Rhinoceros Summer Page 2

  “I said—”

  Meghan glanced back at Lydia, a worried, almost exhausted expression on her features. She tugged on Margaret’s arm. “Let’s just go. My mom’s probably waiting to take us to the salon by now.”

  Margaret rifled through the DVD rack for another few seconds and then flicked back a case so that it snapped sharply as it hit the case behind it. “Fine.”

  The M’s left, Margaret stiff-necked and never once looking back, Meghan apologetic, Mary waving like nothing at all had happened.

  Lydia finished out her shift by cataloging all the contemptible items the store sold. A Bible cover styled after a Gucci purse. She’d received that one as a Christmas present last year from her parents. Thomas Kinkade light–up paintings. Candies and teas and journals and flip-flops. Ties, coffee mugs, pins, and belt buckles. All emblazoned with a cross, a Bible verse, or a crown of thorns. The store was a model for successful Christian marketing, and that’s how she summarized her own life too.

  When manager-Lydia finally released Lydia from her shift, she moved to the sidewalk outside the bookstore to wait for her dad. Opening her bag, she pulled out her Olympus point-and-shoot camera. It was old and not anywhere close to what a professional photographer used but it worked.

  A hangnail on her right forefinger caught on the camera strap. She kept her nails short to better work with the camera but otherwise didn’t bother caring for her hands. The M’s had made her try out fake nails when they first become friends freshman year. The nails had seemed to balloon up her slender hands. Every other minute the acrylics caught against clothes, walls, the refrigerator door, her own skin. Several cuts on her forehead took weeks to heal when she sliced herself while brushing hair out of her face. She’d played her nails against every available surface, listening for the tap-tap of her acrylics against metal, wood, plastic, glass—a nervous tic that had driven her parents crazy.

  After the nails grew out enough for a crevice to appear between them and her cuticles, she’d soaked her fingers in a bowl of acetone and vowed never again.

  She threw a rock so it skipped across the two-lane street in front of her, took a picture of where it stopped, then looked to see if manager-Lydia could see through the window.

  Nothing.

  Good.

  She didn’t want to deal with another lecture about proper employee behavior. Between the hours at the bookstore and her other church commitments, this might be her only time today for pictures. Her dad—no, Pastor Aaron Gibb—was late. Again. Tonight was her photography class, but he probably didn’t remember.

  Get Aaron Gibb in front of a crowd and he’d light up the room. Force him to talk one-on-one with someone and a kind of befuddlement overtook him. Ask him to pay attention to details like picking up his daughter on time set him up for failure.

  She focused the camera on a piece of trash in the gutter. She had an entire series of these pictures: broken glass on asphalt, used Snickers wrapper on asphalt, twisted cigarette butts on asphalt, tire skid marks on asphalt. She’d shown them to the photography teacher. He hadn’t insulted them but also couldn’t hide his lack of enthusiasm. Her parents had seen a few and laughed them off, saying something about taking pictures of the inside of a pocket.

  She wanted to apply for a National Geographic internship position, but they wanted a portfolio with strong photojournalism and compelling single photographs. Photos full of surprises, fresh-seeming, original story ideas, the paperwork had said. Her gutter pictures didn’t come close. She knew that much. But with the little amount of time left between work and taking pictures for the church, she didn’t see how to get the shots she needed. She tried, every day she tried, but she knew none were National Geographic-worthy.

  All that lay in the gutter today were a few receipts from the bookstore, wet from water running off someone’s yard a block away. The black ink had smeared, turning purple and fuzzy, and the white paper was almost translucent. She zoomed in for a close-up of the receipts and kept the line from where the sidewalk and gutter met to the right third of the frame to force the viewer’s eye upward and into the picture.

  “What are you doing, honey?”

  Lydia took the shot, then looked up at the familiar blue Ford station wagon. “Just taking a picture.”

  “Of trash?” Dad asked.

