Beauty Queen

the young woman with a baleful wounded look at Marion. For a moment Bill thought she was going to rail at Marion about how he had come as a traitorous guest to the Laird house while her mother was still alive.
    Then she turned around, and looked at Bill full in the eyes.
    As long as he would live, he would never forget that look.
    "Jeannie," he said in a low voice, "I am very much at fault for not having told you sooner. I did not have the courage to witness to the truth. But I have it now."
    "So I see," she said in a strange animal tone.
    Slowly, with cautious rustling sounds, the little Bible study group were sitting back down in their metal chairs. They could not take their eyes off him and Jeannie.
    Bill shrugged a little and spread his hands. "If your conscience tells you that you have to go on campaigning against gay people, then go ahead. But I have to tell you that you and I will break fellowship on this one point. And I will oppose you. Publicly.”
    She turned away, but he already knew, from her expression, that her very political mind was already coming to life, considering the ramifications of all this.
    "There is no way I can undo the harm I have done," he said. "I gave you a campaign donation, and you used some of that money to campaign against Intro Two and defeat it. My lack of courage touched the lives of innocent people that
    I did not know, and harmed them. But from now on it will be different. Among other things, I will campaign openly for Intro Two next time around, and maybe next time we'll get it passed."
    She turned around and looked at him again. "In other words," she said sarcastically, "you are trying to blackmail me into stopping my reform movement against homosexuals."
    "Call it anything you want," said Bill. "What people are going to see is the curious spectacle of the daughter calling her own father an infidel. When the public sees you on one side, and me on the other, they can hear both sides of the story."
    She shook her head disbelievingly, and put her hand over her eyes.
    "I must be dreaming," she said.
    "Why don't you sit down?" said Bill. "We'll go on with our discussion. If you want to join in, feel free. After all, didn't Jesus debate with the elders in the temple?"
    Marion, always the soul of English chivalry, brought a chair and put it behind her. She looked daggers at him ... then she looked at Bill... and then slowly she sat down.
    Feeling as if he was about to faint, Bill picked up the Bible again, his hands still shaking. Let's face it, he thought, this is too much excitement for an old man like me.
    "Let's see now," he said, "before we were interrupted, we were talking about faith . . ."
    He flipped a page, looking up at them again. Swiftly his gaze touched the gaze of every brother and sister in the room, then Marion's. Marion had a small smile on his face, but his eyes wore the old tender expression that Bill had not seen there for some time. Finally his gaze touched Jeannie's.
    She sat there somewhat awkwardly on that infidel chair, in that infidel room, amid two dozen infidels, looking at him with that deep and disbelieving hurt in her eyes. And that was when he learned how much his daughter loved him. She might never accept him, might never understand him. But on the strength of less love, she would not be sitting there now. She would already be standing out on deserted South Street, angrily waiting for the occasional cab to come along.
    As the Bible discussion went on, Mary Ellen sat with her eyes riveted on those fatal two—the homophobic daughter and the gay father.
    For one of the few times in her life, a genuine religious emotion shook her. She had come so close to robbing those two of their necessary confrontation. She had come so close to robbing the world of whatever courage and understanding might flow from that clash of theirs.
    Yet she had had the undeniable reasons to take the gun in her hand. She, too, had had the right to a confrontation— a very private one with herself.
    Looking back on it now, it shook her to the depths to see how it all had happened.
    For one of the few times in her life, she really said a prayer. There in that dusty old store, with no altar and no minister, just the knocked-over candles and her friends and her lover and the Bible laying on the scarred store counter, she uttered within herself a wordless and passionate thanksgiving for her deliverance.
    In that moment, she saw herself pressing, freer than she had ever been, toward