Chapter Seventeen
I lay awake texting with Lisa for two hours that night.
We joked about my mother walking in on us having phone sex and about how poor Gerald was surely busy flogging himself for kissing me.
I wanted to leave for home first thing in the morning so badly I almost couldn’t stand it, but I knew I needed to stay just this once.
I woke up at eight and realized when I went to use the bathroom that my mother was already cooking. The smell of coffee followed me back into my bedroom and it almost made me want to get up. Almost but not quite. It was nine when my door opened. “Breakfast is ready!”
I was wearing a T-shirt, but I yanked the covers up to my chin anyway. “Mother. Will you please knock?”
She ignored that. “Well, it’s breakfast time. Come get some pancakes before they’re cold.”
“I have to shower first. I’ll heat them up if I need to.” What I needed was more sleep, but I waited until she’d closed the door again and dragged myself out of bed. By the time I had showered and put my church clothes on, Dad was sitting at the table too.
“Do you need me to heat anything up?”
I shook my head at Mom. “I can do it. I’m sure everything is fine.”
“Are you wearing that?”
I set my pancakes and bacon in the microwave and poured myself a cup of coffee. I was in nice pants and a sweater, nothing offensive. “Yes.”
“You’re not wearing a dress?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Most of the ladies wear dresses.”
“I do recall that. I’m going to be wearing this.”
Mom sighed, but Dad interrupted her with the Illini score from the previous night. Even though she and Dad had already eaten, Mom sat at the table with us and sipped at a cup of coffee. “Are you sure you can’t stay for lunch?”
I shook my head. “I need to get going right after church.”
“There’s a wonderful little restaurant down the street. It has sandwiches and soup and those flatbread pizzas.”
“Sounds nice, but I really need to get home.”
Mom nodded, although I could tell she still wasn’t happy. “Well, we’ll get going in about forty-five minutes.”
“I can drive myself and just take off from church.”
“Oh, no. We’ll all drive together.”
Of course we would. After eating, I went to busy myself with packing up.
It took about thirty seconds, but I pretended it was an epic project so I could text with Lisa.
At ten fifteen, we packed into Dad’s car, just like always.
I hated sitting in the back seat even when I was going somewhere with friends and I really hated it with my parents in the front.
If coming to Saulsbury made me feel like I was thirteen, being in the back seat made me feel like I was seven.
It was chilly and the heat didn’t get back to me. I was glad I hadn’t worn a dress.
When Dad pulled onto Maple Street, I saw it two blocks down: scores of white wooden crosses planted in the front lawn of the church.
For a moment I was surprised, since one of the liberal churches in Memphis did that for World AIDS Day.
Before I could mention it, Mom turned toward the back seat.
“They’re in memory of all the unborn babies that were aborted in the region this year. ”
My response was involuntary. “Oh my God.”
“I know! So many. It’s so awful.”
I was stunned. My mother had never been pro-choice, but both she and the church seemed to have crept further and further right before I realized it had happened.
I knew there was nothing I could say, and I hated it.
There was nothing that wouldn’t be inflammatory, that wouldn’t drive her into a frenzy, that wouldn’t fuck up the whole weekend.
I just stared at the crosses, all the crosses, and stewed.
I wondered how they defined “the region.” I wondered where they got their statistics. I wondered why this was my life.
“It’s new,” Dad said quietly. It didn’t sound like he was particularly supportive of it, but I couldn’t read his face.
“We’ve had it for the past few years,” Mom said. “You just haven’t been to church when you’ve come home for Thanksgiving.”
Lucky for all of us. I sat quietly as my father parked the car, my body taut with anger.
My mother went off to talk to someone so Dad and I walked toward the side entrance in silence.
I could feel him glancing at me from time to time, but I didn’t look back.
I was about to enter the sanctuary when I was almost taken down from behind.
“Aunt Sam!” Mary Margaret, Rebecca, and Rachel managed to wrap their collective arms around me in a hug that almost knocked the wind out of me.
