A VISIT FROM JESUS

Jan worked at a market in the town of Traverse City, Michigan, known chiefly for its fine cherries and cherry products, and, once a year, a festival in that fruit’s honor. For two months she’d been dating X, the market’s owner. A hardworking middle-aged man, with fine blue eyes set into a thin face, he treated her at first, and even later, with a quaint formality. For weeks after their first kiss he seemed afraid to touch anywhere beyond her face. In the storage room they drank coffee together, sitting on top of unpacked corrugated boxes of canned goods. He fumbled with his words, wrung his hands in thought. His first wife had died years ago in a strange boating accident on Walloon Lake. He spoke of it only once and tears came to his eyes. He lived in a small apartment above a bakery, up a rickety flight of wooden stairs. They drank coffee there, too, sitting on the back steps, enjoying the night wind. They walked alone together at Mission Point. It was early fall. The tourists had cleared out for the winter. He didn’t talk much, but it didn’t seem to matter. She liked his silence. She held his hand and felt the wrinkles around his knuckles, the hard calluses around the pads of his fingers. When he did kiss her, she ran her hand around the back of his neck and tried to soothe him. It was like this for a month. Walks, drinking coffee, holding hands and kissing. Once, choking over his own words, he said: You’re so beautiful, a young girl, only twenty-four, who, like an angel, has come into my life. And she was beautiful, with long golden-honey hair, and rich-fleshed lips, soft beyond anything, and wide brown eyes. That afternoon she held his face in her hands and bathed him in kisses, working down to the open collar of his shirt.

Business slowed at the store as it usually did in the offseason. She swept the floors and restocked items while he worked over his books and listened to the radio. She heard the faint clicking of the calculator keyboard. Occasionally, he stopped, looked up at her, and smiled.

For her part, she told him the basics. When she was seventeen she had married Bob Karr, her high school sweetheart. He went off to the Persian Gulf War and came back bitter and confused and, he claimed, extremely ill from desert fungi. All day he scratched himself. She kept the story simple, not wanting her past to cloud things with this soft, quiet man, but she implied that her first husband, on his return from the war, had changed. He was abusive, she said. She moved back in with her parents in Paw Paw, attended a nearby community college for two years. Then, one summer afternoon, Bob shot himself. Shortly thereafter, as if in response to this tragedy, both her parents were killed in a car accident. And so she moved north to Traverse City and found her job working at the market with X.