The history of Suzanne and Foy is found in "Came Grief and Compassion" and "Captain Crunch." Suzanne also briefly appears at the end of "Cutter."

Foy decided he would like to ask Suzanne to have dinner with him, but the thought of picking her up and driving her home felt too much like high school. He had no idea how adults date, having not been on a date since the early 80s.

Is it like it was in high school? Pick her up, eat, drive her home, then get nervous and wonder if you should try to kiss her? Good God, I hope not.

He dropped by Suzanne’s cubicle and asked her. She agreed to have dinner with him and seemed happy about it. He asked if she would mind meeting him at the restaurant.

“No, that’s fine. I actually prefer that for the first date anyway,” she said.

Her eyes opened wide, and she brought her hand up to her mouth.

“I didn’t mean that there would be other dates or anything. Not that that would be…uh, but what I mean is this is just two people having dinner. We both know that, so…”

Suzanne pulled her shoulders up close to her ears and sucked her breath in audibly between clenched teeth. She lightly clapped her hands a few times and then rubbed them together.

“Okay,” she said.

Foy chuckled. “Don’t worry. I know what you meant.”

Suzanne tightened her lips and nodded slowly and deliberately as a humorous admission that she was embarrassed. She pulled her lips apart with a sucking noise and said, “Yeah.”

They agreed to meet for dinner on Friday night at 7 pm at a local restaurant that was not fancy but was quiet.

*******

Foy arrived at the restaurant first. He liked arriving early. He was seated by 6:45 in a booth where he could see the front door. He tried to read a book he had brought with him, but he kept being distracted by a desire to look and see if Suzanne had arrived.

She entered the restaurant a few minutes after 7:00. She glanced around, looking for him, and when her eyes swept across his part of the restaurant, Foy waved. She moved quickly to the table, looking at the ground in front of her feet as she walked. She slid into the booth across from him and flashed a smile.

“Hi,” she said.

"Hey,” he responded. There was a brief silence. Suzanne looked around the restaurant as if she was sizing the place up. Foy watched her eyes moving around. She returned her eyes to him, noticed he was looking at her, and dropped her gaze to her napkin, which she unfolded and set deliberately in her lap. She then interlaced her fingers and placed her hands on the table as if a meeting were beginning. She looked at him as if to say, “Let’s begin.”

Foy felt as though they had crested a hill together, paused at the top, and were going to hold hands and run to the bottom. He had a momentary sense of discomfort and fear, but he relaxed easily because he knew that talking to Suzanne would be very much like running downhill. It would be hard to stop. And Foy could talk to anyone; there was always that. In that brief moment, Foy understood exactly what part of himself to let out. He slipped on his charming, socially adept persona like an ancient priest putting on a robe for the thousandth time.

“You know, when I first met you I noticed you were carrying around a bunch of printer sheets with numbers and accounting stuff all over them. I know you work in accounting, but I still don’t know exactly what you do. I probably won’t understand it, but I’m curious.”

Suzanne cheerfully told him the story of her professional life. She had gotten a college degree in English, but a natural ability with numbers and math had led her into various accounting jobs. She wasn’t a CPA but had earned many of those kinds of responsibilities over the years. She supposed that she liked her job pretty well. “It’s a living I guess,” she said.

She was fascinated that he was once a priest and asked a number of questions about that. She seemed to grant him a certain wisdom and goodness based on his history. He recognized this in her tone and appreciated it, though he would not have granted as much to someone in his same situation. In particular, she wanted to know what had caused him to leave the ministry.

Foy said he had no idea how to describe his spiritual journey through professional ministry and out of it. Then he proceeded to spend 20 minutes doing just that. He fell into the narrative of his life easily and spoke of his early love of scripture, the joy of his theological education, and his discovery of the beauty of tradition, archetype, and myth. He spoke easily, vulnerably, and with great passion, bringing himself almost to tears several times.

“The story of Christianity is handed down to us in the language of archetype and myth. That doesn’t say anything negative about the story or the history behind it. That kind of story language is understandable to people from every age and from every social and economic level. I mean, the gospels are a beautiful collection of stories that will break your heart if you let them. It’s gorgeous. It’s… And yet somehow being a minister began to feel false to me. You can’t get paid for being spiritual without that damaging you somehow. I don’t think you can, anyway. Maybe it was just me. But I got to where I couldn’t tell the difference between myself and the role, you know?”

She nodded slowly, deeply engaged in listening and thinking.

“I don’t know what it would be like to lose yourself in that role, of course. But I know as a woman what it’s like to have a pretty heavy role laid on you and a lot of expectations. And those expectations are good things that you want to be or do, but also things that you could lose yourself in. So yeah, I think I understand.”

Sometimes he would lean across the table toward her, as if he could bring her into his life by drawing their faces nearer to each other. When she spoke he rested his chin in his hand and alternated between watching the way her mouth moved and looking directly into her eyes. Foy didn’t realize that this conversation was very intimate for a first date. As a minister he had become accustomed to getting intimate with people quickly, enjoying the experience, then moving on. He finished his story with a light and humorous description of the office from his point of view, his confusion in the secular world, and the funny things that had happened to him in his new profession. By the time he was done they were both laughing easily, talking rapidly, and gracefully interrupting each other as though their conversation was a dance.

He had no way of knowing how vulnerable she was to such an encounter. He did not know how disappointing her marriage had been, for she had not spoken of it. Her parents had not had much intimacy together, so she had been ill-equipped to know what it meant to find love. And she had been young when she met her husband. After a few years she realized that she was married to a man who could not look her in the eyes and have a conversation. All attempts to draw him emotionally closer to her had failed. He didn’t have much to talk about beyond television, movies, budgets, or lawn care. In fairness to him, she hadn’t been interested in anything beyond that when they had met. It had surprised him when she suddenly wanted deep and abiding conversations with him about life and love and God and everything. The divorce was finalized about a year before Jeremy got sick, so she had gone through that experience alone.

It was strangely appropriate that they had spoken of myth, for she created her own myth in the space of one evening, molding Foy into her perfect image of a man and deciding that all along the problem had simply been that she had not found her soul mate.

By the end of the evening they had covered so much ground that neither could have mapped where the conversation had taken them. Foy couldn’t help but notice how happy she seemed, and this delighted him. In his mind - which was the mind of a writer - he saw the whole thing as a romantic story. Two lonely souls finding each other one evening. She had grieved the loss of a child while he grieved the loss of the Church. How perfect that they should find each other like this. And yet, in that way that is curiously common to writers, he stood somehow apart from it all, doling out his feelings and his language from a detached place, as if he was standing off to the side.

They hugged when they parted. Not a sideways hug, like the one at the office, but a full-on hug with arms around each other. He felt the soft crush of her body as they pressed together, and the smell of her hair filled his nose and made him feel light-headed. She was shy when they parted, and he saw everything in her eyes. And seeing it, he told himself that it was good. It had to be good because she was so happy and so was he.

The following Monday at the office, when Charlene asked how the date had gone, Suzanne replied with only four words.

“Can I keep him?”

rlp

There are 15 Foy Davis Stories. This is an ongoing project. I have no idea where it is going.