God’s Warrior

TIM KNEW IT WAS A BAD IDEA TO STOP AT THE BAR ON THE WAY back from Ruth Ramsey’s. It just seemed like a better idea than going home to Carrie just then, and not much worse than what he’d been doing for the past half hour anyway, which was driving aimlessly around Stonewood Heights listening to Workingman’s Dead, thinking about how much better it would be to kill an hour or two in a bar than it would be to go home to Carrie.

He must have orbited the Homestead Lounge four or five times—this was after casing and rejecting the Evergreen Tavern and the Brew-Ha-Ha, both of which were much too conspicuously situated on Central Avenue in the heart of downtown—before working up the nerve to pull into the parking lot, conveniently tucked away in the rear of the building, which meant that he at least wouldn’t have to worry about Pastor Dennis or anyone else from the Tabernacle driving by at exactly the wrong moment and wondering if that was Tim Mason they just saw going into that gin mill, ’cause it sure looked like him.

Even so, he felt shaky and exposed—but also oddly joyful, like a convict tiptoeing away from prison—as he crossed the patch of cracked blacktop that separated his car from the back entrance, his heart hammering against his rib cage the way it always did at moments like this, the blood roaring so loudly in his ears that it drowned out the panicky whimpers of his conscience. It was one of those things that hadn’t changed with age: he’d felt just like this at sixteen, buying a bag of pot in the high-school bathroom, and at twenty-one, ducking into XXX World, the sleazy “Adults Only Boutique” out on Route 27. The same heady mixture of exhilaration and dread had raced through his veins at thirty-two, the first time he’d cheated on Allison, and again two and a half years ago, when he shook off a host of doubts, and stepped through the doors of the Tabernacle, a sinner hoping to be cleansed. It was impressive in its way, this lifelong ability to forge ahead in spite of his better judgment, to wade into one sticky situation after another with his eyes wide open.

Inside the Homestead, he hesitated for a few seconds at the end of a short entranceway, grappling with a sharp sense of disappointment. When he’d seen the old-fashioned neon-martini-glass-sign from Lorimer Road, he’d imagined a dim, smoky bar, the kind of place where a man could skulk anonymously in a corner, nursing his shame to a sound track of Sinatra and George Jones. But that, he realized, was the movies; this was Stonewood Heights on a Tuesday night. The place was bizarrely well lit, the air disconcertingly fresh—the statewide smoking ban had been in place for over a year—and there wasn’t a jukebox in sight, just a half dozen TVs strategically deployed throughout the room, all of them playing ESPN with the sound off. A handful of patrons were stationed at the bar—one youngish guy in a suit was tapping away at his laptop—and a few others were shooting pool, and damn if every last one of them didn’t swivel their heads more or less in unison and stare at Tim with the same look of hungry welcome in their eyes, as if maybe he was gonna be the one to finally liven things up a bit around here.

“Come on in,” the bartender called out. He was a chunky, friendly-looking guy with a goatee and a green-and-white-striped apron tied around his waist. “We don’t bite.”

Tim returned the smile and took a couple of steps forward, into the light and back in time, before suddenly remembering who he was, whirling around, and fleeing for his life.

CARRIE WAS in bed when he got home, watching Nancy Grace on the little TV on top of her dresser, a guilty pleasure she only indulged in when he was out of the house. Tim couldn’t figure it: wars, elections, and natural disasters barely made a blip on his wife’s radar screen, but if someone killed a family member, or a pretty teenager went missing on a tropical island, she was all over the case like Encyclopedia Brown, spending hours listening to windbag legal experts split hairs about a defense motion to limit discovery, or the significance of the fact that authorities were still calling the husband a “person of interest” rather than a “suspect.”

Tim didn’t say a word or even raise an eyebrow, but Carrie grabbed the remote and turned off the TV the moment he entered the bedroom, before Nancy could finish explaining just how sickened and offended she was by this latest outrage against common sense and human decency.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“That’s okay. I know you don’t like her.”

“Really, Carrie. Watch whatever you want.”

She shook her head dismissively.

“I wasn’t even paying attention.”

“Whatever,” he muttered, unbuttoning his shirt. “Just don’t feel like you have to do it on my account.”

“I’d rather talk to you anyway,” she said. “We’ve hardly seen each other all day.”

