“I don’t think so,” I replied. “I’ll trust your judgment. If you think I’m squinting too much, you’ll have to rescue me.”

“Will do,” she said. She turned away, then turned back. “I’m glad I met you, Lee Murphy. You’ve made this easy.”

“I think it’s Avrum’s doing,” I told her.

“Maybe. Who knows?” She smiled again. “Remember: smoke and mirrors.”

CHAPTER

13
 

AS I WAITED IN THE CHAIR FOR THE CROWD TO SETTLE, I THOUGHT of Avrum’s instructions about his memorial service. Do it on the third day. You know why, he had written.

I did know. It was Avrum’s last gently cynical swipe at Christianity. “If Christ can rise on the third day, and him being such a nice Jewish boy, so will I,” he had boasted. “Such a story, such a story,” he would say in his old-man chuckling. “You know, Bobo, your people, they’re worse than the Jews, and this God, this God, he must be a hardhead.”

I had tried to understand why Avrum was so intolerant of religion, but he would never tell me. He would sneer and look away, and then he would babble about some horrendous world condition and demand to know where my God was at such times. “Maybe on a holiday,” he would thunder. “Maybe this is where he is. On a beach, sleeping in the sun. Huh? Could he be there?” Harry Burger believed Avrum’s anger was from his agony over the death camps of World War Two. If God existed, how could he stand by and permit such things? But for Avrum, that was only one example. Wasn’t it God who put Job to test when Job was the only man doing everything God expected of him? And why? Because God had a little side bet going with Satan. What kind of God would do that? Avrum had railed.

But I did see Avrum in church once. He went with Harry Burger. They spent their time nudging one another and nodding toward me, smiling like children watching an amusing embarrassment.

And that is what they were watching.

My brother, Raymond, had asked me to speak at one of his small churches, permitting him an early break for a summer-long vacation in Georgia.

“I can’t do that,” I told him.

“Sure you can,” Raymond assured me. “I’ve got a sermon already written. All you’ve got to do is read it. Everything else will be taken care of by the lay leader.”

“But I’ve got to work,” I protested.

“I talked with Mrs. Dowling about it,” Raymond explained. “She said you could get off. In fact, she said she’d come to hear you.”

“What?”

“She said she’d come. I think that’s good. She likes you. She told me you were doing a great job.”

“I don’t think this is going to work,” I argued.