Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Christina
□ Tell my dad to fuck off
The sun isn’t even up when we park in front of the little house behind the church.
“It’s the church parsonage,” I explain to Danny, voice distant in my own ears.
At our former parsonage, the church built a wooden staircase connecting our house to the back door of the sanctuary so my mother and I could walk down the hill without our heels sinking into the grass.
“You’re sure he’s awake?” Danny asks.
Neither of us said much during the drive. I just held Danny’s hand on his thigh and leaned across the center console to rest my head on his shoulder. I rubbed the edges of his hair between my fingers in the semidarkness, letting the soft, familiar strands steady me.
Danny is the one I want beside me for any of life’s battles.
Which makes it all the more terrifying that he’s offered. That I could have what I want.
That I could lose it.
“He’s definitely awake.” I’m still staring at the front door of the parsonage.
“It’s Sunday morning. I may not know exactly what his office looks like in this house, but I know he’s pacing it and praying and reviewing his sermon notes.
He’ll have three points to today’s sermon, most likely alliterated.
He’ll start with some amusing, fictional anecdote, and he’ll even write in where he should raise his voice and slap his hand on the pulpit for maximum effect. ”
In many ways, my life as an Evangelical pastor’s daughter was very Groundhog Day. Church, shame, prayer, rinse, repeat. Going through the motions over and over.
My little routines with Danny feel nothing like that. Each one is familiar enough to bring comfort, but life-giving enough to stay fresh.
Facing the man in that parsonage might be how I can keep them.
After one more steadying breath, I exit the car. Danny gathers up the camera bags and keeps a warm hand on my lower back up the pathway to the house. I ring the doorbell.
My dad is already wearing his Sunday suit, like I knew he would be, when he opens the door.
“Chrissy?”
It’s not often I’ve gotten to shock my dad.
Besides how we behaved as the pastor’s children, I’m not sure he ever paid enough attention to us kids to allow for shock.
He was always in some shadowy corner sketching out his next sermon or yelling at us in the car to pipe down so he could hear the audio recording of his last sermon.
He was at the hospital when members of his congregation were sick.
He was officiating weddings, delivering eulogies.
He was having affairs and going on benders.
“This is a delightful surprise,” he says, pulling me into a hug. I hesitate, but then I’m hugging him back. Tightly.
I haven’t seen or spoken to him in over a year.
As much as I like to write him off as this villain who selfishly and recklessly hurt me and everyone around him, he’s still my dad.
He’s still the man I spent my entire life looking up to and pleasing.
When I pull back, I notice he looks a little better than the last time I saw him.
He’s clean-shaven, at least. One of the lewd details my mother spilled in the wake of our family’s fall from grace was that she always knew when my dad was having an affair because he would grow his beard.
She reckons he thought it made him look cool and dangerous.
Right now, he just looks confused.
“Sorry, who’s this?” he asks, eyeing Danny.
“This is Danny. Danny, this is my father, Pastor Edmondson.” Ugh, that was force of habit. “I mean, Tom.”
Dad holds out a hand to shake. I’m surprised he doesn’t instantly disintegrate under Danny’s intense stare. That scorching anger that I’ve only seen glimpses of blazes in my boyfriend’s eyes. But after a beat, he does return my father’s handshake, stiffly.
“Danny is making a documentary about me,” I explain, trying to move the moment along. “So I want to chat with you a minute, and I want you to give us permission to film the conversation.”
Dad’s eyes narrow. “Chat with me about what?”
I scoff lightly. Behold our master bullshitter of Sunday morning, ladies and gentlemen. “What do you think?”
He swallows, guilt shadowing his eyes. “Chrissy, you know I can’t do that.”
He can’t do it because he wants to protect the pastoral persona he’s duped the people in this new location with. That’s the only thing he’s ever cared about. “We can blur your face and change your voice.”
“But people will still know it’s me if they know I’m your dad.”
I laugh humorlessly. “Yes, but anyone who knows you’re my dad already knows what you’ve done. I’m not gonna go introduce myself to your new congregation.”
He looks at his watch and clicks his teeth. “Could we do it after service this morning? I’m right in the middle of—”
“No.”
Run-for-the-hills voice: +1,000 percent.
Dad, smartly, draws up short. He’s never heard this voice from his compliant prop of a daughter. I think Danny stops breathing. But I only have eyes for the coward in front of me.
“You have prioritized church over me for my entire life. You’re not doing it today.”
He rocks back on his heels, sizing me up. “Alright, darlin’. Come on in.”
That felt awfully right.
Dad leads us to a little living room, and Danny quickly sets up two tripods as Dad settles in a recliner and I sit on the adjacent couch. Once the cameras are rolling, Danny sits next to me, and I immediately wind my fingers in his.
Dad furrows his brow at our joined hands. “He’s making a documentary of you?”
“He is,” I say evenly. “He’s also the love of my life.”
Danny whips his head to me. I keep sharp eyes on my father, but I squeeze Danny’s hand a little tighter to make sure he knows. For me, there is only him.
I go on. “And he’s just offered me the world. Everything I deserve and everything I want. But I’m too broken up over what happened to our family to accept it.”
That’s the crux, isn’t it? The girl who grew up on the church stage can’t let go. I know I am whole as I am and worthy as I am. I know I don’t need anyone to save me. I know I’m poised to live a richer life on this side of the trauma and would never go back.
But damn, I am so fucking sad.
I’m so fucking sad about the years wasted in church services.
I’m so fucking sad that I subscribed to backward, hateful beliefs.
I’m so fucking sad that I spent hours crying over my journals, begging God to forgive me for not being as good as he expected me to be.