This was true, though not unusual. Carrie started work an hour earlier than he did, so they rarely spent more than a few minutes with each other at the breakfast table, and dinner was equally dicey; they only managed a real sit-down-and-talk meal a couple times a week, on those evenings when Tim wasn’t working late, and neither of them had to rush off to Bible Study, soccer practice, band rehearsal, or a small group meeting.

He pulled the change out of his pocket and dumped it into a glass jar on his dresser. When the jar got full, he gave it to Abby; there was usually close to thirty dollars in there by that point, a windfall that used to be a lot more exciting to her when she was younger, before her mother married a rich lawyer. Now it was just a habit, more money she took for granted. He turned to Carrie.

“Did you see the sandwich I left you in the fridge?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Sorry about the onions. I told the guy twice not to put them on.”

“That’s all right,” she assured him. “I just picked ’em off.”

She kept her eyes on him as he undressed, but as far as he could tell, it wasn’t for the purpose of admiring the relative flatness of his belly, or marveling at the way his middle-aged butt continued to resist the relentless claims that gravity made on flesh. Nor was she gazing at him with the kind of critical eye he sometimes turned on her, issuing mental demerits for the stubble on her legs, or the ominous plumpness of her upper arms, which were going to be a problem down the road if she wasn’t careful. It seemed to Tim that she barely noticed his body at all; she was just trying to get a reading on his mood, so she could adjust her own behavior accordingly. What she didn’t seem to understand was that her constant scrutiny affected his mood, made him annoyed with her and vaguely ashamed of himself, implying as it did that he was a sullen, difficult guy who needed to be humored and coddled for the sake of domestic tranquility.

“So how was the group,” he asked. “Good turnout?”

“The usual. We barely got to discuss the reading, though. We spent most of the night trying to cheer up Patty DiMarco.”

“Her mother?”

“The doctors thought she was responding to the medication, but she’s right back where she started.”

“Poor Patty.” He tossed his dirty clothes in the hamper. “As if she didn’t have enough troubles.”

“What about you?” Carrie asked. “Everything go okay?”

“I think so,” he said, stepping into a pair of plaid pajama bottoms. “I had to eat a little crow, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

She pondered him for a moment, smiling thoughtfully.

“C’mere,” she said. “Let me give you a back rub.”

“That’s okay.” He still hadn’t gotten around to notifying her of his decision to put their sex life on hold for the time being. “It’s kinda late.”

“It’s no trouble.” She pursed her lips, a pouty little girl. “You seem tense.”

“Really, Carrie. I’m fine.”

She threw off the covers and stood up. She was wearing a sleeveless white undershirt of his, tight enough to emphasize the fullness of her breasts, and a pair of tattered maroon gym shorts, also his. It was a cute look for her, much better than the long-sleeved flannel nightgowns that he’d found so depressing the first few months of their marriage.

“Come on.” She took him by the arm. “It’ll feel good.”

“Carrie, please.”

“Let’s go.” She spoke firmly, a nurse addressing a skittish patient. “Lie down.”

Tim was about to protest again, but he was distracted by the sight of her nipples pressing against the flimsy ribbed cotton of the undershirt.

“All right.” He sighed. “But just a quick one.”

He lay facedown on the bed—the sheets were still warm and fragrant from her body—feeling both annoyed and excited. A soft grunt escaped from his lips as she sat down on top of him, straddling his hips with her knees and settling the bulk of her weight directly on his ass.

A full chapter in Hot Christian Sex was devoted to “The Loving Art of Marital Massage,” and Carrie had clearly given it some study. Her early efforts had been timid and ineffectual, but recently she’d become bolder and more proficient, kneading and mashing his muscles with gratifying savagery.

“Oh yeah,” he croaked. “Right there. Little higher.”

“I can’t believe how tight you are. It feels like a bunch of tennis balls under your skin.”

She took her time—Carrie was nothing if not patient—moving methodically down his back, karate-chopping his shoulder blades, digging her thumbs into the knotty channel along his spine. Ripples of calm spread through his body, filling the empty spaces where the tension had been. Sensing his relaxation, she lowered her mouth to his ear.

“I was worried about you,” she whispered. “I expected you home a long time ago.”

“I was just driving around,” he explained. “Trying to clear my head.”

Her voice was warm in his ear.

“Is everything okay? You haven’t seemed like yourself lately.”

