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

to put away some of the supplies that she had taken out of her bag. She wrested her bag away from him, shoving a blood pressure cuff and amber vials of medication inside before sliding the zipper closed.

“Can you help me bring some things to my car, Miriam?” Without waiting for my reply, she handed me the bag, and I followed her to the driveway, where she popped her trunk.

“How long?” Mrs. Cade asked when we shared the trunk’s shadow. I rearranged some of the cardboard boxes to make her birth bag fit.

“I think it was three hours this time. The shortest.”

“Not the labor, Miriam. The bruises.” Her voice shot down an octave. She reached up and placed a hand on the trunk lid but didn’t move to close it.

I recoiled—even though I’d been waiting for someone to give voice to what had been happening with Papa, her words landed in the center of my chest like a punch. We weren’t supposed to talk about family matters outside the house. That was especially true now that Papa’s reputation was on the line.

“It’s me, Miriam.” Her hand moved from the top of the trunk to where mine was resting by my side; she interlaced her fingers with mine and squeezed. With her other hand, she cupped my chin and guided my face level with hers, snatching my eyes from where they were searching the cracks in the ground. I finally looked up at her, and she tilted her head to the side as her eyes brimmed. My lips trembled.

“I can’t, Mrs. Cade.”

“I know what I saw. You can either confirm what I already know or lie to me. And I know you’re not the kind of person who lies.”

Mrs. Cade knew me as the person who recited memory verses in her kitchen over plates of homemade cookies; the person who always stood by her dad and believed him to be infallible. Mrs. Cade had no idea the kind of person I had become. The kind of person who healed but lied about it, who had seen and heard unspeakable things. I wasn’t ready to tell Mrs. Cade what was going on at home—saying it out loud would make it real.

Mrs. Cade’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out of the duffel bag and touched the screen. “I have to run. A high-risk mother is in labor. I’ll be back to check on your mother and Isaac. And to finish this conversation.”

As she got in the car and put it into reverse, I looked back through the screen door. I could make out the shape of Caleb rocking Isaac in his arms. Since Bethel, it had always been me to come to Ma’s defense, even when she and Caleb hadn’t come to mine. Caleb had ignored my warnings about Papa until the night before, when pretending everything was okay was no longer possible. So maybe it was only fair that he would have to be the one to stay and protect her rather than me.

“Wait!” I yelled when Mrs. Cade had backed halfway down the driveway. Her car jerked to a stop, and I ran to open the passenger door before sliding inside. Mrs. Cade turned off the radio, presumably to give me space to say what I couldn’t before. The car’s doors and windows pressed in tighter as we veered under a canopy of trees. It would be easier to tell her everything when I got farther away from the houses I recognized, when the car outran the looming shadow of Papa’s congregation.

“For about five months. He hit a man on the revival circuit, back in Bethel. He hadn’t been able to heal him, and…” My voice drifted off. It should have been harder than this to betray Papa, but, after I took a deep breath, the truth spilled over the dashboard. “He’s been hurting us—me and Ma—since we’ve been back. Ma’s gotten the worst of it.”

Mrs. Cade nodded as she swerved right down a narrow dead end. Then she reached over the gulf of empty travel mugs between our seats and rested her hand on my knee.

“It’s worse than I thought.”

“You knew?” I looked over at her, but she was squinting at the road, nodding.

“He hasn’t been healing for a while. I know that he used to heal—at least I think that he did. He started forgetting who had the power—him or God. And that’s where he started to go wrong. And I’ve seen some other troublesome things around the church, even before what happened with Micah and Deacon Johnson. He’s had the deacons covering up for him, pretty much eating out of his hand, until they couldn’t hide what was going on any longer. When he got rid of Deacon Johnson, that was the last straw for most people, and that was his last real defender except for Deacon Farrow. People are losing faith in him for the first time in his life. A prideful man like your father can’t hear that truth about himself. And he can’t take that sitting down.”

Mrs. Cade must have been talking about another preacher in another church in another town who had gotten too much power and forgotten who gave it to him. As I tried to process the first phrase, there was another one beneath it—deacons covering up for him—and beneath that another one—losing faith in him. Each phrase echoed in my skull. I wanted to ask Mrs. Cade so many questions, but before I could, she pulled into a driveway.

“This is it.” She popped the trunk and jumped out before I could ask her anything.

By the time I stepped out of the car, Mrs. Cade was already up the driveway, the duffel bag thumping against her right leg. A few steps behind Mrs. Cade, my heels sank into the rotted-out wooden boards on the porch before following her inside. Thoughts of Papa disappeared in the claustrophobic, labyrinthine hallways whose walls were cluttered with pictures of unfamiliar faces. At the end of the