Amen, L.A. Page 10

  As fast as she’d shown up, she was off.

  “Charm challenged,” Alex decreed as we sat down and a handsome Latino waiter poured us glasses of springwater fragrant with orange slices.

  No kidding.

  “She can be a bitch.” Alex sipped her water. “I think she’s having a hard time with me being friends with you.”

  “I’m not like your other friends, you mean.”

  Alex shrugged. “You are who you are. I like you. That’s good enough for me. It had better be good enough for them.”

  We ordered our lunches—lobster pot stickers and barbecued salmon for Alex (though she insisted that we share), and a grilled-chicken salad for me. While we waited for the food to arrive, Alex kept me entertained with stories about her friends. Nothing truly gossipy, just the various machinations of who had been whose boyfriend or girlfriend when. The couplings and decouplings were truly dizzying. I found myself hanging on every word, waiting for her to talk about Brett Goldstein. When she didn’t, I polished off a pot sticker and then oh-so-casually asked about him.

  “So … Brett seems nice,” I ventured.

  Alex grinned. “Does ‘nice’ mean ‘hot’ in Minnesota?” She forked a piece of salmon into her mouth.

  “Nice and hot,” I clarified, hoping I wasn’t blushing.

  “And taken,” Alex reminded me. “Not that you should let a little detail like that stop you.”

  “I am not a boy poacher. Besides, his girlfriend, Skye, is six kinds of gorgeous. And sweet, too.”

  Alex raked a hand through her lush hair. “Sometimes. They haven’t been together for very long. This time, anyway. I have this theory. When a new relationship is at its hottest, it has nowhere to go but down. I think Brett and Skye reached peak heat a month ago. Which means they’re probably, like, two weeks away from breaking up.”

  “Come on,” I chided. “Relationships are about more than sex.”

  Alex gave me a wide-eyed look. “Really?” Then she burst out laughing. “Okay, sometimes they are,” she admitted. “But come on. Brett has like forty-eight IQ points on her. I don’t think we’re talking a meeting of the minds here.”

  So Brett was smart. I had kind of suspected that. Yet he chose to hook up with a gorgeous, sweet, but not too bright girl for the obvious reason. Which meant he was superficial. Which meant—

  “You’re still thinking about him,” Alex said accusingly, digging back into her salmon. It had been pan-seared and was crusted with sesame seeds.

  “No I wasn’t,” I said quickly. Correction: lied quickly.

  “You have to try this fish. It’s to die for.” Then she mentioned a concert at the Hollywood Bowl later in the summer, Adele and Janelle Monáe, and asked whether I might want to go. I definitely did. I’m a huge Adele fan.

  It made me think that I ought to invite her to something, too. The next night, at sunset, there would be a songwriters’ night at the church, where several Oscar-winning songwriters would be performing their music, accompanied just by guitar or piano. It would take place in the courtyard, with refreshments and casual seating. These songwriters’ nights were a church tradition. There was no charge, but there was a donation box for a worthy charity. The next event was raising money for Kidsave, a nonprofit organization that supported abandoned kids in Colombia, Russia, and Africa.

  Maybe she’d like to go with me?

  I asked.

  She scowled. “Absolutely, positively not.”

  Whoa.

  “You don’t like that kind of music?”

  Her face got two more shades of dark, like a fast-approaching summer thunderstorm. “The music is fine.” Her voice was cold. “I just don’t like churches.”

  “This isn’t religious—”

  “I know that,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m not dense. But churches are not something I do, period. And don’t ask me if I believe in God, because the jury is out on that one. I’m just not coming to your church. Period. End of discussion. Please don’t ask me again.”

  That took me by surprise. Alex had been to rehab and seemed committed to her recovery. Many rehab programs are based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a God-centered program. I know this because our church in Mankato frequently hosted Twelve Step meetings. Where were her meetings if they weren’t in churches, and how could she do her recovery if the jury was out on the subject of God?

