's a matter of the scripture, which the preaching simply brought out. And now, the same for Ellen. It really is hard not to see a pattern there."

We took our leave and hurried on. Kelly went off to her own apartment, saying she would rejoin us in a little while, and we went on to ours. Barbara said, "You really do think that, about those three sermons, don't you?"

"Would I say it if I didn't? Really extreme levels of coincidence do happen—or it appears to be no more than coincidence, anyway—but there is a point where that stops being a reasonable explanation. Occam's Razor. And I didn't want to get into Ellen's vision, not today certainly, but when you add that in I'm about ready to throw in the towel. Not just the content of the vision, though that's part, but the fact of it. There are issues we need to deal with, each of us plus Ellen and me together, but I don't really have much doubt about the eventual outcome."

It occurred to me to wonder whether Barbara's being with us this specific weekend might not also be part of the same pattern, but lacking data I didn't say anything about that.

Ellen and I went into our bedroom to change, and we also made the bed and tidied some. We went out and folded up the couch, removing the pillow first and putting it on our bed. Barbara had made her bed. Of course, we were going to need to unfold it so we could wash the sheets, and as soon as I thought of that I unfolded the couch again and stripped the bed. I just put the blanket on roughly and folded the couch again, then put the sheets in with our laundry.

Barbara was looking at Sam's second drawing. She said, "I wish we'd taken time to talk about these yesterday. The one of you and Jenny is obvious, but I don't think I understand this one. And there may not be time later."

Pete called before I could answer, asking whether they might come yet. I said that if Tammy wanted to see how the peppers were done they should come straight over. I said, "I said something on Tuesday I think, but I forgot yesterday and this morning. Can you bring that folding table? Some people may have to eat sitting on the couch anyway, but that would really help. Except we'll be short of chairs." I was so distracted that I didn't follow up on that thought. He said they would bring the table, and we said goodbye and disconnected.

Barbara went with me into the kitchen. While I started getting ingredients out, I said, "That first one was done the very night Jenny dumped me. Sam went and screamed at her until she came to apologize—I'm sure you know that!—and we started trying to put things back together, but she—Sam, I mean—also arranged for me to spend the night with Ellen. So I gather that Sam kind of sat up half the night crying because I was so hurt and unhappy, just sketching things as therapy to sort our her own feelings, and that one was a good enough job that she drew it like that. She hid it in my suitcase the day she flew off and I moved in here, and I fell apart again when I found it.

"The second one. Sam really is feeling that God is there, demanding her attention and telling her that she once again needs to repent and put her life together differently. I suggested that she sort through her feelings again by sketching, and that second one is what resulted. The first one she gave me the original, that one is a copy. Remember, it's her feelings. We've talked about it a little, but not enough. But Sam has done a lot with horses at some point in her life. I don't know enough to say how much or what or when, except that it was probably before her parents died, which I think was when she was nine or ten. She used training a young horse to the saddle as an analogy for something, once, for example.

"Anyway, here's my own take. I really want to sit down with Sam and talk about it sometime, though. She's in a position where she's got to change horses, and it's dangerous and scary because she's not sure she can do it. And she can't stop and get off one and then get on the other. Life just doesn't allow for that, even if it sometimes feels to me as though that's what I'm trying to do myself. She doesn't really know what those men chasing her are, except maybe what they represent isn't people. And everything she has, everything she's ever loved and held on to, is in those saddle bags, and she can't take them with her. Aunt Sally said she thinks I'm one of those things, and there is nothing in this world I'm more sure of."

I was to the point of tears. "I love her so much, and it's so hard for me. She's being torn apart, again, and there's nothing I can do to help her, except make very clear that I do love her and want her to do what she has to. It's way harder for her, first because it's her life, and second because I do have Ellen, who loves me almost as much as Sam does, and I love her that much, too. I can't really tell Sam whether her decision is right, unless I can make my own mind up. Even though my feelings say it's right, and important."

I shut my eyes, trying to prevent more tears from leaking out, and tried to breathe deeply and steadily. Ellen put down the dishes she had in her hands, and came over and held me. I was starting to get a little calmer, but only a very little. Ellen said, "Barbara, will you please come and hold him instead of me? I think he can't help being reminded right now that he had to call her when we quarreled, and he knows that hurt her. It all ties together. And Phil, I love you, and unless you decide to drive me away I'm staying. Remember that! I'm sure I'll hurt you again, somehow, but never again like that." Barbara did come over and hold me until I was—mostly—back in the present again.

Almost right away, there was a knock on the door, and Barbara went to open it. It was Pete and Tammy, but Martha, Scott, and Hannah appeared at the head of the stairway while they were coming in. After we had all greeted them all, Scott started to say something, and another knock interrupted. Kelly, of course, bearing a large container of fruit salad. We all said hello to her, and Pete said, "I wasn't sure whether I should bring the table and chairs up yet. They're still in the car."

I said, "You brought chairs? Thank you! I totally forgot those, and I was worried. I really need to get onto dinner, and I'm supposed to be showing Tammy and I guess Ellen, but you're welcome to anyone else who's willing."