Tim felt a momentary urge to open up to her about his stubborn feelings for Allison, his close call at the Homestead, the sense he sometimes had that Jesus was losing interest in him, or vice versa, but it seemed like a shame, getting into a serious talk right now, when he was finally feeling loose and even a bit cheerful, so he clenched his butt cheeks and bucked his hips, not quite hard enough to knock her offbalance. She giggled and slapped his thigh.

“Bad boy.”

He did it again, and she laughed even harder. It was almost sad how easy it was to please her, like she was a little kid who just wanted a playmate. He bucked a third time, and she let out a whoop.

“Yee ha!” she said. “Ride ’em, cowboy!”

AS USUAL, Carrie fell asleep right after they finished making love, while Tim remained wide-awake beside her in the dark. Allison used to complain about the speed with which he dozed off after sex (at least on those nights when he wasn’t all coked up); she was one of those women who believed that a heart-to-heart postcoital conversation was as essential a part of the experience as a cigarette in an old movie, as necessary on the back end as foreplay was on the front. Tim, on the other hand, didn’t mind at all now that the roles were reversed. As comforting as it was to have Carrie curled up beside him, making the soft strangling noise that was the closest she ever came to snoring, it was a relief not to have to talk, to be able to follow his thoughts wherever they felt like drifting.

Not that they were drifting all that far. His mind remained pretty firmly anchored on those few bewildering seconds he’d spent inside the Homestead Lounge, peering dumbly over the lip of the abyss, as if he didn’t know exactly what kind of misery was down there at the bottom, as if he hadn’t spent the last three years of his life dragging himself out of it.

Something had made him turn away before it was too late, but what? It would have been nice to say that Jesus had come to his rescue, or that he’d heard Pastor Dennis’s voice crying out to him, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like pure chance. If the bar had been darker, or a good song had been playing, or a pretty woman had been sitting next to an empty stool, the night might have gone in a completely different direction.

Where were You, Lord? he wondered. Why didn’t You stop me?

He knew what Pastor Dennis would have said. He would’ve said that Jesus had better things to do—sinners to save, sick children to heal, a world of hurt in desperate need of His love. He didn’t need to be wasting His time telling people things they already knew, or helping them do things they were fully capable of doing on their own. And if a man like Tim—a warrior for Christ—wasn’t strong enough to keep himself out of bars, then maybe he’d never accepted Jesus into his heart in the first place.

But I did, Tim thought. And You helped me. Don’t give up on me now.

He would’ve been a little less freaked out if he’d had a clearer sense of what had brought him to the Homestead. It seemed obvious to him that Ruth Ramsey was at least partly responsible, but it was hard to say why. He’d said good-bye to her feeling pretty good about their meeting. He’d accomplished what he’d set out to do—she’d accepted his apology and assured him that she wasn’t going to make any kind of official fuss to the Soccer Association—without experiencing any embarrassment or unpleasantness. She hadn’t insulted him, or made him grovel, or taken any cheap shots at his religion, with the possible exception of that one weird comment about Cat Stevens, and even that made a certain kind of sense once she explained it.

On the contrary, she’d been polite and friendly, and he’d enjoyed her company, though not in the way he’d feared. He arrived at the house with his guard up, remembering how attractive she’d seemed at the soccer game, but now he had to wonder if that wasn’t some kind of illusion created by the sun and the blue sky, combined with the aura of scandal that trailed her wherever she went (the one other time Tim had seen her, she’d been standing before a school board meeting, issuing a grim, clearly coerced apology for making inappropriate sexual comments in the classroom). During their brief conversation at halftime, he’d been struck, not only by the weathered prettiness of her face and the surprising litheness of her figure—if he wasn’t mistaken, she’d looked a bit dumpier in the auditorium—but by something stubbornly girlish in her demeanor, a combination of feistiness and shyness that he’d found instantly appealing, and that only made it that much more mortifying when she started screaming at him at the end of the game.

At her house, though, she seemed older and more ordinary, a forty-year-old woman with tired eyes and a melancholy smile, hardly the formidable opponent he’d expected. She didn’t express any anger toward him, just treated the whole prayer thing like an afterthought, nothing either one of them needed to worry about, and he was happy enough to follow her lead, to be absolved from the responsibility of having to defend what he’d done, or tell her what he knew to be true, which was that she needed Jesus just as much as he did, and that Maggie did, too. Because, really, who was he to dictate how anybody else should live their life, especially when he was a guest in her house, asking for a favor, and she’d been so nice to him?

