“Stop it,” I say. “Stop talking about her. You didn’t even know her. You weren’t even—”
“I did,” he says, cutting me off. “I knew her.”
“No you didn’t.” How can he even say that? Is he trying to make me mad? “You only came to town like two years ago.”
“I came back to town. I’m from here, Jo. You really didn’t know that?”
I didn’t.
But why should I? I hate the guy.
Grandma Margaret hates him too. Says he’s all show. Says his idea of preaching in bars to reach the sinners on their own turf is just an excuse to drink on the job. If she knew about the pastor and Aggie she’d probably drop dead on the spot.
Maybe that’s why Aggie is dating him. Maybe she didn’t get a chance to rebel properly when she was my age—Mama was rebellious enough for both of them—so she’s doing it now. It makes no sense otherwise. Aggie and the pastor are opposites in every way.
“Fine, whatever. I’m going to bed,” I say, shaking my pajamas out.
“I saw what happened to her,” the pastor says. “What her choices led to. It would break Aggie’s heart if she thought you were headed the same way.”
Can he really have known Mama? I look at him, really look at him. He’s got this doughy kind of face, boyish. Always clean-shaven. I know he’s a few years younger than Aggie, which I guess puts him around the same age as Mama.
“It would break Aggie’s heart,” he goes on, “if she knew you were trying to climb out your bedroom window on the very same night the cops brought you home.”
He’s made his point already. He’s just rubbing it in, the righteous asshole.
“Don’t tell her, then,” I snap.
“I won’t,” he says.
“You won’t?” I wasn’t expecting that.
“If you agree to my conditions.”
Ah, right. I feel another fuck you hovering on the tip of my tongue, but I bite it back.
“If you tell on me I’ll just tell everyone in town about you,” I say. “You and Aggie.”
Maybe if I do, I’ll get lucky and Grandma Margaret will come by with her shotgun.
He shrugs. “Go ahead. I don’t care who knows.”
Bullshit. “Why are you always sneaking around then?”
“It’s for Aggie.” He pushes himself up from the window. “She doesn’t want people to talk.”
Is he bluffing? I honestly can’t tell. Aggie has always been really private about her personal life. It’s funny, because she’s a terrible gossip when it comes to other people’s business. Maybe that’s why she keeps secrets herself.
Or maybe it’s because of Mama.
Everyone in town knows about Mama. Knows what happened. Whispers about it. When they look at me sometimes I can see their thoughts as clearly as if they were written on their foreheads. Isn’t it just too tragic, what happened to her mother? But then again, that girl always was a wild one. We all saw it coming. Oh yes, she had it coming. Better hope this little apple fell a long way from that tree.
Well, whatever. They can all go to hell. None of them really knew Mama. And none of them know me.
The pastor strides toward me. I back up. My hands grope at my bedside table, close over a hairbrush, but the pastor stops a few feet away, with the bed between us.
“I am going to help you, Jo,” he says. “I am on your side.”
“You are definitely not.”
“I am,” he says. “I swear. I’ll see what I can find out about your friend, let you know as soon as I hear anything. But that’s exactly what I’m talking about. The kind of reckless behavior you are engaging in isn’t safe. I’m trying to help you.”
I open my mouth to tell him where he can shove his so-called help, but then I stop.
This is exactly what he wants, isn’t it? The little lost lamb running straight into the jaws of the wolf, so intent on doing wrong that the shepherd has no choice but to break its legs. It’s the story he’s trying to write me into. His story. And I’m playing the role he’s written for me to perfection.
“Fine,” I say, “I don’t care. I’m going to sleep.” I swallow my hate and lie down on the bed, still in my jeans and hoodie. I cross my arms, close my eyes, pretend the pastor isn’t there. I’ll wait. I’ll write my own damn story, one without him in it at all.
“May the angels watch over you always,” he says, before he leaves. “May they never let you out of their sight.”
* * *
—
I wake to a pounding headache and Aggie banging on my bedroom door.
