God Loves the Lonely

Sara worked at the resort hotel as a chambermaid, making beds and smoothing sheets for the city people. She had left her home in Maine dreaming of a warmer kind of life but only managed a few hundred miles and that was not enough to outdistance the cold. She was born with a wine red birthmark in the shape of a heart that covered one side of her face. Her daddy always told her, “Some people hide their hearts. Some people wear ‘em on their sleeve. Yours will always be on your face.” But whenever she looked at herself in a mirror, all she saw was a stain. And all she dreamed of, when she allowed herself to dream, was something strong enough, perhaps love, to clean it all away. But love she knew didn’t exist for a girl like her. A big girl. A hard worker. A bedsheet girl, with the stain of a heart on her face. The kind of girl no one could see and if they somehow did could not remember. No, that was for the others that men looked at and dreamed of. Girls with soft hands and fair features. She looked her own hands, scaled from the bleach, rough and bent at the knuckles. She was only 20 but her back ached and when she felt her heart at all it was thinner with every year, like it had been starved. Sara had long ago given up on the idea of a family of her own. “My heart must not be smart enough,” she told herself. “Some people are just not clever enough to find love.” So she decided that small things like the sound of laughter from someone else’s children were enough. They would have to be. Happiness, she knew, was like the rain. Sometimes it poured, but it always evaporated. Some things last and others, like happiness, don’t. And looking at the fraying marriages of the city people she told herself, “If love ever touched me I would hang on . . . hang on to it like life and breath itself.” Because she knew what life is without it. No life at all, just time and work leaning into a heart until it could barely lift either. The hotel had closed for the season but the staff was still busy cleaning and putting things up and away. They would be there through the end of October. One afternoon the concierge beckoned her. He was the son of a ditch digger from Canarsie who, longing for a better life, worked his way up from the kitchen to waiter. He had been deferential for so long that bowing had become like breathing. But now, approaching 60, his bones sometimes ached and the black shoe polish he applied to his hair could not offset the deepening lines in his face left by worry and age and a growing fear of what the future may hold. “A couple, newlyweds, has car trouble. They aren’t guests but asked for help.” He grimaced and sighed then somehow remembered that he too had once been young and stupid and in trouble, so he decided that he would at least point them in the right direction. “Take this key to the repairman in his shed on the far side of town,” he told Sara. That day the rain fell on the hill country. It ran off the paved roads and pooled in the dirt until it formed puddles. It seemed for a time as though the rain would last forever but it never did. And the puddles seem as though they will never dry but the heat of the world crawls into them and they become dust. And the dust is taken by the wind and forgotten. Evaporated. Until another storm is born is and comes raining down again and again. Finding it's way to God's green earth for a time. Just like people. As Sara walked past the shops, there were fine ladies from the city on the sidewalks. They moved from store to store trying to find something to make their fading beauty greater than the doubts and worry they knew was carefully hidden beneath their finery. Sara lumbered along, worried about the odd little man that she had to meet. She had seen him limping past the church on Sunday, eyes always down, covered with oil and grease. And when she did, she felt a part of herself begin to reach up and out from under the certainty that her heart could never feel anything. But she did feel something. Something in him matched something in her. Something unheard but unmistakable. Something broken and holy. Something trying still to ring, like the cracked church bell. The fine ladies on the sidewalk formed a clot. And as Sara approached they looked up, eyes steady and demanding. Sara lowered her face in shame as they came toward her, then stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter. She waited as they passed then started to step back up but shrugged and continued in the street past the shops, the post office and the church. The sign for Sunday’s sermon was up. The black letters against the white: “God Loves the Lonely.” She walked past the graveyard. There the names of great men were carved into whitening stones, their memory evaporating now like fallen rain, until only blank slates remained. Each cleansed of the vanity that they might be remembered for all times. By the time Sara reached the shed, the dirt road had muddied her shoes. The puddles were deep and her white chambermaid dress had grown dark and soiled. 'Dirt always finds a way in,' she thought, touching her face. Some stains only deepen. Then glancing at her own reflection in a store window looked away. Some stains, she knew, never come out. The shed was surrounded by the remains of rusted cars. Each was missing some essential thing that would allow it to run again. And seeing them, Sara thought of herself, filled with a growing quiet that slowed her heart each year until it too was almost touched by stillness and forgotten. And among the wreckage was Tullio, limping between cars. He held a wrench in his good hand, clutching his withered hand to his chest, calling out to the remains scattered around him. Sara stood watching, afraid to speak, waiting for him to turn. “I know you think you’re nothing,” Tullio said to the wrecks. “But I know what you were. And I know what you are. I can feel the motion in you still. And I can hear you saying no no no. I can’t. I can’t. With every rusty bolt.” He turned to the DeSotos and the Chevys and the Packards. "You weren’t worth a damn until you were broken, just running easy down the highway. But now I know you feel like me. You remember what it is to want to run.” He felt for the broken tooth, its ache and the memory of his loss, like gold filling its space. Sara listened to Tullio talking to the ruin all around him. And suddenly she wished she wasn’t a woman who was too big. She wished her hands were small and her face was fair and her heart was tender. And then she wished from the silent bottom of herself, far beneath the stain, that she too might someday be repaired. Tullio, breathing hard, listened for some reply. And