Abilene was sitting in her usual seat, in the row behind the Aimes family. Matters of life and death were clearly more important than the petty dramas of the Smurf Club, Jess thought fleetingly. For the moment at least.
Suddenly, Ivy jumped up and ran to the back of the church where the bathroom was. This had happened yesterday morning as well, but Jess hadn’t thought much of it. Maybe the stress of Alex’s death and Jess’s revelations were causing her sister to have stomach problems. Jess’s list of things to feel guilty about kept growing. It was now a long list. After all, how many friends or boyfriends had either of them had who wound up dead? Jess had brought this on somehow, and now her sister was probably falling apart under the stress. She always had been more delicate than Jess. And yet, if she wanted to help a cow give birth, she’d have to toughen up…Weird thoughts flew in and out of Jess’s mind as she struggled to sit there, so near to the Thornbushes.
After the service, the congregation dispersed. Jess shuffled toward their family car, her head down, as was her typical posture lately.
“Jess,” came a familiar voice behind her.
Stephanie kept a safe distance; she looked uncertain about what Jess’s response would be. Her smoky eyes fixed on her with tenderness and pain; she looked utterly lost. But Jess couldn’t go to her. She turned back toward the car, her eyes filling, willing her feet to resume their slow journey.
She heard Stephanie’s mother calling her from behind.
“We have to get to the market before the rush!” Ms. Greer called.
Jess turned and saw Stephanie joining her mother, though her eyes hadn’t left her. She seemed a quiet, reluctant participant in this new reality.
* * *
In the Aimes’ car, their dad kept glancing in the rearview mirror at Ivy. She was sickly pale and gripping the door handle.
“Are you sick?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “There’s a stomach bug goin’ ’round.”
“Only in the mornings.” His eyes pierced her. For a man who generally wasn’t very observant about his kids, he currently had an eagle eye on his eldest daughter.
“No,” she insisted. “It gets me in the afternoon too.”
“I don’t see you runnin’ to the bathroom in the afternoon.” He would not let it go.
This got their mother’s attention. She turned to her older daughter.
“Good thing you made it,” Danny said. “You could’ve shit yourself in the front row.”
“Hush!” Carolyn snapped.
But Danny was laughing too hard to restrain himself.
“It wasn’t that kind of sick,” Ivy tried to explain.
“You mean you puked?” Danny asked.
“Will y’all shut up?” Jess barked, regretting her unfortunate seat between the two most disgusting people on the planet this particular morning.
No one said another word the rest of the way home.
Later that afternoon, as Jess shot hoops in the driveway, she could hear the muffled sounds of arguing inside the house. She couldn’t take any more stress, so she let the basketball release it for her, sometimes pounding the ball instead of dribbling it. The voices began to rise, mostly Ivy’s and her mother’s. Her father must have said something extra egregious, because there was quiet, followed by a sudden surge of Ivy’s loud sobbing.
Jess was worried, of course, but something held her in place. She continued to dribble, unable to care more in the face of her own stress.
It wasn’t long before the side door opened and Ivy came out with a suitcase. She held out an old football jersey she never wore and handed it to Jess. “You always liked it more than I did anyway,” she said in between sniffs.
“What’s goin’ on?”
“They’re kickin’ me out.” Ivy looked away with an odd smile, as if she were unable to believe the words herself. “Cobb’s pickin’ me up.”
“What? They wouldn’t do that!”
“Daddy said he didn’t have a daughter anymore,” Ivy told her.
Her solemn face made quite an impression on her sister.
“Why?” Jess demanded. “What for?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Jess threw her arms around her sister, hugging her tightly and begging her not to go. “This isn’t happening!”
“I’m sorry.” She looked at Jess with dead eyes.
All the Bible quoting, and this is what it came down to. When it really mattered, where was the love and compassion?
Jess tripped over her words. “Why would they? How can they?” This was a nightmare. “What did Mom say?”
“What about her?” Ivy answered bitterly, starting down the driveway. She swiped at her splotchy, tear-soaked cheeks.
Cobb’s truck came down the road, but, wisely, he stopped at the base of the driveway. Upon seeing him, Ivy gave her sister one last hug.
“Don’t ever tell them your secret,” Ivy warned, then ran with her suitcase down to the gravel road.
“Where are you goin’?” Jess shouted.
“I’ll write you!”
“No! C’mon…” This wasn’t happening.
Jess watched as the rusty truck disappeared behind a cloud of black exhaust smoke. That creep. He smelled like a pig. He had weird patterns of facial hair, and he apparently didn’t have the sense to use a condom. Now Ivy couldn’t come home. Strange, disjointed thoughts circled in her mind, like how she’d never eat corn on the cob again. Deep down she knew it wasn’t entirely Cobb’s fault. But he was an easy target to hate.
Then there were her parents. In a weird way, she wasn’t surprised that their father would have gone off the deep end about Ivy’s pregnancy, but she’d always thought of her mother as a more reasonable, less judgmental person. Why on earth would she have gone along with this? Jess assumed she already knew the answer. What her father said was always the final word. What did it matter what her mother felt? How could she stand it?