“I’m up!” I shout. “I’m up.”
I ooze my way slowly out of bed. If I turn my head too fast I swear I can feel my brain slamming against my skull. Flashes of last night, each one worse than the last, come back to me.
Lee. Running, trailing her ripped lace. Does she have any idea how close she came to being caught?
I inspect my left wrist in the morning light. It’s red and so swollen that I can no longer make out the bite marks. The skin, when I gently prod it with my finger, is hot as a summer sidewalk. I pull on my baggiest top: a gray 3XL Lester Middle School Track and Field hoodie that my coach ordered by accident. The sleeves are long enough that only the tips of my fingers are visible.
Out in the kitchen, Aggie’s making pancakes. I don’t remember her ever making pancakes before. She’s even humming. The smell of burnt oil fills the whole second floor. Smoke sizzles up from the cast iron pan.
It reminds me of when we first moved here and she’d cook for us downstairs in the bar kitchen. It was just me and her, back then. I thought of her as old, the way kids think of all grown-ups, but she was only in her twenties. She’d never lived on her own before, never had the money to afford it, so those first weeks were thrilling for both of us, like an endless sleepover, free of Margaret’s supervision. Aggie would fry mozzarella sticks and onion rings for dinner. She let me eat maraschino cherries straight out of the jar. She was more like a big sister than a parent. We would stay up all night. Watch late-night reruns, gossip about the patrons of the bar.
Aggie would tell me about her childhood, about Grandpa Joe taking her out to hunt deer. How much she loved it. She told me how she’d been called a tomboy all her life, how nobody thought she was pretty, unlike her sister (and her voice got tight when she said that word and she looked away and I thought she’d cry), but Let me tell you, Jo, she’d said, being pretty is overrated. You know what happened to all the pretty girls in my school? They had babies and got married and they spend their days running around cleaning up after their kids and husbands and nobody cares if they were pretty once. Don’t try to be pretty, Jo. Better to be tough. Better to be hard and smart. Better to be free.
I miss it, miss how Aggie used to be, before the pastor came along. She’s been different since they started seeing each other. She’s distracted. She doesn’t have time for me, and even when she does, she acts less like a sister and more like a mom.
I know exactly whose fault that is.
The pastor’s sitting in his now-usual spot at the card table. There’s a fleck of shaving cream on his neck, which means he must have shaved this morning in our bathroom. I bet there’ll be tiny dark hairs all over the sink, clinging to the faucet, stuck in the grouting.
I sit. Aggie slides a plate with two lopsided pancakes on it in front of me, and as she leans down I notice a reddish blotch on her neck. The same kind Savannah is always so proud of, making a point to swish her hair, tug at the neck of her shirt, show it off.
Aggie has a hickey.
“I feel sick,” I say. The pancakes are slightly burnt. They’ve got chocolate chips in them, but those are even more burnt, lodged like little black coal deposits in the lumpy pancake hills.
“I’m sure you do,” says Aggie. She plunks a mug of black coff
ee on the table in front of me so forcefully that some of it sloshes onto my plate and soaks into the pancakes. “That’s what they call a hangover. Serves you right.”
I guess the cops told on us for drinking. Or else she could smell it on me when I came home.
“Have you heard anything about Henry?” I ask. “Is he okay?”
Aggie exchanges a glance with the pastor and my stomach drops. Surely he can’t be…
“I made some calls,” the pastor says. “Sounds like the kid’ll be just fine.”
He shoves a whole pancake into his mouth, smiles at me, cheeks puffed out. Aggie has turned back to the stove. She slops more batter into the pan. I push my plate away.
“Can I call Savannah now?” I ask.
“Go get dressed,” Aggie says, without turning around. “The pastor is going to take you to Saturday-morning Bible study.”
“Bible study?” No way I just heard those words come out of Aggie’s mouth.