  Besides, I hadn’t invited her to just any church. I’d invited her to my church, where my mother was the minister—the same mother who had not called the cops when her brother decided my bedroom was the ideal location for a naked guitar recital. And I wasn’t asking her to come for Sunday worship, or any kind of worship. It was a songwriters’ night!

  I felt hurt. Here I was, accepting Alex for who she was and accepting her past. Church was part of my past; it was part of my present and my future, too. It was as much a part of me as breathing. Who was Alex to declare she would never set foot in one? It wasn’t like her prescription for living had been all that effective.

  Then I thought about Sean and me. It wasn’t like my prescription for living had been 100 percent effective, either.

  I considered challenging Alex anyway but then remembered something my mother had once preached in our Mankato church. “When it comes to matters of God, religion, and our church family, we attract more people by what we do in five seconds than by any words we could speak in an hour.”

  As I recalled my mom’s sermon, Alex reached under the table for a small bag from the spa. She thrust the bag at me. “For you. Open it.”

  “You didn’t need to—”

  She held up a hand to stop me. “Please don’t do the sputtering oh-I-can’t-accept-it thing. What good is a makeover if you can’t keep it up?”

  I opened it, and there inside were all the cosmetics that had been used to create my new and improved face. She must have bought them while I was in the makeup chair. I fingered the gorgeous Dior lip gloss tube, with its gold crested crown. It was a little work of art. How would I ever return to CoverGirl or Maybelline or whatever was on sale at the drugstore?

  “I don’t know what to say,” I murmured, glad I’d held my tongue before. “It’s so generous.”

  “No biggie,” Alex insisted. She changed the topic to clothes and some of the boutiques near the hotel she wanted to show me.

  I listened, thinking about the opposites. Alex had such a strong, negative reaction to the idea of coming to church, and then she turned around and gave me this amazing gift. I had a feeling there was a lot I still didn’t know about my new friend, and possibly a lot that she didn’t want me to know.

  Chapter Ten

  “Ladies and gentlemen, friends of the Church of Beverly Hills, let’s give a big hand to Mr. Kenny Loggins!”

  Kent Stevens, dressed in Hollywood-chic black jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black sport coat, swept his hand toward the singer-songwriter with the scruffy beard and expressive brown eyes. The audience of five hundred rose to their feet and cheered as Kenny unstrapped his guitar and took a sheepish bow.

  Gemma leaned toward me. “He’s so old.”

  “He’s fantastic,” I declared.

  Kenny had just run through a medley of some of his biggest hits, from “House at Pooh Corner” to “Your Mama Don’t Dance,” and then segued into songs he’d written for classic movies like Top Gun and Footloose. I knew the tunes but didn’t know that Kenny had been the songwriter. I admit to a fleeting moment of jealousy. What a life that had to be. Wake up, hang around, maybe go to the gym or walk your dog, come home, write a song, get that song in a movie, and then hear your song every time you saw the film.

  Kent slung a friendly arm around Kenny. “Kenny’s not going anywhere,” he announced. “But he could use a break. Let’s go to the social hall for dessert, and come back shortly for the second half of our show.”

  The crowd applauded this, too, and I couldn’t help thinking that if Alex had come with me, she would have had a fantas
tic time. In addition to Kenny Loggins, we’d heard from Alicia Keys. After the refreshments and more numbers from Kenny, Matt Redman was supposed to close the show. It was a lineup that people would have paid hundreds of dollars a ticket to hear, if they could get a ticket. But if you were a member of the Church of Beverly Hills, you could come to hear them for free. I figured that it was partly out of the goodness of these artists’ hearts, and it was partly because their agents, their managers, their lawyers, and the chief executives of the movie companies that had made the movies in which their songs had been featured were sure to be in the audience. It really didn’t matter what motivated the musicians. The clear plastic collection box for Kidsave was at the entrance to the courtyard, and by the time I’d arrived, it was already full of cash and checks.

  It was a night of great music. The courtyard had been set up with risers and chairs in a neat semicircle around the stage, almost like theater in the round. No expense had been spared; professional lighting towers rose dozens of feet in the air, and a first-class sound system had been erected. It was as different from my coffeehouse experience in Minnesota, where I sometimes played my own songs, as my church here was different from my church in Mankato. I know. I’d been in Los Angeles for a week now. I should have been used to it. But I wasn’t used to it, and I wasn’t sure that I could ever get used to it.