  She didn’t answer. Even though she wanted to defend her pictures, past experience told her it would make her feel ridiculous. She gathered up her camera and bag and climbed into the car. “You’re late,” she said.

  He turned the car back into the street. “Aah…” He glanced over. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  “Did you take your vitamins today?” He looked especially worn out and it wasn’t even Sunday, his high-energy day, when he burned miles of calories during his carpet-pacing sermons.

  “This morning.”

  He craned his head around as his smooth, uncalloused hands jerked the car into the next lane. Her dad’s hands always seemed ready for the spotlight. People stared at them during his sermons. Someone had once accused him of leading a mob with those hands, but Dad had responded that it wasn’t a mob if God was at the head of it.

  He turned the wrong way at the next light. “Dad, where are we going? I need you to take me to class.”

  “What do you mean? We’re going to that dinner.”

  “What dinner?”

  He glanced at Lydia. “My promotion dinner is tonight.”

  Lydia turned away. Mom had said she needed to be at the dinner but she’d forgotten. She had looked forward to class all day. They were going over digital light effects this week, in-camera techniques that would teach her how to control the white point in pictures. She rested her head against the glass window and closed her eyes.

  “It’s this dinner that made me so late,” he said, still sounding apologetic. “They want me to speak and I had to go through my whole stack of Gibb’s Quips to find something appropriate.”

  Gibb’s Quips were his little sayings, slogans he used to jumpstart sermons or to put onto the church’s street sign for people to read while driving by. There were books and books of these types of slogans available where Lydia worked, but he liked to create his own.

  She forced herself to sound normal. It wasn’t his fault she’d forgotten about the promotion dinner. “Which Quip are you using tonight?”

  “I’m going to give the weather report: the Son is always shining.”

  “Dad!” Lydia sat up.

  “What?” He pulled his head down like a turtle ducking into its shell for protection. It was a familiar movement—one Lydia witnessed whenever he and Mom verged on an argument.

  “Mom and I told you that one doesn’t make any sense.”

  “That’s just my starting point to connect God and the weather. It’s just a lead-in, but that’s not what I want to talk about.” He cleared his throat. “I was also late because of an international phone call I received early today, from a Mr. Paul Besly, in Tanzania.”

  Lydia didn’t respond. Overseas missionaries always called him looking for support. “Conducting God’s business across international borders,” he would say. Like that made it more legitimate, more like a powerful business operation.

  The station wagon turned into a neighborhood where the streets meandered in long curves with no sidewalks. The lots were huge and the houses had expensive lawns still green in spite of Sacramento’s triple-digit heat. Mature trees towered into the sky. A black metal fence surrounded a house that looked like a miniature castle. A pair of peacocks spread their tails from the inside of the fence.

  “I received the call this morning.”

  It frustrated her, how Dad disappeared into his work, forgetting she and Mom existed. But there was no question in her mind that he loved them, no matter how clumsy he was at showing it. “And that’s why you were late picking me up. I know, Dad. It’s always something like that.”

  He ran a hand through his thinning hair.

  Lydia almost rolled
her eyes. He could whip a crowd into frenzy and act like the most powerful person in a room, but now he seemed unsure of himself. She resigned herself to a conversation of boring church politics—the missionary asking for more money, Pastor Gibb finding a nice way to tell him the elder board had said no. “Okay, what was it about?”

  He turned the car into a tiled stone driveway and kept the engine running. “What are your plans for this summer?”

  She grimaced. “Besides working full-time at the bookstore? And taking pictures for the church directory?” She looked away. “Not much, I guess.”

  “Well…a missionary friend of mine—he can’t pay anything. Just give you food and a place to stay. You’d have to raise your own support, but he needs someone to take pictures. What if…” He turned off the car. “What if you went to Tanzania this summer?”

  Lydia held still. So still, she could hear the engine noise of another car driving past, the laughter of the church staff already inside the house, her father’s eager fingers tapping the steering wheel. So still, she could hear one of the peacocks scream.

