Something buzzed near the mattress. The phone from Stringy. I had nearly forgotten about it.
Good night princess, the message read.
My heart pounded. He wasn’t of the church, he wasn’t my age. And if he were my husband, the father of this child and not Lyle, then the child would not be a holy property anymore. I would not be Godshot. The child would just be a common shame, the result of sin with an infidel, a couple who were uncareful but who were doing their best to make things right.
I texted back, Thinking of you. Like everything was normal. Like I wasn’t about to ruin him.
Chapter 13
In the brash heat of November, smoke filled the valley from wildfires north and wildfires south, settling over us like a warning. I listened to the news saying the town of Paradise was burning, that people had died in their cars trying to escape. A man who had abandoned his burning car said he ran past countless people frozen behind their wheels in gridlocked traffic. He knew they would all die. It sounded horrifying but I couldn’t fathom another town aside from Peaches in any clearness. All the same, the smoke from the death towns filled my chest until it ached. The only thing that would clear it was rain.
“God’s smiting them,” Cherry said, shaking her head as if Peaches was better off somehow. But I saw the tremble of her hands. I knew we were thinking the same thing.
We were next.
ONE NIGHT AFTER a long shift at the red house, I came home to Taffy waiting on Cherry’s porch. She stood quickly when she saw me. She looked me up and down. “The world is all over you,” she said. “I can practically smell it.”
“You’re smelling smoke,” I said.
She peeled a long strip of skin from her cuticle and it bled hot red. “I just want to know if you’ve been blessed.”
“Who can say what a true blessing is?”
“Did you not speak up because you are or because you aren’t?” I stood still. I could tell she was ready to brim over. She heaved a sob. “Tell me you weren’t blessed either. Tell me I’m not the only one.”
I looked at her little child’s face. Her flat chest and her clear clean skin. “You’ve never received your blood, have you?”
“God hates me.”
“What do you think’s going to happen to all these church babies?” I said.
She put her face in her hands. “Of course Denay went right ahead and got shot like it was so easy. Got her blood in a fine red stream. I saw it in the toilet, all that glory.”
“I’d count yourself lucky,” I said.
“Lacey, if you’re saying that, you’re not in Vern’s lane, that’s for sure. If you’re shot it’s not fair. It’s not fair at all!”
I felt anger looking at this old best friend. Someone I had once cared about, thought of as a sister. “Maybe you just haven’t been obedient enough,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself. “Maybe you’re just not worthy.”
I WENT TO the red house every day, keeping my secrets deep within me like a good GOTS girl, but I felt the river of my sin widening, felt myself up to my neck. I would need the money now from the phone calls with a baby coming, I told myself, and I craved the comforting way Daisy looked at me. The way she knew of the child I carried and the way she let me try on her lipsticks and wiped the dirt from my face and fed me glasses of water from the jugs she had delivered. The water was reason enough to go. I thought I would die without her water.
The town seemed to thin even more, moving trucks in infidels’ driveways. Quitters is what Cherry called them. What remained was the Body and our assignments: proselytizing, deeper commitments to prayer, keen eyes tuned to spot anyone set to step out. Obedience would bring rain, a fact as true as the sun. But I had figured out by now that only the young unmarried girls like myself were making a real sacrifice. It was only us, the girls of new blood who shifted around town, heads down veiled in mystery. I asked Cherry what her assignment was and she pretended to load a shotgun and pointed it at me. “You,” she’d said. “Kapow.”
I sat in church on Sundays, eyes on my knees. I wanted