“Linda, I really don’t think we should worry about it,” Kurt said. “Samuel is in God’s hands. If the mission president decided to transfer him, that’s his business, not ours. We should pray for Samuel to find those he’s there to find. This isn’t about him having an easy, comfortable experience. It’s about him learning about how to put his own feelings aside and help others.”
I didn’t buy this logic at all. I wanted to know if Samuel was being persecuted. These days, the apostles kept insisting that gay people were part of God’s plan, that they were loved and welcome in the church. As long as they were celibate, anyway, which was the path Samuel had chosen, at least for now. No one had any reason to tell him he was less worthy of membership or service than anyone else. It was just plain bigotry if they did.
I had to work to unloosen my jaw. “You don’t still think that Samuel is going to be ‘cured’ of being gay if he’s faithful enough on his mission, do you?”
“No, Linda, I don’t think that,” Kurt said. He looked away as he spoke, though.
“But you think he should marry a woman and try to become straight?” I pressed him.
“Linda, I don’t want to argue with you about this anymore,” Kurt said. “I just want Samuel to be happy, and I want him to have all of God’s blessings. Right now, he’s on a mission, and that means following the mission rules, including changing companions and locations without complaint when he’s asked.”
I knew all about following rules. I also knew about the price of following rules that were meant for square pegs, not round ones. I didn’t want to see Samuel forced into a role that wasn’t authentic to him.
“I want Samuel to be happy, too, Kurt,” I said, sighing. “I’m just not sure where that will take him or the rest of us.”
“Well, let’s wait until that moment comes and enjoy the present,” Kurt said.
It was a reasonable request, so I let the matter go. For now. I was still trying to live by what I’d told Gwen, about embracing all of the good and realizing that God was there in all of it.
Chapter 5
I got an unexpected phone call from Gwen early the next morning.
“Linda? I need you to come meet me.” Her voice was clipped and urgent.
“Gwen? Where are you?”
“I’m at Gabriela’s apartment.” She gave me an address that wasn’t far from the building the ward had been in—close to the freeway, on the less nice end of town. “Please, can you come over right now?”
“What’s going on?” I asked, wondering if I should call Kurt or the police.
“Gabriela says she’s been accused of embezzling money from the ward. She’s terrified the police are going to come arrest her, and that she’s going to end up deported with her kids left here all alone.”
“Oh no!” I said, hearing Gabriela’s panic through Gwen’s voice. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to worry about your kids having no one to care for them. I didn’t understand where the accusation about her taking money from the ward would even have come from, but I wanted to help the poor woman.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said.
“What’s up?” Kurt asked from his side of the bed.
I explained briefly.
“How could she have taken money from the ward? She can’t even serve in an executive calling as a woman.”
Mormon wards were very careful about who handled money. There were only a few men designated to take the gray envelopes that held offerings and tithing, and even then, they weren’t supposed to open or count the money unless there was more than one of them there watching to make sure it was all deposited properly.
“Maybe she had access to one of the billing accounts at the grocery store?” I asked dubiously.
“I guess, but most of the time, people just get receipts and are reimbursed.”
“Well, Gwen could be confused,” I said. “I didn’t talk directly to Gabriela.”
“All right. Go on, then. I hope you can calm them both down. Let me know if you need anything,” Kurt said and gave me a quick smooch on the lips before I left him there, still warm in his covers.
As I drove down the mountain and west toward the Oquirrh mountain range, the sun was high in a clear sky, and it felt more like early September than late October. Leaves were on the ground everywhere, and I could hear them crunch faintly under my tires as I drove.
I pulled into the apartment complex’s parking lot, not far from the prison, which was destined to be moved as soon as the new buildings were finished in Tooele, west of here and far from any population centers. The first apartment building was not in good shape. Patches on the roof needed to be repaired, and the balconies seemed to be falling down. The siding was faded and looked brittle enough to be blown off in one good windstorm. It didn’t look like there had been any maintenance in years on the yellow lawn or the unkempt scrubby pine bushes around the perimeter.
There were at least a dozen young children outside playing on an old rusted playset without any supervision, but I didn’t recognize any of them as Gabriela’s.
I went upstairs and knocked on the apartment door.
“Come in!” called Gwen from inside.
I turned the rusted knob and stepped in. There wasn’t much there in terms of furniture, but the floor was spotless, and the kitchen was at least as clean as my own.
As soon as the children saw me, they came running toward me and yanked on my purse, asking for candy.
Gabriela glanced over at them, but I could see from her tear-streaked face that she was desperate.
“Thank you for coming, Linda,” Gwen said. “I think the kids are hungry, and Gabriela is too worried to deal with them right now.”
