“Where did it come from?”

“I made it.” He said nothing about the ring, about Aaron X. Doily.

She nudged the Mountain Dews, her bare toes cast in green shade by the sunstruck bottles. “It doesn’t seem like you.”

“Well, it is me,” he said, adamant. He realized now he wanted Heather to tell her brother, so Buzz would understand he could presume nothing about Dylan or Brooklyn.

She sat, folded her legs in the grass. He stood, still looking for the sign she comprehended the importance of what he’d shown her.

“Dylan?”

“What?”

“If you stayed here you wouldn’t have to go to private school.”

He was stupefied. The remark was so irrelevant and appalling, he didn’t even know where to start.

“I’m not staying here,” he said simply, perhaps cruelly.

Heather abruptly stood, her face red and shocked, as if he’d slapped her.

“Take it off,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“No.”

She moved to the path, abandoning the bottles which lay in the grass.

“What about the surprise?” he said. There was a breeze suddenly, and he felt the cape flutter and snap perfectly at his back, like a stadium flag.

“I don’t care,” she said without turning.

“I haven’t even shown it to you yet,” he yelled, but she was gone.

After a moment he moved, anyway, to the end of the dock, there bent his knees, pointed his hands straight from his body, preparing what he’d planned for weeks. Heather might be watching from high in the grass at the field’s edge; it was possible. Or not, didn’t matter now. He didn’t need to be known in Vermont, this null area that was only measured in its distance from the city, its use as a restorative, a place to get your act together before returning to the real world. In his case, to prepare to be thirteen in the city, to kiss city girls, to be the flying boy who fights city crime, shit incomprehensible to anyone from Vermont.

He dove in air. The mirrorlike surface dazzled his eyes as he executed a pinball circuit, like one of those dragonflies, inches above. He trained on the far bank to keep from dizziness, flew near and turned, brushing the high grass there, springing an explosion of waterstriders snoozing deep in roots.

He toured the water twice around. When he landed running on the dock he took a splinter in his heel: never fly without proper footgear. And the corner tips of the cape had dangled and were soaked. That’s how close he’d been. So: 1. Wear sneakers. 2. Hem cape. One way or another, you were always learning something.

chapter 12

The church was a garage, set back on Dekalb Avenue behind a low white picket fence that fooled no one, being flush to the busted slate sidewalk and wedged between an ironworks and a plumber’s shop. On a Saturday the ironworks was in full operation, oblivious to the services next door, rolling gate up to reveal a man in a welder’s mask dipping an acetylene torch against a window grille, sparks spilling on the concrete floor. The block also included an auto body shop, its windows showing a 1967 pinup calendar; a “record” store, glass papered with empty album jackets to conceal the interior from the street, protecting sellers of something likely not records; and two boarded lunch counters with thirties vintage Coca-Cola signs intact, emblazoning forgotten names. The church, whitewashed cinder-block exterior decorated with a handpainted tin sign reading PARLOR OF GOD, “ IN HIS BOSOM WE ARE REVEALED,” REV. PAULETTA GIB, PASTOR and decorated with a golden Star of David was absolutely a garage, plywood doors open to expose five rows of backs and nodding heads of sitters in folding chairs facing the woman with the microphone at the front of the room. August sun blazed down, baking the churchgoers. Ties were tugged loose at necks, knees eagled to ventilate genitals, cuffs hitched. The pastor’s floral dress was soaked at the belly and where the wattles of her upper arms pressed against her ribs. As she paced at the front she expertly flipped the mic’s cord across the floor at her feet, keeping it looped far from her high, thick-heeled shoes, which bore a print to match the dress.

The two men, father and son, each boiling in a suit and tie in the midmorning heat, moved through the gate of the picket fence and took seats at the back, just inside the shade of the garage.

“We had better strive to emulate the five virgin brides,” the woman said at the pitch of her talk. “Keeping our wicks cropped close, keeping our oil clean, preserving the flame, oh yes.”

“Oh yes,” came the murmured and shouted reply.

“Keeping that light in the window so when the robber bridegroom arrives he can see us waiting faithfully in the window, oh yes, all in our fine things, in our finery all untouched, not one fingertip soiling our garments, not one.”

“Not one, not one.”

At the end, as the tiny congregation milled through the picket fence and onto the sidewalk, the pastor found her way to the strangers who’d arrived late and seated themselves in the rear, Barrett Rude Senior and Junior. They stood as she approached.

“Welcome,” she said, holding out her hand. “Pauletta Gib.”

“That’s a fine service, Sister Gib,” said Senior, bowing deeply. His tie was still knotted tightly at his neck, despite the heat.

She nodded at him, then opened her hands, and they stepped out together into the glare. Pauletta Gib turned to the son. “You’re that singer with the Distinctions,” she said.

“Barrett Rude Junior, ma’am. No longer with the group.”

“I’d heard word you were raised within the Parlor.”

“Raised by my father in the church, yes.” The singer softened his voice, spoke as humbly as he could. The pilgrimage to the garage-front church today was for Senior, not a concession but a gift.

But Pauletta Gib had eyes for the tall man who wished today only to stand in his father’s shadow. “Your singing’s given a lot of easement to folks,” she said.

Barrett Rude Junior lowered his head as his father said: “My son is not a worshipful man, Sister.”

Pauletta Gib arched an eyebrow. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Rude, that a worshipful man is measured one Sabbathday at a time. Today I find your son here within my walls.”

“I have only just joined him here in the city. He had no idea of the existence of your temple.” His choice of words conveyed hesitation over the setting, the dressed congregation lingering on the sidewalk where men from the ironworks now misted a section of grille with black Krylon. The paint settled to form a blurred negative of the grille on the pavement.

“Yet you found us today, praise be to God.”

The father at last found voice for what he wanted her badly to know: “I once had a ministry of the Parlor of my own in Raleigh, North Carolina.”

Her frown seemed to go through the older man, to pass over his tight-knotted tie, his fresh shave, his keen and defiant expression, to ask How long ago was that? And what transpired in between?

What she said, though, revealed nothing of her conclusions at the going-over her eyes had conducted: “Love sets up a Parlor wherever it wanders.”

To that Barrett Rude Senior could only add, grumpily, “Praise God.”

The woman took the son’s hands in hers, gazed deep in his flinching eyes. “Would you sing in our church next Sabbathday?” The tone suggested it was a kindness she offered the singer, not the request for a freebie it should seem to be.

But it was the father, now shifting his weight from squeaking shoe to squeaking shoe, who ached to be at Pauletta Gib’s microphone.

“I don’t know,” said Barrett Rude Junior sincerely, not certain what his father would prefer to hear, mostly wishing he could cause the question to be unasked.

“Don’t speak to it at present,” said Pauletta Gib, patting the singer’s hand. “Your heart will clarify the question in your sleep.” Then she turned to the father, her tone slipping an octave. “I trust I’ll see you next week, Mr. Rude. Unless you’ve already set up a temple of your own.”