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

By the time he stepped out of her embrace, his shoulders were square, not slumped, and he walked down the hallway with a newfound confidence.

“We’re going to the Johnsons’ for dinner tomorrow night. A thank-you of sorts. They’ve been praying for Micah’s healing for years, and they want to celebrate with me. With us.” He caught himself, but Ma didn’t seem like she heard the mistake. I stood at the edge of the kitchen as he rummaged in the refrigerator and drank directly from the carton of orange juice.

“That sounds wonderful, honey.” Ma planted another kiss on his cheek before she playfully elbowed him in the shoulder for brazenly engaging in a habit that she hated.

We stood on the Johnsons’ porch the next evening—I jammed the illuminated doorbell in rapid succession while Ma held a glass container of cornbread aloft next to me.

“Coming,” Mrs. Johnson called over the familiar chime. I heard her slow, lumbering footsteps and tapped my fingers against the doorjamb to get her to move a little faster. The questions I needed to ask Micah had been buzzing around my head since I saw her on Monday.

“What’s the hurry, Miriam?” Papa asked behind me. I couldn’t turn around to look at him; I’d barely been able to look at him since he came home the day before and declared Micah healed.

“Come in, come in!” Mrs. Johnson appeared in the doorway. “I’m so glad you could make it.” She took the dish from Ma, and we followed her inside. Before I could even greet her, I bounded up the thirteen stairs that led to Micah’s closed door.

“Micah,” I whispered into the raised letters of the mini license plate that bore her name—a souvenir that I brought her from a revival in Oklahoma two summers ago. Hearing nothing, I balled my hand to knock, but that gesture was foreign. Instead, I opened the door slowly into the pink of Micah’s room—the pillows and comforters on her bed, her desk in the corner with the sparkly lamp on it. She knelt beside her comforter, head in hands, a prayer leaking from her lips.

It felt like I was eavesdropping on something I shouldn’t have been part of, but I knew better than to interrupt when someone was talking to God.

“Thank You for my healing. Thank You for the hands that healed me. Let me be obedient enough to be worthy of Your favor. Amen.”

She stood up from the edge of the bed and looked startled, stepping back as though she hadn’t heard me call her name or come inside. “Miriam.”

Suddenly I didn’t know where to start.

Micah clearly wasn’t feeling tongue-tied though. “Now can you tell me what you said in the annex?” She whispered annex, as though that word made her aware that only a thin floor separated us from our parents. She stood in front of me, shifting in her pantyhose the way she always did when she was uncomfortable.

I closed my eyes and felt the heat of the annex again, heard the noise from the fans. “They just slipped out.”

“What slipped out?” Her voice wavered as she looked down at the sheer fabric that bound her toes.

I was only confirming what she’d already heard, but my heart raced as though I was confessing something new. I took a deep breath. “The words Papa uses when he heals people. That’s what I said.”

“That’s what I thought. Do you know what’ll happen if your dad finds out?”

With one step, I closed the gap between us. “He can’t find out because it’s a sin, and you know it as well as I do.”

“But I’m healed. And you did it.” Her voice, light and victorious, didn’t match the frantic pace of my words.

“But you know as well as I do that women don’t have that gift.”

“Then how do you explain that I didn’t feel anything when your dad healed me, but I felt it when you did?”

Until now, I’d been pretending that she was mistaken. I hadn’t let myself imagine what it could mean if what she’d said in the hospital was, in fact, true.

“Micah, Miriam, dinner!” Mrs. Johnson’s voice from downstairs shook the silence in Micah’s room.

“I don’t know. Just promise that you won’t say anything to anyone.”

Micah and I stood across the room from each other, still as statues. She stared at me for what felt like an eternity.

“Please, Micah,” I begged.

Micah moved away from me and stepped toward the door, and I was frozen as I watched her leave. When I could finally make my legs move, I followed her downstairs and sat in the empty seat between her and Caleb.

After Papa prayed for the meal, Micah’s body was rigid next to mine as she took small nibbles of her mom’s chicken and dumplings. On the other side of me, Caleb took loud, indelicate bites, even slurping the broth, before complimenting Mrs. Johnson on the meal. I looked at my spoon in my bowl, unable to say a word to anyone.

“So I know I’m not supposed to ask this,” Papa began, his mouth full of Ma’s cornbread, “but I figure I can break protocol because I’ve known you since you were a baby. What did it feel like?” Papa’s voice was loud and brash over the dinner table. His question was improper, self-serving. Aggrandizing was the word Papa used when he called out other men for it.

Micah quickly shot a glance in my direction before turning back to Papa. She seemed to think for a second, and I looked down as she spoke, wincing before the first word came out. “You placed your hand on me in the back of the ambulance, and a tingle passed through my feet,” she began. “Then the rest of my body got warm. When you prayed, said healing words, it was weird. Like I felt the disease leaving me all of a sudden.” She shoved a spoon in her mouth at the end of the sentence. I didn’t realize that I’d been