Chapter Fifty-Eight
A heavy silence bore down on everyone at dinner. Even while her parents tried to argue quietly, Jess looked at them differently now. Who were they kidding? It wasn’t as if she and Danny weren’t going to notice that their sister was missing from the table.
Her mom didn’t eat. “You didn’t even talk to her!”
“I offered to make arrangements if she didn’t keep it.” He sounded businesslike.
Jess knew what he meant. “I thought abortion was a sin,” she said.
“This doesn’t concern you,” he replied.
“She’s my sister!” Jess was smoldering, sickened by his unflappable demeanor. “You made her go away! That concerns me!”
Surprisingly, he let that comment go, not even slowing the cutting of his T-bone steak.
“She’s not gone for good, is she?” Danny asked.
“Course not,” their dad said.
“We don’t know that,” their mom corrected, unable to look at her husband.
Jess couldn’t see the point in having dinner. She wasn’t hungry. She was tired of food, tired of eating and sleeping, tired of being. What was worth being in the world for anymore? Everything she held dear was a sin. Everything that made her happy also made her repulsive in the eyes of others and, subsequently, in her own eyes. Seeing how her father reacted to Ivy, she could only imagine what he’d do to her if he ever learned her secret. It clearly had to go with her to the grave.
Her father said in between bites, “You reap what you sow.”
“She needs a father,” her mom said. “Not a preacher!” She threw her napkin down and bolted up from the table, clearing dishes before anyone was finished. Jess didn’t care. She wasn’t going to eat anyway. Something about her dad’s eerie, quiet resignation scared her—that and the way he’d begun styling his hair to look more like the evangelists on TV. Was he having delusions that he was the next Oral Roberts?
Jess helped her mother wash dishes. She was disturbed by her father’s blank, almost robotic affect. He reminde
d her of the Bible story about Isaac, the man who was told by an angel to kill his only son to prove his love for God. He had the kid out on a stone slab, getting ready to slay him with a knife when the angel stopped him at the last minute and said something like, “Yeah, God believes you now. You can let your son live.”
The story always freaked her out because a) what if the angel hadn’t stopped him soon enough? And b) if you have to kill a child to prove you’re devoted to God, didn’t that sound more like cult behavior? Why would a loving God ask anyone to do something that awful?
With Ivy, it was as if her dad was willing to erase her from his life completely. This was yet another reality in her home life that made her feel at odds with religion altogether. It made no sense, a contradiction of everything she’d been taught.
While she and her mother washed and rinsed off dishes in silence, Jess saw her dad staring down Danny in the kitchen. “I expect you to do your chores and keep that room clean. Don’t let this be an excuse not to keep that bed made.”
Jess wasn’t sure, but she almost felt her mother shudder at his words. It was as if she could read her mind—how would a made bed matter at this moment in time? What was wrong with her father?
But all her mother did was shake her head, making irritated gasps. Why didn’t she say anything? Their family was falling down around them, and she was unable to speak. Jess couldn’t understand this.
“Make my bed?” Danny asked incredulously. He was now old enough to fight back more, and it was obvious that their father wasn’t going to have it. “You gonna kick me out too?”
“You may be excused now,” their father responded, rising from the table.
After this latest bit of crazy, Jess decided she didn’t know her father at all. It was one thing to worry about his temper, but kicking your own daughter out of the house? This flew in the face of everything he preached.
Later that night, Jess heard a sound outside—too distant to be under her bedroom window, but close enough to be somewhere in the yard. It wasn’t the low, creepy growl of the Wallaces’s cats in heat, so she decided to check. She threw on her jacket and jeans and quietly went downstairs and out the side door. She hoped it would be Ivy.
As she rounded the corner of the house, the sound grew louder; it was like a wail. In the backyard, the shed light was on. It was an exposed, hanging bulb that cast a harsh glow across most of the yard. Jess stepped a little closer, careful to stay in the shadows, when she realized it was her father, crying on his knees. He soon got up and grabbed a rake and threw it against the wall of the shed. The clanging sound of the rake tines against the metal wall startled and scared her. She ran away from the shed, hearing more garden tools hit the walls, realizing that he was tearing up the place.
Seeing him like this confirmed her worst fear—that as much as he acted the part, he wasn’t the peace-loving man he tried to pretend to be. Just because he refrained from yelling at home didn’t mean that he wasn’t without violent tendencies, which he was able to let out in a controlled environment like church. There he could yell and scream and pound his fists, and instead of everyone thinking he was a mental case, they’d shout, “Amen!”
But Jess knew there was something darker, even more sinister under the surface. It was scary to wake up one day and see your parent as an imposter. On this night Jess felt sure he was crying not because he’d lost a daughter, but because he couldn’t maintain control over his family.
Trudging through the grass and back up to the porch, she wondered if this was the kind of mistake the family could ever recover from. Clearly her sister couldn’t feel welcome in their house anymore. Her father’s actions had pushed her even sooner to marry a guy he didn’t like. They would have to leave town so everyone wouldn’t know about Ivy’s “condition.” With an uncertain future, Ivy and Cobb might be homeless with a baby on the way.
