Thank You for the Music Read Online Free Page A

would feature President Bush dressed like a sexy waitress asking idiotic-looking customers in patriotic T-shirts, “How would you like your end-time sirloin cooked?” Everything was end-time with Maria. He tried not to think of her too often, but in his town a handful of minivans were adorned with bumper stickers that said Warning: In case of rapture this vehicle will be unmanned. That was a particularly annoying symbol of end-time wackiness, and wasn’t Maria smart enough to know that end-time crap had existed since first-time? He knew the answer to that. She was smart enough, certainly, but something somewhere had gone wrong with her. “She came into the world with her screws loose, and that’s how she’ll leave it,” his father had once remarked. His brother, the pastor, had defended her. “She’s a good kid,” he’d said. “We don’t know the whole story. Give her time.”
    He loved his brother fiercely for those kinds of moments, despite all the Christianity, which he felt was an insult to their Cherokee grandfather, a figure who’d been inexplicably crucial to him as a child, a man who’d lived in a tiny house that had been flooded by the river’s rising. He remembered himself as a small boy swimming through those ruined rooms, his grandfather’s rocky laughter dancing in the water. The two of them sat together in a chair later that evening in a neighbor’s house, listening to a ball game on the radio. How, he’d wondered later, could certain Christians in the wide, taut net of his family condemn a man who knew how to sit with a boy in a chair and listen to a ball game the very night his house gets flooded, the very night he loses the nothing he’d had? What kind of religion would exclude a man like him?
    Back at the table of strangers, you’d also notice how the pastor’s brother had dark eyes gently regarding whoever spoke to him; you’d see how generously he listened, nodding, smiling, making whoever talked with him feel utterly at ease. In fact, had he not been assertively male in appearance, he would’ve seemed almost womanly in this regard. He had none of the usual male discomfort in the face of talk; he didn’t sit back and cross his arms over his chest, he didn’t let his eyes wander around the room, nor did he interrupt, or ever try to dominate a conversation. He had such a deep sense of human vulnerability this listening was actually hard work; you could catch him wincing on occasion. These qualities, innate tendencies that had deepened thanks to a troubled daughter, made others value his presence and think of him as the salt of the earth.
    One winter night when he was listening to NPR’s account of the Muslims and Hindus killing each other in India, the pastor called.
    They hadn’t spoken since Christmas, and that had been a short, friendly talk, involving neither of their wives, who in past years had hung on downstairs phones trying to do a four-way chat, which the pastor’s brother had always found excruciating. It wasn’t just that he happened to be a born phone hater, the sort who gets lonelier and restless having to hear the disembodied human voice leaking out of a plastic receiver; it was that his wife, Rachel, on the other phone would laugh in a way that seemed reserved for the pastor alone. And something behind his breastbone would rise like hair on a cat’s back, until he’d break in with “Why don’t we talk one at a time,” and they’d ignore him. He would then feel trapped by that familiar sense of isolation experienced most exquisitely when his brother and his wife addressed each other. His face burned with a humiliating jealousy; he would go and press his forehead against the window.
    He was grateful that the calls lasted no more than twenty minutes or so. Then relieved when the pastor had grown so busy with his inner-city congregation years ago, more