"Yes!" someone yelled from the back of the church. "How?"
"Less than a month ago, Dwayne Coffey was in this church, sitting where one of you now is," the pastor continued. "His wife and lovely little girls seated by his side. And when the service ended, and I stood outside, I saw Dwayne and asked him how he was. I knew about his battles with his demons. Many times we'd talked about them, prayed together.
"Crystal had turned her back to him, looking after the little girls, or pausing to talk to one of the many people who loved her. And Dwayne said to me, hardly louder than a whisper, 'Pastor Hendrick, my soul has died. I know it just as sure as I know the sky is blue.' He looked me straight in the eye when he said it, and I knew it was true. Souls can die before people. We've all seen that happen. We all know that sense of powerlessness we feel when someone we love is lost to Satan.
"We forget sometimes that accepting Christ as our savior isn't something we do once or twice in our lives. It's something we have to do every single moment of every single day. Just because Christ is in our heart doesn't mean Satan is satisfied to leave us alone. For Satan, no soul is off-limits. Not Dwayne's, not yours, not mine. Satan puts his temptations in all our paths. 'Look this way,' he says. 'Here's lust. Here's drink. Here's envy and anger, greed and resentment.' And all of us, not just Dwayne, but you and me, we all give in to those temptations at some point or another. We are all guilty. We all allow Satan to chip away at our souls. Some days, with Christ's help, we're stronger than Satan. Some days, even with Christ at our side, Satan wins the battle.
"Yes, Dwayne Coffey was a Christian. I baptized him. I struggled with him against his demons. But Satan was stronger than Dwayne. And Dwayne's soul died.
"Satan may have won that battle," Pastor Hendrick continued. "But it was Crystal Ballard and her beautiful little daughters who won the war. Because we know when Dwayne raised his knife to them, their hearts and their souls went straight to heaven, straight to the loving embrace of their Father, their savior. The girls were too young to have sinned, too young for Satan to care about. And whatever sins Crystal might have committed in the everyday course of her everyday life, those sins were washed away in the blood she shed trying to save the lives of her precious daughters. Crystal Ballard died for the love of her children just as surely as Christ died for the love of us all.
"So as we grieve at our loss, our horrific loss, let us also rejoice for the four souls Satan cannot have. Let us celebrate God's power and give ourselves to it and vow to do battle against Satan in his many wicked forms. Let us vow to love with the purity of Crystal's love, the purity of those dear little girls' love, the purity of Christ's love. Now let us pray."
He began the recitation of the twenty-third Psalm, which I recited along with Trace, with Granny Coffey, with everyone else in the church and most likely everyone else outside. I was comforted by the familiarity of the words, by the sense of being part of a whole far greater than me. And I was grateful that someone had offered an explanation I could understand for an act I could never truly understand.
Then a man walked to the pulpit. "I'm Michael Ballard," he said. "Crystal's brother." He took a deep breath. "I want to thank Pastor Hendrick for his words of wisdom. I was one of those full of questions. But through Christ's mercy, I have found an answer. Heaven must have been short four angels. God looked at all of us and found the four most perfect..." He began to weep and walked away.
A younger woman approached the pulpit. She was carrying a guitar.
"My name is Sarah Towner," she said. "Some of you know me from this church. Some of you know me from school. I was Kelli Marie's kindergarten teacher." She took a deep breath, and I could see she was fighting her tears. "Kelli Marie was a dear little girl, and she loved her mother and her baby sisters very much. She loved to sing. She told me once this was her favorite song. It's a song we sing in school, but Kelli Marie knew all the words before I taught it in class. She said she sang it all the time to Kadi and Krissi. So I'm singing it for all of them."
She began to strum her guitar and sing.
The itsy-bitsy spider
Climbed up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain
And the itsy-bitsy spider
Climbed up the spout again
I started to cry, and my tears soon became sobs of hysteria. They couldn't be stopped. I had no control anymore. Everything halted, everyone stared, and I kept weeping, until finally Trace lifted me up and dragged me down the aisle, out of the church, into Faye's warm and accepting embrace.