Jess closed the door as softly as she could and tiptoed back upstairs, feeling angry at her mother too, with every step. She could’ve blocked the door so Ivy wouldn’t leave. Disagreeing with her husband wasn’t the same as doing whatever she could to keep Ivy at home. She was, after all, fifty percent of their parents, wasn’t she?
When she made it safely back inside her room undetected, Jess crawled into bed, gripping her basketball as if it were the only friend she had left. In a weird way, it was the most familiar, comforting thing she had, something she could count on more than any person or idea in her life. At least she’d never lose that.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The next day at practice, the girls were energetic and excited about the upcoming game with their archrivals, the Fullerton Falcons. When practice was done, they made a circle around the coach.
Sylvia Drysdale smiled a little. “Now I don’t want y’all gettin’ too cocky. But I think we’re ready for ’em.”
The girls shouted and clapped as they ran off to the showers.
When Jess was dressed, Kelly came over to her. “Hey,” she said.
Jess said nothing.
“I’ve decided,” Kelly continued. “About that thing I want you to do.”
She turned and saw Kelly looking particularly devious. At once Jess knew what was coming was going to be something serious, something she’d regret. “Our deal’s off. You didn’t keep your promise.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” Kelly assumed an attack posture with her hands on her nearly nonexistent hips.
“You told Fran. You weren’t gonna tell anybody.”
“Okay,” Kelly conceded. “I told her. But no one else. She’s sworn to secrecy. Now unless you want the whole school to know the truth, I suggest you keep your side of the bargain.”
Jess thought it over. Kelly could still do some serious damage. The whole school had been traumatized by Alex’s death. There were grief counselors stationed in the office every day. How would it look if everyone knew that Alex’s girlfriend had been lying to him the whole time? They’d hate her so much they’d drive her out of town with pitchforks. And who knew what they might do to Stephanie. That thought sickened her even more. When she considered her options, she realized she didn’t have any.
“All right,” Jess said.
Kelly grinned. She seemed so evil, she almost had fangs.
Jess stood there, waiting for her sentence. When she heard it, it took everything she had not to lunge at her and clasp her hands firmly around her scrawny neck. She fantasized about it, envisioning what it would be like to squeeze and squeeze until the last air bubble escaped from her throat.
After all, if she was going to hell, why not take Kelly down with her?
* * *
Dan and Carolyn got ready for bed, neither speaking to the other. He loosened his tie.
“Am I losing you?” he finally asked.
Carolyn sat on the bed, her back to him. “We’ve never made decisions about the kids without consulting each other first.” She was a stone statue in a nightgown.
Dan seated himself beside her. “I tried so hard to teach Ivy all the values I was raised with, and look what happened?”
“You tried too hard.”
“I’m the same man I’ve always been,” he said gently. “The man who loves you with all his heart.”
For whatever reason, she couldn’t look at his face. Maybe she was afraid of what she’d find there, that it would be something she couldn’t stomach. “Tell me something,” she answered coldly. “Tell me you’re not more concerned about how this reflects on you as a preacher than about what it means for Ivy’s life.”
He simply replied, “It’s not as bad as you think it is.”
“Losing our daughter?” She turned to face him.
“No, caring about what my congregation thinks.”
“Tell me your pain is that of a father who’s worried about his daughter.” She stood up and busily began removing her jewelry, each piece clinking onto the top of the dresser. Her plea was an urgent one; she had to have an answer to this most basic question. Unbek
nownst to him, their marriage hinged on his answer.
“I am worried about Ivy. But you have to understand…people in this town look to me as their moral guide. If I can’t control my own daughter…”
She closed her eyes. “So that’s it then?”
“I’m still the same man,” he repeated. “Remember how we met? How you saw me in—”
“Don’t.”
“I know you remember.”
“Yes,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What was most endearing about you…” She searched for words. “When we said goodbye, you standing there in Logan Airport, confused by flight schedules…that was a real man, a man who was trying to impress me, not knowing I could see his imperfections. And that I loved you for them. Down here you think you have to be infallible, something resembling God. You don’t even see how you’re destroying our family to maintain that image! You don’t see it.” She was breathless, unrehearsed. Feelings poured out like water.
“I haven’t changed,” he insisted.
“No, I guess not.” She looked at him. “Maybe I’m just seeing it for the first time.”
“Seeing what?”
“How much you like the power and attention. That for you being a preacher comes before being a father.”
She expected him to at least deny it. But he said nothing. He buttoned up his pajamas and said nothing. That was worse than anything he could have said.
“You know I love the kids,” he finally said softly. But he still sounded remote, as if they were concepts in a textbook and not real people he lived with every day.
It wasn’t good enough for her. She’d sacrificed so much to be a part of his world, to shape herself to fit into this more conservative lifestyle, never telling a soul about her past aspirations, trying to be the best homemaker and attending church more often than she ever had in her life, even joining a cooking group where she had to make disgusting recipes like okra pie—only to find out that she was more invested in their family than he was. That he was, and always would be, more devoted to his career and his relationship with God. She should have known it coming down to Tennessee…maybe she just didn’t want to.
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