Family Law, Gin Phillips [top novels of all time .txt] 📗

reflection of my Laura Ashley dress with tomato sauced dripped down the front. I imagined some future version of myself inside Lucia’s den, coming home and pouring myself a glass of tea—no, wine—and then falling asleep on the sofa. I watched my sleeping self, a complete stranger. I listened to the wind chimes making their fairy sounds. When I wandered back down the driveway, I did it slowly.

“Many will meet their doom,” I heard myself singing, “trumpets will sound. All of the dead shall rise, righteous meet in the skies—”

It had been the closing hymn today. Even the part about eternal damnation was cheerful. I stopped at my car, keys in hand. The longer I stayed, the harder it would be to invent a believable excuse. As it was, I could tell Mom I’d stopped for gas, although she had to work this afternoon, and there was a chance that she was already headed to flip around the open sign at Barre None and sell leotards and toe shoes to a bunch of ballerinas.

I spun away from my car, heading down the sidewalk in the opposite direction from Aunt Molly’s house. I had never turned right when I left Lucia’s house. I had no destination. I was only taking one step after another, and within a few houses, the street seemed unfamiliar.

The sermon today had been about Noah and the blessings of righteousness, and I’d partly listened but I’d also figured out a long time ago that if I kept reading past the verses the pastor quoted, I’d find the good parts. Like the chapter about Noah starts with an announcement that in those days “Nephilim” were on the earth, and the “sons of God” had children with the “daughters of men,” and those children grew up to be heroes. So what the heck was a Nephilim? It was like the writer got off track and started a fantasy novel in the middle of the Bible. There was an entire world buried in that verse, and—even when I asked—every Sunday-School teacher shrugged and skipped right past it.

They skipped past the part after the flood when Noah got drunk and passed out naked, and they skipped the part in Leviticus about how to deal with men’s discharges and semen. (I wished someone would explain what men discharged besides semen.) Pastors loved to talk about how Lot’s disobedient wife was turned into a pillar of salt, but what about the part where two angels visited Lot’s home, and a mob of men demanded he hand over the angels to be raped? And then Lot offered up his two virgin daughters to be raped instead? Those same daughters later got their father drunk, had sex with him, and wound up pregnant.

“Are you reading your Bible every night?” my grandmother loved to ask me, and I wondered if she had any idea what was actually in the thing.

I could hear the martins in the trees. Away from my usual path, every step seemed sharp and clear and foreign. The concrete was mottled with leaf shadows and smashed crepe myrtle blossoms the pinks and purples of Hubba Bubba. A worm, dried out. Tiny volcanoes of anthills.

“Troublesome times are here,” I sang, starting over from the beginning, “filling men’s hearts with fear. Freedom we all hold dear now is at stake.”

Today the pastor had stood in the pulpit and explained how God’s deep disappointment in mankind forced him to flood the earth and obliterate nearly everyone on it. We taught toddlers about those cute animals walking two by two, but God wiped out, maybe, thousands of kids and parents and grandparents. Or was it millions? We never talked about the slaughtered ones. We talked about Noah and the blessings of righteousness.

“Aren’t we lucky,” the pastor had said, smiling. He was a gentle man, not like those angry preachers in movies. “Aren’t we lucky to be born here? To be born into the right families at the right time and place? Think of some African tribesman, born in the dirt, who never even hears the name of Jesus. Who never has the chance to be redeemed. We are blessed, brothers and sisters. We are chosen.”

It was a pleasant thought as long as you didn’t think about all the people—tribesmen or otherwise—roasting in hell.

Everyone has their role.

It was one of the pastor’s favorite lines. A congregation follows its elders. Children obey their parents. A woman is a helpmeet to her husband.

Alice and Gus Rogers sat across the aisle from me, shushing their six kids, who were all a little strange because they weren’t allowed to watch television. The Rogerses had been missionaries in Africa for years, and if we believed everyone who was unbaptized would burn in hell, shouldn’t more of us be like them, strange or not? Shouldn’t we head out to convert all the Africans or Asians or Episcopalians or whatever? Instead we sat there, Sunday after Sunday.

Everyone has their role.

Was our role to be saved and everybody else’s role to burn?

The whole church was lazy, like when adults find a chicken sandwich inside the Arby’s bag instead of the Beef ’n Cheddar they ordered, and they eat it because it’s too much trouble to take it back. The Rogerses sat behind my fifth-grade Sunday-School teacher, Valerie Springer, who couldn’t teach my class after that year because once we turned twelve, a woman wasn’t allowed to lead a class with boys in it. Did Mrs. Springer ever point out that women teach those same boys all day long every Monday through Friday? Did anyone ever say, hey, could we spend more time talking about these people condemned to eternal damnation? Lucia grew up Methodist, which meant she was sprinkled as a baby instead of being properly baptized, and it was impossible to imagine that she would go to hell, and yet I thought of multitudes disappearing into rising water, screaming and sobbing.

Sometimes my thoughts twisted down these paths until I rounded a corner and caught a