Did she have food in the house? I wished Gwen had warned me I should bring something over to feed the kids. I did have more candy, but that wasn’t lunch. Looking in the refrigerator, I saw only milk. I opened a couple of cupboards as Gabriela rattled in Spanish to Gwen, who nodded and made reassuring noises. It made me uncomfortable to imagine being in a situation where I didn’t have enough money to buy food for my children. Things had been tight in the early years with me and Kurt, but never that tight. And Gabriela didn’t have a husband with whom to share the burden. She was applying for DACA, which meant she could end up being deported, too. And then what would happen to her children? I couldn’t help but worry for her.
I found some cans of tuna in the cupboards, and although there wasn’t any mayonnaise, I used margarine to stick the tuna to the homemade bread on the countertop. It was good bread, the gluten strands properly activated so that it held together instead of crumbling.
The children devoured the bread and made no complaint about the tuna fish lacking mayonnaise. They asked about more candy though, and I gave them what I had.
After that, I attempted to entertain them by performing various animal pantomimes. Their favorite was the elephant, which they had me do over and over again until Gabriela and Gwen were finished.
I could only hear snippets of their conversation, all of it in Spanish. The only part I understood was when Gwen gave Gabriela five twenty-dollar bills, crisp from the bank. It wasn’t until we were out of her apartment and standing by my car that Gwen explained to me what was going on.
“She says that Bishop Hope demanded she repay money he gave her for food and medical bills last month,” Gwen explained.
“Why would he do that?” I asked, because it seemed a matter of course that a bishop would offer to cover expenses in a situation like this, a single mother with three small children to care for. I wondered if that could have had to do with Gabriela’s phone call at the church.
“He claimed that she hadn’t turned in the proper receipts,” Gwen said, rolling her eyes at me.
“Seriously? That seems like taking things a step too far.” The Mormon church liked their record-keepin
g, but even the late President Thomas S. Monson had been known for a quote: “Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.” Wasn’t that what was happening here?
“I can believe it of Greg Hope. It’s all about what makes him look good,” Gwen said.
I didn’t give a hoot about the bishop at the moment. I cared about those kids. And Gabriela. “Should we go back so I can give her some money, as well?” I suggested. Kurt and I always had enough and to spare, and what else was money for but helping people?
“I told her we’d come back tomorrow after I talked to Bishop Hope about her situation. I promised her that I’d make sure he didn’t call the police on her,” Gwen said. “That seemed far more important to her than money right now.”
I thought about the nearly empty refrigerator I’d opened, but sighed. “All right. Would it help if I got Kurt to call Bishop Hope and talk about the situation? Maybe he can get the stake president involved as well.”
“Thank you. That will probably be better for Gabriela. Men in the church always listen better to other men,” Gwen said sourly.
At home that night, I asked Kurt if he’d contact the stake president about the money problem in the Spanish ward. I explained what Gabriela had told Gwen.
Kurt rubbed at his bald spot. “Linda, I can’t do that. It’s none of my business. Not to mention it’s not within my realm of authority. Only the stake president can talk to another bishop about problems in his ward.”
The sacred church hierarchy, of course, but I had prepared a counterargument. “You can talk about it as a problem for Gwen. She’s a member of your ward, and she has questions about how money is being managed in that ward, where she has a calling. Wouldn’t that work?”
Kurt gave me a skeptical look, but he promised he’d call and “feel out the situation.” “Have you considered that you’re assuming that Gabriela is telling the truth when she might not be?” he pointed out.
“Why would she lie?” I asked.
“Because she’s desperate and needs the money,” Kurt suggested. “But it might not even necessarily be a lie. Maybe she’s just frightened and a little confused.”
I seriously doubted that was what was going on. “You’re taking Greg Hope’s side because he’s a bishop,” I said.
“Well, I guess I do assume there’s a reason he was made a bishop. He has to have served well in the past. So maybe I do give his side of the story more credence than hers.”
I was boiling over with fury at this point. How were women supposed to be given credence if they were never granted positions of authority? But men didn’t seem to see the problem, because they were never on this side of it. Even good men like Kurt couldn’t see it.
“Seems like if you’re a woman and you’re not white, you’re always going to be considered lesser in this church,” I blurted out in frustration.
“Linda, I think you’re too emotionally involved to look at this clearly. Whenever there’s a woman you think is being oppressed, you blame the church,” Kurt said.
“And there’s a reason for that,” I said pointedly. “Women are often abused by the system of patriarchy in the church and by the men within it who benefit from that system.” I sounded like one of my own college essays on feminism, but I wasn’t ashamed of it.
“Fine. I’ll do my best. But bishops are usually in the business of helping people, you know.”
“Then why is Bishop Hope threatening to call the police on her?” I asked.
Kurt had no answer for that.