Pastor Dennis would have seen the work of the Devil in that, and maybe he had a point; after all, how could you be tempted into betraying the Lord with your silence if you felt scared or repulsed by the tempter? All Tim really knew was that the moment he left her house, he found himself overcome by a strange sensation of emptiness and defeat, or maybe just loneliness, a feeling deep in his heart that what he needed more than anything else was some good music, a stiff drink, and a little more time away from his wife.

HE STILL felt a bit rattled at work the next morning—jittery and furtive and antisocial—though none of his colleagues seemed to notice anything amiss. They were used to Tim’s keeping to himself in the morning, heading straight to his cubicle and getting a jump on his e-mail while the rest of them made a slower transition into the workday, analyzing last night’s episode of Lost, or catching up on the latest escapades of Aimee, the hot twenty-three-year-old loan processor whose complicated love life was the source of enormous vicarious pleasure to the mostly female staff of Loanergy Home Finance.

“So it’s back on with me and Vinnie,” she announced, ostensibly addressing Rita Mangiaro, but speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear. “We went out for a drink last night, like just to talk, right? And sure enough, I woke up in his bed this morning. I’m like, Hello, Aimee? You are such a slut!”

“You did not!” Rita gasped. She was the office’s top producer by a long shot, a retired teacher who got tons of referrals from her former students at Bridgeton High. Sitting next to her all day, Tim never failed to be both amazed and irritated by her inexhaustible appetite for gossip and idle chatter, which somehow didn’t interfere with her ability to make four times as many loans as he did.

Aimee gave one of her patented what’s-a-girl-to-do shrugs. She was a round-faced, voluptuous blonde with a salon tan, stiletto heels, and a cheerfully ditzy personality. She would’ve been a textbook bimbo, except for the fact that she also happened to be the best processor Tim had ever worked with, a fastidious, punctual, almost pathologically organized master of complicated paperwork who had saved his and everyone else’s bacon ten times over. The whole office would have fallen apart without her.

“It was crazy,” she admitted, with a rueful mixture of pride and embarrassment in her voice. “And then I had to get up and do the walk of shame, right past his mother. I’m like, Hi, Mrs. Ruffo, long time no see.”

“Ouch,” said Kelly Willard, a single woman a few years older than Tim who was always going on adventure vacations to places like Tanzania and Chichén Itzá, then complaining that she hadn’t enjoyed herself. “Why didn’t you just go to your own apartment?”

“His was closer,” Aimee explained. “We were kind of in a rush. And I definitely wasn’t planning on spending the night.”

“I’m sure his mom was thrilled to see you,” said Rita.

“Totally,” Aimee agreed. “I’m like her most favorite person in the world.”

Even Tim had to laugh at that. Without really trying—the office had an open floor plan, so it was hard not to overhear—he’d been following the saga closely enough to know that Mrs. Ruffo hadn’t been particularly fond of Aimee even before Vinnie, a short-tempered bodybuilder, had gotten himself arrested for assaulting Gary Wilkinson, the married real-estate agent she’d been seeing on the side. According to Aimee, Gary had been unaware of Vinnie’s existence, so he didn’t know enough to be alarmed rather than creeped out when this angry muscle-bound dude approached him in the locker room of the Ultra-Body Health and Racquet Club and asked if he wanted to see a picture of his girlfriend.

“Uh, sure,” Gary said, thinking it impolite to refuse. “I guess.”

Vinnie produced what was described in the police blotter as an “intimate Polaroid snapshot of a mutual acquaintance,” then gave Gary a couple of seconds to study it before punching him in the face. He squeezed in a couple more shots before being restrained by three bystanders in various states of undress, including an off-duty cop in a jockstrap. In the end, Vinnie pled guilty, and Gary’s wife filed for divorce.

“Was this a fluke?” Shelley Margulies asked. Too-frequent Botox treatments had left her with a single expression, an all-purpose grimace of unpleasant surprise. “Or are you guys really back together?”

“I don’t know,” Aimee replied. “We’ve been through this so many times, I’m kind of scared to say yes. But I really think we’ve grown a lot in the past few months.”

“The thing I’m wondering,” Rita said, “is what he’s gonna do about that tattoo.”

