The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  Grace attempted to turn the spattering slices from one side to the other. “Ouch. Ouch! Forget it. They can just cook on this one side.” Grace wiped her burned hand across the bib of her overalls.

  “No! They have to be turned. I watched Rhonda’s dad do it and he flipped them over. They won’t be done right.”

  “Then you flip them.” Grace held the fork out toward Jory, who was backing away. “Ah! Very brave,” she said, and went back to poking at the bacon.

  “You have to put them on a paper towel when they’re done.” Jory reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a head of lettuce. Their head of lettuce. And here on the windowsill were their tomatoes. And on the counter was their applesauce . . . sweetened applesauce with sugar in it. They were going to drink pop with dinner. Shasta grape pop. Jory put the head of lettuce under the faucet and turned on the water. “How do I get the water out?”

  “I don’t know. You pat it or something. With a dishtowel.”

  “We don’t have any dishtowels.”

  “Use a napkin.”

  “Pat is a weird word.” Jory turned and held the dripping head of lettuce in front of her, a soggy napkin underneath.

  “Here. Come here.” Grace reached out for the lettuce. She rolled it up and down against the front of her overalls. “See? Drier already.”

  “Very sanitary,” Jory said.

  Grace took the head of lettuce and tucked it carefully underneath the waistband of her overalls. She gazed down at the results.

  “Wow,” said Jory.

  Grace continued to stare solemnly down at her abdomen.

  The front door opened and shut. “Knock-knock,” their father called out from the living room. “Anyone home?”

  Grace slid the head of lettuce out of her overalls and put it on the counter. She turned and began forking the bacon out of the pan and onto a plate.

  “We’re in here,” Jory answered, feeling a surprising stab of disappointment.

  Their father ducked slightly as he walked beneath the curved entryway into the kitchen. “Well, here you are,” he said, “safe and sound. I was beginning to worry.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Jory. “I made it home okay.” She turned and began tearing leaves of the lettuce into smaller pieces and putting them in a yellow bowl that she lifted down from one of the cupboards.

  “What happened to your bus?”

  “Nothing,” Jory said quickly. “What do you think of our dinner?”

  “It certainly smells . . . bacony.” Their father put the books he was carrying onto the kitchen table. He leaned over the frying pan and peered at the remaining pieces of bacon. “Well,” he said, “look at you two. You’re cooking dinner.” He straightened back up and gazed around the kitchen, blinking, as if it were too bright. “Think of that.”

  “What did you think we’d do?” asked Grace, not looking up from her work.

  “I meant,” he said, “that I’m proud of you. That I’m proud of the way you’re fending for yourselves.”

  “Really?” said Grace. She continued in her careful slicing of a tomato.

  Jory brought the jar of applesauce over to the table and sat down. “Why don’t you eat with us, Dad?”

  “Oh, no—that’s a sweet offer, but your mother will be expecting me to eat when I get back.” He sat down at the other end of the table and began curling the edge of a place mat between his fingers.

  “How’s Frances?” Jory stared straight ahead at her father.

  “She’s fine. First day of school. She loves her teacher but doesn’t like the other kids. Plus, she says she’s bored—she’s tired of reading about elephants that wear pants. The usual.”

  “I’m not going back to Schism, Dad.” Jory continued to stare at him.

  “Well.” Her father moved the place mat forward and backward on the table. “We can talk about that.”

  “I’m not going to go there.”

  “Well,” he said again, “we need to think about what’s best here. The law says you have to go to school until you’re sixteen, so that part’s not open to debate. Schism is close by and it’s a perfectly decent school. Its curriculum is a little outdated, that’s true, but it seems to be covering the bases fairly well academically.”

  Jory shook her head.

  “The kids may not be quite what you’re used to.”

  Grace sat down and handed Jory a sandwich. Jory looked at it, then set it down on her plate. “I want to go back to Arco Christian.”

  Her father took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “I realize that. But we’ve already discussed why that might not be the best idea right now.”

  “I wouldn’t talk to anyone about anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Jory glanced at Grace and then back at her father. “I wouldn’t say a word.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t mean to.” He readjusted the place mat, aligning its edges with the table’s. “But that’s not the whole reason.”

  “You’re punishing me, aren’t you? I can’t go back to my school because of the earrings, right?”

  “No. No. That’s not true. Mom and I have forgiven you for that. It’s just, well, we think it might be good for you to have some time away from things—to rethink your situation a bit. Reappraise the way you want to live your life.”

  Grace put her sandwich down. “That sounds a lot like punishment, don’t you think?”

  Jory gave Grace a fleeting look of amazement. She sat up in her chair. “The kids all smoke and swear, Dad. Aren’t you worried about what kind of influence that will be on me? Don’t you care if I start to smoke? Or drink?”

  Her father leaned forward and spread his hands out flat against the tabletop. “I don’t think you will, Jory. I’m fairly certain of the things we’ve taught you.”

  “Fairly certain?”

  “Fairly certain.”

  “I just won’t go, then.” Jory pushed back from the table. She stood up and leaned against her chair. “The truant officer will have to come and get me.”

