pressed ham

This is a story from my book, "Ravens and Other Stories". It's available from Amazon.com.


So it all came down to this. Mike sat looking at his hands, trying not to laugh, or cry, or rage, trying to look appropriately chagrined.
What were you thinking, Leslie was asking. (“Leslie,” thought Mike, for about the four hundredth time, “what kind of name is that for a man?”)
“I mean, did you think it was the right thing to do? Did you think it would be funny?” asked Leslie.
“Well, actually, I did. I told you, I thought Kathy was alone in the car, and she’d get a laugh over it.”
“I certainly wouldn’t find that sort of behavior funny,” interjected Carol Stein.
Mike looked around at the faces staring at him from across his coffee table, feeling a bit like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights, or the criminal in the back room, except these faces weren’t capable of instilling fear and he was still too amused at the events of yesterday to work up any real fear.
Bob Carlson, insurance salesman, Gary Simon, retired music teacher, Ralph Martin, manager of a small injection molding factory, Leslie, who had once taught school, then farmed, and was now what he called “semi-retired”, and Carol, office manager (“we used to just be secretaries”) for a real estate firm. All of them old enough to be his father, grandfather, or mother, in Carol’s case, except Bob, his junior by a year, who wanted desperately to be old, out-old-manning the others at every opportunity.
“What kind of example are we setting?” Bob was voicing his perennial question. “What are our young people going to think? When I was in school, I had good role models like Vernon McGee, and these guys.” He indicated the others with a wave of his hand.
“Pastor, can you excuse us?” said Gary, the only one of the bunch likely to find the current awkward discussion even remotely funny. “We need to talk in private.”
Thirty six hours earlier Pastor Mike Evans was riding shotgun through the arid countryside of eastern Kansas. His neighbor, Bill, was driving. Bill was not a member of the congregation, and didn’t want to be. Mike, though he wasn’t supposed to admit it, liked it that way. He and Bill shared a stinging wit and a love for old cars. In fact, they were returning from a car show where they’d browsed restored Chevys and Fords, had a few beers, and laughed over each other’s “one time in high school” stories.
Mike had just put the almost true trim on one in which he had mooned the entire football team as they traveled to an away game. Bill was gearing up to counter with his own full moon memories when Mike noticed his wife’s car in the lane ahead of them.
“Look, there’s Kathy’s car,” he said. And then, maybe it was too much beer, or too much memory, but for whatever reason he heard himself saying, “You ever press ham?”
“What?”
“Press ham. Pull up alongside of Kathy and I’ll show you.” He was already loosening his belt.
As his buttocks hit the glass and he was explaining the origin of the term “ham pressing”, breath sluiced from between Bill’s teeth, who pulled his cap down lower. “Shit, man, she’s got Gertrude Bandy with her.”
Mike went light headed. All the blood left his head and seemed to balloon his ass all out of proportion. His pants, which had glided so smoothly down to his knees, were now three sizes smaller. He slid down in the seat, turning his face toward Bill, who hit the gas as laughter geysered out of him.
“You’re in it to your chin this time, Mike!”
Gertrude Bandy. She led the Sentinel Reporter in letters to the editor. She was constantly complaining about something and when she wasn’t complaining, she was gossiping. She was one of Mike’s most frequent visitors, usually to complain. Where Kathy was taking her was beyond him. Not that it really mattered.
Later, as they neared their little town, Bill asked what he’d always wondered about his friend, “Why do you keep at it? I mean the pastor thing. These people are going to call you on the carpet, chew you up, and send you packing. How can you keep it up?”
Mike smiled. “I think it’s because I really believe the stuff I talk about. I really believe it. God, Jesus, the Church, the resurrection, eternal life, I really do believe it.”
“Yeah, well, I would say you shot yourself in the foot, but I think you aimed higher.”
And so it all came down to this. Down into the recently finished basement with Kathy for fifteen minutes, waiting for the obvious with the certainty of a dying man. Kathy sat in the corner, worrying her nails between her teeth.
“What’s wrong with you?” she’d asked him after dropping Gertrude off and apologizing profusely, knowing it was no good, watching her march into the house to begin the first wave of assault, the phone calls. “That was disgusting!” Supper had been that frozen silence of uncertainty, anger, and regret.
Later that night, lying in bed, she’d turned to face him, rising over him like a cloud. “If you’d stay in better shape, maybe Gertrude wouldn’t have been so offended,” she’d whispered, and they laughed silently until they were both choking, trying not to wake the baby sleeping in the next room.
Then this visit from the ministry committee, arranged by a painfully embarrassed Gary Simon.
Carol’s smile was gone. That sickly sweet, pitying, self-satisfied smile that normally danced across her face was gone. No, not “danced”; her smile did not dance. Dancing was first cousins with sin, a gateway activity, to be frowned on, or at least, given a pitying smile intended to wither the dance enthusiast. [“Hey, Bill. You know why Carol and Dave don’t have sex standing up? Might lead to dancing!”] Well, the smile that normally sat condemningly on her narrow, once beautiful face was gone. The smile that hadn’t faded even when he was arrested for protesting a nuclear generator site, when he’d preached for a month straight about reconciliation [knowing she hadn’t spoken to her sister-in-law in ten years], even when he’d taken the youth group to a homeless shelter and lost three kids for a few hours [they’d eventually called his cell phone, everything was all right, nothing wrong being sheltered by a few prostitutes]. Now, finally, that smile was gone.
Leslie, however, who took his faith so seriously that little made him smile, was trying out his version of a smile. He looked like a man who’d had one too many bran muffins at breakfast and would need, very soon, to excuse himself. “Mike, it’s the decision of the ministry committee to recommend to the congregation that we let you go, effective immediately.”
Gary cleared his throat, rough sandpaper in the living room’s silence. “Of course, you can live here for ninety days and we’ll provide a reasonable severance package. For while you’re looking,” he added, the red rising from his neck into his cheeks. “Do you have any, uh, questions for us?”
“No, I guess not,” he managed. The back of his throat tasted like the bottom of a pond. He didn’t think it would feel like this.
The awkwardness swirled around them during the attempts at parting pleasantries, but Mike couldn’t manage more than to stumble feebly to the door. As he stood looking through the glass, he saw Carol turn her head toward the house. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped, making her look all the more like a grim bird. He could see, but not hear, her shriek. Every other head in the station wagon turned as well.
Mike watched them gaping at something on the side of the parsonage. Then he realized they were looking in the living room window.
As he came into the living room he saw the form of his wife, pants down, ham pressed against the bay window. With a low chuckle, he joined her.