Good Touch, Bad Touch Collection (Palate Teasers #6)

Marin

Granted, my life is weird. Super-duper weird. But this? This?

Jesus watches me from the dashboard. Actually, several Jesuses do. One from a medallion glued above the AC vent, and another bobbling figurine above my grandpa’s odometer.

I’ve looked at Jesus a lot in my life. A lot. I can never tell if he’s angry, annoyed or just kind of…meh.

But never mind about Jesus for the moment. Right now, the AM radio is blaring so loud that the car speakers crack and buzz making the preacher’s words cut in and out in weird stutters and stalls.

“Thy soul sh— be —ar—d only —f you —pent, sinn—! Re—nt!”

As the preacher rages on, I stare at the swish, swish, swish of the wipers battling the freezing mist that started as we turned onto the road leading out of Sherman and toward Carson Mountain.

“Grandpa. Tell me where we’re going. Please,” I beg, looking over to see the muscle in his jaw tighten to stone as he hisses something unintelligible through his dentures.

He’s never been this mad and certainly has never dragged me out of the house and into the truck in the middle of the night.

He thumps the dashboard in agreement with the roaring preacher. “Hear that, young lady? Repent!”

I swallow hard and re-focus forward. The road is dark and unmarked, the asphalt gleaming like diamonds in the headlights of Grandpa’s brand new eighty-thousand-dollar GMC truck.

Biting back tears, I twist the sleek satin of my dress in tight fingers on my lap.

It’s cold, but the bulky red coat Grandpa insisted I wear as he tugged me out the front door after finding out I was not going to choir practice but to an appointment at a modeling agency, is warming me from my knees to my neck.

“I keep telling you. It wasn’t my idea.” One thing about being born with a Bible in one hand is that I honestly cannot lie. Impossible. “It was Stacey at school. She took those pictures of me, she sent them to the agency, she set up the appointment. I had to go. She’s my only friend, grandpa.”

Grandpa grumbles. “You won’t talk your way out of this.

I didn’t do enough to stop your mother from ruining her life…

and mine… but you…” His nostrils flare, knuckles white on the steering wheel, his gold Rolex glinting in the moonlight.

He narrows his blue eyes at me. “I will not let the devil take you like it took her.”

My heart sinks. I’ve been paying for my mother’s sins since birth. In fact, my birth was her sin.

Mom had me at seventeen. All I know is I was born in the same room I now occupy in my grandfather’s sprawling mansion. But I guess money can’t fix everything because my mother died two days after my birth.

When I was around ten, I heard two of the deacons’ wives in church talking about how more girls would keep their knees together if they had to give birth with no pain medicine and a midwife who was paid extra to provide no comfort. Like my grandfather did with my mother.

Just because you have a nice house and go to church on Sundays, sure doesn’t mean your life is candy corn and teddy bears, that’s for dang sure.

Grandpa’s wife, my grandmother, passed away one year before I was born, so he raised me tangled up in grief and anger and the twisted righteousness he thought was the solution to everything.

He never talks about my mom, except in offhand references to the shame she brought upon him for fornicatin’ outside of marriage. The only thing I have of hers is a couple school pictures I found tucked inside my grandmother’s old bible and from the pictures, we could be twins.

As far as my father, that’s a mystery and I’ve never had the courage to ask.

I tug my legs together as the heated leather seat bakes me from under my rear end but it does nothing to chase away the chill that’s taken root deep in my soul.

I point the toes of my red heels into the floor mat, then pull them back, stretching out my calves. I’m sure not used to six-inch stilettos. Grandpa would never have bought me anything so sexy. But Stacey did, and I just wish she had chosen a different color.

Everything on my body is red. My dress, my jacket, my nails. Even my underwear and my bra. Red, red, red… everywhere. It’s always been this way. Grandpa insists the children of Jesus need to see me coming, so they know to look the other way.

How one out-of-wedlock pregnancy could turn him into an irrational tyrant I’ve still not puzzled out, but on the upside, I’ve never had to wonder if my socks match my slacks. Or my shirt. Or my shoes.

I blink twice, pinching the inside of my cheek between my molars, but the tears come unbidden. All I’ve ever wanted is to feel good in my skin. To feel normal somehow, like the girls at school I see walking around wearing makeup and chittering about boys and just being so carefree.

“You need to learn the value of life. Away from all this.” He waves his hand around the truck. “Time that you were humbled.”

