corrupting influences, and that had been the end of it.
“I don’t know exactly,” I told Cora. “I just have this … bad feeling.” She nodded, but she clearly didn’t understand.
The truth was that I didn’t understand, either, and the fact that I lacked a good answer—a sound explanation for this “bad feeling”—bothered me. My grandmother had shown me nothing but kindness, but I couldn’t seem to stop judging her according to the church’s rubric. I had already crossed the lines between “Us” and “Them” several times—for Josh, Newbery, Chad, Libby, even Cora and Ryan here in the casino—but somehow, those lines remained firmly in place.
It was an obvious point, but it suddenly struck me that this Us/Them mindset was deeply ingrained and resistant to change. Unless I wanted to be forever ruled by a nebulous fear of outsiders, it wasn’t enough for me just to cross that line a few times; I needed to decide whether the line should be moved, or changed, or erased entirely. It couldn’t be a simple matter of a blanket rejection of my former beliefs, either, which would be no less silly and irrational than unquestioning acceptance of them. Instead, I would need to look at the evidence. I’d need to carefully examine each of these thought patterns, holdovers from Westboro that would have to be challenged and reconsidered—over and over again—if there was any hope for lasting change. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
I thought about the last time we’d heard from Nana—a birthday card she’d sent to Grace back in October. I had felt so sad for her, ignored by our family for years on end. Happy birthday, Grace, she’d written. I’ll bet you are growing up beautiful. Wish I could hear from someone. I love you. As little as I’d seen Nana, she hadn’t missed sending us birthday cards in all my years. Like my mother, I had seen her efforts as a pitiful substitute for having a real presence in our lives, but now the gesture seemed like determined persistence—an effort to maintain an open door despite my parents’ attempts to seal all doors shut. Nana had been trying to show that she loved us, even though she couldn’t be around us.
“I think I want to call Nana now,” I said to Grace. She nodded. What was there to stop me from picking up the phone that instant? I got her phone number from Josh and began to pace an empty room filled with slot machines, tuning out their jingles as the phone began to ring.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Nana … this is Megan.”
“Hello!” she said. “Megan who?”
I winced. The moment I clarified that I was her granddaughter, Nana started to cry—and all the harder when I explained that Grace had left, too. “I have been waiting for you grandchildren for years,” she said. “Decades. Megan. I never thought it would be you.”
“I didn’t, either,” I told her truthfully.
Listening to my grandmother describe her years of struggle and sadness, I began to see the lasting effects of Westboro’s treatment of outsiders. Nana’s pain didn’t come from a one-time decision to keep her at arm’s length and out of our lives, but from a continuing and active rejection—from watching the years of her life tick by without the love of her family. Nana had been living this nightmare for more than thirty years. The pain was ongoing. I wondered how I would ever bear it.
* * *
Dec. 20, 2012—Day 3
THE SUN ALSO RISES
Wonderful how one loses track of the days up here in the mountains.
Time slowed to a crawl in Deadwood. The hours stretched out endlessly before me, and on the good days, I couldn’t get enough. After year upon year of constant churning and contention, I began to relish the quiet. I would take the day’s reading to the fluffy green couch by the huge window in the living room—a single pane, so it was a view unbroken—but I’d often end up spending more time staring out the window than at the page, watching the snow blanket my car and the neighborhood and the pine forests farther up the hill. When Grace was ready for chocolate or an adventure, I would happily indulge. I loved seeing where her whims would take us. Donning thrift store wedding dresses for an impromptu photo shoot at Deadwood Dick’s Antiques. Watching students put the finishing touches on the life-sized log cabin they were building in shop class during a drop-in tour of the local high