The Widow's Son by Thomas Shawver

Joseph Smith’s words in my book:
    “ ‘9. Wherefore, I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin.
    “ ‘10. I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.’
    “At first I wondered if Lamar intended to retract everything he’d said about blood atonement. But he wasn’t one to mince words or speak in riddles—nor was he likely to experience a crisis of faith, as misbegotten as it might be. Aunt Regina was dying of throat cancer. Maybe that had something to do with it. But why couldn’t he tell me it was no longer necessary or moral to comply with the oath? I wanted a definitive answer.”
    “Did you get it?”
    Emery rubbed the back of his neck. “I tend to overanalyze and dwell on the internal architecture whether it’s a machine or person. But I don’t think emotions are bad impulses to be suppressed lest they get in the way of rational thinking. The next morning Lamar called to tell me Regina had died. There was no mention of blood atonement. I thought my prayers had been answered.”
    At that moment, Natalie returned from downstairs. She was smiling again. Apparently, the differences with Josie had been resolved.
    “What prayer was answered this time?” Natalie asked.
    “I was telling him about my aunt’s passing.”
    “Oh.” She turned to me. “That same day Emery came to Café Provence to give me a rose he’d plucked from his garden.”
    “And to invite you to the funeral,” Emery said.
    “Oh, yes.
That
. I was astounded, especially when he said the service would be somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Until then he was just a customer, a quiet one at that. The encounter behind my house was the first time I’d seen him outside the bistro and here he was inviting me to meet his relatives at his aunt’s burial.”
    “You laughed at me,” Emery reminded her.
    “Not at
you
,” Natalie said, chuckling, “but the absurdity of your request. I mean, I’ve been invited on some weird dates, but to a funeral?”
    “It worked,” he said, tossing a gentle smile at her.
    “What worked?” I asked.
    “I knew I’d have to do something audacious to attract her attention,” he explained. “For engineers, fear of failure is the biggest cause of inaction. But I have a theory that it’s really failure only if you don’t learn from it, so…”
    “Have I mentioned Emery has a highly developed frontal cortex?” Natalie said suggestively. “Just what every girl desires in a man.”
    Emery tilted his head questioningly. So did I.
    I wasn’t sure anymore where the jokes ended and nutty reality began. Leaving aside the fact that Emery had come to town to cut her throat, Natalie, who could have had her pick of men, seemed totally captivated by a person who had about as much charm as the mathematical equation for terminal velocity. I wondered, not for the first time: Was her ardor an act?
    “There I was,” she said, jumping back into the story, “trying to figure out how to say ‘Hell no’ nicely when he hands me the rose. It was a brilliant move. I take it, of course, and immediately find myself stabbed by a thorn. My thumb is spurting quarts of blood, I’m hopping around the tables, and I drop my order pad into a customer’s crème brûlée. I started guffawing so loud that snot flew out of my nose onto Em’s shirt. Every eye in the place was staring at us by then.
    “Once the giggles subsided,” she said, grasping Emery’s hand, “I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell?’ So I tested him. I said I’d go, but that he’d have to take Claire, too. I thought for sure that would be a deal breaker without hurting his feelings.”
    “Was it?” I asked.
    Emery looked surprised that I would think such a thing. “Of course it was okay by me. More than okay. We had a wonderful time with the family. Even Uncle Lamar