  All she wanted was to live some exotic adventure through the eyes of a camera—to capture the world like how she had seen it done in National Geographic.

  “Will Mom let me go?” she whispered.

  “Let me worry about that.”

  Lydia and her dad entered the living room to find the elder board and most of the administrative staff sitting around tables covered with plates of cheese and crackers and glasses of sparkling cider.

  “Hey, here’s the man of the hour!” someone yelled.

  Dozens of people raised their congratulations and toasted Dad on his promotion to senior pastor. Mom smiled at Dad from her seat on the couch.

  The hostess, a deaconess from church, offered Lydia a wrapped roll of Testa-mints. They were like Altoids, except these mints had the numbers 1 through 10 stamped on them. Supposedly the ridge of the number against the tongue helped a person not break that commandment, at least for as long as the mint lasted. Lydia had sold this stuff to the woman that morning.

  “For after dinner,” the hostess said.

  Lydia smiled awkwardly and took the roll, determined to throw it away at her first opportunity.

  Almost feeling like a ghost in the room, she floated to the open seat next to Mom. She barely registered the various hellos, her mind busily remembering what she knew about Tanzania from her books and magazines.

  “Thank you all for coming. I appreciate your support.” Dad cleared his throat. “I also have an announcement.”

  Lydia froze. Her body became substantial again, pressing its weight into the couch. She tightened her hands into fists and tried to calm her rising fear. This was how he would tell Mom, in front of the entire church staff? Throw the news at her like a punch in the gut, thinking he would make it impossible for her to say no, but instead, making it impossible for her to say yes? No, he must have some other announcement to make.

  “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to share this day with my daughter. She may think I haven’t noticed her interest in photography.” He winked at Lydia.

  A few chuckles sounded from other people in the room. Dad’s talent for obliviousness was common knowledge within the church.

  “But I am happy to report that I have secured a position as a photographic foreign missionary for my daughter. She will be traveling to Tanzania in less than a month.”

  Soft clapping immediately erupted.

  “God bless her!”

  “Congratulations!”

  Dad wore a look of satisfaction on his face, but Lydia focused on Mom, on her black shirt and red-flowered skirt, her simple pair of open-toed, black-heeled sandals set close together on the hardwood floor, how it all gave the impression that a proper pastor’s wife sat there, except for the lips Mom pressed into a thin white line.

  “Aaron, I need to speak with you. Now,” Mom said after moving next to him so only Lydia and Dad could hear.

  Dad spoke quickly to the hostess. They walked into a side hallway.

  The hostess asked everyone to enjoy the appetizers for a few minutes longer until dinner was ready.

  An older man from the church’s elder board came and shook Lydia’s hand. “This is a great opportunity for a young woman.”

  She recognized him but didn’t know his name, not that it would matter. She bolstered her resolve to calmly receive whatever advice he was about to dish out. “Thank you.”

  “My own daughter squandered her chance. She went on a mission trip a few years ago, but instead of doing the Lord’s work, one of the people she ministered to ensnared her. I told her the devil made her fall in love with a heathen and God would help her fall back out. But she’s still with him.”

  He lowered his head enough for Lydia to see the soft exposed skin and liver spots on top. She knew what he would say next, something about not letting the same evil happen to her.

  “I’ll pray to Jesus every night while you’re gone and ask him to keep you safe from the same fate,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He gripped her hand for another long second, searching her eyes, probably trying to find whether she was capable of his daughter’s sins. Then he released her hand and moved away.

  Other people congratulated her. But after a few minutes, they fell into smaller group conversations, took advantage of more sparkling cider, ignored her, and ignored the Gibb family drama unfolding before them.

  Lydia scurried after her parents.

  Her parents had shut one of the bedroom doors. Unwilling to face more congratulations from the church staff, Lydia lurked in the dim hallway, as if she was some cat burglar hiding from a spotlight.