He’s full of shit. If I was born with a Bible in my crib, he was born with a deed to a 10,000-acre tobacco farm and all the righteous weirdness to go along with it. But I don’t point that out. I’m already knee deep in sin and backtalk is not going to help.

That word humbled, though. That’s new. And it worries me.

The road narrows, the woods around getting thicker and more menacing.

The road turns from pavement to gravel, then from gravel to mostly mud, but the truck handles the winding road upward into the mountains like a train on a track.

There’s no stopping this, and the preacher on the radio thunders his agreement.

I shiver as we wind into the dense forest. That’s the thing about North Carolina. There are big cities, quaint towns and farmland but there are also mountains and back woods that reek of Deliverance.

It’s a terrible movie. But Burt Reynolds turned my insides to warm custard and had me writing out Mrs. Marin Reynolds in the back pages of my notebook for a year.

It was the only show I could pull in the night I snuck into the attic with five extension cords and some tin foil and managed to get the thirty-year-old Magnavox to find a station.

Otherwise, no TV for me. Not unless it’s ordained by Grandpa. And, don’t even mention a cell phone. That’s two weeks of penance right there.

As we round a hairpin turn doing fifty the back of the truck slides and I yelp grabbing at the door handle. The inertia throws my burning cheek against the cool glass as Grandpa pumps the brakes and calls for Jesus to take the wheel.

He seems to make an exception to his every rule when it comes to Carrie Underwood.

Panic rises in my center, coiling around like a snake.

“It was a modeling agent meeting. Something special for the last year of high school, Grandpa. Sort of like an internship.” Wow, that’s a reach but I’m desperate.

“Nobody touched me, I didn’t touch nobody else.

I didn’t sin. I don’t need cleansing.” I hold up the tattered printout of the email string Stacey gave me with the details.

“See? Modeling. Not tempting the holy into damnation.”

Grandpa snatches the printout from my hand, balls it up, pushing the button to lower the window then releases it into the night like a paper snowball.

The freezing wind blows his silver hair around as he flashes me a look, the furrows in his brow so deep they could pinch pennies.

“You are the sin, child. Your earthly form is the sin.”

Hearing that isn’t new. I am the apple that tempted Adam. The fire that burns men. I’ve heard it all so many, many times.

He takes a right, then a sharp left onto an unmarked washboard road.

Mud spatters onto the side windows, and in the headlights I see a cabin ahead.

No, not a cabin. A shack. Moss clings to the roof, and the window to the left of the front door is flapping in the wind, covered with clear plastic secured by duct tape around a crooked frame.

All the protests die on my tongue when Grandpa skids to a stop, throwing the truck into park and flies out of his door without a word. He’s hella spry for eighty-five when he’s fired up that’s for sure.

I spring from my side, heels tottering on the gravel of the little driveway. He drops open the tailgate with a thud. And my heart sinks into the squishy ground along with my shoes.

He’s throwing out red bags and cardboard boxes. A kerosene stove; Preppers’ Warehouse MREs; iodine tablets. A blanket, a pair of red rubber boots. Jugs of water. A battery-powered lantern.

Suddenly, the plan starts to come into focus. No, no, no!

“You can’t be serious? You’re not going to leave me out here.” I toggle my head to the right, then to the left. It’s not just isolated here, it’s apocalyptic.

I nearly face plant into a puddle as I stumble trip reaching for his arm, but he shoves me away. “Best thing for you, my girl. If you end up like your mother…I’ll never forgive myself.” He says then turns away.

“Grandpa. I’ll be good. I have mid-terms coming up. What about school?”

He slams the tailgate closed without reply.

The diesel engine still rumbling tells me he’s not staying.

The mist filled air cools my face and after a pause, he turns to me in the red taillight glow and makes an X with his fingers as I tug the thick jacket around me.

“If you survive this winter, you’ll be saved.

I prayed and that’s what the Lord told me.

You are eighteen, but you are not grown.

You will find your humility here. With Jesus. ”

“And if I don’t survive?” I ask as my airway constricts, the scent of the diesel mixing with the freshness of the mountain forest.

“Then your sin will die with you.”

Sin. Impurity. Temptation. Evil.

I press a fist to my chest, my heart frozen, unworthy of beating.

Never in all my life did I think wearing a little make-up, reading some fashion magazines and going to a modeling agency interview would put me here. Grandpa might be crazy, but I never imagined he’d abandon me.

“When will you be back?”