Tim had actually been wondering the same thing. After their most recent breakup, Vinnie had gone through a Billy Bob Thornton-style crisis that he’d resolved by modifying the “Aimee” tattoo on his massive left bicep so it now read, “Aimee = Bitch.” Tim knew this because he’d been present the day Vinnie barged into the office to display his revenge to its victim.

“I told him he could keep it.” Aimee smiled, tickled by her own magnanimity. “I’m the first to admit that I deserve it. And you know what else? It kind of turned me on to see it there. Plus, it’s really nice work.”

Like a lot of people her age, Aimee was a tattoo aficionado. She had four of them herself, including one she’d gotten just a couple of months ago, placed so low on her back that she’d had to undo her pants so her office mates could admire it.

“Tim,” she’d said, right before the big unveiling, “you may want to turn away.”

Tim’s coworkers knew he was a born-again Christian and a recovering addict; he’d told them early on, as Pastor Dennis had advised, and kept a Bible and a book of Devotions on his desk in case anyone forgot, along with a Gospel-Verse-a-Day calendar that Carrie had gotten him for Christmas. Today’s selection was Mark 9:50: “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”

“Thanks,” he’d told Aimee. “I’ll cover my eyes.”

Although Pastor Dennis frequently warned his flock to expect persecution and/or mockery as Christians in the secular workplace, this hadn’t been Tim’s experience at Loanergy. At worst, he suffered from a mild, intermittent sense of apartness, as if there were an invisible wall separating him from the rest of the office. If anything, his coworkers treated him with a little more solicitude than necessary, apologizing for using profanity in his presence, or telling him to plug his ears while they discussed The Da Vinci Code or one of Aimee’s drunken hookups. He sometimes had the feeling that they enjoyed having him around to shock, and he did his best to play the role assigned to him, though it wasn’t always easy to pretend to be scandalized by the revelation that drunken young women sometimes had sex they regretted, or that a fellow loan officer who happened to be a grandmother might call a double-crossing client a “shithead.”

Come on, he occasionally found himself thinking. If you ’re gonna sin, at least do something interesting.

Though he had to admit, he did like Aimee’s tattoo. He’d meant to turn away, but there was something riveting about the sight of an attractive young woman unbuttoning her pants in the middle of an office. She only tugged them down a couple of inches in the back, just far enough to reveal the sweet slope of her hips, the triangle of a pink cotton thong, and three fairly large Chinese characters, which she said stood for Strength, Loyalty, and Perseverance. He didn’t look for long—just enough to admire the thickness, precision, and startling blackness of the calligraphy, and to trade an appreciative glance with Antonio Morris, the only other male witness—but it was apparently long enough for the image to sear itself permanently into his brain, so he could conjure it at will in those odd moments when something like that came in handy.

HE LEFT the office around eleven for his twelve o’clock lunch with George Dykstra of DBH Design & Build, one of the bigger residential developers in the area. It was an important meeting for him, a rare face-to-face with a serious player in the industry, and he thought it would be a good idea to take a little walk beforehand, to clear his head and think about how he wanted to present himself.

As ironic as it was for someone with his abysmal credit history to be working as a loan officer, Tim enjoyed his job and considered himself pretty good at it. He’d gotten into the business four years earlier, after building the kind of spotty résumé that might have been expected from a musician with two years of college and a problem with substance abuse: a little temping here, some construction work there, a failed attempt at running his own landscaping business, followed by a hodgepodge of retail and restaurant jobs, and capped off by a three-year stint as an agent for Lucky Rent-A-Car, during the sober, responsible period that followed Abby’s birth. It wasn’t a terrible gig, and he drew frequent praise from his superiors for his ability to calm irate customers. There was talk about a possible promotion to Assistant Manager, but it died down around the time he returned to his true vocation of snorting coke, at which point the job stopped looking like a stepping-stone to better things and revealed itself to be a deeply annoying distraction from the serious business of getting high and fully deserving of the contempt with which he began to treat it.

Divorced and precariously sober at the age of thirty-seven, he was searching for a new career path when he came across the classified ad in the Bulletin-Chronicle—“Mortgage Professional, Experience Preferred, Will Train”—and decided that he had nothing to lose by applying. His timing couldn’t have been better: shockingly low interest rates had triggered a tsunami of residential refinancing, and warm bodies were needed throughout the industry to perform the humble but nonetheless critical work of matching eager borrowers with appropriate (or at least willing) lenders.

