“My mom’s on a motorcycle,” I said.
“Television,” he said, offering the word like a consolation prize, gesturing to the small screen mounted above the Slurpee machine that no longer housed Slurpee.
I took a palm-sized green Bible, small enough to fit in a pocket, so convenient, from my purse and set it on the counter. “You open to Vern’s work in your life, sir?” I said.
He looked at the Bible but didn’t touch it. “Mom likes beer” was all he said.
“I wish you would pretend to be out of stock when she comes.”
He slid a pack of watermelon gum across the counter. “I can give you candy and that’s all I can do. Don’t ask me for cigarettes.”
What would it be like if Bob were my father? I could spend my days working at the Wine Baron, saving all the patrons who came in for their fix. We could fill the bottles of whiskey with food coloring water and my mother could be in love and we could bring Bob to Vern and Vern would convince Bob to make her not drink anymore. I wanted to ask if he was married, but then I saw myself through his eyes and knew he would not want a daughter like me, grease-haired and begging for help in a quickie mart, a wife driving drunk through town, getting on trashy men’s motorcycles for no reason.
“You should get rid of those dirties you got back there,” I said. I pointed to the adult entertainment aisle where I’d accidentally lifted the yellow plastic cover off one of the magazines the week before and not understood, not entirely, what I’d seen. All the flesh pressed together sent a shock through me, the slick shaved skin, the faces of the women painted and hard.
“I sell what people want,” he said. “And everyone wants that.”
I left Bob to tend his cigarettes and waited for what felt like hours outside the Wine Baron. I spat on the ground between my feet. I wondered if I’d have to walk home. If the motorcycle man would be with her when they finally showed up and, if so, if he’d never leave. What would he need from me? I was older now and the thought scared me.
But then she came: my mother, like a mirage, back from the ride, her voice high-pitched, carefree, a performance for the man. She looked revived, cheeks red, clutching him like they’d known each other for years. “You have to do it, Lacey! It’s amazing.”
“Better make room on that motorcycle for God,” I said.
The man said, “Come on, little country girl, when you gonna get to ride a hog like this again?” There was a laugh in his eyes but I knew the quick underside of it would be a violent hand.
“Feel this motor!” my mother squealed like the dumbest person alive.
I looked at her. “Tell me where you go,” I said. “Or I’ll tell everyone you’ve been sinning.”
She smiled. “You don’t know what I’ve been dealing with, little girl.”
“Take me with you, then.”
The man grunted, bored. He needed my mother’s attention. “She’s got baggage,” I said to him.
“Come on, Lacey, be nice,” she said sweetly, but the man guided her roughly off the bike by her arm and pulled out of the parking lot. I knew we’d never see him again.
On the drive home I wanted her to say it was all a joke, that she wasn’t pulling us into that same hole we’d lived in before our conversion. But she didn’t, and I felt us falling and falling and fear filled me, for I knew the hole we were going down would be darker than ever now that we’d been living in the light.
The next Sunday my mother was drunksick. She lay in bed and writhed around like the possessed. I pressed a cross to her forehead for healing. I said, God, please God.
She swatted the cross away. “That doesn’t work.”
I pulled back, stunned, for we’d seen it work countless times. Seen Vern pull sickness from the mouths of children, seen old Wendall Meeker, a Vietnam vet with no cartilage in his knee and a bad heart, hobble in and lie before Vern, and Vern had restored the knee, and Wendall walked out of there with the strength of a boy, his memory wiped clean of the war that ailed him each night like the cruelest hammering. His sure steps were proof alone to me, but my mother acted like she’d never seen such enchantment.
I guided her to the bathtub where she vomited yellow into the water. I took a cup and poured some of the filth over her head. “Be baptized!” My voice echoed in the tiny room. She covered her ears. I pulled her up by the underarms and I dried her and dressed her. “We never miss church,” I said.
“I made you into a fool,” she slurred.
I grabbed the keys and guided her out the door.
She vomited into a dead stick bush outside that used to bloom poisonous white flowers in the spring and each spring my mother would tell me as if for the first time of the boy who cooked a hot dog on a branch from a plant just like that one and how he had dropped dead after eating it.
In the parking lot, she considered the Rabbit, her body tilting to find balance. Finally she walked around to the passenger side and got in. “You drive,” she said, challenging me, thinking probably that I’d back down.
But no. In the name of Vern I jerked us down Old Canal Road, braking and jolting, my mother giggling, sunglasses over her makeupless eyes, unknown bruises up her bare legs, offering me no direction on how to operate a vehicle. Part of me wanted to laugh, too, just pull over and die of laughter, let this whole sadness kill me.
I led her into the pew and we sat next to Grandma Cherry. She looked at my mother and then at me and shook her head.
“Summer flu?” she asked. She poked my mother’s leg. “Smells like a tavern after a fight.”
My heart pounded. I knew in this moment that it was a mistake to have come at all, but if we didn’t show up Vern or an elder would surely have come looking. I had imagined them finding her sick in bed, casing our apartment, deciding we were unfit believers. They might throw us out of the church and then what would be the point of living at all?
The Body pressed into pews, avoiding the nails that poked up from the old wooden seats. I looked at the pulpit and hoped my cousin Lyle, two years my senior and recently well blessed with spirit speak, would come in soon to distract Cherry from my mother, who was sinking down in her seat, spineless, head to one side.
I was never to have ill feelings toward the church and I never had. But a small voice within me kept nudging. My mother had only begun this downhill slide since she’d taken her assignment. I had almost thought to follow her some days to see what she was doing, but the Rabbit seemed to speed away from me so fast. I didn’t want to imagine her assignment was somehow pulling her away from the church, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Vern had given her something she clearly couldn’t handle.
“Happy Easter, ladies,” an older man named Gentry Roo said as he found his seat.
Happy Easter. I looked around and realized every girl except me wore white frills and that every woman except my mother wore a white floor-length canvas dress, and the men wore their sequined capes of many colors. Vern had said the capes were delivered by angels, so everyone who laid eyes upon the men of the church would be pulled into belief, the capes so hypnotic. Like many traditions of the church, I couldn’t remember when exactly the capes arrived for the men, only that they did. Cherry wore black for she was widowed, and my mother and I were in jean dresses smudged with dirt. On my mother’s feet was an unmatched pair of flip-flops.
Lyle walked in and came straight for Cherry and kissed her on the cheek, but his eyes were on my mother and me. I tried to nudge her so she’d sit up, look alive, but her legs splayed apart instead. He sat between Aunt Pearl, my mother’s older sister,