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

“There were other crushes before your father,” she laughed. “Kevin and Christopher. But they weren’t real. I knew it the second I met your father because they all vanished—their names and faces. And for an instant, nothing else had any meaning in my life.”

“What was it like? Falling in love.”

She stretched out her legs in my twin bed, her toned dancer’s calves twining around each other like cords in a rope, her pointed toes emphasizing her high arches. It was clear what he saw in her—a beautiful dancer who clung to his every word as though it were gospel. And she saw someone who could save her from her life. She told me that her heart burst when Papa pulled her, soaking, from the murky lake water, but lately I’d wondered if she had been desperate for anything to take her away from the house where she grew up. The boy who came to town wearing a suit that was two sizes too big happened to be in the right place at the right time and distorted her sudden love for God into a love for him. For a moment, all the power that she let him wield in the house made sense—she had never known Papa without God and never known God without Papa.

“Keep going. It’s getting really good,” she said, nodding to the book.

I turned back to the open book and continued reading even though my brain wasn’t keeping up with the words. Ma put her hand on my knee; I must have paused too long.

“I know this hasn’t all been easy, Miriam. And I’m sorry.” Ma was inches away from me—her scent of laundry detergent and floral soap faint in my nose—but I couldn’t look at her as she spoke.

“Sorry for what, Ma?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing. Everything.” She tossed her hands in the air; as they fell back to the comforter, her voice dropped. “He’s different. I can’t think of another way to describe it. The man that I married never would have hit the man in Bethel.”

I willed my chin to look in her direction. She was looking straight ahead, at the closed door, at Hannah in the bed across from us. “And I brought all of you along on this ride. It hasn’t been easy for any of us, but particularly you. If I had known then what I know now—” She cut herself off before the inevitable end of the sentence.

“What would you have done differently?”

There was no reply, but I felt her shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “I was really young. I was in love.”

“Are you still?” I snatched the words from the bottom of my throat. I expected her to chastise me for asking such a thing, but in the long pause that passed between us, the Ma who was always so certain about God and Papa didn’t seem certain at all.

“It’s not as simple as that, honey. It’s not a yes or no. You’ll see.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them.

We heard a door open downstairs, and Ma quickly kissed me on the forehead before wishing me good night. I slid the book under my mattress after she left.

The air felt heavier when she was gone, like someone had left a window open during a passing storm. Now that I’d seen Papa for who he really was, it was hard for me to understand how I’d once been one of his staunchest defenders. Perhaps Ma just had more faith in him—or faith in general—than I did. Or perhaps it was that she’d known him for a whole lifetime before I’d even been born, so for her to suddenly see him through different eyes might have felt impossible.

The next evening, a few dozen cars were in the parking lot for the inaugural healing service. We stepped inside the sanctuary to see a hundred or so people already there; they wore jeans, T-shirts, waitress uniforms, and dingy sweatshirts that they would never dare to wear on Sundays. Whatever illness had made them come out tonight had stripped away all desires for vanity.

Caleb, Hannah, Ma, and I walked to the front of the church and slid in the pew next to Micah right before service was supposed to begin. I didn’t know what to expect as Papa walked to the pulpit. Several deacons were scattered on the carpet below in the same assigned positions they had on Sunday mornings. Papa bowed his head, and his lips moved in some form of prayer that we couldn’t hear; a few people around me looked up in concern. As Papa continued mouthing inaudible words, the doors at the back of the church opened and slammed shut, jolting me in my seat as the sound echoed off the empty pews in the back few rows. I couldn’t turn around until he ended the opening prayer, even as the pews creaked under the weight of the new people who had entered.

“In Jesus’s name, I pray. Amen.”

On the amen I spun around to see several more stragglers coming into the sanctuary. A few older women moved slowly down the aisle in thick-soled shoes. Among them were Mrs. Deveare and Mrs. Lewis: names that had been on and off the sick and shut-in list for years. Names that we claimed to pray for even when they were displaced by newer names—the accident victims, the young mothers who’d had complicated deliveries—the ones who had been in the bloom of health a few weeks earlier, whose deterioration had been so sudden that it made the rest of us draw in breaths at the mention of their names.

Behind them, Dawn Herron stepped inside, her arm gripping her father’s crooked elbow for support. The Herrons weren’t really members. Even though Papa had made house calls to convince them to change their minds, they resisted his overtures, only coming on occasional Sundays right before healing and leaving before the offering. Dawn was the only nonmember on the