Within a week he was on the phone, identifying himself to prospective clients—their names and numbers had been purchased from a telemarketer—as a representative of the Dream House Mortgage Company, a start-up run by three former frat brothers in their mid-twenties who didn’t seem to notice, or at least weren’t overly concerned about, the hard-to-explain gaps in Tim’s employment history. His “training” consisted of a quick lesson on how to read a rate sheet and price a loan, a one-day seminar at the Warrenton Marriott, and whatever on-the-fly advice he could grab from his bosses, who didn’t spend as much time in the office as he might have expected.

For two full years, Tim stayed afloat doing one ReFi after another. With rates hovering around 5 percent, the decision was a no-brainer for most homeowners. All you had to do was lay out the facts, no arm-twisting necessary. You felt like you were doing your clients a favor, arranging things so they had hundreds more dollars in their pocket every month, while making a nice little commission in the process. It was one of those rare situations in life where everyone came out a winner.

Dream House went out of business around the time rates began creeping up—one of the partners moved to Florida, and another decided to go to physical therapy school—and Tim made the jump to Loanergy, a more established firm, signing on as “Senior Mortgage Consultant.” With the ReFi market losing steam, he had no choice but to shift his focus to purchases, transactions that were more satisfying on a personal level—he got to work much more closely with his clients—but also fraught with pressure and the potential for bad feelings. Deals fell apart all the time, due to unpredictable contingencies, rigid deadlines, and the sometimes unreasonable demands of lawyers, sellers’ agents, and lenders, not to mention good old human error (Tim learned the hard way what happened when you failed to lock in a good rate the day before the Chairman of the Federal Reserve made a big announcement). But deals got made all the time as well—the papers got signed, the checks got written, the property changed hands. His income varied widely from month to month, but on the whole he was doing better than he’d imagined possible when he’d started.

About six months ago, though, after years of booming, the real-estate market went flat. Houses sat all spring and summer with FOR SALE signs planted in their front yards. The buyers disappeared. Ever since he’d started at Loanergy, he’d gotten most of his leads through the Tabernacle—Pastor Dennis encouraged his flock to do business with other believers whenever possible—but it was just too small a niche to keep him going. Feeling the need to branch out, he got new business cards, did some mass mailings, even started buying lists from telemarketers again. He tried making inroads into some of the other evangelical churches in the area, but it turned out that Pete Gorman of Faith Financial had them pretty well locked up.

With the slow winter season looming, Tim had come to see the situation as urgent, if not dire. He still had some savings, and Carrie had a steady job. Allison and Mitchell were rolling in money, so he figured no one would begrudge him a missed child support payment or two if he explained his situation. But that was just the short term. Taking the long view, it was clear that the profession was about to undergo a contraction, and that a fair number of people weren’t going to survive. Tim was determined not to be among those left behind. It wasn’t just that he liked his job; he needed it. Because he could imagine all too well what it would feel like to wake up in the morning with nowhere to go, the whole day stretching empty in front of him, and the Devil hovering at his shoulder, whispering all sorts of suggestions as to how a guy like Tim might want to fill it.

THE HOSTESS at Cosmo’s Diner directed him to a window booth where a barrel-chested guy dressed like a construction worker was squinting at The Wall Street Journal through a pair of half-frame glasses perched on the tip of his nose. It took Tim a second or two to connect this formidable figure with George Dykstra, the sunburned goofball in board shorts and wraparound shades he’d met a couple of months ago at an instructional clinic for youth soccer coaches.

“Hey,” said Tim. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

George waved off the apology and folded up his paper.

“You’re not late,” he grunted, gripping the edge of the table and beginning the arduous process of extricating himself from the booth, which clearly hadn’t been designed to accommodate torsos of unusual girth. “I was early.”

George led Tim through an elaborate series of greetings—handshake, back slap, manly hug, hair tousle—before sucking in his gut and wedging himself back into his seat. As Tim followed suit, George drew his attention to the young, olive-skinned waitress in tight black pants filling water glasses at a nearby table. He admired her for a moment, then leaned forward with a confidential air.

“I’m telling you, Timmy. I don’t know who does the hiring around here, but I’d like to write him a thank-you note.”

“She’s a nice-looking girl,” Tim observed.

