His Right Hand

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  I would say that being a Soho author is a dream come true except that I never had a dream like this. Introverts tend to have rather boring dreams, of days spent by lakes alone, or about food. As a triathlete, I also dream about running, cycling, and swimming—the same motions over and over again. But in this case, reality exceeded any dream I might have had. I didn’t know publishing houses like this existed, peopled by real-life book royalty who are really rooting for you.

  Thank you, all those at Soho who have championed me and my “little” book. Thank you, all you authors, for being so welcoming to me. But more than that, thank you for writing the books that you write. Thank you for being true to whatever this thing inside of us is that demands that we write, that we bleed into our books every color of the rainbow. Thank you for being on this journey with me, and for finding Soho and making it your home. You are my family.

  Continue reading for a preview from the

  next Linda Wallheim mystery

  For Time

  and All Eternities

  My son Kenneth pulled up in the driveway as I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes one morning, just after Kurt had left for work. A surprise, considering Kurt and I hadn’t seen much of him lately.

  “Mom? You home?” I heard Kenneth call out, not bothering to knock on the door.

  “In the kitchen!” I answered. I loved that my sons felt like they could come and go as they pleased. As far as I was concerned, this was still their home as much as mine.

  Kenneth came over and gave me a big hug. “I love you, Mom,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  He smelled just slightly, like he’d been sweating on the drive up. “What’s up?” I asked cautiously. His coming over unannounced like this had to mean something was wrong, and he was clearly nervous to tell me about it.

  “I’m getting married,” he said simply.

  “What? How? To whom?” Why hadn’t he said anything about dating someone seriously? Why wasn’t he announcing this at a family dinner with everyone there—his father in particular? If he was already ready to commit to marriage, why hadn’t we met her before now? And why did he look like he was waiting for me to get mad at him?

  “Her name is Naomi Carter,” Kenneth said.

  “That’s a lovely name,” I said, trying to reassure him that he didn’t have to be nervous about this. If he loved her, I was sure the whole family would love her.

  “She’s great, Mom. I’m a lucky guy.”

  “You’d better say that!” I said, shaking a finger at him, but not seriously. “Oh, Kenneth, I’m so happy for you.” I hugged him again, but could feel stiffness in his back. He was still holding something back. “So?” I said, when I released him.

  “So what?” said Kenneth.

  “Sweetheart, there’s obviously something wrong or you would have told us about this two weeks ago at the family dinner. Does she have two heads or something? Is she a felon?”

  He sighed and then looked around the kitchen as if to make sure Kurt wasn’t there. I wondered if he’d waited down the hill until his father’s truck had passed before coming in to see me.

  “Spit it out,” I said. Now I was really starting to wonder. Why hadn’t he brought her with him? Wasn’t that the traditional thing, to show off the ring to the family?

  “Naomi’s part of—well, her family is only kind of Mormon,” Kenneth said.

  “Kind of Mormon? What does that mean? Isn’t that like being kind of pregnant?” I was going for a teasing tone, though clearly this was a big deal to Kenneth. I figured he meant that she was from an inactive family of some kind, and that made sense to me, given Kenneth’s own inactivity since he returned from his mission four years ago.

  It also made sense that he hadn’t wanted to tell Kurt first. He was going to want me to act as an intermediary. I wasn’t worried, though—I was sure eventually everyone would get over it. Most Mormons were inactive at one point in their lives for various reasons. It wasn’t the end of the world—or the end of an eternal family.

  Kenneth sighed again, and rubbed at his head in a way that made him look just like Kurt, if Kurt had had more hair. “I guess there’s no easy way to say it, Mom. Her family is polygamous.”

  I was so shocked I had to gather my thoughts. Of all my sons, Kenneth was the last one I would have expected to be interested in a polygamous branch of Mormonism. I really was not sure how I was going to handle it if Kenneth were about to tell me he’d be having multiple wives, if that was what he planned for the future with this Naomi Carter. My youngest son Samuel’s being gay might be problematic in the church, but polygamy felt just plain wrong to me, legal or not. I’d never really accepted the polygamous past of the Mormon church and had always assumed I’d never have to. I thought I’d raised Kenneth to think the same way.

  “Are they FLDS?” I asked slowly. The Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints was the most infamous polygamist branch of Mormonism, led by the now-jailed “prophet” Warren Jeffs, who had been indicted for statutory rape after he married dozens of barely teenage girls, some of whom were also his close blood relatives. Just the idea of Kenneth sitting down for Sunday dinner with men who did that made me sick. I suddenly wished that Kurt were here, after all.

