and pulled out of the parking lot. I knew we’d never see him again.
On the drive home I wanted her to say it was all a joke, that she wasn’t pulling us into that same hole we’d lived in before our conversion. But she didn’t, and I felt us falling and falling and fear filled me, for I knew the hole we were going down would be darker than ever now that we’d been living in the light.
Chapter 3
The next Sunday my mother was drunksick. She lay in bed and writhed around like the possessed. I pressed a cross to her forehead for healing. I said, God, please God.
She swatted the cross away. “That doesn’t work.”
I pulled back, stunned, for we’d seen it work countless times. Seen Vern pull sickness from the mouths of children, seen old Wendall Meeker, a Vietnam vet with no cartilage in his knee and a bad heart, hobble in and lie before Vern, and Vern had restored the knee, and Wendall walked out of there with the strength of a boy, his memory wiped clean of the war that ailed him each night like the cruelest hammering. His sure steps were proof alone to me, but my mother acted like she’d never seen such enchantment.
I guided her to the bathtub where she vomited yellow into the water. I took a cup and poured some of the filth over her head. “Be baptized!” My voice echoed in the tiny room. She covered her ears. I pulled her up by the underarms and I dried her and dressed her. “We never miss church,” I said.
“I made you into a fool,” she slurred.
I grabbed the keys and guided her out the door.
She vomited into a dead stick bush outside that used to bloom poisonous white flowers in the spring and each spring my mother would tell me as if for the first time of the boy who cooked a hot dog on a branch from a plant just like that one and how he had dropped dead after eating it.
In the parking lot, she considered the Rabbit, her body tilting to find balance. Finally she walked around to the passenger side and got in. “You drive,” she said, challenging me, thinking probably that I’d back down.
But no. In the name of Vern I jerked us down Old Canal Road, braking and jolting, my mother giggling, sunglasses over her makeupless eyes, unknown bruises up her bare legs, offering me no direction on how to operate a vehicle. Part of me wanted to laugh, too, just pull over and die of laughter, let this whole sadness kill me.
I led her into the pew and we sat next to Grandma Cherry. She looked at my mother and then at me and shook her head.
“Summer flu?” she asked. She poked my mother’s leg. “Smells like a tavern after a fight.”
My heart pounded. I knew in this moment that it was a mistake to have come at all, but if we didn’t show up Vern or an elder would surely have come looking. I had imagined them finding her sick in bed, casing our apartment, deciding we were unfit believers. They might throw us out of the church and then what would be the point of living at all?
The Body pressed into pews, avoiding the nails that poked up from the old wooden seats. I looked at the pulpit and hoped my cousin Lyle, two years my senior and recently well blessed with spirit speak, would come in soon to distract Cherry from my mother, who was sinking down in her seat, spineless, head to one side.
I was never to have ill feelings toward the church and I never had. But a small voice within me kept nudging. My mother had only begun this downhill slide since she’d taken her assignment. I had almost thought to follow her some days to see what she was doing, but the Rabbit seemed to speed away from me so fast. I didn’t want to imagine her assignment was somehow pulling her away from the church, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Vern had given her something she clearly couldn’t handle.
“Happy Easter, ladies,” an older man named Gentry Roo said as he found his seat.
Happy Easter. I looked around and realized every girl except me wore white frills and that every woman except my mother wore a white floor-length canvas dress, and the men wore their sequined capes of many colors. Vern had said the capes