  She strained to make out her parents’ voices and then heard her mom say in a loud and clear voice, “If you quote one of your Quips to me, so help me, I will throw this lamp at you.”

  Lydia slumped down against the hallway wall and tucked her feet beneath her so the church people couldn’t see.

  That sealed it. No East Africa.

  She remembered family moments of ice cream dates, laughter around the dinner table, her parents arm in arm at a school function, but over the last few years the house had become a container for her family’s confusion and resentment, where one walked carefully across the hardwood floors and minimized noise until reaching the safety zone of a closed bedroom door.

  The door cracked open and Dad stuck out his head. “Oh, good. Lydia, come in here. Mom wants you.”

  She scrambled to her feet and went in. The pink pinstriped wallpaper of the bedroom burned into her mind. This moment, this opportunity, given and taken away in a matter of minutes. Pink was all she saw until her mother moved into view, holding in her slender hands a small lamp with a bright pink shade, its unplugged cord dangling against her red-flowered skirt.

  “How long have you known about this?” Mom tried to cross her arms with the lamp still in hand.

  Lydia averted her eyes from Mom’s accusing face. “Just the car ride here.”

  Mom set the lamp down on the mattress. Her hands fluttered up to retuck her hair into a neat ponytail. She replanted her shoes into the pink carpet as if they were tree trunks with roots that just might sink through and crack the foundation. “And what exactly did he promise you?”

  “He didn’t. He said he had a friend in Tanzania who needed someone to take pictures.”

  “Humph.” Mom turned to face Dad. “Who is this friend of yours, anyways?”

  Dad’s shoulders hunched over as if he pushed against a strong wind. “You know him, Gloria. An old college buddy from the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. He’s on your Christmas card list. Paul Besly, remember?”

  “Wasn’t he the one who got that girl pregnant?” She repositioned her arms across her chest, tucking her hands out of sight. Where Dad was thin and tall, Mom was thin and short and had a stubbornness that went unmatched in the Gibb family. She’d been a club-hopping L.A. girl once, a woman who wore lo
w necklines and high heels like she’d been born in them. At least, that’s the picture Lydia had formed out of the few details her mom let slip over the years. She didn’t understand how her parents had managed to fall in love.

  “Oh, Abby? That was just a rumor.” Dad scratched his chin lightly with one hand. “I know for a fact that he caught the missionary bug and finished seminary in Tanzania.”

  “I just…this isn’t some supervised trip to Mexicali with the youth group. This is Africa!”

  “You know she’s dreamed about this since she was little. And now a Godly man has given her a Godly opportunity. Would you take that from her?”

  “That would be perfect for you, wouldn’t it? If your daughter became a real foreign missionary? You would be the envy of every pastor whose kid left the church.”

  “Gloria.” He sighed. “Yes. I’m glad—no, I’m proud that Lydia is a God-fearing Christian. Is there something wrong with that?”

  “No…I—”

  “Good. Now before anyone says something they’ll regret, let’s take a deep breath.”

  Lydia and Mom watched while he paused to breathe in.

  “There’s no reason to settle this tonight,” he said. “Let’s go back out, enjoy the celebration and talk about this tomorrow. In fact…” He reached for his pocket Bible and began thumbing through the thin pages.

  “Don’t you dare quote a verse at me,” Mom said.

  He glanced up then thumbed faster through the pages. “Here it is.” He held out a piece of paper. “It’s Paul’s phone number. He said we should call him if we had questions. You can ask him about Abby.”

  He held out the paper but Mom didn’t reach for it.

  “I want to go,” Lydia said. She took the piece of paper from Dad. Her hand almost trembled as she pressed it against Mom’s arm. “I want to go. Please, just see what he has to say.”

  Mom gripped Lydia’s hand and then put the paper in her skirt pocket.

  2

  Five days later the Gibb family trio sat around the living room coffee table, each on the edge of his or her respective couch cushion.