* * *
The jet leveled off somewhere over Arkansas and my mother had already moved on to her second glass of champagne and her fourth complaint.
“I simply don't see,” Floris Mae said, holding the flute up to the window so the diamonds at her wrist could catch the light, “why a man of your stature has to fly into the middle of a cornfield to shake hands with people who buy their suits at a warehouse.Lincoln.Honestly, Harrison.Lincoln.”
She said the name of the city the way other people said the name of a disease.My mother at fifty-nine was a triumph of money over time—the blond helmet of hair lacquered into permanence, the face pulled smooth and tight as a drum, the ice-blue eyes that had never in my memory held a degree of actual warmth.She wore couture to a regional convention the way a general wears medals into a village.The little people, she called them, our flock, the three thousand faithful waiting in Nebraska.The rubes.She said it without lowering her voice, because in my mother's universe the hired help and the faithful occupied the same category.
“They vote,” I said.“That's why we fly into the cornfield.”
“Mm.”She sipped.“They vote, and they tithe, and they weep when you tell them to, and I'm sure it's all very important.”
I looked out the window at the cloud cover and did not say what I was thinking, because I had learned a long time ago that the things I thought and the things I said were two separate things, and only one of them was ever audited.What I thought was this: that without the little people there would be no private jet.No estate in River Oaks.No couture gowns, no diamonds, no Citadel of Faith megachurch, forty feet of glass and limestone rising up over the Houston skyline.Without the rubes in their Men’s Wearhouse suits, my mother would be the widow of a dead televangelist in a paid-off house, and I would be—
I didn't know what I would be.That was the trouble.I’d never once been allowed to find out.The empire had been built on me, around me, the way a pearl is built around a piece of grit—and the grit, I'd come to understand, doesn't get to choose.It only gets to be smothered, layer by lustrous layer, until the thing the world admires has no resemblance left to the small ugly seed at the center.My father had laid the first layer.My mother had spent the ten years since his death laying the rest, and somewhere along the way the man named Harrison had disappeared entirely inside the thing called Pastor Cole.Most days I couldn’t tell you where one ended and the other began.
The little people made us everything we were.They tithed our jet into the sky and the megachurch into the Houston skyline; their faith, real and trembling and decent, was the foundation under every inch of the marble we walked on.And the woman across from me sneered at them into a glass of champagne while their money chilled it.I said nothing, and the saying-nothing was its own small daily betrayal, one more layer over the grit.The hollowness opened under my sternum like a trapdoor with nothing beneath it, and I smiled at my mother, because that, at least, I knew how to do.
“You've gone gray around the edges,” Floris Mae observed, studying me now instead of her wrist.“You've been off all morning.What is the matter with you?”
“It's the anniversary,” I said.“Of Kimberly's death.Ten years today.”
My mother's brow did not move, because my mother's brow no longer moved, but a flicker of pure blankness crossed the ice of her eyes.“Who?”
I turned from the window and looked at her.Pilled out again, I thought.She must be deeper into the prescriptions than usual; she had a doctor in Houston and another in Palm Beach and between them they could sedate a draft horse.
“Kimberly,” I said, and heard the edge come into it before I could stop it.“Your daughter-in-law.My wife.The girl you picked out for me yourself, at the spring gala, in 2013.Remember her?”
“There's no need to take that tone with me.”Floris Mae rolled her eyes—actually rolled them, the way a bored teenager does—and turned back to the window.“Of course I remember Kimberly.Lovely girl.Bad blood vessels.It was all very sad and a very long time ago, and you've made a perfectly good career out of it.I don't know why you insist on dredging it up every spring like it's a holiday.”She drained the flute.“You should be thanking her, not mourning her.”
And the worst of it, the thing that closed my throat, was that she wasn't wrong.Mother was monstrous, but she wasn't wrong.
The intercom chimed before I could answer.
“Pastor Cole, Mrs.Cole—this is the captain.We've begun our descent into Lincoln.Should have you on the ground in about twenty minutes.Little bit of weather moving through, nothing to worry about.Please see that you're buckled in.”
“Thank God,” my mother said, to no god in particular, and reached for the bottle one more time.
I drew the seatbelt across my lap and clicked it home.Below the clouds, somewhere, the flat green grid of Nebraska was rising to meet us—a mid-tier city in a swing state.Three days of handshakes, prayer breakfasts, and a speech about the sanctity of the family I would deliver flawlessly and believe, on some cold cerebral level, every word of.That was the part no one understood about me, the part I’d never been able to confess to a living soul: that I believed all of it.I simply could not live it, and the gap between the belief and the living was the pit I had been falling into for thirty-five years without ever reaching the bottom.
My mother shut her eyes against the descent.And under the cover of the engine noise and the dimming cabin, I did what I always did when the falling got too loud to bear.
I took out my phone, and opened the app.
It loaded slowly—the network out here was thin—and then the grid populated, square by square, and I felt the old contemptible flutter of hope.
Lincoln.A city full of strangers, none of whom had ever sat in my pews.At least there was that.At least, in the dark, in some anonymous room, I could be for an hour or two the one thing I was never permitted to be in the light.
The profiles finished loading, and hope curdled in my chest the way it always did, because I knew exactly what I was looking at and exactly what I was: a grid of headless torsos and blank gray squares, men with no faces and no names, each one of them hiding the same way I was hiding, each one of them a little locked room with a frightened man inside.A whole quiet city of us, refreshing our blank screens, praying into the dark.My own profile was one of them.No face.No name.Just a torso, a lie, and the word discreet, like a password into a country where no one was ever truly let in.
I stared at the gray squares, and the pit under my sternum yawned wide.A single thought rose up clear and terrible out of the despair, the way the date had surfaced that morning out of the still water of the day:
What in God's name would it take—what would have to break, or burn, or end—for one of those faceless squares to finally, just once, look back at me with an actual face?
ChapterThree
Alec
The Lincoln Grand had the kind of lobby that wanted very badly to be a cathedral and had settled for being a Marriott with delusions.Forty feet of atrium, a chandelier the size of a small car, and a marble floor polished to a glassy shine that threw everybody's reflection back up at them whether they wanted it or not.I stood in the check-in line with my duffel over one shoulder and my camera bag over the other, and I did the thing I always did at these conventions, which was feel like a stray dog that had wandered into a wedding.
