Revival Season - Monica West (10 ebook reader .TXT) 📗

without looking over at me. Next to me, Ma speared a triangle of pancake for Hannah and cupped her chin to guide it inside. I nudged her knee while she wiped syrup from Hannah’s lips.

“Do you believe what he said?” I mouthed.

Ma looked at me quizzically, and I made sure that Papa and Caleb were still talking before I repeated the words, slower this time, elongating my mouth around the vowels. She peered over my shoulder at them before shrugging.

“I saw what happened,” I mouthed again. “I saw him hurt the man.”

“What are you two talking about down there?”

I froze as the tendons in her neck became tight cords. The slick palms of my hands slid against the table’s surface.

“Just girl talk. Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” Ma said.

The tasteless hunk of French toast had jagged edges as it went down my throat, but I focused on swallowing instead of looking at Papa. When Papa didn’t believe you, his lips puckered with scorn; I couldn’t be on the receiving end of that expression, not after what I had already seen. After what felt like forever, he went back to talking about highway numbers with Caleb. I moved my right foot over inch by inch until it was touching Ma’s shoe. She left her foot there and returned to feeding Hannah.

Every few minutes, I caught Ma shooting glances at Papa. Did he at all resemble the man she had married sixteen years ago? The way the story went, she was seventeen when a cocky, twenty-year-old boxer turned preacher came to her town as the Faith Healer of Midland. She gave her life to Jesus on the spot and married Papa six weeks later. We had lived under the canopy of that belief my whole life, eating and drinking faith in God first and Papa second, never questioning Papa’s healing abilities, the same way we never questioned the existence of the sun, even when it was hidden behind clouds. Our belief left no directives about what to do if our faith in Papa faltered.

FIVE

The next afternoon, we spread thin bath towels by the concrete edge of the pool at Sleepy Elms Motel. A neon orange sign blinked V CANCY in the lobby window. I laid Hannah on the first towel, and the jarring rip from the loosening Velcro teeth of her leg braces echoed over the shallow water. I stripped her to her cotton undershirt and panties before lowering her into the pool on top of a floatie. She held the yellow foam noodle for dear life and kicked her thin legs with surprising force. Every so often, she dipped her open mouth below the surface and came back up with full cheeks.

A few kids throwing an inflatable ball by the NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY sign looked over. They spied Hannah first; then their eyes roved to Ma and me. Our long skirts and loose shirts starkly contrasted their oily torsos that were barely covered by bright strips of Lycra. The moment they made eye contact, I turned away from their brazenness the way Papa had always told us to when we were in the proximity of immodesty. Papa made it clear that God looked more favorably on modest girls like me. He had also told us that nothing happened to the man outside the tent, but I tried to push that thought aside.

A girl who seemed to be the ringleader of the group raised her hands in the air; the tank top portion of her bathing suit rose a few inches, exposing the hollow concavity of her navel. She knew all of the words to an ungodly song I’d never heard, and, as she sang, her arms swayed the way ours did to church hymns. I kicked eddies into the lukewarm water and raised my hands like hers—my shirt slid up a bit, and I raised the hem even more until an inch of my stomach was showing.

“Miriam, what are you doing?” Ma grabbed my shirt and yanked it down before looking over her shoulder. “Don’t let your father see you doing that.”

But I had seen the cab pick Papa up hours earlier—in the waning moments of gray when night yielded to dawn. Caleb and Hannah were still asleep as I hooked the blackout curtains with my forefinger and saw him open the cab’s back door with his stuffed briefcase reliably by his side.

“He’s not here, Ma, you know that. Besides, it’s hot outside.”

“It’s immodest.” The final word slid out between clenched teeth. “You can enjoy the sun without being naked.”

She leaned all the way back—sunbathing, as it were—even though a thick layer of gray cotton shielded her skin from the sun. Stretched on her back with her arms raised overhead, the small swell of her belly protruded beneath the dress’s fabric. The faint pink heart tattoo on her right wrist peeked out—one of very few remnants of her life before Papa. While her eyes were closed, I rubbed my thumb on the inky section of skin—the heart’s black outline and light-pink interior were indistinguishable from the smoothness of the rest of her wrist. She looked down at my fingers in the center of the tattoo and didn’t flick them away.

“Did it hurt?”

“I thought it did when I got it, but then I had children. That was a whole new kind of pain.” She ran her hand over her stomach.

“Did your parents know?”

She laughed. “They never knew what the three of us did. And if they did know, they wouldn’t have cared. I grew up in a different kind of house, Miriam. My sisters and I practically raised ourselves. If we didn’t cook, we didn’t eat. We went to bed when we were tired and to school when we wanted to. The only good thing my dad ever did was pay for the occasional dance lesson when there was enough money to go around, but he never came to any of my performances.” There