  “Not the FLDS, Mom,” Kenneth said. “Her family is independent. And very modern. Her dad is an OB/GYN at Salt Lake Regional. One of the wives is an investment broker and another is an artist. Naomi is in med school, too. She wants to be an OB/GYN like her father.” He held my gaze and it was as if he was begging me not to judge him just yet.

  I struggled not to make a remark about it being a lot cheaper to have a lot of babies if you were a baby doctor yourself.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, hoping I knew my son as well as I thought I did. “Are you two planning to be polygamous?”

  He snorted at that. “Of course not. Mom, I’m just trying to make sure you understand her history. So when you meet her parents—her father and her mothers—you aren’t caught by surprise.”

  I felt an enormous wave of relief. Mormons hadn’t been polygamous since the late 1800s, when the prophet and president Wilford Woodruff had ended the practice. Sometimes I heard older Mormons say that God was polygamous or that polygamy was still going to be required in heaven, but it wasn’t a topic I’d heard mentioned in General Conference and I figured that was clear evidence that it wasn’t part of the modern church anymore.

  “How did you meet her?” I asked, glad to get to the more normal part of being a nosy mother.

  There was a long pause and I realized we weren’t done with the difficult part of the conversation. “If you must know, Mom, we met at a former Mormons group. We call it Mormons Anonymous.”

  I felt a twinge of pain at that phrase. Mormons Anonymous—like Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous? They were talking about Mormonism as if it were some kind of addictive behavior that you had to recover from.

  “I knew you were having trouble with the church,” I said, waiting for him to explain.

  “Mom, the final straw was the exclusion policy.”

  I felt a gut punch at this and found myself holding onto the kitchen counter to keep from sinking to the floor. This was the one thing I couldn’t defend the church I loved on.

  If Kenneth had said any other issue had been his breaking point, I could have talked him around it. Or I thought I could have. The church was full of flawed people, even the prophets and apostles, and we couldn’t expect that there would be no mistakes made. But deliberately punishing children for the choices of their parents—that was not only cruel but directly against Mormon doctrine, which said we believed that God judged us as individuals and not because of some inherited sin from our parents.

  I’d always loved the church’s feminist reinterpretation of the Garden of Eden story, the emphasis on education being the way to divinity, the close-knit Relief Society and
the way Mormons looked after each other. I loved The Book of Mormon and eternal families and the idea of a Heavenly Mother. It hurt that Kenneth was throwing all of that away because of this one thing. And yet, I understood it.

  “You weren’t one of the people who went to that mass resignation event, were you?” I asked Kenneth. It had been all over the news. Ten days after the policy on “same-sex attraction” was leaked back in November, thousands of people had lined up in City Creek Park in Salt Lake City to have their names struck from the Mormon church’s register in protest against it. Things had been tense between Kurt and me as well. We had had one epic argument back in November about how the policy would affect Samuel’s future, and it had gotten so ugly that Kurt had left the house and slept at his office that night.

  I hadn’t thought about resigning from the church myself, but I hadn’t known how to go to church the next week, or the week after that. The only thing that had saved me had been joining a private Facebook group called “Mama Dragons,” a group of Mormon women who were fierce in defending their LGBT kids. I could say anything I wanted to them and no one else (including Kurt) would see it. Some of them had left the church, but others were trying to stay like I was.

  “No, we didn’t go to the mass resignation,” Kenneth said. “Actually, Naomi and I hadn’t met yet in November. And I didn’t want to do anything rash that would affect the rest of my life and my relationship with all of you. But ultimately, I felt sick about having my name connected to the church in any way. So I looked for a support group and started going to the meetings. Naomi was there, too.”

  “You’ve officially had your name removed, then?” I had to ask. It would hurt Kurt deeply, and even though I understood Kenneth’s choice, it hurt me, too. It meant our eternal family now had a Kenneth-sized hole in it.

  “I know you were busy getting Samuel on his mission, Mom, and I didn’t really want to open it up for family discussion. But yeah, I went to see a lawyer who said he’d file the letter officially, so I didn’t have to go through the harassment and the waiting period the church wanted to set. It was official in March.” His words were clipped and sounded almost rehearsed.

  “Oh,” I said softly.

  Then Kenneth started apologizing. “Mom, I know I should have told you about all this before now. I kept telling myself I should bring it up at family dinner, let it all hang out. But I guess I was a bit of a coward. I knew how disappointed you and Dad would be.”

  “I love you, Kenneth. I will always love you.” That was the most I could manage.

  Kenneth sat on one of the stools and after a little silence said, “I’ve never told you this before, but one of my companions during my mission, Elder Ellison, was gay. He told me in confidence, and I’d been told so many times that gay people were pedophiles and perverts that I believed it. I was scared of him. I called the mission president and outed Ellison to him.” Kenneth looked ill and tense.