I’m so fucking sad that I thought my family loved me for more than my performance.
I’m so fucking sad I lost everyone and everything I thought I cared about.
I just want to cut the girl who grew up on the church stage loose so I can move forward with a clean slate.
“What could I possibly do now?” Dad asks. It’s not an antagonistic question; it’s a pleading one. In fact, there’s so much self-loathing lacing the question, a note of compassion rises in me.
“I know this fundamentalist, Evangelical pastor’s life is brutal. I know because I’ve lived it too. The shame, the guilt, the performance. Jesus, Dad, you must—”
“Language, Christina.”
The harsh reprimand seems to crack out of him on instinct. He looks like he immediately regrets it, but Danny stiffens dangerously beside me.
Nope. He doesn’t get to speak to me this way. He doesn’t get to dictate my behavior. Not anymore. I’m a motherfucking Jezebel now.
I stare my father down. “Did you know there are parents who just love their children unconditionally? Who think they’re great no matter what? Who want them to do whatever and be whoever, as long as they’re happy?”
Dad presses his lips together. “That’s not God’s role for parents. Any parent like that is doing their child a disservice.”
“And yet you live however you want and make yourself happy all over the place.”
He barks a derisive laugh. “If you think I’m happy, Chrissy, you’re sorely mistaken.”
I would lunge and physically shake the man if Danny weren’t keeping me tethered to the earth. This is beyond cognitive dissonance. This is self-hate and delusion on steroids.
“Then what the fuck are you doing?” I snap. “And yes, I’ll cuss and take the Lord’s name in vain as much as I fucking want because I’m not just an extension of your pulpit anymore. Why did you run around in secret? Why did you stay a pastor? Why are you living this horrible split existence?”
Dad seems like he might pop back for a moment, but then he slumps in defeat. I’ve never seen a man look so tired.
“My first affair wasn’t a fling, you know,” he says, staring at the floor.
I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. My father has never spoken about his personal life with me, much less his secret personal life.
“Over ten years ago now. Her name was Susanna, and I was in love with her. She showed me the world. I had never seen live theater, I had never had wine, I had never …” He trails off.
Oh my god. He experienced his own Jezebel List with his own Danny.
“My parents were handing out recordings of my preaching when I was ten years old. I found your mother at Hilltop to be my music minister and was given my first church as soon as we were married. I was only eighteen. We had your oldest brother right away, and then another, and another, and then you. I didn’t choose any of it, Chrissy. ”
I’m trembling. I didn’t choose the Evangelical life I was living, either.
If something as big as my father’s indiscretions hadn’t shaken me to my core, I might have married Mark, had his children, and continued to live my life on yet another church stage, switching from pastor’s daughter to pastor’s wife.
I might have continued to straddle the divide between my inherited beliefs and my growing doubts until I was nearly split in half.
What if my enlightenment didn’t happen in my early twenties?
What if I was already a wife and mother whose livelihood depended on spreading these damaging messages?
“Susanna was like a revelation.” He looks off in longing. “I didn’t know life could be so fun. I didn’t know the world wasn’t only an evil place, but an exciting one. A good one, even.”
His words could be mine. This is the power of generational legacies.
Even though his Jezebel List came later in life, my dad was lucky enough to have those messy, glorious experiences that could have broken the cycle.
If he had been brave, I wouldn’t have been subjected to the same abuse he’d been subjected to.
Danny sandwiches my shaking hand between his.
Then Dad’s eyes harden. “You wanna know why I live this horrible split existence?” he spits.
“Because I wasn’t put on this earth to be happy.
And neither were you. God doesn’t want us to be happy; he wants us to be holy.
Your mother found out about Susanna, and instead of starting a new life with my love, I stayed with your mother and with you.
Continued to pastor. It’s the only thing I know, and the only thing that might redeem me in the end. ”
He’s locking down his doubts in real time, like I used to. He’s emotionally manipulating me the same way he emotionally manipulates himself, like I used to. He is too scared to start over—just like I’m too scared to truly start over.
He clutches at his hair. “But once I had done bad, I decided I might as well be bad. The affairs that followed … I’m bad, Christina. Is that what you want to hear? I have to believe God will have mercy on me.”
With each of his words, grief washes over me like the rising tide.
This is the end result of a life spent performing, of categorizing every thought and action as good or bad, of living in the world but not being of the world.
When you’re locked behind those walls, it’s almost impossible to see over them.
That was me for a long time. And I pity that girl. Just like I pity him.
We both deserved better.
“Okay, Dad,” I finally sigh.
“That’s it?” he asks, eyebrows raised.
“That’s it.”
“You’re not going to rip into me some more? Demand more answers? Curse like a sailor?”
I huff a laugh. “No. Believe it or not, I don’t really have any interest in dragging you through the mud. And I’m not sure you’ll ever understand where I’m coming from.”
“Try me, darlin’.”
Okay. Okay. Maybe this is his moment to shake loose for good. Maybe he’ll be able to hear me. Maybe we can scrape together some semblance of a family after all. Maybe I don’t have to suffer this grief forever. Maybe if he can start over, so can I.
I swallow. “Your lies were obviously damaging. But it was our day-to-day life that cut deepest. Keeping us from the world, parading us on the church stage, having us believe we needed to pray and beg and earn our salvation day in and day out … those things were infinitely worse than any of your indiscretions.”
“No.” He shakes his head violently, swatting away my words. “Those were the only good things I’ve done. You’re just in a low valley right now, Chrissy, but none of my children will be lost. You’ll come back into the fold. It’s how I raised you, and it’s who you are. This is your path.”
“You don’t know anything about her.” Danny is on his feet.
I’m crushed under the waves.