  “All right,” her father said slowly.

  “All right,” said Jory. She turned and walked through the living room and out the front door.

  Outside it was dark and cool, with a hint of what real fall would bring. Jory sat in the porch swing next to her book bag. She pushed off against the porch’s wooden flooring with her feet and swung back and forth in the darkness. A light was on in Mrs. Kleinfelter’s house. Jory wondered if she was still in the living room watching a silent television. She wondered what Mrs. Kleinfelter was having for dinner. What was it like to live all by yourself, with absolutely no one there? No one to talk to or cry with or even to touch, ever? Jory pulled her sweater sleeves down until they covered her hands. She listened to the swing’s chains groaning where they had been screwed into the wooden slats in the porch’s ceiling.

  Her father opened the front door and came outside. He stood on the door’s threshold, looking out into the evening. He put his hands in his pockets. “Just try it for a semester,” he said. “One semester.”

  “One month,” Jory said.

  “Three months.”

  “One.”

  Her father laughed. “Two months,” he said. “And that’s my final offer.”

  Jory pushed off again with her feet.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “We’re all going to be okay.”

  “Right,” Jory said. She continued to let the swing take her back and forth.

  “Come on,” he said. “Walk with me out to the car.”

  Jory got out of the swing and they started down the steps together. They walked past the shadowy bridal wreath bush and the hollyhocks and the plum tree. “What do you think of your neighbor,” her father asked as they passed Mrs. Kleinfelter’s house.

  “I like her,” Jory said.
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  “Good,” her father said. “She seemed nice when I spoke to her.” Jory’s father stepped over the curb and walked out into the road. He stood next to the driver’s side of the Buick, and then he opened the car door. “We miss you at home,” he said.

  Jory looked into her father’s eyes, which were the exact same color as her own. “You could take us back, then.”

  As they stood next to the car, a truck came quickly down the road toward them. They watched its headlights coming closer. It pulled to a stop next to the Buick and even in the dusky light Jory could read the hand-painted lettering on its side. Grip leaned out the truck’s window. He looked first at Jory and then at her father. “Do either of y’all two know how to get to Lone Star Road from here? I seem to be lost.” He smiled in an open-faced way that made Jory’s heart thrum.

  Jory’s father moved closer to the truck. “Lone Star’s at least a couple miles in the opposite direction,” her father said, pointing. “Back that way,” he said, “to the north.”

  “I must be all turned around.” Grip shook his head. “I never was any good at directions. Not much good at apologies either.” He waved and pulled the truck back out into the street.

  Jory and her father watched the truck’s taillights dwindling away. “Not the brightest fellow,” said her father. “He’s still going the wrong direction. Maybe he’s been drinking.”

  “Maybe,” said Jory, and squeezed her hands together tightly inside her sweater sleeves. She jumped up on her toes and quickly kissed her father’s cheek. “Bye, Dad.”

  “Well, good-bye to you too,” he said, and kissed her back.

  Grace was already doing the dishes. Jory’s bowl of applesauce and her sandwich sat on the table. “It’s not warm anymore, but it’s probably still good,” said Grace, turning around.

  Jory sat down and picked up the sandwich. She suddenly felt incredibly hungry. “We could get a TV,” she said.

  Grace rinsed out a glass. “Pastor Ron says that television is a mind-numbing diversion,” she said. “And that it encourages violence and immorality.”

  Jory rolled her eyes. “Oh, really? Well, who was it that used to sneak out of her bedroom to see Barnabas Collins every day at four o’clock sharp?”

  “What?” Grace turned and faced Jory, her face and birthmark distinctly rosy colored. “I did not. I was just keeping you and Frances company.”

  “You were completely in love with him. Him and his wolf-head cane and his sexy fangs.” Jory made a vampire face and raised her fingers up into claws. “You thought he was devastatingly handsome.” Jory was making most of this up, but Grace, for some reason, blushed even more furiously.

  “Anyway,” said Grace, turning back around and intently scrubbing at a dish, “we don’t have any money, so we couldn’t get one even if we wanted to.”

  “Maybe I could steal one. I’m supposed to be pretty good at that.”

  Grace shook her head.

  Jory spooned up some applesauce and stirred it around in her bowl. “We’re reading Lord of the Flies in English I. It wasn’t allowed at ACA. It’s a banned book or something. Maybe I should call Mom up and tell her I’m reading banned books.”

  “I’d rather read anything than do my trigonometry.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t really have to do it. It’s all just correspondence stuff.”

  Grace scoffed. “Just correspondence stuff? I have to send all my homework off and have it graded the minute I’m done with it. It’s just as hard as regular school, but without any of the good parts.”

  “What good parts?”

  Grace turned off the water and turned around. She leaned against the sink. “You know,” she said, and shrugged helplessly.

  “You mean like football games when it’s cold and they have a bonfire afterward and the Pep Club sells popcorn and apple cider and cinnamon doughnuts? And then everybody gets thrown in the ditch? And the hayride last year with the squirt guns? Remember when Mr. Vanderwoode let them turn his barn into a spook house, and Lydia Quenzer was too scared to go inside but Brian dragged her in anyway and she cried and her mom had to come get her? And then the time Donna Hazen jumped on the trampoline in her dress on the field trip and so we didn’t get to go into the Kuna Caves after all.”