When Aggie and I still lived with Grandma Margaret, God was always this tug-of-war between them: Margaret trying to get me to say thank you, Jesus before each meal, Aggie cutting in loudly to say, Thank you, cow who died to make this burger, thank you, Fred who works the meat counter at the Kroger, don’t fill her head with nonsense, Ma, that’s what you did with the two of us and see how that turned out.
“Yes,” says Aggie, “and don’t even try to wriggle out of it. You earned this.” So it’s a punishment. In the old days she never punished me.
The pastor grins at me. This was his idea, obviously He must have talked Aggie into it. Go die in a fire, I think. I picture it, the flames licking up the sides of his face, fake silk jacket dripping off his back, skin bubbling.
“You going to eat those?” he asks. I shake my head, too full of hate to speak, and he reaches over with his fork, steals a soggy bite.
* * *
—
I reluctantly follow the pastor, dragging my feet and kicking at stones on the pavement, over to Minnie’s Home Cooking, which is just two blocks from the bar, down Main Street. It’s a short building, sandwiched between the old Elks Club and a pile of rubble that used to be a lawyer’s office. Inside, the ceiling sags and the floor bulges in the middle, the gray-blue carpet rumpled up like waves. The walls are lined with old photos of Lester from when the mines were still open.
Savannah and I used to come here after school sometimes. It costs a dollar seventy-five for a grilled cheese sandwich, crisp and buttery. Seventy-five cents for a side of fries.
I wish Savannah were here with me now, instead of the pastor. Last night was stupid, yes, reckless. But this is too cruel a punishment.
Minnie’s is packed. People turn to look at me as I pass. Do I look that bad? Or have they heard about last night? I hope not. I keep my head down, pretend I don’t notice them. The pastor and I sit at a table beneath a photo of Lester during the 1907 flood.
“We’re a little early,” he says. “You want some pie?”
The day’s flavors are on a whiteboard by the counter: key lime, chocolate cream, peanut butter, peach. I wish I could say yes, but I know he’s just trying to bribe me.
“I don’t like pie,” I say, which is perhaps the biggest lie I’ve ever told.
“Suit yourself.” The pastor waves the waitress—Lacey, one of Minnie’s daughters—over and orders a slice of key lime.
“You getting anything?” Lacey asks me. She’s friends with Savannah’s older sister, so she knows me.
“I’ll have a root beer,” I say.
“Sure thing, wolf girl,” says Lacey, with an exaggerated smile, before she swishes away.
I dig my fingernails into my palms, force my expression to stay neutral. So she’s heard about last night. Heard the details, even. The bite on Henry’s neck. My lie about the wolf.
Everybody’s probably heard. The whole damn town.
Who told them? Jack? Savannah? What about Henry? Did he say what I told him to? Does he remember seeing Lee? Did he tell anyone about her? I don’t know what I’d do, if my secret got out. The pastor clears his throat.
I close my eyes. I want to open them and be back in the woods two nights ago, running through the forest with my sister, letting all the pointless daytime things go streaming out of my head like so much smoke. Out there, at night, it all seems like nothing. Electric lights, math books, judgmental people, closed doors. There’s no use for any of them. The trees are spreading their arms wide. The sky is limitless, dark and full of stars.
I open my eyes. The pastor has pulled a thick gold book from his bag.
“You ever read any of this?” he asks.
“Of course,” I snap. He probably thinks I’m some ignorant little heathen who just needs to be shown the light. But I’ve had plenty of exposure to religion in my life.
“Apologies,” he says. “I wasn’t sure.” Grandma Margaret bought me an illustrated Bible for my fifth birthday. I can still remember the watercolor painting of Noah’s ark. Cheery little blob animals lined up on the deck. The broad blue-green swoop of the waves. And in the foreground, sticking up from the water, so small that anybody who wasn’t looking real close would probably miss it: a hand.
Grandma Margaret’s version of religion was like that picture. Sunlight and happiness and God’s love if you followed all the rules, if you were the right kind of person. But the ones who didn’t make it on that boat? They didn’t matter. They deserved what was coming to them.