hearing nothing he threw the wrench, and watched it bounce off a cracked windshield. And he hollered just once. “I can’t.” Then fell to his knees. In the driest darkest part of herself Sara felt something like rain. Something in her, something wrecked and broken and forgotten, was beginning to flood. And a tear forced its way out and rolled down her cheek. Sensing someone, but embarrassed, Tullio straightened himself as best he could then turned and called out. “Who’s there? Oh, yes Miss. Yes . . . what can I do for you?” “I’m sorry Mister,” Sara said, her voice halting. “I’m from the hotel.” He limped toward her, listening hard. “I’m supposed to give you this, some kind of car trouble with a guest.” Then looking up, “They said you’d know.” She reached out. The key was suddenly somehow more than a piece of metal. It felt as if she was offering this damaged man a key to something greater. Something she felt in herself and in him too. Something wrecked and trying to run. She was confused and flustered, but certain too. He stood looking at her, then limped over and reached out his good hand and she gently laid the key in his palm. “You saw that?” he said. “Me hollering.” Sara nodded and felt another tear grow heavy behind her eye. “Don’t mean nothing,” Tullio said. “I’m just a crazy old fool. Ask anyone. I talk to myself . . . I talk to these wrecks . . . I holler at the sky. But none of them never answer . . . not never.” He looked up at her and then away “I don’t care about nothing . . . I don’t . . . I can’t.” Sara looked away. 'Don’t,' she warned herself. 'Don’t. All that ever happens is hope rains down then evaporates in the heat. But some other part of her was listening to something like a cracked ringing in herself and in him too. The sound of something broken and somehow blessed by the brokenness. Don’t. But she reached out her hand. The hand, coarse from trying to make the world clean, bent before its time from work and arthritis and bleached down to its bones. And she touched his withered arm. Startled Tullio looked up, then stepped back and away. “I’m sorry,” Sara whispered. “I’m sorry.” Then turned to go. “It ain’t right,” the old woman said. “Young girl like that, her wedding night and holding hands through a wall. Liked to break my heart.” Sara nodded and sat down beside her. The beds had all been stripped and the laundry started, and the old woman had stepped into an alley behind the laundry. She had smoked two packs of no-filter Camels since she was 13, and her voice sometimes sounded like a cough when she spoke. “All these rooms empty, and them on a honeymoon. Just feels dirty to me.” The old woman had spent her life cleaning other people’s sheets, bleaching them stark white, and making beds, like laying in her sheets was the way to make up for all the dirt the city people did to each other. Sara watched as she took a drag. “Have you ever been in love?” she asked. The old woman looked away. She began to speak but her voice cracked, and she wheezed and broke into a cough. “I don’t know. Maybe once.” “What’s it feel like?” Sara asked. The old woman exhaled and dropped the remnants of the butt and crushed it with her heel. She looked up through the smoke like she was trying to see clearly, then searching herself, halted, looking for the right words. “Well, honey, it feels like a train. You start to feel something in you flutter, like a rail shaking. Then it all starts to rumble down inside. Like something powerful is coming on you, and you’re just a rail. It feels like something you’ve been waitin’ on your whole life but don’t know you’ve been waitin’ on it. But it’s finally come for you. And finally it’s gonna haul you away to something . . . something.” She looked up, her eyes searching, and raised her hand. “Something better. Something like living was always supposed to be before it got caught up and lost in so much dirt.” Sara looked up and realized the old woman was crying, crying without a sound, and she thought of the sermon sign in front of the church. “God Loves the Lonely.” She reached over, the way that only women know to do, and touched her sleeve, and the old woman reached a hand and touched her. “Yes, there’s some kind of powerful to it. But sometimes it passes you right by. And sometimes if you try to stop it, make it wait for you, it’ll roll right on over you. Love can do that, too. Flatten you, like a penny. Leave you busted up on its tracks.” Both women held their breath as the afternoon freight train scraped along the rails in the distance. “I’m done with all that now,” the old woman said. “Them tracks don’t run through me no more. But you’re still young, honey. I know you can’t see it, but there’s a train out there coming for you, too. I believe that. I seen too much not to. God loves the lonely.” Sara raised her hand to her face and tried to cover the stain. “That old mark don’t make no never mind. There’s a man with the right kind of heart out there that will look at you someday and be blind to that old stain.” Then putting her arms around Sara, the old woman whispered, “Hell, we’re all stained. You’re just honest is all. You wear it on your face. The rest of us carry it down deep.” The old woman squinted. “But I can see it. Who you are. There’s gonna be a man that’s blind to the rest that will see it, too. And your heart will save his. That’s what a woman’s heart is for. Saving them. Salvaging them men from this junkyard living.” They were both quiet for a long moment. The old woman finally said, “All this talking on love makes me angry. All these rooms, and that couple, that girl the other night crying and shaking. I could feel the train in her. And that boy, her husband, his hand reaching through, made me ashamed. Ashamed about doing nothing, ashamed to be in the room when they should be there alone." Sara looked at her and saw the good heart of the old woman. The woman that tried to make the world a little cleaner for all its stain. A woman that felt love once and understood that anyone that has ever felt it owes something. Something that can’t be repaid, but a soul might gotta try in whatever way it can. “Tell her to come onto the back. Go on. Go on and find her and the boy. Tell her to come see me by the laundry. Miss Bitterly’s is enough for the likes of us, but that girl’s gonna have her wedding night. The sheets will be white and her husband’s arms will be round her neck.” Then eyes glistening she whispered, “And by God, I'm gonna find a way, she’s gonna catch that train.” Sara felt her pulse quicken, got up to go, then stopped. She turned and threw her arms around the old woman. “God loves the lonely,” she whispered, and hurried away to find the bride. WLM