and your family.” He hung up before she was forced to return his kind wishes.
Clarice arrived at the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club fifteen minutes after receiving Forrest Payne’s call. Her mother stood on a small hill just east of the parking lot. Tall and thin, Beatrice Jordan looked elegant in the black, sable-trimmed sheared mink coat that Clarice’s father had given her twenty years earlier after doing something especially humiliating to her, the details of which Clarice was never privy to. In hands covered by her bright red leather Christmas gloves, Beatrice held a megaphone. She bellowed, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing. Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.”
Clarice had heard her mother’s hilltop sermon dozens of times. It always began the same way, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing. Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.” After that, a Bible verse. As Clarice approached her on her hill, her mother broadcast Romans 8:13. “For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.” Beatrice was especially fond of the more ominous verses.
Clarice’s mother’s first Pink Slipper bullhorn sermon occurred during a visit home not long after she’d moved away following her husband’s death. Clarice had been at home awaiting her mother’s arrival. Anticipation had just transformed into worry, causing her to station herself at the front window to watch for her mother’s rental car, when the phone rang. Pretty-voiced Forrest Payne had told her that her mother was at his place with a megaphone. She hadn’t believed him until he carried his phone outside so she could hear her mother’s amplified voice crackling out warnings of damnation.
Mr. Payne had said, “Clarice, I’m calling you instead of the police out of respect for the many years your daddy, God rest his soul, served as my attorney.” But she suspected it was really out of respect for the fact that her father had spent so much money at the Pink Slipper that Forrest Payne should have named a room, or at least a memorial stripper pole, in Abraham Jordan’s honor.
After Clarice persuaded her mother to stop sermonizing that first time and got her back to her house, Beatrice informed her daughter that she was finally ready to openly acknowledge her deceased husband’s infidelities. But she also made it clear that she had entered into a new type of denial. She refused to hold Abraham responsible for any of his misbehavior. Instead, she blamed his cheating on the loose women and poorly chosen male friends who she believed had led him down a sinful path. She focused her righteous fury on Forrest Payne and his little den of iniquity out on the edge of town.
So, once or twice a year, Clarice’s mother, the epitome of all things ladylike and proper, stopped by Forrest Payne’s Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club armed with a megaphone and an unquenchable thirst for revenge. It is terrifying, Clarice thought, what marriage can do to a woman.
Making the situation even worse, Beatrice didn’t recognize Clarice at first. When she saw that Clarice was walking toward her instead of going into the club, she took her daughter for a fresh convert. She pointed the megaphone at Clarice and said, “That’s right, sister, turn your back on that house of evil and listen to the Word.” Seeing, finally, that it was Clarice, Beatrice said, unamplified, “Hi, sweetheart, I suppose he called you again.”
Clarice nodded yes.
“Well, I was just about finished here anyway.” But she wasn’t done quite yet. A truck pulled into the parking lot just then and the driver, a heavyset, bearded man in a cowboy hat who moved as if he had already had a few drinks, walked falteringly from his vehicle toward the fuchsia front door of the club. Beatrice lifted her megaphone again and squawked out, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing. Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.” When the man disappeared inside the Pink Slipper, she tucked the bullhorn under her arm and descended her hill.
She stopped just in front of Clarice and looked her up and down. Clarice was wearing