Chapter 10 #3
“I don’t think you’re the first pastor’s kid to have a story like that. But pretty soon you’ll be leaving, right? You’ll go off to college or trade school or go find a place to be a hermit like me, and then you call all the shots.”
“They’ll want a say in it no matter what. I don’t think they’d be too happy if I decided to do what you do.”
Inadvertently, I tongued the devil’s stamp on the inside of my mouth. “No, probably not.”
“He was really mad when you left the other day—after you said that thing about the bears? He acted like it was all just a joke but I could tell he was mad.”
“Hope he didn’t take it out on you.”
“No, he’s not like that. But he told me to forget about volunteering here. Like because you had a different opinion you must be a bad influence or something.”
“Well, historically that’s been the prevailing opinion of unmarried women living alone in the woods with animals.”
“Yeah, I guess. But I don’t know. I hate the way he is sometimes. Like if I care about anything, it’s a distraction from God. Bikes, baseball, animals, whatever. He acts like I shouldn’t have a life.”
I thought back to my mother and grandmother, how suffocated I’d felt with them, how strict I found their rules. Compared to Zeke, they probably would’ve been freewheeling hippies, but I broke all their rules nonetheless. I did everything they told me I shouldn’t.
“Even moving here,” he went on. “It feels like we just came here because he knew it would be hard. I mean, my grandpa lived here for a while, so there was that, but that was before my dad was even born.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. The deed, I thought. He knows about the deed. He knows about the land.
Norman may have fled Burrsville in fear, but he’d taken the deed to his land with him.
His share made up more than half the sanctuary, but as the decades had passed with no sign of him and my power only growing, I had almost forgotten the land was not legally mine, that it was only mine as long as I could keep people from remembering otherwise.
I had relied on the guilt that drove him from Burrsville to keep the land a secret, but who knew what he might’ve said on his deathbed, what he might’ve confessed.
I stood there frozen, anticipating that he would sense the dread in my silence, that he would turn to gloat, but he prattled on about his father’s predilection for misery, apparently unaware of how precariously my world was balanced in that moment.
“Your grandpa lived here, huh?” I interjected when he paused for breath. “Right in Burrsville?”
“My great-grandpa. My actual grandpa and grandma died when my dad was a baby, so Grandpa Norm raised him, and I just called him grandpa. We saw him a lot. He was a logger during the Great Depression and he came here for work, but he didn’t stay long.
He went to South Carolina after that, but Dad wanted to come here for some stupid reason. ”
“What about your mom? Didn’t she have an opinion?”
“Mom’s opinions are Dad’s opinions. I don’t think she liked it at first, and I thought maybe I could get her on my side, but when I tried to talk to her about it, she grounded me. She actually pushed him to move us a week earlier than he’d planned, told him my friends were being a bad influence.”
I nodded; none of this was surprising to me. I knew Rachel’s type, had seen it before—women slavering to be seen as worthy helpmeets to their godly husbands, driving their children to the point of shutdown in the name of holiness. But it wasn’t the information I needed to know.
“So what’s the plan?” I prodded. “They’re just going to stay in the parsonage until your dad retires? He must be close to that age.”
David snorted. “He’ll never retire. He’ll die at the pulpit. He said his life’s purpose is to restore this place, whatever that means. It won’t matter where I go to college or end up moving, they’ll stay here and guilt-trip me for not doing the same.”
“Only if you let them.”
He finally paused, glancing at me in surprise. Maybe he’d expected some platitude about understanding his parents when he was older, but that hadn’t been my experience. If anything, I’d come to understand my mother less, to resent her choices more.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before,” he said.
“You haven’t,” I said. “And that’s why your parents don’t like me. We should probably get you home before they start wondering where you are, though.”
“I can walk, I don’t mind.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll just make sure I drop you off a couple blocks away.” I winked, and his face broke into Norman’s easy, lopsided grin.
I kept my promise, taking a left well before the parsonage and driving up a couple streets before I pulled over. There was an older man outside putting far too much mulch around the single daylily by his mailbox, but he had his back to us. David unbuckled, pausing with his hand on the door.
“Hey, thanks a lot. For taking the squirrel, and for letting me vent and stuff.”
“Anytime.”
“Can you just—I’m pretty sure my dad already got the parents, the squirrels. But I think there’s more babies up there.”
“You want me to bust in and tell your dad I’m taking them, come hell or high water?”
“If you went tomorrow morning, it would only be my mom. Dad always goes to the church office first thing Monday morning to start working on his next sermon.”
“I’ll do my best. You take care of yourself, okay?”
“I will.”
He jogged off, sticking to the choppy sidewalk rather than cutting through yards like a neighborhood kid would’ve done. I pulled a U-turn and went back the way I’d come, just in case.
When I arrived home, David’s squirrel was dead.