Read an Excerpt
The Monk Upstairs
A Novel
Chapter One
Thy vows are upon me, O God: I will render praises unto Thee.
Thou hast delivered my soul from death:
wilt Thou not deliver my feet from falling,
that I may walk before God in the land of the living?
Psalm 56
It was seven minutes past the appointed hour, and the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. Everyone was trying to put a good face on it, but a certain tension was inevitable. The organist, an ancient monk with a round pink face like a dried pomegranate, was muscling through another round of "On Eagle's Wings." Apparently his repertoire was limited; but the music took on an unsettlingly dirgelike quality the second time through. The guests sat quietly, their small talk long since expended, glancing discreetly at their watches, reading through their programs again as if they might have missed something. Chelsea Burke's baby had begun to cry, in one of the back pews, and the noise was approaching crisis proportions. Abbot Hackley, who was to perform the ceremony, stood at the front of the chapel with his hands folded in front of him, his heavy white chasuble trimmed with dazzling gold, a benediction waiting to happen. The look on his face was determinedly serene and seemed to suggest that this was all in God's plan, but from time to time he would sway a little, as if in a wind. The poor man was in the middle of the third course of some particularly savage clinical trial treatment for colon cancer, and the wedding had been scheduled to avoid the worst of his debilitation postchemotherapy.
Peering through the crack in the door at the backof the chapel, Rebecca reviewed the major decisions of her life and decided that it had been a bizarre lapse of judgment to get married at all, much less at Mike's old monastery. They should have just eloped if they were going to take this mad leap. She had actually, seriously, truly in her heart wanted to do that, to jump in a car and drive up to Lake Tahoe. They could have gotten the damned thing done in some roadside chapel, had a few margaritas and some Mexican food, and been home before anyone was the wiser. But she'd made the mistake of mentioning the plan to her mother, and Phoebe had swung into panicked action and taken charge of constructing a more or less traditional fiasco.
Which was now duly unfolding. Rebecca turned to her mother and said, "I told you—"
"Don't even start," Phoebe said. She sat placidly on a folding chair someone had dug up for her, with the walker she'd been using during her recovery from the stroke she'd had the year before parked beside her. When the time came to process into the church, Phoebe had insisted, she was going to do it without the prop. Rebecca wasn't sure her mother could walk that far unsupported, and the image of Phoebe sprawled halfway up the aisle like a beached fish was not helping her stress level. But there had never been any stopping Phoebe.
"He'll show," Bonnie said. She was the maid of honor; it was her duty to be upbeat. And Bonnie could afford to be generous: her own wedding at Grace Cathedral the previous autumn had gone like extravagant clockwork. "His watch is probably off. Did you make sure he'd reset it at the switch from daylight savings time?"
"That was weeks ago. Surely we'd have known by now if he was running an hour behind the rest of the world." But even as she said it, Rebecca realized that it might not be so. Mike was often enough several hundred years, if not millennia, out of sync with the rest of the world, and he was perfectly capable of losing the stray hour here or there, like a pair of socks kicked under the bed of eternity.
"He's out there praying, or whatever it is he does," Bonnie insisted. "Or having a drink for the road."
"He'll show," Phoebe seconded. "Just relax, sweetheart. The man's a goner."
"If he needs to pray or drink at this point, we shouldn't be doing this," Rebecca said, but she was surrounded by resolute Pollyannas, and she took a deep breath. It was, clearly, a moment to simply exercise her inner resources and cultivate serenity. To Zen out, as Phoebe liked to say. Unfortunately, all that came to mind in terms of spiritual substance was the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Rebecca had been cruising along in what she thought was acceptance until five minutes ago; but apparently that had just been denial, because she was seething now, in the old familiar way. It felt like she had spent most of her adult life in stage two of grief over her relationships with men.
The back door swung open, and Rebecca's heart leaped instantly into the purest stage five, without transition, but it was her daughter and her ex-husband, who had slipped out to look for Mike. And, it was clear at once, not found him. Mary Martha, looking a bit flushed in her pink flower girl dress with its even pinker ruffled front and puffy sleeves, had an air of uneasy compliance with circumstances beyond her grasp, like a dog on the way to the vet's. Rory looked the way he always looked when he had managed to escape a social gathering for a while, like he had just had two hits of something in the bathroom. He was wearing his only suit, the blue off-the-rack thing he kept on a hook for court appearances.
The Monk Upstairs
A Novel. Copyright © by Tim Farrington. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