Hannah said, "I can help carry!"

Scott said, "Let Hannah and me come with you then, Pete. If we need someone else we can ask after our first trip." But Martha went along as well.

I showed Tammy and Ellen the basic recipe in my cookbook. I said, "This is pretty much what I did the last time, except I was afraid it would be too bland, so I added some more spicing. I don't keep Worcestershire sauce on hand, so I used a little soy sauce and a couple of drips of molasses, plus a drop or two of hot sauce. I don't bother with tamarind, which apparently is in the real stuff. I also have some steak sauce that's ginger- and garlic-based, not peppery, and I added some of that and I think we'll do it again.

"I decided to fiddle with the recipe, and I thought some cheddar cheese would be nice. And in fact, I also quickly browsed through some online recipes, and they all called for cheese. And we'll cut the Italian sausage up fairly small and put it in with the beef.

"This is going to be just a little strange, because I've never made it on this scale. I should have thought to ask you or Kelly to bring a baking dish. We'll use what I've got. Oh, and you see that the recipe calls for condensed tomato soup. I use a commercial pasta sauce, and not always the same kind, and the result is a little soupier. I hope it doesn't turn out to be just the pasta sauce that Tammy liked so much, because this probably is a different one.

"Now, for cooking you have to learn by doing, so I'm going to try very hard to just supervise and let you two do it all. These are mostly pretty easy, but for this many there's a lot to do."

Before we started, Tammy pulled out her phone and took a picture of the page with the recipe. "I hope I'll be able to remember what you said about your changes," she told me. In the end, by the way, she decided she would never remember, and made notes on paper.

So they got started., cutting the tops off the peppers and coring them. I got out another half pepper I had left from Saturday's lunch, and put it with the tops. I said, "I cooked the rice yesterday. We'll nuke it for a minute or two so it's hot or at least warm, when the time comes. And be warned, you can't keep cooked rice too many days, even in the fridge. It spoils. After I had it happen a couple of times, I did some online research, and there's some bacterial strain that survives cooking. Always sniff first."

The biggest pan I had wasn't big enough for all the peppers at once, so they were boiled in two batches. The peppers were good, large ones, and I was hoping that one apiece would be enough. We were making three extras. I was pretty sure Hannah couldn't manage a whole one herself, so quite possibly part of hers would be available. In fact, I suddenly worried about whether she would eat any at all.

I went over to Martha to ask about that. She said, "She will eat a bite or two. She knows that's the rule. If she likes it, we'll give her a small portion. If not, I always have emergency food in my bag."

"I'm sorry that I didn't think to ask on Tuesday. We do have some dry cereal and things like that on hand. And fruit. Crackers and peanut butter."

That reminded me. Bread dough would soon be ready in the bread machine. I got out a pan to use for rolls and oiled it, while supervising the pepper preparation. I told them to double the onion—reminding them that we were doing a double batch already—and asked them to peel and chop some large garlic cloves as well. They grated the cheese, and I told them it would be mixed into the meat- pepper-rice mixture just before the peppers were stuffed. The garlic would be mixed in just before that.

I had them drain the juice from the can of tomatoes into a jar and get it in the fridge. I would have to find a use for it before too long. Otherwise, it was mostly just following the recipe, so I got the rolls formed and rising, then into the oven a little later.

It turned out that my large casserole dish and my standard baking dish together were just about right. Doing one more pepper would have been a little better. I should have just tested the fit with the raw peppers ahead of time. I pointed this out. Ellen had the bright idea of using a couple of toothpicks to pin together the peppers that seemed likely to topple over, and it worked beautifully.

I warned them that they were sharing the oven with the rolls, and that it was twenty-five degrees hotter than the peppers' recipe called for. I said that I didn't know how this would affect them, but that I thought it would be better than trying to bake the rolls cooler, and that we'd turn the oven down when the rolls came out.

The folding table and chairs had been set up, and the tables were set. Pete and Tammy, bless their hearts, had known how many chairs we had, and had brought one non-folding chair along, too. Martha consulted me about beverages—juice, water, and coffee being the options, plus tea or herb tea if someone wanted it, and she and Kelly checked with everyone and poured. That pretty much assigned the seats. The fruit salad was in serving bowls. The configuration of our table plus Pete's and Tammy's was a little awkward all round, but I thought it would work.

Kelly had watched us in the kitchen at first, but once the tables and chairs were there, she and Martha had turned to getting the tables set. Scott and Pete contributed to that effort as well. Either Martha or Scott generally was keeping an eye on Hannah. Hannah really was a well-behaved little girl, but five year olds have an excess of energy, inquisitiveness, and impulsiveness, and a deficit of good sense, forethought, and self-control—by adult standards. Though it seems a lot of adults aren't always much better! And there she was cooped up in a small apartment full of busy adults and nothing much to do. Books had been brought for her to look at, but I thought that she must have pretty much exhausted them before that point.

