Reprisal

But still… as useful as the camaraderie had been, there'd been a price to pay. She couldn't help noticing how the secretaries addressed all the other Ph.D.s in the department as "Doctor," while she was always "Lisl." A minor point, but an irritating one.

"Where'd you find them?" she asked as Adele reached the top of the knoll.

"Right behind my seat cushion. Isn't that something!"

"I thought you said you searched the entire area."

"I did! I did! But I left out one thing. I forgot to ask for the Lord's help."

Out of the coiner of her eye she saw Will pause in mid bite. She groaned inwardly. Adele was a Born Again. She could go on interminably on the subject of Jesus.

"That's great, Adele," Lisl said quickly. "By the way, this is Will Ryerson."

Will and Adele exchanged nods and hellos, but Adele was not to be turned from her favorite subject.

"But let me tell you how the Lord intervened for me," she said. "After you dropped me off home last night, I got big Dwayne and little Dwayne together and we knelt in the middle of our living room and prayed for the Lord to help me find my keys. We did that twice last night, and once again this morning, just before the school bus came for little Dwayne. And you know what?"

Lisl waited. Apparently it wasn't a rhetorical question, so she took a wild stab.

"You found your keys."

"Praise the Lord, yes! When big Dwayne dropped me off this morning, I went to my desk, sat in my chair, and felt a lump under my cushion. I looked and—Praise the Lord—there they were! It's a little miracle, that's what it is! Because I know they weren't there yesterday. God found them and put them where I was sure to happen across them. I just know he did. Isn't the Lord wondrous in his ways?" She turned and started back down the slope, bubbling and babbling all the way. "I'm spending the whole day just witnessing and praising Him, witnessing and praising my wonderful Lord. Bye, y'all!"

"Bye, Adele," Lisl said.

She turned to Will and saw that he was leaning back against the.tree and staring after Adele's retreating figure, the sandwich lying forgotten in his lap.

"Incredible!" he said.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"People like that make me lose my appetite."

"Nothing makes you lose your appetite."

"The Adeles of the world do. I mean, how empty-headed can you get?"

"She's harmless."

"Is she? I mean, where's her perspective? God isn't a good luck charm. He's not there to help you find your keys or make it a nice day for the church's Labor Day picnic."

Lisl sensed the growing heat behind Will's words. He usually avoided the subject of religion—anything else was fair game, but he didn't seem to like to talk about God. This would be good. She let him roll.

"God helped her find her car keys. Great. Just great. Praise the Lord and pass the mashed potatoes. Where's her head, anyway? We've got thousands—no, hundreds of thousands of people starving in places like Ethiopia. Desperate fathers and mothers kneeling over the bloated bellies of their starving children, crying out to heaven for a little rain so their crops will grow and they can feed their families. But God's not answering them. The whole damn region remains a dust bowl with children and adults alike dropping like flies. Adele, however, sends up a couple of quick Our Fathers and God hops right to it. He locates those lost keys and shoves them under her seat cushion where she's sure to find them first thing in the morning. There's still no rain in Ethiopia, but Adele What's-her-name's got her goddam car keys." He paused for breath, then looked at her. "Is there something wrong with that scenario, or is it just me?"

Lisl stared at Will in frank shock. In the two years she'd known him she had, never heard him raise his voice or become angry about anything. But Adele obviously had touched a raw nerve. He was seething; the scar on his forehead was turning red.

She patted his arm.

"Calm down, Will. It doesn't matter."

"It does matter. Where does she get off thinking that God's ignoring prayers for rain in the Sudan to go put her car keys where she can find them? It's not fair for her to go around telling everybody that God's answering her ditsy prayers while prayers for things that really matter go unanswered!"

And suddenly it was clear to Lisl. Suddenly she knew why Will was so angry. Or at least thought she did.

"What did you pray for, Will? What did you ask for that didn't happen?"

He looked at her, and for a moment the shutters were open. In that moment she had a glimpse into his soul—

—and recoiled at the pain, the grief, the agony, the disillusionment that welled up in his eyes. But mostly it was the overriding fear that shook her so.

Oh, my God! Oh, my poor Will! What happened to you? Where have you been. What have you seen?

And then the shutters slammed closed and once again she faced a pair of bland blue eyes. Opaque blue eyes.

"It's nothing like that," he said calmly. "It's just that the childishness and superficiality of that kind of religion gets to me after a while. It's so prevalent around here. You hear of bumper-sticker politics, but it seems to me they've got bumper-sticker religion in these parts."

Lisl knew from what she had glimpsed in his eyes that it was much more than that, but sensed it would do no good to probe. Will was shut down tight.

Lisl added another mystery to the mental list she'd been keeping about the enigmatic Will Ryerson.

"Not just around these parts," she said.

"Yeah," he sighed. "Ain't that the truth. It's all over the country. Televangelism. God as game show host. A heavenly Wheel ofFortune."

"Except the money comes from the contestants instead of to them."

He looked at her. "You've never said much about it, Leese, but I gather you're not very religious."

"I was raised a Methodist. Sort of. But you can't get too far into higher math and stay very religious."

"Oh, really?" he said with a smile. "I've looked into some of those journals you bring up here. I'd say it takes quite a leap of faith to get involved in that stuff."

She laughed. "You're not the first person to feel that way."

"Speaking of higher math," Will said, "what about that idea you had for a paper? How's it coming?"

Just thinking about the paper started a buzz of excitement within her.

"It's going great."

"Good enough for Palo Alto?"

She nodded. "I think so. Maybe."

"No maybes. If you think so, you ought to enter it."

"But if it gets rejected—"

"Then you're right back where you started. Nothing lost except the time you spent working on it. And even the time isn't completely lost because you'll no doubt learn something. But if you don't do the paper, and don't submit it, you're betraying your potential. It's bad enough to let other people stifle you. But when you stifle yourself—"

"I know, I know."

They'd been over this ground before. Lisl had grown so close to Will over the past couple of years. She'd opened up to him as she had to no man before, more even than to Brian during their marriage. She never would have believed she could be so intimate with a man without sex edging into the picture. But that's the way it was.

Platonic. She'd heard of platonic affairs but had always thought them fantasies. Now she was living one. Once she had broken through Will's shell, she'd found him warm and accepting. A great talker and a better listener. But she'd remained wary of him. The deep discussions during lunch hours here on the knoll during the week, the long, aimless, languorous drives on weekends… through them all Lisl had stayed on guard, dreading the inevitable moment when Will would put the moves on her.

And dread really said it. The nightmare of divorcing Brian had been still too fresh in her mind, the wounds had barely stopped bleeding and were a long way from healing. She hadn't wanted another man in her life, no way, no how, especially not someone about twenty years older. And she knew—just knew—that Will was going to want to expand their relationship beyond the purely intellectual to the physical. Lisl didn't want that. It would back her into the position of rebuffing him. And what would that do to their relationship? Wound it, surely. Perhaps even kill it. She couldn't bear that. Shje'd wanted things to stay just as they were.