"Why do you have to ask? You know the kind of trouble I mean. I don't think you want to force me to describe it to you.

The last time it happened it could have gotten out of hand and turned into really terrible trouble for you and the Church and all of us. You were lucky. We were all lucky. The Church was lucky. Sometimes, Johnny, people go looking for you and they can't find you anywhere. And I am reminded of what was going on two years ago. There's a rumor you're seeing a married woman. Can it be true? After the way you promised the last time, never again?"

"Are you losing your wits, Mag? Are you losing touch with reality?"

"Do you want to answer me, or do you want to sidestep the question? Are you messing around with someone?"

"No. I am not messing around with anyone."

"When you are tempted, Johnny, you are not exactly a pillar of strength. You've proved that more than once."

"And you manage to rekindle the memories once a month at least, don't you? Everybody else who knew anything about it has forgotten, all except Mary Margaret Meadows. Maybe it's the way you get your kicks, living in my past."

"I'm not going to let you make me angry, John Tinker. I think there are quite a few people who remember it. But that's beside the point. Lately you've been so irritable and restless and remote, and it makes me wonder how vulnerable you might be to some sort of trouble. Why don't you take a good look at Tracy Bellwright? She would make a really lovely bride, Johnny. She'd make you happy. And then there'd be somebody to really approve of the good things you do, to be proud of you for them, like that sermon this morning."

He stood up slowly and looked down at her and smiled.

"Sis, how would you ever get to know anything about that kind of restlessness? Look at you! You've put all other kinds of temptation behind you with a knife and fork. Gluttony is one of the sins of the gratification of self. Until you can control your own hungers, sister, and your own insecurities, try to stay the hell out of my personal life. Okay?"

He strolled out of the small projection room, closing the door softly as he left. She sat quietly for a long time, and then remembered the trick she had learned in childhood. If you tried to catch the rolling tears with the tip of your tongue, they would stop.

He's going bad, she thought. Ever faster. Like something rotting away underneath the shiny outer skin. You'd have to cut into it to find the rot. For many now, he has become more and more a person playing a part. A person pretending to be the Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows. A polished performer with a saintly look who, on any Sunday, preaches to more people than ever listened to Jesus Christ in his whole lifetime. He wanted all this because it was Poppa's. He wanted it dreadfully. And each year that he took over more of it, he wanted it less. Now he has it all, and maybe he doesn't want it at all. So he's getting more reckless. What is the game with the loaded gun? Russian roulette. With Johnny it is woman roulette. The loaded situation, loaded with risk. Defying God and his own father. Maybe, in some warped way in his mind, they are one and the same. There are rumors. He knows I didn't make them up. And if they weren't true, he wouldn't have been so vile and nasty to me.

From memory she whispered aloud the second and third verses of the Thirty-sixth Psalm, the Jerusalem Bible translation used by all the faithful of the Eternal Church of the Believer.

"He sees himself with too flattering an eye to detect and detest his guilt; all he says tends to mischief and deceit, he has turned his back on wisdom."

So he's pretending to be something he isn't and so am I. Paul couldn't handle that kind of strain, and maybe he was the best of the three of us. I am handling it better than Johnny. Does that make me the worst of the three of us, or the strongest?

She got up and rewound the tape and settled back and watched the Reverend Tom Daniel Birdy again. And again he touched her heart.

Six.

By nine-thirty on that Sunday evening, the Reverend Joseph Deets was reclining in familiar and delicious comfort in the small living room of his bachelor house in the Meadows Settlements at 11 Zedekiah Lane. The tract houses in that area of the Settlements were based upon the smallest and simplest floor plans, and were occupied for the most part by single people or childless couples who worked at the Center and rented rather than owned the small houses.

An old tape by the Modern Jazz Quartet was playing, and the intricate music was just within the range of audibility. All the draperies were closed. A floor lamp with a blue shade was the only light in the room, over by the couch. He was stretched out on his most expensive piece of furniture, a television chair with toggle controls which worked much like those on a hospital bed, raising and lowering the back and the knees to the most comfortable position. Within reach of his right hand was a small table with two glasses and a decent bottle of California Cabernet Sauvignon.

His old blue robe was open, and Doreen's head was tucked beneath the edge of his jaw, and her forearms were under his back, her fingers hooked back around the top of his shoulders.

