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chapterone
Marin
Granted,my life is weird. Super-duper weird. But this?This?
This is level-10 bananas.
Jesus watches me from the dashboard. Actually, several Jesuses do. One from a medallion glued above the AC vent, and another bobbling figurine above my grandpa’s odometer.
I’ve looked at Jesus a lot in my life. Alot. I can never tell if he’s angry, annoyed or just kind of…meh.
But never mind about Jesus for the moment. Right now, the AM radio is blaring so loud that the car speakers crack and buzz making the preacher’s words cut in and out in weird stutters and stalls.
“Thy soul sh— be —ar—d only —f you —pent, sinn—! Re—nt!”
As the preacher rages on, I stare at theswish, swish, swishof the wipers battling the freezing mist that started as we turned onto the road leading out of Sherman and toward Carson Mountain.
“Grandpa. Tell me where we’re going.Please,” I beg, looking over to see the muscle in his jaw tighten to stone as he hisses something unintelligible through his dentures.
He’s never been this mad and certainly has never dragged me out of the house and into the truck in the middle of the night.
He thumps the dashboard in agreement with the roaring preacher. “Hear that, young lady? Repent!”
I swallow hard and re-focus forward. The road is dark and unmarked, the asphalt gleaming like diamonds in the headlights of Grandpa’s brand new eighty-thousand-dollar GMC truck.
Biting back tears, I twist the sleek satin of my dress in tight fingers on my lap. It’s cold, but the bulky red coat Grandpa insisted I wear as he tugged me out the front door after finding out I was not going to choir practice but to an appointment at a modeling agency, is warming me from my knees to my neck.
“I keeptelling you. It wasn’tmy idea.” One thing about being born with a Bible in one hand is that I honestly cannot lie. Impossible. “It was Stacey at school. She took those pictures of me, she sent them to the agency, she set up the appointment. I had to go. She’s my only friend, grandpa.”
Grandpa grumbles. “You won’t talk your way out of this. I didn’t do enough to stop your mother from ruining her life… andmine… butyou…” His nostrils flare, knuckles white on the steering wheel, his gold Rolex glinting in the moonlight. He narrows his blue eyes at me. “I will not let the devil take you like it took her.”
My heart sinks. I’ve been paying for my mother’s sins since birth. In fact, my birthwasher sin.
Mom had me at seventeen. All I know is I was born in the same room I now occupy in my grandfather’s sprawling mansion. But I guess money can’t fix everything because my mother died two days after my birth.
When I was around ten, I heard two of the deacons’ wives in church talking about how more girls would keep their knees together if they had to give birth with no pain medicine and a midwife who was paid extra to provide no comfort. Like my grandfather did with my mother.
Just because you have a nice house and go to church on Sundays, sure doesn’t mean your life is candy corn and teddy bears, that’s for dang sure.
Grandpa’s wife, my grandmother, passed away one year before I was born, so he raised me tangled up in grief and anger and the twisted righteousness he thought was the solution to everything.
He never talks about my mom, except in offhand references to the shame she brought upon him for fornicatin’ outside of marriage. The only thing I have of hers is a couple school pictures I found tucked inside my grandmother’s old bible and from the pictures, we could be twins.
As far as my father, that’s a mystery and I’ve never had the courage to ask.
I tug my legs together as the heated leather seat bakes me from under my rear end but it does nothing to chase away the chill that’s taken root deep in my soul.
I point the toes of my red heels into the floor mat, then pull them back, stretching out my calves. I’m sure not used to six-inch stilettos. Grandpa would never have bought me anything so sexy. But Stacey did, and I just wish she had chosen a different color.
Everything on my body is red. My dress, my jacket, my nails. Even my underwear and my bra. Red, red, red… everywhere. It’s always been this way. Grandpa insists the children of Jesus need to see me coming, so they know to look the other way.
How one out-of-wedlock pregnancy could turn him into an irrational tyrant I’ve still not puzzled out, but on the upside, I’ve never had to wonder if my socks match my slacks. Or my shirt. Or my shoes.
I blink twice, pinching the inside of my cheek between my molars, but the tears come unbidden. All I’ve ever wanted is to feel good in my skin. To feel normal somehow, like the girls at school I see walking around wearing makeup and chittering about boys and just being so carefree.
“You need to learn the value of life. Away from all this.” He waves his hand around the truck. “Time that you werehumbled.”
He’s full of shit. If I was born with a Bible in my crib, he was born with a deed to a 10,000-acre tobacco farm and all the righteous weirdness to go along with it. But I don’t point that out. I’m already knee deep in sin and backtalk is not going to help.
