He tramped back to the truck, where Angela waited.
She handed him a bag of peanuts and a cold can of ginger ale. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
His sister glared across the lot toward their mother. “She shouldn’t get so mad. It wasn’t your fault.”
David flinched. “It was.”
“Hey. Hey, stupid.”
“I’m not answering you because I’m not stupid.”
She cupped his chin. “Next time you have a problem you can’t handle, you come to me, okay? You’re too little to take on everything.”
Before his parents’ breakup, David would have yelled back at her that he wasn’t little and that she wasn’t the boss of him. Now he accepted her comfort with a grateful nod while he chewed his peanuts into a dry paste.
David awoke in the parking lot of a Super 8 motel.
“Wait here,” Mom said and got out.
Wiping drool from his mouth, he looked around at cars and asphalt lit by the glow of pole lights. “Where are we?”
“Sacramento.” Angela sighed. “God, this really and truly sucks.”
He stretched. “I’m hungry. What time is it?”
“Just hang tight.”
“Do you think there will be kids there? Where we’re going?”
“It’ll be like going to church every day. It’s all Mom cares about now.”
“Sunday school can be fun sometimes.”
“Yippee.”
The truck door creaked open, and Mom leaned inside. “We’re checked in. Let’s eat some supper before we head up to the room.”
She led them across the street to a bright Denny’s. The host got them seated in a booth and passed out menus and crayons.
David opened his kid’s menu and started coloring the woolly mammoth from Ice Age. “Can I have the chicken tenders and fries, Mom?”
“Spaghetti for me,” Angela said. “And lemonade.”
“Oh, me too, please.”
“You got it.” Mom smiled at them. “Look at us, having an adventure.”
“Can you tell us about this place we’re going now?” Angela asked.
“It’s a community near Tehachapi. They call themselves the Family of the Living Spirit. They’re very selective about who they let in. I sent a letter to Reverend Peale, and he wrote back personally to invite us to join.”
David chewed on the word in his mind. Tehachapi. Mysterious and old. He pictured buffalo and little tendrils of smoke wisping above tepees.
“Where is this place?” Angela said.
“South east of Bakersfield. Not too far from Los Angeles. They live a pure life there, simple and close to God.”
“God kills people,” David blurted.
The smile wavered. “Not us, Davey.”
“Angela said we’ll have to go to church all the time.”
His sister kicked him under the table, but he ignored her. She did say it.
“We’re going to live off the land,” Mom said. “You can grow anything in the Cummings Valley, year round. Lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, spinach. The weather is always gorgeous. It’s a wonderful place for children to grow up.”
David wrinkled his nose. “Spinach?”
“Why is Tehachapi better than Twin Falls?” Angela said.
“The people,” Mom answered. “Everybody at the community lives in harmony with each other and God. I want to be surrounded by people who love me no matter what and won’t hurt me just because they can.”
“Sounds like the life I had back home,” his sister muttered. “Minus the part where we have to grow our own food.”
The server arrived to take their order. While Angela slouched in moody silence, Mom ordered their suppers with a bright smile. David hoped she’d forget what Angela said and remain in a good mood.
After the woman left, the smile vanished. “Your life wasn’t as great as you think it was. The world is chock-full of people who’ll try to take everything from you. They say they love you, but they only love what you can do for them.”
“You don’t know my friends. And you don’t know these people either.”
“The Reverend Peale’s community doesn’t just talk the talk,” Mom said. “They live spiritual lives in accord with God’s laws. Every day is planned out for them, they know exactly what comes next, and they want for nothing. We’ll be happy there. The wilderness will be the safest place to be when it all goes down. In any case, a little hard work in fresh air and a little less TV will do you a world of wonder, Miss Angela.”
His sister slouched even further in her seat, quietly fuming.
“Why does God want to kill everybody?” David asked.
“He doesn’t. Men will destroy the world with their greed and sin. The end will be a time of tribulation and testing.”
“He can stop it, though, right? Why doesn’t he?”
“So Jesus can return to his chosen people in all his glory.”
Put another way, if everyone was good, Jesus wouldn’t come back, though Jesus coming back was what God promised and Mom wanted.
He frowned. “Okay.”
“Don’t think too hard about it,” Mom said. “Feel its truth in your heart.”
The truth was he depended on his mother for everything, and God and Jesus made her happy. As long as they did, he’d love them too. And if he was good enough, maybe God would leave the world alone.
In the blazing heat of day, Mom pulled off the road and parked in the shade of a stand of blue oaks. She unfolded her road map and scrutinized the markings she’d made on it.
“I think we passed the turnoff,” she said.
She frowned at her children as if getting lost was their fault. The black discs of her sunglasses covered her eyes. David didn’t like when she wore sunglasses. Whenever she did, he never knew which mom he was going to get.
“So let’s go back and find the turn,” Angela said.
The U-Haul growled as Mom yanked the wheel and nudged the gas pedal. “We can’t be late. They gave us a very specific time we should come.”
“Why can’t we be a little late?”
“Because,” Mom grated, “they have a small community that is very picky about who they invite to join, and I want to give them enough respect to show up on time. Like you should give your mother respect.”
“Respect goes both ways.”
She regarded Angela from behind her sunglasses. “Respect starts with you, Miss Angela, and any respect you receive in return is earned. So mind your manners when we get there. We’ll be on probation for the first six months. If that mouth of yours gets us thrown out—”
Angela glared out the window. “I don’t care if—”
“We’ll be there on time, Mom,” David said.
“From your lips to God’s ears, Davey—aha! Here’s the turn.”
The dirt road cut through woodland. Nobody lived here except the Family, far from civilization. Mom had said they were going into the wilderness, and she wasn’t kidding. The U-Haul’s tires crunched stones and banged across ruts.
The drive went on and on, taking him farther from everything he knew and closer to a new life among strangers. Nothing but the dark trees and the dirt road. David shrank in his seat. He imagined himself caught in a steel trap, unable to move until the hunters arrived.