Her firm breasts were pressed flat against his wiry chest. She lay frog like her body slack and deeply penetrated, utterly relaxed. Across her back and shoulders and rear was a featherweight mohair throw, shielding her from the faint chilly breath of the air-conditioning vent in the wall nearby.

He slid his two hands up under the throw, and with his workman clasp and closely trimmed fingernails, he traced slow patterns from the small of her back down around the solid gluteal cheeks and back up again, now and again detouring to trace the inner and outer lines of her velvet thighs, altering now and again the force of his touch, from a questing firmness to the lightest brushing stroke, but never changing the pattern or 72the rhythm. At last, as anticipated, she made a murky sound, almost a sound of complaint, and ground her head against his jaw, pulling at his shoulders with her hooked fingers. Her personal history, retrieved by him from the detailed data bank when he had first become curious about her, had not prepared him for her shyness, reluctance and fear. As he continued to caress her without haste, gently, he felt deep within her a tiny clenching, like the fist of a small sleepy child.

It had taken him a long, patient time to release her from the conditioning inflicted on her by her hearty motorcycle sweetheart, a fellow rough, selfish and hasty in his lovemaking.

Now that she was over the effects of him, she was, Joe Deets thought, like a tidy little cauldron of some wonderfully fragrant sauce which sits there on the back of the stove with the blue flame turned very low under it, a few wisps of steam rising. At any time, day or night, one needed only to turn the blue flame up a half whisker and the cauldron would simmer, then bubble at the edges and soon lift into a rolling boil.

He smiled to himself, tilted her head up and found her lips, then began a more strategic stroking. She sighed, shifted, and then breathed more quickly and shallowly as her hips began small movements. He felt her approaching climax from a long way off, and he helped her over the edge and into it, relishing her soft mewing sounds.

Once again he had been able to wait her out, willing himself back from the very edge of his own release, so that when she was still, he remained within her just as he had been before, deep, hard as a hickory post, pulsing almost imperceptibly with each strong thud of his heart.

He felt the hot wax of her tears on the side of his throat.

"No need for crying, sweetness," he told her.

"I'd just plain kill myself if she sends me home."

"I told you how many times? She won't send you home."

"How can you be real sure, Joe? This is black, dirty, evil sin and she knows it and you know it. You are older, she said, than my own dad and that makes it worse even."

"In one sense it's sin, Doreen. Every night of my life I pray for forgiveness for what we're doing. I tell Him we're weak creatures and we just can't seem to help ourselves."

"That's what I told her. We're in love and we can't help it.

She said you could help it if you wanted to. She said you've always been like this. She said you were always making it with young girls like me, and you don't really give a damn about me.

All you care about, she said, is getting sex from young girls.

And it is always the same for you."

"Not like this. Not really like this. Never before like this, believe me, love."

"She says it means your sin is worse than mine."

"It probably is."

"Because you're so old?"

With an inward wince he said, "That isn't what I meant. I'm a preacher, Doreen. That's what makes it worse. But sometimes providence moves in strange ways. I have enormous responsibilities to the Church. Crushing responsibilities. Until you came into my life I was sleeping badly, I had constant indigestion. Worry about my duties to the Church was slowly killing me. And if I can't carry on, there's nobody else who can do my work. It would be a terrible setback for the Church. Do you see what I'm driving at?"

"Maybe. I don't really know..."

"Doreen, darling, believe me, you came along at just the right time. You are important to the Church because with you I can relax. All my worries are eased. I sleep at night. I am using you, dear little heart, to keep myself sane and alive. I'm using you, for the good of the Church, and that is what is sinful."

She hugged him, clamping those strong farm-girl fingers into the flesh of his shoulders.

"I love you, I love you, I love you so much, Joe!" she cried.

"I know," he said comfortably, and with great care he reached out to pour them some more red wine. The memory of Patsy Knox's fierce and angry eyes slid through his mind, leaving a residue, a taste of staleness. The tape had ended, leaving only the whispering hum of the air conditioning. A car moved slowly down the street, the glow of headlights appearing briefly against the draperies. When she rose up to drink her wine, her blonde hair lay in a tangle across her eyes. She peered through the hair at him, a small once-wary creature in a thicket, now conditioned to the ways of the captor.

He felt as if he were on the verge of some great new truth, but it turned to nothing when he tried to put it into words. Each one, in her own time, is the very best of them all, he thought.

And that does not have much meaning. It will come to an end.

There will be a final one a last lady and I will not know at the time that she is indeed the last one. This one could be the last one. A dear child. No regrets.