Almost Friends by Philip Gulley Read Free Book Online Page A

become to him. He used to have a high tolerance for chaos and clatter. When the boys were younger and would quarrel, he would reason with them, trying to understand how their fight had begun. Now he doesn’t care who started it; all he wants is for their sons to hit one another quietly.
    Sam feels the same way about church. He has given up illusions of pastoring a megachurch. Now he just wishes people would get along. Being a pastor is like negotiating a minefield—one wrong step and your world explodes, so you tread carefully. Like the month before when Frank had suggested they ask the trustees to put a new lock on the front door of the meetinghouse. Sam had advised against it. “You don’t want to go there,” he’d told his secretary. “Because Dale Hinshaw will want to rehash everything. It’s better just to leave it alone.”
    When Sam had come to work the next morning, the new lock was on the door and Frank was putting away his tools.
    “I know nothing,” Sam said. “I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I have no idea where that new lock came from.”
    “What new lock?” Frank asked.
    There are some things it’s best not to know—which of your children started the fight, why it took fifty years to replace a lock, or what grand scheme Dale Hinshaw might be cooking up. Knowledge is a good thing, but ignorance is not to be discounted.

Seven
Krista’s Big Plan
    I n her fifteenth year of teaching, on the last day of school—a fine, spring day when all the world was shiny green and new life was breaking out wherever one looked, a perfectly splendid day, as last days of school tend to be—Krista Riley quit her job. She sat at her desk, wrote a letter of resignation, piled the detritus of fifteen years of teaching in a box that she carried out to her car, and marched into Principal Dutmire’s office before she changed her mind.
    Mr. Dutmire, a veteran administrator who tried never to appear surprised, was stunned. “Quitting? You can’t quit. What will you do? All you’ve ever done is teach. Is it the money? If you coached the girls’ volleyball team, I could get you an extra thousand dollars a year. How about it?”
    “What I know about volleyball could be put in a thimble,” Krista said. “Thanks just the same, but I want to go to seminary and be a minister.”
    “But you’re a woman,” he said.
    “So everyone keeps reminding me,” she replied. Then because Mr. Dutmire was a generally kind man and only occasionally officious, Krista smiled and said, “I believe God has called me to ministry not in spite of my being a woman, but because of it.”
    “I thought you were Catholic,” he persisted. “They don’t even allow women to be priests.”
    “Who says I have to stay in the Catholic church? I could be Methodist or Presbyterian, or Quaker for that matter. I might even become one of those snake-handling Pentecostals. They allow women to be ministers.”
    “You’d change churches?” asked Mr. Dutmire, a man who so resisted change he’d once boasted of eating the same brand of breakfast cereal for thirty-two years.
    “People do it every day, most of them for the silliest reasons. I don’t see why I can’t change to honor my calling.”
    Principal Dutmire removed his glasses, spritzed them with cleaner he kept in his desk, wiped them clean with his handkerchief, then positioned them carefully behind his ears, the bridge resting just above the notch on his nose, so that he stared over the tops of them at Krista. “Very well. I’ll get the paperwork started today.”
    Then like the fledgling whose first foray from the nest is both frightening and exhilarating, Krista thanked him for understanding, though it was clear he didn’t, and walked from the school, her life a delicious swirl of possibility and promise.
     
    As it turns out, the Methodists didn’t work out. Neither did the Presbyterians. They presented her with a numbing list of requirements designed to weed out the feeble and