of anger or rejection and finding only incomprehension. I saw that where he had always been slim before, he was thick and muscled now. He had less hair, but his face was the same—the male version of mine.
My head started to spin, and I finally exhaled. In my hands was an envelope full of photos—of our parents and our siblings through all the years Josh had missed. I pulled them out and started to babble, not knowing what to expect.
“Hi!” I squeaked nervously. “I brought these for you. This is Jonah, and this is Gabe, and Noah … Luke. Grace took this one of Mom and Dad when we were hiking, and…”
He sat still, unmoving, and I rambled on.
Finally, he interrupted: “Hold on a second!” He stood up, took the photos from my hands, set them on the couch, and motioned for me to stand. His embrace had all the intensity of my final ones with Bekah and Mom and Dad, and though this one was “hello” instead of “goodbye,” I couldn’t stop the tears from spilling over again.
Grace walked in the basement door a minute later.
Josh stepped back from me. “What are you doing here?” He sounded truly bewildered. As if he thought it might be a dream.
We stayed up talking until the wee hours of the morning, and if it weren’t for the sweeping changes in Josh’s life, it would have seemed like we’d never been apart at all. Josh was married now and had a little boy. He’d finished college and gotten a master’s degree. He had a great job. He had just bought this house. Motivated, industrious, and hardworking, just like our parents. I was elated for my brother and proud of what he had accomplished without the vast support system we’d grown up with—but I couldn’t help feeling very small next to him. There were only seventeen months between our births, and at twenty-eight, he’d already managed to build a wonderful life. I felt a pang of envy and regret that he and Grace had both chosen to leave Westboro so much earlier in their lives. Their decisions had left them more years to live in a world outside of Westboro’s conjuring—years I had wasted hurting people in a misguided effort to serve an image of a God that seemed less real all the time.
But I got more years with our family, I reminded myself before bitterness could root itself too deeply. Eight more years of morning coffee with our mother. Of sharing jokes and indie rock music with our dad. Of pulling Noah and Luke around the neighborhood in the little green wagon while they slept. Of French-braiding Bekah’s shimmery auburn hair while she read aloud to me. I called forth memories to steel myself against twin but opposing tendencies I felt warring inside me: between regretting the past and romanticizing it. I couldn’t allow bitterness to steal the beauty in my family, or love to conceal the destructiveness in it. I wouldn’t rewrite history. I would hold the whole messy truth of it to myself all at once.
I wouldn’t do to them what we had done to Josh.
“We have more family, actually,” I told Cora. “Like my grandparents. We haven’t spoken to them yet.”
“Why not?” she wondered.
I paused. Growing up, I’d hardly known my dad’s parents. Since neither had ever been part of our church community, we didn’t see them except for rare visits. My mother had always spoken derisively of them, and I understood from a young age that they were not like us. Nana and Grandpa had married young, and divorced amicably when my father was a baby—a cardinal sin in Westboro’s estimation, especially because they had both remarried. Still, their occasional stops had been grudgingly allowed until a few years earlier, not long after Grandpa’s final visit. He had stopped by unannounced one summer day, and my mother had used the opportunity to instigate a fight with him: she asked him what he thought of our protests at soldiers’ funerals. Grandpa was a career military man, serving in the U.S. Air Force until he retired, so when my mother asked, he told her exactly what he thought of the protests. Seeing the contentious discussion, my nine-year-old brother Noah wandered over: “Who is this guy?!” he demanded. Grandpa had left a few minutes later, and I hadn’t spoken to him since. My parents wrote letters to Nana and Grandpa enumerating my grandparents’ sins, insisting they wouldn’t expose us children to such