she could feel the little wooden church shake as Uncle Thorpe strode toward her.
“Playing you their war song,” John Joseph nearly yelled into Justine’s ear. His three brothers made up three-quarters of the band, the piano player the only woman of the bunch. The most gifted musician in the family, John Joseph refused to play in church. Instead, he sat in the back with Justine, who didn’t find his joke funny.
The Saints banged their callused hands on leatherskinned tambourines, working themselves into a hallelujah frenzy that only stopped when Uncle Thorpe set his jaw and said a prayer over a bottle of olive oil. He poured some into each deacon’s upturned hand.
In the hush, Uncle Thorpe hitched his polyester pants high enough to show the green stripe of his tube socks and knelt before Justine. She could have stared a hole through Lula, who now stood dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief in a small group of women behind the deacons.
Justine wasn’t going to bow her head. Couldn’t. Not if she wanted Six Flags. She knew that the minute she started to pray, she would lose her nerve. Who knew what she might say if she let herself go. Brother Eldon, the deacon with the bushy eyebrows angled into a permanent scowl, was already beginning to speak in tongues and squeeze her shoulder too hard.
“I pray you’ll save this young woman, Lord, who is old enough now to know you, Great God, and therefore to deny you,” Uncle Thorpe began in his down-low prayer cadence that always went straight to Justine’s insides. She hoped he’d finished, but then he shouted, “Show her your glory, Lord!” The band took off again, vamped into “I Come to the Garden Alone,” her granny’s favorite song.
Playing that song right now was a dirty trick, and they knew it. Her granny sat up front in the perpendicular pews reserved for deacons and elders. Justine could see her face, could see her arthritic brown hands curled on her knees. Granny sometimes kept her hearing aids turned down during services, and Justine wondered if they were on now. She wondered if Lula had told her about Six Flags.
“Keep Justine from this world and the sins within, Lord,” Uncle Thorpe shouted. The band picked up the pace until her granny’s slow, mournful hymn sounded more like the Stones. People were beginning to convulse and shout, as the Holy Spirit took charge of their mouths and bodies. “Help her to make choices with her body and mind, Lord, that lead her closer to you.”
Justine kept her eyes on Lula, but tears began to roll down her cheeks. She wiped her face, angry that they would think they were getting to her, ashamed of the night that had led her to this moment, maybe even more ashamed that Granny would think Justine chose an amusement park—or worse, her father—over her own mother. Her mother—who’d had to quit art school when he left, who had to stand in line for the government commodities she’d always wanted to feel above, whose artist’s fingers ballooned with blisters from the first job she’d found at a shoestring potato factory.
She thought about trying to pray. Maybe God would be there and would show her a way. The thought had hardly formed when Brother Eldon pressed her head downward, as if by putting her head in the right position he could force words into her heart and out of her mouth. Furious, she cut her eyes at John Joseph, who chomped his gum, unmoved by his father and the deacons.
Justine felt her lip quivering, but then John Joseph blew a big pink bubble and smirked—for her, she knew. He was her cousin, but she could have kissed him.
4.
When Justine heard two honks from the big horn, she looked around the empty house and felt a sorrow she couldn’t explain. She brushed off the hungry cat and climbed into a running Lincoln with whitewall tires, her father a stranger in a car full of strangers. She couldn’t think of a time she’d felt more affection for her mother.
There was a minute—the boy was asleep, and she’d thought that his mom was—when Justine caught a flash of what it had been like before her father left. She remembered how special it had been for one of the girls to be chosen to run an errand with him, to stand in middle of the seat next to him and have him put the flat of his hand against her chest as he came to a stop. In the steady hum of the wheels and road, she quit worrying about how Lula would feel when she got home from work and saw that Justine had gone through with the trip. From her place in the passenger-side back seat, she watched her dad adjusting his fingers on the steering wheel, tensing his jaw. She saw the razor burn on the back of his neck and remembered rubbing her fingers along the stubble when he held her in the rocking chair. She’d spent years pretending that dream of him away, and now here he was driving her down the interstate in a new car, a blonde wife sleeping at his side. Before she could catch the words falling from her mouth, she said, “You didn’t even call.” He didn’t understand what she’d said, so he looked back over his shoulder with raised eyebrows. Now she’d have to repeat herself. “Why didn’t you at least help us?” she said, a little louder.
At that, her stepmother raised her head, yawned, and blinked around the car. “Oh, honey, you know your mama is plumb crazy.” Justine closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the window glass, praying as she never had before for God to keep her from putting her hands on another person’s body, lest she kill her stepmother where she sat.
The trip was downhill from there, no fiery redemption. Justine hardly said another word the rest of the drive to Texas, certain that Uncle Thorpe’s premonition was right and that no matter her motives she would die a wretched soul on a roller coaster. Her father’s boy was sticky and kept pulling her hair; her father was awkward and overly polite. The stepmother (if the woman who had disappeared your father, the car, and the bank account could be considered a mother of any sort) wore gold rings and a crop top that showed her freckled chest. She made a big show of feeling sorry for Justine in her long dress.
By the time they got there, Justine felt so nauseous and frightened of dying and going to hell that Six Flags was one of the worst days of her life. She threw up on her father’s shoes while waiting in line for Big Bend, and one of the ticket takers told her she was not allowed to ride because “vomit at these speeds ain’t pretty.” Her stepmother took Justine’s place in line, and Justine held her half brother’s hand as she watched her father and stepmother click up the near-vertical roller coaster track and disappear in joyful screams. She thought her nausea was from fear.
5.
Though she was fifteen and a bonerack, she started showing late. So when it came time to start school that fall, all she knew was that she hadn’t felt right since the day she first talked to her father on the phone. She didn’t let herself think of any reasons beyond that. She started sitting next to Lula in church, leaving John Joseph in the back to trim his nails with his pocketknife and break wind without an audience.
She’d avoided Russell Gibson since the night she snuck out with him. He’d asked John Joseph to have her call him, as if they were merely two star-crossed lovers, but she cut John Joseph off before he could get the words out. She wanted to forget, and she’d almost been successful with the summer so full of Six Flags and penance.
But then for two days straight she couldn’t eat lunch or make it through Ms. Peterson’s fifth-period Algebra 2 class without running to the bathroom to vomit. On the third day, Nurse Sixkiller waited outside the bathroom. Justine was still wiping her face with a rough brown paper towel she’d wet in the sink when the nurse put her wide palm to Justine’s forehead.
“You’re not warm,” she said. “Clammy, maybe.”
Justine tried to push past Nurse Sixkiller and return to class, but the woman had that way of holding down the Earth. She would not budge. Justine acted like she didn’t care about her place at the top of the class, but that was the only thing that kept Lula from putting her in the church school, which she would surely