While the table was being set, and then once the job was done, Kelly was talking quietly to Martha and Scott, whichever was available or both of them. Spiritual discussion and advice, I thought. I was really glad that she was finding mature Christians for that.

The rolls came out and the oven was turned down. We decided to let the peppers cook for the full appointed time. We warned everyone that dinner was imminent. We were about on target as far as time went, except that Barbara was probably going to have to leave before Ellen and I had another chance to talk with her alone. I really hoped that the advice I'd given her was good.

We all sat down, and I asked Scott to pray. When he had, things were passed around. There really were only the peppers, the fruit salad, and the rolls, but there was enough of everything.

Scott said, "I had meant to play for you all while you worked, but things were too noisy and spread out, and then we wound up talking with Kelly. I hope a little bit of music when we're done will be all right. We do have things to talk about."

Martha said, "Hannah wanted to ask Phil something. Hannah Grace, this is a good time, but you're going to have to do the asking."

Hannah looked at me and got shy for a moment, but then she pointed to Sam's first drawing on the wall. I'd seen Scott hold her up so she could look at the drawings, earlier. She said, "Why are you in that picture there?"

"Did you see by yourself that it's me, or did your dad tell you?"

"I could tell. It really looks like you."

"That's very good, for a girl your age. And yes, it's me. A friend of mine, a young woman Ellen and Barbara and I all knew in school, drew that. She's studying art right now, and she's also a very good musician. She may well be as good as your dad is, when she's a little older.

"That picture is telling a story, a true story. It's really telling two stories, about the same two people. Did you see the young woman running ahead of me, in the picture?" Hannah nodded, wide-eyed but eagerly. "In gym class that year—it was just last year, our last year in high school—that year we often played a game. Boys and girls were paired up as partners, by lot. Do you know what that means?" She shook her head. "In this case, it means that they took all the girls' names, and wrote them on pieces of paper, and put them in a bucket. Then each boy, without looking, reached in the bucket and pulled out a piece of paper. The girl whose name was on it was his partner for that day. So nobody knew who my partner would be any day, and nobody knew whose partner any girl would be. Do you see how that was?"

She nodded, smiling. I thought she was pleased to have understood.

"Then we all lined up across a wide track for running on, with the girls in front and each girl's partner a very short distance behind her. A man blew a whistle, and all the girls started running. Very soon, he blew his whistle again, and all the boys started. Each boy was trying to catch his partner, and each girl was trying to reach the finish line without being caught. This took being smart, as well as just running. It was a long way to the finish line, almost a mile. If a girl tried to run as fast as she possibly could, she would get so tired that she would have to slow down and maybe even walk, and her partner might catch her even if she was faster than he was. That's how the game worked. Do you understand all that?"

She nodded very vigorously, excited at this point.

"The very first day we played that game, I drew from that bucket the name of the girl you see there, so she was my partner that day. So, in one way, that's why I'm running after her in that picture. And in the end, I caught her.

"But there's more that the picture is about. You see, that girl—that young woman, I really should say, was a friend of mine. We had been in classes together in school, and we liked each other. But partly because of that game, we fell in love with each other. We were hoping that someday we might get married to each other. She was my girlfriend, and I was her boyfriend.

"Now, here's the other story. Every morning, we, and a lot of other people, got up early to run around that same track for exercise. And we ran next to each other, together. We did that partly because we loved each other, but even more because we really did run about the same speed. To run with a partner, you need someone who runs just about as fast as you do. Otherwise, one of you is running too slow to get stronger and better, or one of you is running too fast, trying to keep up with the other one."

I looked at her, and she nodded, a little more doubtfully. Martha said, "He's right, Hannah, it works like that. I'll talk with you about it sometime. But that's why Daddy and I don't run together very often."

"Anyway, that young woman—her name was Jenny—was unhappy about some things. She felt that I wasn't treating her right, even though we had agreed about these things at the beginning, and she felt that I should know she was unhappy without her telling me. And I didn't really know. So she got more and more unhappy with me, and she got mad at me, and madder and madder over time. So one morning, very early, when we were running together, she started crying, and said some things that she meant to hurt me, and told me she didn't want to be my girlfriend any longer. And it did hurt me, a lot.

"The friend who drew those pictures—her name is Sam, for Samantha—went to Jenny and tried to help her see that she had not done things right. There was nothing wrong with her saying she was unhappy and didn't want to be my girlfriend any longer. Way back in the beginning, when we had agreed that we loved each other and wanted to be together, we had talked about the things she was mad about, and agreed that if she started feeling really unhappy about them we would stop being together. So what was wrong was only the things she had said to me, things that were untrue and unfair and meant to hurt me very badly.

"Sam got Jenny to admit that she hadn't been right, and they came to me so she could apologize. We agreed to go back to running together in the morning, and to studying together, which we had been doing, with this same friend who drew the pictures and sometimes some other people. She couldn't decide whether she wanted to be my girlfriend, to have me as her boyfriend, again. She eventually decided she did, but it never was the same. And now Jenny is across the country in a university there, and Ellen is here and she's my girlfriend, and we hope and plan to get married before too long.