“I think she’s Greek. Cute little accent.” George’s eyes narrowed with calculation. “Wonder if Cosmo’s slipping her the old souvlaki. I wouldn’t put it past the bastard. Bring ‘em in on the boat, ship ’em out when you get bored. Pretty good deal, eh?”

Tim replied with a noncommittal bob of the head, doing his best to maintain a neutral expression. George removed his reading glasses and tucked them in his shirt pocket. Deprived of their senatorial gravity, his face looked shrewd and boyish, suddenly familiar.

“I’m just curious,” he said. “You ever fuck a Bulgarian?”

“Not that I know of,” said Tim.

George nodded slowly, as if pondering a subject of great complexity.

“Only reason I ask, I dated this crazy chick for a while before I got married. Yanka. That was her actual name if you can believe it.” He gave a nostalgic chuckle. “Total nympho. Used to claw at my back and thrash her head around like she was having a fit. Loud, too. Touch her in the right place, and she’d scream like the Russians were invading. I could never tell if it was just her, or something they put in the water over there.”

Tim forced a smile, thinking that it would be a good idea to find some gentle way of cluing George in to the fact that he was a Christian. They’d spent a whole morning together at the coaches’ clinic, but the subject of faith hadn’t come up, and George had clearly developed a mistaken impression of what kind of guy he was. It would spare them both some awkwardness if he came clean, but how to do it without casting a chill over the meeting was a thornier question. Sometimes the wiser course was just to let things unfold naturally and wait for the right opening to present itself.

“It’s nice to see you,” he said, hoping to steer the conversation in a healthier direction. “I really appreciate you meeting with me.”

George was staring at the waitress again, his gaze so insistent that she put down the pitcher and asked if he needed something. He grinned and shook his head, then turned back to Tim.

“Sorry I had to cancel on you last week. We had a big disaster out at Fox Hollow. Whole shipment of granite countertops came in, and they were all too big. Had to send ’em all back to the quarry. Now my tile guys gotta sit around for two weeks with their thumbs up their asses while the counters get recut. That job’s been one headache after another.”

“I hear it’s a pretty big development.”

“Twenty units. Almost all presold, thank God. Just got in under the wire. I know some guys who are all set to break ground on big projects next spring, and believe me, they’re all shitting their pants. Nobody’s buying jack.”

“It’s a tough market. I’m feeling it on my end, that’s for sure.”

“You wanna know who’s really fucked? My cousin Billy. Asshole bought himself a Hummer dealership. Try selling a fucking Hummer these days. I warned him, but he’s a stubborn little prick. Serves him right.”

“It’s a weird time, all right. Kinda scary.”

After the waitress took their orders, George excused himself to go to the restroom. Tim took advantage of his absence to remind himself of his strategy for this meeting, which wasn’t to whine about hard times but to sell himself as an experienced, up-and-coming, can-do loan officer with a solid client base, someone a guy like George Dykstra could be proud to be in business with. Not that he was expecting much, at least not right off the bat; he understood all too well that a high-volume developer like DBH probably had long-standing relationships with a whole stable of mortgage brokers. All he really wanted was a foot in the door, a chance to prove himself, to show that he could play with the big boys.

“Damn,” George said, as he squeezed back into the booth. “Those fucking mochaccinos are worse than beer. I’m pissing every ten minutes.”

Tim sat up straight, preparing to make his pitch, but a strange feeling of self-consciousness came over him before he could begin. The moment seemed wrong somehow, but he couldn’t tell if this was an accurate reading of the situation or just an excuse for avoiding the unpleasantness of asking a favor from a person who wasn’t really even a friend. He turned to look out the window, as if the answer might be found in the passing traffic on River Street.

“How’s your team doing?” George asked.

“Not bad,” Tim replied, feeling simultaneously relieved and disappointed to be let off the hook. “We had a rocky start, but we’re finishing strong. As of this week, we’re tied for first in our division.”

“Lucky bastard.” George looked dejected. “We did just the opposite—started out like gangbusters, then we fell apart. It’s gotta be my fault, but I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

“There’s only so much you can do,” Tim reminded him. “You gotta work with the players you got.”

“I got the players,” George insisted. “At least on paper. But some of these kids, they got attitude problems. The other team scores one lousy goal, and they just give up. We stink, we never win, can we just go home? It drives me crazy.”