Twenty
"I'M GOING TO GET DRUNK," Faye informed me that night. "Not roaring, fall-on-the-floor drunk. Just drunk enough to forget the sight of those little coffins. I'm sorry, sweetie. It's not a Dairy Queen night. It's a getting-drunk night."
I nodded. Faye was already on her fourth beer, so she wasn't telling me something I hadn't guessed.
"Shame you can't get drunk," Faye said. "I'd offer you a beer or three, but Terri'd kill me."
"No, that's okay," I said. I'd made enough of a fool of myself that day without needing to get drunk on top of it.
Faye had started out drinking from a glass, but around the third beer she went straight to the bottle. She took another swig. "Worst thing I ever saw," she said. "Not that I could see much from outside. More like what I felt I saw. We all felt it out there. We all felt those coffins, those poor little girls' coffins."
I thought about how the girls had shared a bedroom, the twins had shared a bed, and now they would share the earth beneath their tombstone, three little coffins, almost touching each other and their mother's, but separated for all eternity.
"You all right?" Faye asked me, not for the first time that evening.
"I'm fine," I said. "I'm sorry I lost control."
"I never saw anyone cry like you did today," Faye said. "It was like you were crying for the whole world."
I cringed. I had no business crying the way I had, no right. They were my sisters by blood only. They weren't like Brooke and Alyssa, whom I'd shared everything with for most of my life. No one who saw me could possibly think I was crying for Kelli Marie and Kadi and Krissi. They'd think I was a fraud. Why shouldn't they? That's what I thought.
"Good for you to cry," Faye said. "You keep things bottled up. Terri says that all the time, that you keep too much to yourself."
I bent down to scratch Moe's ears. I liked Moe. He didn't care who scratched his ears, just as long as someone did.
"You look like Budge," Faye said, starting on her fifth beer. "Your eyes, your mouth, they're Budge Coffey all over again. And maybe a little of you is like Budge. There was some goodness to him. I knew him most of his life. I saw the good along with the bad."
I had also. That made it almost worse, remembering the man who pushed me on the swing, who kissed me good night, who sang "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" every time I asked.
"But you're Terri's daughter," Faye said, "in every way that counts. Doesn't matter who you look like. Inside, you're like Terri."
I shrugged. There had been moments during the last few days when I felt like I understood Mom, Terri Doreen Penders Coffey McDougal. But there'd been more moments when I felt like I could never understand her. There were too many lies, too many unspoken truths.
Maybe I didn't want her to understand me either. Maybe I was afraid, always afraid, not just for the past few days but for every day since we escaped Pryor, that if Mom understood me, she'd see the Coffey in me and her love for me would curdle and die.
Faye put down her beer and stared at me. "Just like your momma," she said. "Terri'd rather cut her heart into a thousand little pieces than do something, say something, that might upset people. Jack. I mean Jack. And those spoiled-rotten daughters of his. She doesn't even want to upset their momma, who treats her no better than a nanny. 'Take the girls here. Take the girls there. Bandage their knees. Listen to
their prayers.' Never let them know how she feels, though. Keeps all of that inside her."
"Mom doesn't feel like their nanny," I said. "She loves the girls. They love her. We're a family."
Faye snorted. "Family, my ass," she said. "Families fight. Wives fight. They don't just say 'Yes, Jack. Whatever you think, Jack.'"
"Jack doesn't like fights," I said. "He hates them."
"What does he have to fight about?" Faye asked. "He's got everything he wants. His daughters grab whatever they can get, and you and Terri are grateful for the crumbs. She worships the ground he walks on, and you act like he's a saint."
"He's not a saint," I said. "But we are lucky." I thought about Trace, drifting from home to home. I thought about Budge, unable to stop hurting me, about Grandma Coffey leaving me outside while she slept in a drunken stupor. I thought about Grandpa Penders, who cut Mom off forever because she took twenty dollars from his wallet so she could escape a dangerous husband.
I thought about Pryor, a town that killed its young.
