Pearl

So he took me in spirit to a great, high mountain, and he showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God . . . The twelve gates were made of pearls-each gate from a single pearl! And the main street was pure gold, as clear as glass.. -John the Apostle, from Revelation 21 CHAPTER ONE As my prerecorded voice began extolling the virtues of a Posture Perfect Mattress, Gary Ripley, my producer, came through the doorway and shoved a stack of freshly printed hate mail beneath my nose. "New batch." He dropped the pages onto the desk. "Thought you might want to stir something up in the next hour. The what-to-do-with-Grandma topic is getting old." I cocked an eyebrow at him, but he only grinned and leaned against the wall, lifting his hands in a don't-shoot-the-messenger pose. I picked up the first letter, which opened with a string of expletives, then pronounced me the worst excuse for a counselor the world had ever seen. "The advice you gave that woman in Atlanta came straight from the pits of hell," someone, probably a man, had written. "Leave her husband? Marriage is for better or worse, but you want to overturn God's laws and institute your own." I felt my cheeks burn as I leaned back in my chair. Though I had grown accustomed to vitriolic mail of all types, criticism never failed to sting. Beneath the bluster and bravado I'd adopted as part of my radio persona, I constantly worried that I would hurt someone in a reckless moment of glib patter. "Gary"-I glanced over my shoulder-"do you remember a woman calling from Atlanta?" "Yeah." He snapped his gum. "Yesterday. You told her to pack up and run like mad." "That was the abuse case, right? The woman with the broken jaw?" Gary nodded. "The husband had put her in ICU the month before. How could you forget that one?" "I didn't forget." I fingered the edge of the paper as I studied the e-mail. "I just wanted to be sure I remembered it correctly." No, no cause for guilt on this one. God did want us to weather good and bad in our marriages, but I have never believed he intended women to be used as punching bags. The nameless coward who had sent this note could bluster all he wanted; my counsel in that situation had been sound. I slid the paper to the desk and glanced at the clock. Nine fifty-eight, so I still had two minutes until the top of the hour, followed by eight minutes of news and commercials. Plenty of time for a break. I flipped through the remaining e-mails. "Anything interesting in here?" Gary shrugged. "The usual. People calling you intolerant and a hardhearted witch. Oh, and one calling you a child-abuser." I snorted a laugh. "Because I told that one woman to swat her kid on the rear?" "That's the one. The lady says she's going to report you to Social Services." "She'll have to catch me swatting my kids first." I stood and stretched, then pressed my hands to the small of my back and grinned at my producer. "My kids never need swatting. They're angels." Gary made a face at that, but he didn't argue. Truth was, my kids were good kids, and he knew it. At eighteen, Brittany Jane's only major flaw was her stubborn refusal to keep food out of the cluttered cave she called a bedroom, and Scott Daniel, age five, was a bundle of pure delight. Taking advantage of the break, I left the studio as Gary followed. We visited the coffeemaker in the snack area, filled our mugs with liquid caffeine, then stood and drank, enjoying the quiet break while keeping a careful eye on the clock. Our building, owned by Open Air Communications, housed several radio stations-among them WUBN, the Gulf Coast's hard-rock headquarters; WSHE, soft rock from the sixties and seventies; WNAR, home of the county's best jazz; and WCTY, the voice of new country. At any givHunt, Angela Elwell is the author of 'Pearl' with ISBN 9780849943669 and ISBN 0849943663.