“I’m lucky that way. I’m coaching the A team, and my girls are totally motivated. They hustle, they come to practice on time, they cheer each other on, they give a hundred percent every game. I really couldn’t ask for a better bunch.”

When George’s cell phone rang, it played the theme from Rocky. He withdrew it from the leather holster attached to his belt, checked the caller ID, and muttered something under his breath.

“Lemme put this thing on vibrate,” he said, pressing some buttons and setting the phone on the table. “You know who my biggest problem is? George, Jr. Last year, I swear, he was incredible. Leading scorer on the team, Charlie Hustle. His coach loved him, said he woulda been happy to have a whole team of little Georgies. Now this year, it’s like he can barely drag his ass up and down the field. I don’t know, maybe he’s depressed or something. But he sure looks happy enough when he’s banging away on that goddam Xbox.”

“It’s tough with your own kid,” Tim agreed. “My daughter’s not playing up to her potential, either. I try to talk to her about it, she just tunes me out.”

“You gotta be careful, though,” George reminded him. “You know, not to be too hard on ’em. The other parents are quick to say you’re favoring your own kid, but if you ask me, the problem is just the opposite. Another kid screws up, I’m Mr. Cool. No problem, Eddie, don’t sweat it. But my own kid makes a mistake, I’m like, No dessert tonight, you little shit!”

Their burgers arrived, and Tim sensed another opportunity to nudge the conversation back to real estate. But again he hesitated—it was hard to have a serious conversation with your mouth full—and George was more than happy to pick up the slack by asking if Tim knew any good throw-in plays he could teach his kids. Tim borrowed a pen from the waitress and diagrammed his favorite maneuver on the back of a place mat. Studying the X’s and O’s, George was surprised to see that Tim utilized a two-two-one formation, which led to a fairly involved discussion of its strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis the more standard three-two configuration, a subject Tim had given a fair amount of thought over the summer.

“I wouldn’t say that one’s inherently better than the other,” he explained. “My system puts a lot of pressure on the midfielders, so you gotta be pretty careful about who you put there.”

“You know what?” George said. “It wouldn’t matter what kind of setup I ran if I could use this kid Matt as my goalie all the time, but his parents won’t let me. They want him out on the—”

George’s phone went off again, buzzing so vigorously that it began skittering across the tabletop. He shot Tim a quick grimace of apology before snatching it up.

“Yeah?” He listened for a second, then let out an exasperated sigh. “Ah, shit. All right, I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Half hour, tops.”

He snapped the phone shut and shook his head.

“Sorry to cut this short, but I gotta run. Another mess at the job site.”

George wolfed down the rest of his burger, then paid the bill on the way out, insisting on picking up the tab. Feeling like an idiot for blowing his big chance, Tim trailed him out of the diner and through the parking lot, the bigger man moving so quickly it felt like he was about to break into a run any second.

“All right,” George said, stopping in front of a behemoth SUV. “It was good talking to you.”

“Same here,” Tim told him, nodding a little longer than necessary, as if it were the moment of truth at the end of a first date. “Thanks for lunch.”

“No problem. Thanks for letting me pick your brain. I’m definitely gonna try that throw-in.”

“I hope it works for you. I’ve had really good luck with it.”

George clicked the remote and the locks of his Navigator opened with a solid ka-chunk. He reached for the door handle, but then thought better of it and turned around.

“Oh, hey, I almost forgot. Me and some buddies have this poker game, every other Tuesday. We’re looking for a new guy. You interested?”

“Poker?” Tim said, blindsided by the invitation.

“They’re good guys,” George assured him. “Couple contractors I work with, a real-estate guy, my brother-in-law, and my stupid cousin Billy. The stakes aren’t too high. It’s more about drinking a few beers and shooting the shit. I think you’d fit right in. And you’d make some great contacts for work, tell you that.”

Tim stared at the ground. He knew what to do, because they’d talked a lot about how to handle moments like this at his Addicts 4 Christ meetings. If the other person was a friend, you could just remind them that you’d dedicated your life to Jesus and made a sacred commitment to steer clear of temptation. In the event the other person was unfamiliar with your religious beliefs, you could keep it simple. Just say, ‘No thank you,’ Pastor Dennis had advised. Say you’re busy that night and leave it at that. But when Tim looked up and saw George smiling at him, he found to his surprise that it was impossible not to smile back.

“I’ve been known to play a little poker,” he said.