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

6 about the end days and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It was the sermon that he would have been giving if we were still in Bethel. But we weren’t in Bethel, and he was on the side of the road with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a microphone in the other, looking to all the world like a crazy person.

“What’s he doing?” Caleb’s words stumbled over one another.

“Shh!” Ma’s finger shot to her lips before she furiously rolled up the windows to cut off any sound he was making. My heart stuttered as I jerked forward to see more, but the seat belt pressed me back: a reprimand. Through the front window, the sharp edges of his silhouette got blurry. Papa always called street preachers madmen: according to him, what differentiated him from the lunatics on the street was a denomination behind him, the word of God on his side, and a pulpit.

The man—Papa—looked in our direction for a split second, and I reclined my seat until I was almost horizontal. My heart froze as his eyes fixed on the minivan and then looked away.

“Drive,” I yelled. “Drive!” The words propelled themselves out of my lungs.

Ma let out a gasp that she immediately squelched with her hand—the resulting sound was like someone being suffocated.

“What’s he doing? What’s he doing?” Caleb had been repeating the same question into the window since we got there, emphasizing different syllables and blurring the words together so it sounded like one rapid-fire phrase.

A lump rose in the back of my mouth that I tried to swallow, but it lodged in my throat instead. Ma jolted the car back into motion and jerked away. Papa disappeared from view; I focused my eyes on the double yellow line in front of us until it became wavy in my vision.

Back in the motel room, lunch was a hot dog wrapped in foil that Ma had plucked from the greasy metal rollers at the gas station. She had even turned on the television—breaking one of the cardinal rules of our house. Usually, the smallest transgressions were thrilling, especially when we got away with them. But this was not the same as stealing an extra slice of pie at dessert or returning home from Micah’s house a couple of minutes after curfew.

No one had spoken Papa’s name or offered an explanation for what we had seen. The television’s vivid pictures couldn’t dilute the memory of him shouting on the side of the street like a madman. How had he turned from a man whose congregation had been in the thousands into this? Maybe it had all started with his hitting the pregnant girl—I had told myself it was a mistake, that he was sorry for it. But everything changed that night in Bethel. And if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would have sworn that the man at the corner wasn’t him either. There had to be other things about him that I didn’t know—other things that I hadn’t let myself see.

My untouched hot dog was still mummified in its foil wrapper on the end table. Ma chided me to eat over high-pitched laughter on the television, but a few bites of the cold, slick link didn’t quell the burn in my stomach. Who was this man we were following everywhere, trusting the words that came out of his mouth like gospel? And what else was he capable of?

The desk clock said 11:03 p.m. when I heard a car pull up. Ma was back in her room next door as footsteps against the pavement made a cadence that was distinctively Papa’s. The room was awash with the television’s blue glow as I scrambled out of bed and jammed the power button until the screen went dark. I crept to the door; my breathing quickened as I placed my hand on the lever and pushed it down a millimeter or two. Then all the way.

I stepped into a wave of heat, smack into the impenetrable wall of three vertical gold buttons drooping from his suit jacket. He jolted forward as though he’d seen a ghost; his briefcase dropped from his extended palm, clattering to the ground between us in slow motion. As I dragged my eyes from the scuffed brown leather of his briefcase to his wrinkled suit jacket to the smudged glasses that were halfway down the bridge of his nose, the hot dog tossed in the pool of grease in my stomach.

“Miriam. Why are you still awake? What is it?” His words were blunt at the edges. He moved to get past me, but I widened my stance as he maneuvered to the left to get by. He sighed his annoyance as he looked over my shoulder. The words I wanted to say vanished the way they always did when he was close. I searched his face—reconciling this version of the man I barely knew with the one we’d seen on the street and the one from the night in Bethel.

“Why did you hit him?”

“What are you talking about, Miriam? Get back to your room.” His words were flinty as he flung out his right arm and pushed the air aside to dispatch me.

“Was it because he said you couldn’t heal?” I took one step closer to his hands that dwarfed the key card. I will never hurt you; I will never hurt you. I needed to believe it now, but those words rang as hollow as his other ones. I knew that talking back, especially to Papa, came with consequences. But this man wasn’t Papa anymore.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” With each word, the muscle in his jaw twitched as his eyes darted in their sockets.

“I know what I saw. You lied about this. What else have you lied about?” His anger made me bolder than I really felt; it braced my spine as I sandwiched myself between him and the hotel room door.

“Who are you to question