He went to bed and I went online, trying to seek out an organization that might help an undocumented immigrant in a situation like this. To my surprise, I found a Facebook group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, or MWEG, that had been around since late 2016. There were thousands of women in it, from every part of the United States. I couldn’t see anything but the public posts, which were all about rallies to stop immigrants from being deported, fundraising to help defray the costs of court battles, and actions to send letters to our members of Congress to plead for them to reinstate DACA and stop ICE raids on working families. I asked to be added, then got to work putting together a care package of food staples—flour, sugar, oil, and canned foods—and hoped it wouldn’t be received negatively the next time I saw Gabriela.
Chapter 6
The next day, Kurt came home and told me he’d had a meeting with President Frost about Gabriela and Bishop Hope.
“And?” I asked eagerly.
“And he said that Bishop Hope personally employs more than half the people in his ward at his business.”
Kurt clearly thought this was a heroic effort. I wasn’t convinced. “What does that have to do with the embezzling charge against Gabriela? That has nothing to do with his business.” Whatever it was.
“He also said that the Spanish ward has been in the red for months, and the stake isn’t sure they can cover the deficit. They’re going to have to go to the regional level for more financial help, and President Frost sounded embarrassed about it.”
This was probably information Kurt wasn’t supposed to tell me, but he had anyway. I tried my best to feel grateful for that. “So Gabriela could be telling the truth,” I said. “If the bishop is pressuring her to repay funds, he could have threatened to call the police.”
“It’s possible,” Kurt admitted. “But at this point, we should probably let President Frost take over. He said he’d bring Greg Hope and Gabriela together and negotiate a solution. He said that he probably needed to go over the rules again about what people needed to do to qualify for help.”
It made me sick sometimes that we had people “qualify” for help when the Mormon church was so rich in assets, from cattle farms to stocks to buildings and property. During the Depression, the church had begun a policy of only giving help to those who were attending church and serving in callings, and they had to do extra service hours each week to repay the help in part. The same policy had been extended to the present, most of the time.
“Did he say he’d make sure she wasn’t arrested?” I asked, thinking it was the very least he could do.
“Not exactly,” Kurt said uncomfortably. “But he strongly implied it.”
And that was probably as good as we’d get.
“What about Bishop Hope?” I asked, thinking about Gwen’s negative impression of him. “Do you know anything about him?”
He shrugged. “Not personally, but it’s Greg Hope, you know. The basketball player,” he said. “From BYU.”
It took me another minute to place the name with a face. And then I was astonished to realize I did know him, at least from TV.
“The guy from the car wash commercial?” If he was who I thought he was, he’d done a series of commercials for a local car wash where he had dribbled soap bubbles like basketballs and shot them at a hoop. The car wash had long since gone under.
“That was his first business. He’s much more successful now,” Kurt said.
“At making money or church leadership?” I wasn’t sure what Kurt was trying to say here. I knew Mormon bishops didn’t have to go to theology school or have any formal training. They just had to be considered worthy males who could handle the responsibilities of the job. In my mind, too many bishops were considered the “right material” if they were successful in business or were well known and well liked. It didn’t make them morally upright, compassionate, or even good leaders.
“Back in the day, he had one of the highest-ever records of baptisms for a missionary in the church,” Kurt said.
“What? I never heard about that.” I was also immediately suspicious. I hated when people talked about conversions in terms of numbers. It made it seem like the church was some kind of sales opportunity, and the best missionaries were pushy salespeople. In my experience, good missionaries were more thoughtful and didn’t press religion on people
unless they were interested, but that usually didn’t stack the numbers.
“I understand he baptized over one thousand people in his two years in Mexico,” Kurt went on.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “One thousand people? That’s ten a week. How long did he talk to each of them? Ten minutes?”
I’d heard some stories about what had happened in the ’70s and ’80s when the church was having incredible success in Central and South America. That missionaries had taken kids to the beach and promised them ice cream cones if they were baptized. Or made a detour after a basketball camp instead of heading for the showers after the game. Or baptized young women who thought they were going to be taken to the United States as brides. And on and on. It was a time when anything American was seen as desirable in poorer countries, and to take advantage of that was pretty low, if you asked me. It was definitely not a reason to give someone a leadership position.
Kurt shrugged. “It was what the church needed to grow there at the time. They saw his success as proof of his obedience and leadership.”
I saw it as proof of something else. “Is that really the kind of man who gets higher positions in the church these days?” I asked. What a legacy we were leaving for the next generation, if this was so. The members baptized so quickly in Central and South America were rarely active even just one month after baptism. I wasn’t sure what the point was in counting baptisms like that if the wards and stakes weren’t growing commensurately. How many people did the average ward in that area have in it on paper? Three times as many as a regular ward in the US? Ten times as many?
And then what happened? The real members in those wards were tasked with the impossible job of trying to track the members who had been baptized so hastily and try to convince them to come back to full activity in the church. It was a terrible burden to put on the already overburdened members in such a poverty-stricken area.
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