"We are lucky," I said again. "Luckier than I ever knew."
Faye reached across the table to touch my hand. "Honey, I know. I know Jack's a good man. Lord knows, Terri's told me often enough, all he's done for her, for you. But she turns her back to his bad side. She didn't used to. Before the girls moved in with you, before she gave up her life to care for those brats, she'd talk about Jack the way a wife talks about her husband. The good and the bad. And there was plenty of bad."
"Bad how?" I asked, a question I never would have asked a week before, or if Faye had been sober.
"Bad the way husbands can be," Faye said, finishing the beer and walking over to the refrigerator for what I hoped would be her last bottle of the night.
"Not bad like Budge," I said. "Jack's never hit Mom or me."
"No, hon, not like Budge," Faye said. "There's lots of ways a man can be bad. A man can be faithful and beat his wife senseless, or he can never raise a hand to his wife and cheat on her regular."
"Jack was unfaithful?" I asked. "Not to Mom."
"Not to her or with her," Faye said. "To that high and mighty first wife of his, years before he met Terri."
"I don't believe you," I said. "Jack's not the kind of man who'd do that."
Faye laughed. "They're all the kind who would," she said. "Some dream about it and some do the deed. Jack's case, he did the deed on a regular basis. When Brooke was a baby, he had an affair with a girl he worked with. Val got pregnant with Alyssa to try to hold on to him, but she caught him cheating again and that was the end of it. Val gave up on men, and Jack became Superdaddy. Then your momma walked in, and the rest is history." She laughed. "History," she said. "His story and her story."
"How do you know?" I asked. "You didn't know Jack then."
"Course not," Faye said. "Terri told me. First couple of years, she was worried sick he'd get tired of her, find someone else. He'd done it to Val, and Val had a lot more going for her as far as Terri could see."
"I don't want to hear this," I said. "I'm going to bed."
"Fine," Faye said. "Be like your momma. Turn your back on the truth. But the truth'll set you free. Budge. Jack. My exes. All of them. Men. Sinners all. No saints in this world, sweetie. Just different kinds of sinners."
Twenty-One
I CALLED MOM on Thursday morning after Faye left for work. "Oh," she said, as though surprised to hear my voice. "I can't talk now, honey. We're picking the girls up in a few minutes. Our flight leaves at noon."
"Is everything okay?" I asked. "Has Brooke calmed down?"
"We're all fine," she said. "How was the funeral?"
"Horrible," I said.
"Well," Mom said. "You insisted."
"I know that, Mom," I said.
"I should get going," she said. "Jack's downstairs. I told him I'd meet him there in a minute."
"I'll see you tomorrow night," I said. "Have a safe flight."
"You too," Mom said. "Give Faye my love. And thank her for me, please."
"I love you," I said.
"I love you too, honey," Mom said. "And I've missed you. We'll have a long talk when you get back. Just the two of us. All right?"
"All right," I said. "See you tomorrow."
Mom hung up first. I stared at the phone, at the dozens of messages I'd ignored over the past week. This was as good a time as any to make my way through them. Most were from kids I knew from choir. Some were from kids I hardly knew at all. Three were from Lauren.
The first two were short messages, asking me how I was. The third message was a lot longer.
"Willa, I'm so worried about you," she said, the sound of her voice reminding me of how close we'd once been. "I called Brooke, but she said she hadn't spoken to you in days. I know I haven't been much of a friend lately. Everything feels so different here. I feel so different. And I won't blame you if you don't want to speak to me. But something like this, what Brooke told me ... I feel sick I'm not there for you. I wish I could do something. I wish I'd been a better friend. Oh God, I'm going to start crying. I'm sorry, Willa. I love you, and I'm so sorry about everything."
I'd deleted all the other messages, but I kept Lauren's. I felt as though I'd spent the past week doing nothing but apologizing, to Mom, to Jack, to Pauline, to Faye, to the universe. I was sorry I was angry. I was sorry I was a Coffey. I was sorry I was the lucky one, the one who survived, the one who was never satisfied despite being the lucky one.