  I was sitting with Gemma a couple of rows from the stage, while my parents were in the front. Chad, unfortunately, had to miss it, since his new swim coach was working him out at the UCLA pool. He would come to the church when he was done; maybe he could catch the end of Redman’s set.

  The crowd filed out for intermission, buzzing good-naturedly, while Gemma searched for Lisa and a bunch of her friends. I waited for the aisle to clear before I stepped down, wondering if I should call Alex to say that maybe this was the one night when she should have gotten over her I-don’t-do-church thing.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder as I joined the throng moving to the social hall. “Nat! Hi!”

  I turned. There was Sandra, wearing a pair of black pants and a purple T-shirt from the church youth mission to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi last summer, where they’d helped with the ongoing oil-spill cleanup. I was dressed just as casually, in cutoff jeans and a shirt from the Minnesota State Fair.

  “Hey, how goes it?” I said.

  She stared at me. “Oh my gawd. You look amazing! What did you do?”

  I felt myself blush. I wasn’t used to being complimented on my appearance and I knew she wasn’t talking about my couture.

  “Your hair is amazing. And the makeup. Boy, you sure took to L.A. fast.”

  I swallowed hard. I was going to tell the truth, even if it killed me. “Alex took me to Agua Spa at the Mondrian. She had a gift certificate. It was my first spa day ever.”

  Sandra pursed her lips. “Well, it worked.”

  I waited, sure that some snarky comment about Alex would follow. But it didn’t. Instead, Sandra steered me around a clump of people who had gathered to chat in the middle of the lobby. Three minutes later, we were in the social hall. Although I was used to the church’s pulling out all the stops when it came to food, the “dessert” Kent had mentioned was still eye-popping. There were three long—I mean, twenty yards long—tables covered by red-and-white-checked tablecloths. On them was arrayed an astonishing assortment of baked desserts, plus a gelato bar, plus a dessert crepe-or-Russian-blintz station manned by a French chef.

  Sandra and I joined the crepe line, where the chef was turning out chocolate and strawberry crepes almost as fast as he could pour the batter on his eight-burner griddle. “So Alex Samuels took you to the spa.”

  I should have known that conversation wasn’t over. “Yep.”

  “Did she offer you cocaine?”

  Sheesh.

  “Of course not. For one thing, I don’t do drugs and Alex knows it. For another, she just got out of rehab.”

  Sandra rubbed her nostrils for emphasis. “I take it you did your homework about her.”

  “I read a few things, yeah. And I talked to her. Yes. She had some problems in the past.”

  Sandra hooted. “Problems in the past? Natalie, I got a D in algebra. That’s a problem in the past. I—yes, it’s true—I got into my parents’ vodka with a couple of friends when I was in ninth grade. That’s a problem in the past. I drove my parents’ Beamer to the beach before I had my license. That’s a problem in the past. Compared to Alex, they should nominate me for sainthood.” She put a hand on my arm again. “Just watch yourself, okay?”

  I was getting kind of sick of hearing that. “Sure. Got it.”

  “How come she isn’t here?” Sandra asked suddenly. “Did you invite her?”

  I nodded. “She didn’t want to come. She isn’t that much into churches.”

  “She isn’t that much into churches,” Sandra echoed. “Why am I not surprised?”

  We reached the service area and gave our orders to the chef. Sandra wanted one with chocolate; I wanted one of each. The chef—a mustachioed guy with a strong nose and the bushiest eyebrows I’d ever seen, but still very cute—grinned at me. “Two! Two crepes! You are ze first woman of ze night to ask for two! Ze American girls, zey eat nothing. Will you marry me?”

  I grinned, and even Sandra cracked a smile. “I’ll live dangerously,” she chimed in. “Two for me, too.”