  Grace moved over to the table and sat down in the chair next to Jory’s. “I always loved chapel days and when the choir sang and we lit candles. It felt real. And holy.” Grace smiled. “And the Noontime Bible Study. I felt like I was able to do some genuine witnessing with the other kids then. That I helped strengthen their daily walks with Christ.”

  Jory said nothing. Noontime Bible Study—one of Grace’s proudest achievements—had been popular only with the weirdest of the weird: the loners and the bed wetters and the acne-ridden of Arco Christian. Only those kids who would have been relegated to the farthest tables in the lunchroom willingly attended Noontime Bible Study. Ruthann Hoagterp, who wore dresses down to her freckled calves, and sad, silent, already balding Clarence Muldoon were two of its longtime members. Jory had even heard through the junior high grapevine that Art Tolman had told Grace she should start a club called HAHA—Hicks and Homos Association—and that he had left a note in the school’s suggestion box to that effect. Even at ACA—where it was genuinely difficult to seem odd or unusual—Grace had made a career of being the most sincere and determinedly devout girl the school had ever known. Jory had had to work very, very hard to keep Grace’s reputation as an eternally smiling goody-goody from rubbing off on her own. It was a shameful fact, but several times early in her tenure at Arco Christian Jory had tried to pretend that she didn’t know who Grace was. Later, she had resorted to claiming her older sister was adopted, as if this might explain away Grace’s extreme moral rectitude and apparent lack of self-awareness. Worse yet, when other students would give Jory a half-admiring, half-appalled look and ask whether her sister was “always like that,” Jory would be forced to admit that, yes, she was. She was always like that.

  “And Valentine’s Day, when the Service Club took pink carnations around to each of the classrooms and gave them to people from their secret admirers.” Grace was still reminiscing.

  “And you got one from Darryl Hofstetter.” Jory made a gagging noise. “‘Dear Grace, I like your face, it’s smooth and pink and soft as lace, your friend, Darryl Hofstetter.’ Remember how he used to sit behind you on the bus each day?” Jory shivered with disgust.

  “Oh, he wasn’t so bad. He was actually kind of sweet.”

  “Sweet? You could smell him clear at the front of the bus. Everyone had to open their windows.”

  “That’s mean, Jory. He lived all alone way out on that farm with only his great-grandfather. He didn’t know any better.”

  “He smelled like sour milk! Like wet clothes left all night in a washing machine.”

  “Jesus never cared what people looked like or what they smelled like.”

  “That’s ’cause he never smelled Darryl Hofstetter.”

  Grace threw the dishtowel at Jory and Jory flinched and laughed, catching the towel as it dropped toward the floor.

  “But seriously,” said Grace. “Our bodies don’t have to be everything. They’re only part of us.”

  “Yeah,” said Jory. “But that’s the part of you that has us living out here, you know.”

  Grace seemed to be thinking about something. She gave Jory a crooked smile. “Things smell so weird to me now, and food tastes sort of different too. Even oatmeal tastes strange. Like it almost has meat in it or something.”

  Jory made a face. “Meat?”

  “And I can’t hold my stomach in anymore.” Grace looked down at her midsection. “It’s like my stomach muscles just won’t do anything.”

  “Yuck,” said Jory. “Do you still feel sick?”

  “Sometimes when I first wake up I feel like I’m going to gag or throw up, but inst
ead I just sneeze.”

  “Wow,” said Jory.

  “I know,” said Grace. She laughed and then so did Jory. They laughed and laughed with Grace holding one hand on her stomach. It was a familiar moment, Jory realized—the two of them giggling together—it was just happening in an unfamiliar place and for a very unfamiliar reason. Their laughter died away slowly and they sat silently at the table.

  “Are you scared?” Jory asked.

  “Yes,” said Grace. She sounded surprised to be saying this. “Sometimes I feel like I’m completely alone.”

  Jory was struck.

  “And I miss Frances,” Grace said, as if trying to soften the blow of what she had just said.

  Jory nodded. “Me too. What if she forgets us?”

  “She won’t. She never would.”

  “She might.” Jory listened to the loud tick of the kitchen clock. “It’s my birthday next Sunday.” She studied her folded hands, examining the way her fingers folded over each other. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people. “What if they won’t even come and see me?”

  Grace stood up and walked over to the sink. She turned her back to Jory and immersed her hands in the dishwater again. “Well, then I guess we’ll just have our own party,” she said, picking up another dish to wash. “All by ourselves.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jory and Grace had spent the last hour trying to find an outfit remotely acceptable for Jory’s second day at school.

  “What you have on your body doesn’t really matter,” Grace said, giving up on her search for something that would approximate a pair of bell-bottomed jeans. “It’s how you act and what you say that’s important.”

  “Oh, right, here we go again,” Jory said and rolled her eyes.

  “It’s true,” Grace insisted. “It’s only your spirit that matters.”