Counsel

The Long Saturday

Chapter 45: Counsel

Jude's premarital counseling packet is eighty percent scripture and twenty percent forms designed to humble the literate.

"Why is there a budgeting worksheet?" Norah says, flipping through the stapled packet at my kitchen table.

"Because romance is weak against utility bills."

"This question says, Describe your conflict style using one animal and one weather event."

"That seems spiritually illegal."

I take the packet from her and read the line.

"Oh no," I say.

"Exactly."

She points at me with her pen.

"You are fog and a heron."

"That is slander."

"Specific slander."

Jude's office smells like coffee, lemon wood polish, and the accumulated confidence of a man who has listened to other people's vows long enough to stop being impressed by vocabulary.

He sits behind his desk in a cardigan that suggests an unresolved treaty with autumn.

"You both look offended already," he says as we come in.

"Your packet is hostile," Norah says.

"Marriage is demanding. My stationery reflects this."

There are three sessions.

Money.

Family.

Conflict.

These are apparently the approved categories under which all human chaos may be filed.

The first two go better than expected.

Not because we have no differences.

Because our differences are, so far, the living kind.

Norah thinks paper calendars are a sign of spiritual seriousness.

I think they are the last defense against collapse.

She is cleaner in common rooms and more chaotic in drawers.

I am the inverse.

She forgets to eat when working.

I forget to rest when useful.

Neither of us believes decorative pillows serve the kingdom.

Jude writes things down as if preparing a case file.

"Good," he says at one point. "You are both normal enough to proceed."

It is the third session that matters.

The conflict worksheet sits between us on his desk like an accusation from a mildly educated bureaucracy.

Jude takes off his glasses.

"All right," he says. "The grown-up question now."

"What are each of you most afraid marriage will expose?"

Silence.

Not hostile. Real.

Norah goes first because she is braver than me in chairs.

"That grief has habits I still don't know," she says. "And that one of them will make me cruel at three in the afternoon for reasons neither of us can name."

Jude nods.

"Good. Specific."

Norah eyes him.

"That wasn't meant to be impressive."

"I know."

Then he looks at me.

I know better than to perform insight under those eyes.

"I think," I say slowly, "part of me still believes good things get revoked."

The room goes very still.

No one rushes to make the sentence nicer.

"Explain," Jude says.

I stare at the budgeting worksheet because apparently there is no indignity God will not use.

"I know the right answers," I say. "I know nobody gets promised safety. I know marriage isn't insurance. I know all the theology. That's not really the problem."

"Then what is?"

I can hear the church copier in the outer office, chewing through someone else's administrative sorrow.

"The problem is I keep finding myself waiting for the bill," I say. "Even now. Even here. Like joy is something God lets you borrow until you prove too attached."

Norah inhales beside me, not sharply. Just enough to let me know she heard the actual thing and not its edited cousin.

Jude folds his hands.

"That is not a marriage problem," he says.

"I know."

"It will become one if you start treating your wife like collateral."

"I know," I say again.

Norah reaches over and puts her hand on the desk, palm up.

Not grabbing. Offering.

I put my hand in it because I am not an idiot.

"I do not need you to feel safe all the time," she says, looking at me rather than Jude. "I do need you not to hide from me when fear starts making contracts in your head."

"That seems fair."

"It is extremely fair," she says.

Jude points one finger at us.

"Good. Keep speaking in sentences a mortgage could survive."

That breaks the pressure in the room the way a window breaks heat.

I laugh. Norah does too.

Jude writes something on the pad in front of him.

"Now," he says, "children."

"Absolutely not," Norah says.

"Not now," I add.

"I did not say now. I said the topic."

By the end of it the light outside his office has gone from afternoon to that flat early-November gray that makes every church parking lot look briefly Midwestern enough to confess.

He closes the folder.

"You're not marrying each other because you solved death," he says.

"That would be ambitious," Norah says.

"You are marrying each other because you would like to tell the truth in the same direction for a long time."

That sentence sits in the room a while.

It is not poetic enough to resist. Which is probably why it works.

Jude stands.

So do we.

He comes around the desk and, because he is a pastor and therefore occasionally incapable of restraint, puts one hand on each of our shoulders.

"May God save you from being impressive," he says.

Norah makes a startled sound that might be a laugh.

"May He make you kind when tired, plain when frightened, and quick to repent when you start performing marriage instead of living it."

He pauses.

"And may He give you enough for the actual day you are in, which is all you ever get anyway."

Outside, Norah and I stand on the church steps with the packet between us and the air smelling faintly of leaves and old brick cooling down.

"Fog and a heron?" I say.

"Absolutely."

"What are you?"

She considers.

"A fox and sleet."

"Terrifying."

"Thank you."

We walk to the parking lot side by side, not cured of anything worth naming, but less interested than before in pretending cure was the point.