  We shared a smile. I liked her, but I didn’t feel connected the way I felt connected to Alex. With Alex, I felt like I had a friend who was letting me gaze into her soul, and who didn’t let all that many people in. It made me feel special.

  As we took our white ceramic plates—the crepes looked amazing—and started hunting for a place to sit, I saw a girl our age standing by the doors that led to the main sanctuary beyond. She was petite, probably not taller than five feet, with dreadlocks past her shoulders and smooth skin the color of café au lait. Her huge eyes were set in a high-cheekboned, heart-shaped face. She wore black capris and an aqua embroidered peasant shirt. She looked nervous.

  Now, I should say that the membership of the Church of Beverly Hills is heavily white, though I had seen a few black and Latino families in the pews the past Sunday. That may not seem like much, but our church in Mankato had exactly zero members of color. Zero. That’s Minnesota for you. Not that there weren’t black families in Mankato, but they tended to attend churches on the other side of town. My mom had done a bunch of pulpit-exchange and youth group projects with those churches, the Baptist one especially. She’d already taken some steps in that direction here in Los Angeles. The upcoming interfaith soup kitchen at a park in the San Fernando Valley was just one example.

  “Do you know her?” I asked Sandra, raising my chin to the African American girl I’d spotted.

  “Can’t say I do.” Sandra shook her head and then waved across the crowded room. “There’s Courtney and Gordon. Want to go hang with them?”

  I did and I didn’t. I needed to meet more people. That was for sure. The girl by the door was all alone. I glanced back. She was gone.

  “Please, take my plate?” I asked Sandra. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Sandra took my crepes, and I headed toward the doorway where the girl had been hanging out. I knew what it was like to be someplace where you didn’t feel like you fit in.

  She wasn’t in the doorway. She wasn’t in the hallway. I found her in the empty sanctuary, where she’d boldly flipped on the lights. She stood in the back and seemed lost in thought. When my knee banged into a pew—a klutz moment—she turned around and saw me.

  “Don’t arrest me for church-busting,” she said. “I’m innocent. I swear to God.” She looked pointedly at the ceiling. “Isn’t that right, God? If it is right, don’t say anything.”

  I laughed. This girl—whoever she was—was funny.

  She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Did you ever think that when you talk to God, it’s called praying, but when God talks to you? That’s called schizophrenia.”

/>   I laughed again. “Are you new here?”

  “I’m new pretty much everywhere right now,” she replied. “Mia.” She held out a hand for me to shake.

  “I’m Natalie. Natalie Shelton. I suppose I should tell you—you’ll find out soon enough if you stay for more than five minutes—my mother is the new minister here. Are you a member?”

  Mia shook her head. “No.”

  “How’d you get in, then?” I wasn’t being the visitor police; I was genuinely curious.

  “Oh, I didn’t come for the concert. I had no idea it was going on.”

  “Then …?”

  “Church shopping. Checking it out. The lady at the door said it was fine for me to look around.”

  I grinned. “Impossible to say no to you, huh?”

  She grinned right back. “It happens. Rarely.”

  “Why not come on a Sunday? You’ll get the whole experience.”

  “Including your mother in action, no doubt.” Mia stretched her arms overhead. “It can’t be easy being the new girl at a new church with your mom as the minister. Hang in there. Anyway, I like to come during off-hours. Less conspicuous. And if the sermon sucks, I’m not trapped.”

  I mock-frowned at her. “My mom’s sermons are actually good—please don’t ever tell her I admitted that. She talks to people instead of lecturing.”

  “Then maybe I will come on a Sunday, sometime.”

  I felt bold. “Why don’t you stick around for the second half of the concert? I’ll sit with you. The music is great.”

  Mia shook her head. “Not tonight.” She looked at her watch. “In fact, I should probably be going.”

  I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to this girl. “One more option. This weekend we’re doing a charity thing over in the San Fernando Valley—”

  She laughed. “You’re such a rookie! No one calls it the San Fernando Valley. It’s just the Valley. Or, if you want to be cool, Natalie? Call it the eight one eight.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “Area code. Eight one eight area code. That’s where I used to live.”