But Lauren was sorry too. Lauren, who in some ways reminded me of Brooke, getting what she wanted easily, gracefully. Brooke loved me because she had to. If we hadn't been stepsisters, sharing a home and parents, she wouldn't know I existed. But Lauren chose to be my friend.
I called her back, getting her voice mail. I was almost relieved, since I didn't know what I'd have said if she'd answered.
"It's Willa," I said. "I'm okay. I'm in Texas, but I'll be going home tomorrow." I tried to think how I could sum up everything I'd been through in the past few days in a way Lauren could understand. "I've learned so much about my family, about me. I don't think I'm different, though, just ... I don't know. Sadder. Maybe smarter. It's been awful, but I'm glad I came, if that makes any sense. I'm really glad you called. It helped a lot to hear your voice. Take care. I'll see you when you get home."
I began washing the breakfast dishes, relieved to have a job to do, however small. I'd just finished the last plate when I heard the doorbell ring. I dried my hands on Faye's dishtowel and walked to the front door.
Trace stood there. "I wanted to see how you're doing," he said.
"I'm okay," I replied. "Embarrassed but okay."
"You got nothing to be embarrassed about," he said. "You wasn't the only person who lost it yesterday."
"I wouldn't know," I said. "I was too hysterical to see anyone else. Want to come in? Faye made coffee if you'd like some."
"No, that's okay," he said. "I was wondering if you wanted to go to the cemetery. You didn't get there yesterday, and I thought maybe you'd want to before you go."
"It's a long walk," I said.
"I borrowed Granny's car," Trace said. "She's sleeping it off, so if we hurry, she won't even know it's gone."
My guess was everyone in Pryor was sleeping it off or wishing they could.
"Yes," I said. "I'd like that. Thank you."
I grabbed my jacket and bag and joined Trace. We walked over to Granny Coffey's car. It was filthy, inside and out, reeking of stale cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and pee. I wondered if Trace could strap me on the roof so I wouldn't have to sit inside.
But he seemed oblivious to the mess and the stink. "The seat belts don't work," he said. "But I promise to drive real careful."
I remembered my last trip to the cemetery and hoped Trace understood the rationale behind stop signs.
He drove cautiously and the drive seemed to take forever. I rolled the window down and that helped a little.
"So when do you leave?" he asked.
; "Tomorrow," I said. "Pauline's arriving tonight and we'll go in the morning."
"Who's Pauline?" he asked, taking what felt like half an hour before driving through a four-way stop.
"A friend of my family," I said. "She came down with me so I wouldn't be alone."
"That's real nice of her," Trace said.
"Yes," I said. "It was real nice of her."
"Faye's a friend too," he said. "To your momma and to Budge."
I nodded.
"Budge always liked her," Trace said. "He used to say it was a damn shame the men she got involved with."
My mother used to say the same thing. But I felt disloyal saying that, so I just nodded.
"Are you going to be staying long?" I asked. "Or will you be going home to Memphis?"
"Memphis ain't home," Trace said. "I don't got a home, not like you mean. Never have. All I got are places."
"Do you think you'll stay here, then?" I asked. "Move back in with Granny?"
"Gets awful cold sleeping on the porch," he said. "I'm staying at Budge's till the rent runs out. Look around, see if there's anything there I could turn into cash. You mind about that? It's half yours."
I still felt guilt-stricken over the turquoise pin. "I don't mind," I said.
"I took the guitar already," Trace said. "It's in the back."
"Good," I said. "I don't know how to play."
"He would've taught you, same as me," Trace said. "If you'd stuck around. Budge wasn't good for much, except playing the guitar and making babies."
And killing, I thought. Budge had a real gift for killing.
"And hurting," Trace said. "He was real good at that."
"What do you do in Memphis?" I asked. "What kind of work do you do?"
"This and that," he said. "People want things, I help out."
"What kind of things?" I asked.
"Things a nice girl like you don't want to know about," he replied.
"Legal things?" I persisted.
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