Revival Season - Monica West (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📗

anything that hadn’t already been said. Besides, we confessed our sins to one another regularly—Ma had told us about her anger at God after Isaiah’s death, and Papa had confessed to being prideful. This would just be another confession in a line of confessions. And if he said he was wrong, if he admitted it and repented, we could pray for him and find a way to move forward.

“Tell us, Papa,” I finally said with feeble words. I should have said, Tell them.

“They don’t know anything! They’re lying. All of them. There’s nothing to tell.”

I had leaned forward behind him, straining against the taut seat belt as I awaited his explanation, but I flopped back into the seat after hearing his flat, false words. Ma placed her left hand on the steering wheel, preventing him from driving off, but his two hands on the wheel wrestled it away from her. He jammed his foot on the gas and turned the wheel so hard that Ma’s body slammed into the door.

“I saw—” I began.

Ma and Papa snapped around and looked back at me as though I had interrupted their private conversation.

“You saw nothing, Miriam.” His eyes narrowed in the red-tinted darkness from the stoplight overhead. As he held my gaze, daring me to defy him, a flash of heat passed through my feet and made the tips of my toes tingle. Then a bubble of rage rose to my stomach and popped. He knew that I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

I snuck a glance at the revival tent receding over my left shoulder—I knew it was bad luck, that looking back turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, but I couldn’t help myself. A ribbon of exhaust streamed from the back of the car, tethering us to the people inside before the tent released us into the dark.

We hurtled onto the unlit two-lane highway that unspooled in front of us as far as the headlights illuminated and no farther. Even the stars’ bright pinpricks of light were now hidden behind a veil of clouds. Twenty minutes after leaving the revival tent, we arrived at the Griffith house.

“We need to be out of here in ten minutes, tops.” Papa looked at his gold watch that gleamed in the darkness. He didn’t say where we were headed—we weren’t due to the next revival location until Saturday—four days away. When Ma and Papa went inside the house to pack, Caleb stood by the minivan’s open door with creases between his raised, impatient eyebrows.

“What’s going on?” he whispered.

“Papa hit that guy, Caleb. He hit him when he didn’t heal him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He hit the blind guy and lied about it.”

“How would you know? Did you actually see him hit anyone?” Anger—or was it disbelief?—fluttered behind his eyes. Leave it to Caleb to question what I had seen and not what Papa had done. If he had ever questioned Papa, he had never shown it. It must have felt too good to be in Papa’s sunshine; he had never experienced what it felt like to be in its adjacent shadow.

“Did you actually see the hit?” Caleb’s eyes got wider as he repeated the question, his face hopeful. I wished I had the same faith that he did in Papa.

“Yes. I saw it.”

His cheeks slackened as he shifted his gaze to the crack in the driveway. I could practically see his mind racing as he swallowed hard and then massaged his cheeks. He forced air through a pinhole in his pursed lips—the only sound between us for several seconds.

“It was dark. You didn’t see what you thought you did. You couldn’t have.” His voice lacked the conviction it had a few seconds before.

“Five minutes to go.” Papa’s voice echoed from the bowels of the house.

“You heard him.” Caleb turned on his heel and went inside.

We were refugees in the night: there was no map in Ma’s lap as we drove through dark streets. Through the van’s windows, Bethel was a blur of empty plots of land and vacant shopping centers; only when my knuckles burned did I realize that I’d been holding on to the armrest the whole time. The clock in the car changed from 8:59 to 9:00. Revival would be letting out any minute now, and we were locked in a car moving aimlessly through a city we didn’t know. We crossed the border into a neighboring town as Papa put more miles between us and Bethel. Hunger clawed at the edges of my stomach, and I buried my arms deeper into my abdomen to dull its sharp ache. Hannah started to howl and buck against her restraints, but Papa didn’t look back in the rearview mirror to signal me to quiet her.

At 10:44, we turned right down an unfamiliar road in a town far away from Bethel, in the direction of an oscillating sign that read TY’S DINER. The inside of the restaurant was bright, with leather booths and a few patrons seated on round stools by the counter. As we sat in the silent, still car, our eyes bounced over T-shirts and jeans before we exhaled sighs of collective relief that none of the people in here had been at the revival that night.

“We’re good here,” Papa said.

We ordered our food in monotones and fragments: Eggs sunny-side up, add bacon; short stack of pancakes; French toast; black coffee. At the other end of the semicircular booth, Papa was jittery in his skin, as though a current was running in his veins. He drummed his fingers next to the coffee mug that the waitress kept refilling, causing black liquid to slosh over the mug’s ceramic lip and land in a shallow puddle on the table.

After our food arrived, Papa took one bite of eggs before pushing his plate forward; he reached into his briefcase and spread out the map as though this had all been part of the plan. Papa’s shaky hands traced routes from here to places unknown as Caleb nodded