He pressed the stained toilet paper between his fingers, lifted it close to his eye. I prepared for him to jump up from his seat, maybe enclose me in another hug. But he straightened his shoulders. Let the red paper flutter to the floor. “This could have come from anything,” he said. He picked up a pencil and began to write something in his sermon notes as if I wasn’t even there.
I scooted back in the chair. I just had to get through this part and then I could have my assignment. But how did he want me to do it? I pulled my mother’s dress up a little. I started to raise a foot to his desk.
“Please.” He tapped my foot with the pencil and I put it down. “We’ve been waiting on your blood for a while now. Forgive me for taking this seriously.”
The way he was talking tripped me up. Was he implying I wasn’t taking it seriously? Nothing could be more serious to me. It was like he was scolding and praising at the same time, and suddenly the office felt too hot, too small.
I thought of my mother, how I’d been annoyed with her but perhaps I’d missed something. Now it was too late.
“My mother didn’t want me to tell you.” These words came from my mouth easily.
He leaned back in his chair, let his head fall to one side. This was the soft Vern, the hugging sort, back again. “You’re lucky coming to me so early in your life. Your mother sinned for a long time and I’ve washed the marks of her sin but I can still see the scars.”
My mother never liked to talk about how she was before her transformation. After my father left, her drinking had taken her over like flames through a house. I remembered feeling scared for us sometimes, when she drove down the road swerving and braking late. When she would close herself in our room for days, silent, and I’d sleep on the couch watching television late into the night, M.A.S.H. and I Love Lucy. For a while she’d had a boyfriend who didn’t wear pants around our apartment and I could see his flesh poking out from under his T-shirts. His eyes were always bleary, and he gave me sapphire earrings one night while my mother was passed out. He had pulled me close to him so he could put them on me, only to find I didn’t have pierced ears.
He bent me over his lap that night. He pierced them with the dull poke of the earrings themselves while I called out for my mother and she never came. What a pretty little girl I was, he said, when it was over. And now, looking at Pastor Vern, my heart surged with affection thinking of that time, for it was he who had delivered us out of it.
The conditions of deliverance were these: one, that my mother never drink again; two, that she remain chaste, a bride to the church. Vern had held her to his chest and my mother got starry-eyed. Yearning for something good, she agreed.
“So what do I do?” I asked him now. He put his hand on top of mine, and in a rush, the pounding heat, the sweat on my skin, seemed to cool like a broken fever.
“Each member of the Body needs to be in a place of trust with their fellow brother. The men of this church have been appointed to lead. It’s the holy structure . . .” He released my hand and wiped his nose, which had begun to drip. “Hay fever,” he said. “No trees blooming, no grass, but still, allergies.”
I wanted to ask why God hadn’t healed his allergies but he kept talking. “I’ll ask that you trust this structure with every piece of yourself.”
But my mother wasn’t just waiting around and trusting. She was going somewhere every day like a job.
“Everyone’s assignment will look different,” Vern went on. “Each person has their own gifts within God’s army.” He leaned forward and kissed my forehead with dry lips. I smelled the sun on his skin, intoxicating. Tears welled in my eyes. This wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d wanted to leave with a notebook full of instructions.
“How is your mother?” he asked.
I couldn’t tell him that along with spring’s arrival, beers had appeared in strange places around the apartment, in the back of the nightstand drawer, behind our collection of canned beans. That she kept them in brown paper bags, drank several each evening standing before our sliding glass window looking out at the parking lot filled with half-broke-down Fifth Avenues and Novas. That her eyes had changed from ambitious to roving. Toward what I still didn’t know.
“Blessed,” I said. He smiled wide and I saw a shine of silver fillings in his molars. The devil came over me and I imagined his silent wife, Derndra, kissing his mouth, reaching her tongue back during her wifely demonstration and touching those hidden gems.
“Don’t overdo it in this heat,” he said, but I was used to the heat by now, the heat that never set on us, that only maintained through the night, beckoning me from sleep, the damp sheet kicked off onto the floor.
ON MY WALK home through the dead fields, I thought of my mother in the hot breeze of afternoon when I was five years old, just before the beginning of that first bad drought. A patch of watermelons had sprouted up in the small square of dirt under the second-story stairs of our apartment and she was on her hands and knees marveling at their strong vines, the big green leaves and the basketball-sized melons. She patted them and laughed. She brought me close so I could see.
“I threw seeds down here forever ago,” she said. “Who knew all this time they were growing right up?”
The melons were bright and healthy. They were beautiful and ripe. How had we not seen them before?
She talked all night about them. The sapphire-earrings boyfriend grew more and more agitated with her adoration of something that wasn’t him. He didn’t like her when she was up. “Acting like you’ve never seen a fuckin’ watermelon before,” he said. He slurped Bud Light all night. My mother was oblivious to his growing anger. I wished she would just shut up. I knew what happened when she kept on pushing his buttons, but she didn’t seem to have that awareness, not then, not ever. She couldn’t believe the watermelons were there and she was taking it as a good sign. She didn’t want us to eat one just yet. She called Grampa Jackie, who had been predicting the coming drought, could taste it in the air and had taken on a low demeanor of dread. She laughed like we’d been struck by great fortune, tried to cheer him. “You always said the land was a gift, Daddy,” she said. “It still is!” She didn’t drink that night and Sapphire Earrings slammed out of the apartment and didn’t return until early morning, when he shoved me out of my mother’s bed and onto the floor and took my place.
When my mother woke up, we raced out to check on the melons, to pet and encourage them, but someone had smashed them all. Ripped them from their vines and thrown them against the sidewalk. Their pink insides reeked a sickening perfume. She let me miss school and we sat on the steps while she drank brandy out of one of my old plastic baby bottles, waiting for the killer to return to the scene.
But the killer was in the apartment. It was clear as day that Sapphire Earrings was responsible, but she didn’t seem to understand that at all.
“I’m sad sometimes,” she’d said to me as the sun had left us.
How I’d wanted to fix it for her. How I wanted the world to be good enough so she wouldn’t have to feel its rough edges. If someone could just see her when she was at her best, the way she was in the morning back then, getting ready for the day, dancing and singing, the soft dander of her cheek. The way her neck looked when she tilted it back in the car and sang “Great American Cowboy” along with the Sons of the San Joaquin. I didn’t know what to say to fix it, to make her eyes go clear, to make her steps sure and straight, her breath her own without the bite of alcohol on it. “I’m hungry,” I said instead, and she sighed, went back inside, and got drunk enough for the sadness to reset itself to happiness, only to go back to sadness again.