It was the perfect distraction. I scooped Rachel up and started walking the others toward the nursery. “I can’t believe I get to see you two days in a row!”
“Mommy made French toast for breakfast this morning,” Mary Margaret said. “It was delectable.”
I laughed out loud and glanced back at Missy, who was following us with Jeremiah. “Have a good time, guys,” I said to the younger girls and the baby, then turned back to Mary Margaret. “You’re big enough to go to grown-up church now.”
“I am. They make us go to Sunday school after the children’s message.” Her voice was conspiratorial. “But sometimes we sneak out instead.”
I leaned close and whispered in her ear. “We used to do that too.”
“I know. Daddy told me.”
My father, Kevin, and the boys were already packed into our family’s pew.
The Travis family always sat on the right side, fifth pew from the front.
When she wasn’t singing in the choir, Mom always sat on the aisle, with Dad next to her, then Kevin’s family on the other side.
When we were little, one of us always sat on Mom’s left and the other on Dad’s right so we wouldn’t fight.
I was surprised that Asher, Seth, and Mary Margaret were any better behaved, but they were on their electronics immediately.
I looked around as people started to fill the rest of the sanctuary.
The same families sat near us that I remembered from years ago.
Most had gray or missing hair and several had extended families with them.
The one thing I didn’t expect was a huge screen in the front of the church, so big it covered the enormous golden cross.
It hadn’t been there during the wedding, so I assumed it dropped from the ceiling.
I wondered what kind of excruciating multi media experience we were in for.
At ten minutes to eleven, the organist began to play quiet, ethereal music, which cued everyone to take their seats.
Mom came to join us and leaned over to tell me that I needed to say hello to several people before I left.
The acolytes lit the candles, and the service began with a generic greeting and a hymn.
Mom sang loudly, Dad mumbled off key, and I picked up the hymnal even though the words were projected on the big screen and gave a half-assed attempt to sing along.
I’d sung in the adult choir when I was younger, too. It kept me safe from Jackson Hardeman.
The next time the screen lit up was to share video from a missionary family in Central America.
They were doing renovations on a school, which was nice.
The children in the village seemed happy.
They had goats and chickens that looked happy too.
I sat back and tried to relax, thinking that just maybe everything would be okay.
It was not. Everything in that morning’s news seemed to be cleverly tailored to needle me.
We congratulated Darrell Roundtree on his glorious marriage to a lovely woman who, as Kevin whispered, he had met two months prior on the internet.
We thanked God for the speedy recovery of Esther Harrington and the selfless devotion of her daughter who had moved home in order to care for her after her stroke.
We prayed for several Republican politicians by name and cheered for our troops overseas.
I tossed a few dollars into the collection plate when it came around because my mother was watching me like a hawk, but I didn’t go up for communion.
The youth pastor presented the children’s sermon, and Kevin’s kids scampered out with all the other children. I was jealous.
While I remembered disagreeing with Pastor Hardeman and thinking he was an idiot, I didn’t remember being so incensed by his words that it made my stomach hurt.
Maybe he’d gotten more confident in his tenure, or maybe I simply tuned out enough of the hatred to get by.
One way or another, I was right about the church leaning farther right.
The sermon that morning was loosely based on one of the parables, but somehow Pastor Hardeman managed to tangent into a diatribe on pornography and the general ills of liberal society.
After that, I really thought it was over.
We sang again, and my phone read noon. To my surprise, though, Pastor Hardeman moved to the middle of the sanctuary and folded his hands in front of his body.
“Ushers, please come forward for our special offering.” The screen behind him lit up with a picture of a beaming white woman and man in front of a bed of daffodils. The text read Your Way Home Ministries.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father’s jaw tighten. On my other side, Kevin’s words were nearly silent, yet deliberate enough that I couldn’t possibly miss them. “Oh, shit.”