The Love of My (Other) Life by Traci L. Slatton Read Free Book Online Page A

so perfectly settled into his right place, and so suited to be where and who he was, that the very air around him evened out into greater harmony. It was as if he radiated a note that brought everything around him into beautiful resonance.
    I felt a little envious. Also, suddenly, lonely.
    Three years ago I had made some terrible choices that resulted in my life breaking up around me, as if it were a behemoth ship hitting an underwater mountain of ice. My budding career as a painter was ruined. No gallery would touch me with a ten-foot pole. Then my husband left, and took with him some core part of me. I had been unable to paint until this week.
    But was it really David’s fault that I had lived in a frozen psychic time conglomerate for the last three years? That all I had done for so many months was go to work, see Ofee and a few other friends, and then hide out in my apartment, watching reruns on Netflix?
    The song ended and the rev swept over to me. “I love that hymn,” he said cheerfully. “It reminds me that I don’t have to mastermind things, that I can rest in God and trust.”
    “Trust, what’s that?” I joked. I sank down in the pew. “I can’t rest when I have to make my life work. I have to take action. Sometimes, you know, you have to do something. Something you never expected to do, something bold and maybe even shocking. But then, how do you know if you did the right thing?”
    Reverend Pincek beckoned for me to follow him.
    He strode through the church.
    I was on his heels, but sunbeams streamed through a stained glass window, throwing out rainbow prisms of light and I had a flash: a painting of the opalescent light. Very Turner, with a smidgen of the Hudson River Valley, but without the river.
    “Did you hear, Tessa?” the rev was asking. He gave me a quizzical look. “It’s a paradox. Lao Tzu said, ‘Work without doing.’”
    I was still a little dazzled by the light. “What if you do something iffy, but you’re taking care of someone, or else accomplishing great good? And anyway, it’s not what it appears to be on the surface because there are hidden elements at stake?”
    The rev picked up a hymnal off his desk. “It’s not about accomplishment. It’s about a heartfelt vision of your life. You’re good at that, Tessa.”
    “I don’t know, I don’t have a vision for my life, I make it up as I go along,” I murmured, following him back out to the waiting choir. “Then I shock myself and go too far. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m already mid-thirties, and I’m still just bumbling along.”
    “It’s not about age,” the rev said in his kindly tone. “The Divine is always with you. As A Course in Miracles says, ‘I no longer need to be the director of the universe, and can simply rest in the assuredness that ‘I need do nothing’ but be still and let His forgiveness touch my mind.’”
    The choir, as a body, gathered around the rev and me—and broke into song. The Alleluia chorus.
    The rev and I exchanged a smile.
    “I could really use forgiveness,” I said more somberly than I intended.
    The rev, despite his unflagging bonhomie, is really very sensitive. For a moment, he looked stricken, his face melting in on itself like a wax mask. Then his usual placid expression returned.
    “Not you, Tessa, you’re one of our angels. And it’s not about sin. That’s too literal an understanding.
    Forgiveness is a much broader concept than that. It has to do with wholeness.”
    His secretary, Joan, yodeled out from his office.
    “Reverend, Rabbi Schwartzbaum is on the phone about the peace march!”
    “Okay,” he called back. He turned back to me.
    “Tessa, do you need me?”
    “Mrs. Leibowitz is failing. Her doctor says she’s wearing out with old age. He wants to move her to a hospice. She refuses to go.”
    “Oh dear, let’s call her kids,” he said, his brows beetling together on his forehead.
    “She doesn’t want to worry them. She’s adamant about