  “What happened?” I asked, feeling a well of sympathy for the poor gay elder who must have felt so alone in the world.

  “The mission president immediately came to interview him, and Ellison was transferred to the mission office, directly to the Prez instead of another missionary.” He took a shuddering breath and couldn’t seem to look at me.

  “And then, two months later, I heard Ellison was sent home because of ‘emotional problems.’” There were air quotes around those two words. “He committed suicide the day before I was released from my mission. He was only twenty-one.” He looked at me, and then looked away.

  I’d never known any of this backstory, and I could see now why Kenneth hadn’t told me. I thought of Samuel, who could be hurt by a companion who treated him like this. At least Samuel wasn’t in the closet, but there had to be hundreds of other missionaries who were. I was glad Kenneth was ashamed of himself. I felt a bit of shame, as well, that I had raised a son who could do this.

  But sadly, it made sense of so many things. No wonder Kenneth had refused to go back to church for weeks after coming home from his mission. No wonder he hadn’t done the typical post-mission talk in church, telling all about his converts and funny stories about companions.

  Kenneth rubbed at his face, and his hand lingered there, half-obscuring his eyes. “Mom, I’ve been in agony about this every day of my life since then. I’ve tried to think of some way I could make it up to Ellison, but I never will. The only thing I can do is to figure out how to prove to myself that I’m not the person I was then, that I’m never going to be like that again. I’m not going to be part of making more gay Mormons commit suicide. I’m doing everything I can to make sure they know I’m not like that, that I understand them.”

  I reached for Kenneth’s arm and patted it, but he pulled away, as if he didn’t believe he deserved my sympathy.

  “The truth is that Ellison was the best companion I ever had,” Kenneth added, talking more to himself than to me, I think. “He was a really good person. He wanted to help others. And he believed in God. Really believed that every prayer he said was being heard and answered in some way. And still, I did that to him because I was afraid of—I don’t even know what.” He clenched a fist and then looked back at me, his eyes bare and bleeding emotion.

  “Whenever I think about Samuel on a mission,” he said, his voice almost testimonial, “I can’t help but think of Ellison, and how things turned out. I really hope Samuel never has a companion like me. But the way the Mormon church talks about gay people, I don’t know if the average church member is any more enlightened now than they were when I was a missionary. Or maybe they are worse if they think that their prejudices have been justified by the new policy.”

  I thought about Elder Ellison and wished that I had at least gone to his funeral and heard a little more about him. I felt some kind of spiritual debt to him, through Kenneth. I should have raised my son better. I should have talked to him directly about gay people and how I felt they should be treated. Instead, I had covered up the fact that I had previously been married to a gay man. I hadn’t admitted that to my sons until after Samuel came out to them. What kind of a person did that make me? A flawed, Mormon one.

  Kenneth sighed deeply. “I had planned to tell you after I resigned, but it was harder than I thought it would be. I mean, I probably hadn’t gone to a church meeting in my own ward for a year. But that Sunday, I felt horribly guilty. I couldn’t sleep for fear that God would punish me somehow.”

  “Punish you? You mean about Ellison?”

  “I don’t know if it was about anything specific. But maybe. You grow up believing that God protects the people who are righteous and obey Him, and that everyone else has to deal with hurricanes and droughts and stuff. And yeah, even if you’re trying to give it up, it can be hard to stop thinking about God that way, as someone who punishes.”

  I wanted to ask him if he’d given up belief in God entirely or if he was thinking of joining another church, but it seemed too invasive of his privacy somehow, even if I was his mother.

  “I was so jittery I started buying some pretty hard liquor to try to combat it. And maybe to flip off the church’s rules. But I realized that was stupid. I didn’t want to get drunk to numb myself. I needed to figure out how to deal with the change. So I called up Naomi, who I’d met in Mormons Anonymous, and talked to her about everything, and well, we got closer and closer after that.”

  “I’m so sorry you went through all that alone, Kenneth.” I wish he’d told me. But it was so tricky now, with Kurt as bishop. Even with my own son, maybe I couldn’t be completely honest about my feelings for the church anymore.

  Kenneth shook his head, “No, Mom. Samuel is the one who needed your attention the most. Going on a mission was a big deal for him, especially in those circumstances. I really hope that being open the way that he is, he can change minds. Make things turn out differently than they did with Ellison. But I just needed to explain to you what was going on
at the time so you’d understand how much Naomi means to me. And why we’re not getting married in the temple. Or even in the church.”