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“How do I look at you?”
“Like you think I’m about to tackle you. Like you think I’m after however much is in that thing hanging at your waist. But I wouldn’t do that to you.” She points a finger at my face, wags it in the air between us. “You and I, we are friends, and I wouldn’t hurt a friend that way, Beth. Iwouldn’t.”
She says it just like that—like it’s decided, like it’s a fact. She is to be trusted. We are to be friends. She holds me in her brown stare for a few more seconds, and I can’t deny her message tugs at something inside me. The thing is, I like Martina. Even though I haven’t believed much of what she’s told me so far, I think this might be the nugget of truth I was searching for. I was wrong about her dealings with Jorge. Maybe I was wrong to be suspicious of her, too.
“I believe you,” I say, and God help me, I mean it. I believe Martina when she says she wouldn’t take my money. I just pray it’s not a mistake.
The car behind me leans on the horn, and I press the gas and slide forward, smiling.
The truth is, it’s nice to have a friend.
Unexpected. But nice.
Martina tells me she’s twenty-eight as we work our way through the nave of the church later that morning, stacking Bibles and hymnals in the cubbies between the seats, dropping in bulletins for the evening service. Her family has either died or moved away, all except for a younger half brother, Carlos, a boy half her age about to start high school at Grady—which I gather is a different place than the hospital where she claims to have been born. The two share a father, a deadbeat drifter who last she heard was playing drums in dives up and down the West Coast. Carlos’s mother is kind of a bitch, but she doesn’t drink or forget to buy groceries, and in Martina’s mind, that more than makes up for any snarky remarks.
Martina talks and talks, a constant stream of words to plug the silence, and I don’t interrupt. As long as she’s the one talking, I don’t have to do anything but listen.
As we’re nearing the last row of a section, I step on something hard and lumpy. I reach down, pick up a baby’s pacifier. It’s grubby and cracked, the pink face missing its ring. “Should I throw this thing away?” I say, holding it up.
Martina takes it from my fingers, tosses it into an empty box. “We never throw away anything here,ever. We take it to lost and found. Not that anybody will ever come looking for an old piece of plastic, but it’s not up to us. You never know what you’ll find. Phones, keys, gum wrappers and Lord knows what else. Once I found a diamond earring. A real one, too.”
“How do you know it was real?”
“Have you seen the people who come in this place?” She snorts. “It was definitely real.”
I think of Charlene, the blonde receptionist I met my first day here, with her silky dress and sparkly jewelry, and I don’t argue.
“Anyway, wait’ll you see this place tomorrow morning, after the Reverend packs the house here tonight. There are eight thousand seats in this place, eight thousand bodies, and at least half of them drop crap out of their pockets for us to pick up.”
I reach inside a box for a fresh stack of bulletins. “This place is nothing like the church I used to go to.”
As soon as I say the words, I wish I could snatch them back. Not that Martina seems to notice my accidental sharing. She picks up a piece of trash from the floor, tosses it into the box and moves farther down the line.
“Have you ever gone to one of the Reverend’s services?”
She nods.
“What’s it like?”
“The services are cool. Very happy-clappy, if you know what I mean, but the music steals the show. It’s like going to a concert or something. It makes the hour fly by. We can stay tonight if you want to, but I say we wait until Wednesday.”
“Why, what happens on Wednesday?”
“The Reverend puts on a buffet dinner after the services. Fried chicken, lasagna, mashed potatoes, more food than you’ve ever seen. And you should see those hoity-toity types tear into that buffet like they haven’t eaten for days. They hover around the tables with their plates while the Reverend blesses the food, and his Amen is like the shot of a starting pistol. They dive into that food like...like what are those people in the Bible with the famine?”
“Canaanites?”
“Yeah, them. Anyway, if we stay for the service and then help clean up afterward, we get to eat as much as we want, and the Reverend pays overtime.”
Overtime and a free meal, the two magic words.
I nod, decision made. “Let’s wait till Wednesday then.”
I look to Martina for confirmation, but she’s looking over my shoulder. Her spine straightens, and her brows slam together. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I turn to see a woman—no, agirl—coming down the aisle toward us. She’s somewhere around sixteen or seventeen, though she’s helped along by her height, six feet and then some. Her skin is bronze and her hair is natural, a wild crown of curly ringlets over high cheekbones and big green eyes. She’s dressed like us, in the same khaki pants and God Works Here T-shirt, only hers are skintight, her shirt knotted on the side to reveal a seductive slice of coppery skin. She moves closer, and I see that she’s biting back a smirk.
“I work here. What’reyoudoing here?”