I understand why Aggie wants no part of it. She raised me to be skeptical, tried to provide a counterbalance to Margaret’s dogma. It was hard to have much of an opinion on my own, caught between the two of them.
“Aggie says it’s all lies,” I tell the pastor. Her atheism’s got to be a sore spot, right? Maybe if I press it hard enough I can make him suffer as much as I’m suffering. “She says a bunch of dumb old men wrote it.”
The pastor flinches a little. I silently congratulate myself.
Aggie dating the pastor is the height of hypocrisy. She hates religion, hates women who throw away everything in the pursuit of romance, who change themselves for a man. I desperately hope she hasn’t started to believe any of the things the pastor preaches about, hope he doesn’t have that kind of power over her, hope that it’s just a fling and it will burn itself out.
I’ve been hoping that since the beginning of summer, though.
“If you think you’re going to convert her or something you’re crazy,” I tell the pastor. “Aggie wouldn’t believe in God if he showed up in the bar and ordered a double scotch on the rocks.”
The pastor is flipping through the pages of the gold Bible. His face has gone a little red. I am running imaginary victory laps around the smug bastard.
“You know,” he says, not looking up, “your Mama and me used to go to Bible study together.”
“Yeah, right,” I say. I know what he’s up to. He’s just trying to get a rise out of me, the same way I was doing to him.
“It’s true. With Pastor Nelson. In his living room. We all had to kneel on the floor for ten minutes at the end while he led prayer. He had hardwood floors. Not even an area rug. Thought pain was good for the soul or something. Jolene, though, she would wait until he closed his eyes, then she’d pull off her cardigan and use it as a cushion. When the prayer was almost done, she’d sneak it back on before the pastor noticed.”
I can’t help myself, I’m imagining it. Mama kneeling there on her sweater, smiling beatifically while the other kids stare.
“She was really quite devout,” the pastor goes on. “Came every week. She knew this book backward and forward.” He shakes the Bible in front of him.
“That doesn’t sound like her,” I say, which is stupid, I know. I never met her, not really. But everybody says she was wild. Grandma Margaret calls her a sinner, says she had the devil in her. “She dra
nk and smoked and hung out with a bad crowd. Everybody says so.”
“People can be more than one thing,” says the pastor.
If I’d been drinking something, I might have spit it out. I blink at him, uncomfortable with how close that is to how I feel about myself. A girl with a shadow side.
“Yeah,” I say cautiously. “They can.”
“She had this little silver cross necklace,” he goes on. “She told me once that she never took that necklace off, even at night. Even in the shower.”
He stares down at the open Bible in his hands. I realize I am leaning forward in my chair and I force myself to sit back, hating myself for my own eagerness, for how much I want to believe him.
I’m trying to remember if Mama had on a cross necklace in the pictures I’ve seen. I haven’t seen many. Grandma Margaret ripped all the photos of Mama out of the family albums. But once I snuck down into the basement and rooted around in the dusty cardboard boxes until I found an envelope with a newspaper clipping and a few snapshots. I wanted to keep them all, but I was worried that Grandma Margaret would find out and punish me, so I only kept one, Mama’s sophomore photo, the same one they reproduced in the papers when she went missing. I hid it behind some peeling wallpaper in my room. I used to look at it every night before I went to sleep. Used to talk to it.
“The last time I saw her,” the pastor says, “she was wearing it then, too.”
I guess he figured out that this is the way to get to me. Not threats, not pie.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I ask. I’m giving in, I know, taking the bait, but I have to know. If there’s even a chance that he’s telling the truth, I want every last scrap. I’d give in to the devil himself for that kind of knowledge.
“It was outside Pastor Nelson’s house,” he says. “About two weeks before…well, before what happened. We hadn’t seen her for months, not since it came out that she was pregnant, but she showed up to study and she wanted us to pray for her.”
Some Kind of Animal Page 6
