For This Life Only by Stacey Kade Page B

“Yes,” I said wearily.
    â€œAre you sure?” my dad persisted.
    This had to be coming from somewhere—probably from some well-meaning church member. “Dad—”
    â€œYou’ve lied to us before,” my dad said, and the calmness in his voice was worse than if he’d yelled.
    Line drive over the fence. No stopping that one.
    I slumped in my seat. “If you think you can’t trust me, then why are you asking?” I asked
    â€œBecause I’m trying, Jacob,” he said, his knuckles blanching with his grip on the wheel. “I’m only asking that you do the same. You need to get back on track, Son.”
    How am I supposed to do that? I wanted to shout. Whenhe would never forgive me for not being Eli? When what little we had in common was gone? When I couldn’t undo what I’d done? When I wasn’t even sure if there was a point to any of this?
    I turned away from him to stare out the side window.
    â€œI have a counseling appointment,” he said finally, as we pulled into the parking lot behind the new auditorium building. “Delores and Carol are expecting you in the office.”
    Then he parked the Escalade, stepped out, and smoothed his tie into place before walking away without looking back, leaving me to limp in on my own.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    The good news was that the main offices for Riverwoods were now in the auditorium building. The building was much closer to the parking lot, and the auditorium was far less churchy than the main sanctuary, where we’d been on Sunday. No stained glass windows, polished pews, or candles. It was all modern: theater seating for a thousand, a stage, a giant metal sculpture representing the Dove of Peace—the Riverwoods logo—hanging on the center wall. Far less likely to trigger a panicked, existential freak-out in me. I hoped.
    Outside the auditorium was a maze of hallways and offices and classrooms that might have been found in any school or corporate building. Except for the permanentbulletin board display of a cartoon Jesus with his hands outstretched in welcome to a diverse group of children, and the palm crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday—now brown and dried—tacked to several wooden office doors, beneath the staff nameplates.
    And yet, my shoulders tightened with dread as soon as I crossed the threshold and walked into what had been designated as the “greeting area.” It still smelled like new carpeting and fresh paint, even after eight years.
    This building had been Eli’s home away from home. He’d helped my dad pick where his office would be, both of them well aware of the hope and expectation that it would one day be Eli’s.
    But the last time Eli had been here, it had been just his body, lifeless in a coffin on the auditorium stage.
    I shut my eyes and shook my head, trying to clear the imagined image.
    When I opened my eyes, a set of heavy wooden doors directly ahead of me caught my eye. On the other side of those doors, the quiet auditorium waited, and it felt like an ominous threatening presence.
    The doors taunted me, daring me to face my sins and try to come out without further fracturing. But I was barely holding it together as it was.
    With a deep breath, I turned away from the hypnotic pull of the doors and headed down the hallway that led tothe central office. My dad’s door was closed, the low murmur of voices escaping through the crack at the bottom as I passed.
    I paused at the threshold of the central office area, which was humming with activity. The giant photocopying/collating/folding machine on the back wall was spitting out folded bulletins in a stack on the far right side. Carol, the office manager, was on the phone, arguing with someone, while Delores, my dad’s personal admin, tapped at her keyboard, her long shiny red nails clicking loudly. Shelly, the administrative assistant for the directors of music,