MY MOTHER’S peach cobbler was so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife. When I was five, I hovered around my mother in the kitchen, watching, close enough to have memorized all the ingredients and steps by the time I was six. But not too close to make her yell at me for being in the way. And not close enough to see the exact measurements she used. She never wrote the recipe down. Without having to be told, I learned not to ask questions about that cobbler, or about God. I learned not to say anything at all about him hunching over our kitchen table every Monday eating plate after plate of peach cobbler, and then disappearing into the bedroom I shared with my mother.
I became a silent student of my mother and her cobbler-making ways. Even when I was older and no longer believed that God and Reverend Troy Neely were one and the same, I still longed to perfect the sweetness and textures of my mother’s cobbler. My mother, who fed me TV dinners, baked a peach cobbler with fresh peaches every Monday, her day off from the diner where she waited tables. She always said Sunday was her Saturday and Monday was her Sunday. What I knew was that none of her days were for me.
And for many of those Mondays off and on during my childhood, God (to my child’s mind) would stop by and eat an entire 8 x 8 pan of cobbler. My mother never ate any of the cobbler herself; she said she didn’t like peaches. She would shoo me out of the kitchen before God could offer me any, but I doubted he would have offered even if I’d sat right down next to him. God was an old fat man, like a Black Santa, and I imagined my mother’s peach cobbler contributing to his girth.
Some Mondays, God would arrive after dinner and leave as I lay curled up on the couch watching Little House on the Prairie in the living room. Other times my mother and God would already be in the bedroom when I got home from school. I could hear moaning and pounding, like a board hitting a wall, as soon as I entered the house. I would shut the front door quietly behind me and tiptoe down the hall to listen outside the bedroom door. “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” my mother would cry. I could hear God too, his voice low and growly, saying, “Yes, yes, yes!”
Even before he started coming by on Mondays, I had suspected that Pastor Neely, the pastor of Hope in Christ Baptist Church, was God. He was big, black, and powerful, as I imagined God to be. My very first Easter speech, memorized in kindergarten during Sunday School, was “Jesus is the Son of God,” but I didn’t find it odd that Black God could have a blue-eyed, blond son. Pastor Neely was dark, his wife was pale, and their son, Trevor, who was around my age, had gray eyes and wasn’t too much darker than the Jesus whose picture hung all over church. Plus, midway through every Sunday service, Pastor Neely, his wife, and Trevor stood in the front of the sanctuary and collected a love offering from the congregation as the choir sang “I Love You (Lord Today).” So it was easy for me to deduce that Pastor Neely was the “Lord.” My mother’s cries of passion through our bedroom door confirmed it.
I enjoyed the theater of Pastor Neely’s Sunday sermons. From the pulpit, he thundered and roared at the congregation about God’s wrath and judgment. And when he intoned about God’s goodness and mercy, he wrapped his arms around himself and rocked. Then he stepped down from the pulpit and prowled the aisles of the sanctuary, energized and excited to tell us what he called the Good News. For a big man, he moved with surprising ease and grace. By the time he got to the altar call, most of the women and some of the men would be up on their feet, swaying and crying out. But not my mother. She stayed seated, her face unreadable as usual.
Pastor and First Lady Neely were the opposite of Jack Sprat and his wife. He, thick and corpulent. She, gangly and gaunt, like a child’s stick figure drawing. During the love offering, she stood as straight and stiff as an arrow. Her straight brown hair hung past her shoulders, and I thought she was a white woman until years later, when I saw her up close for the first time, at her front door.
Like many of the church ladies, First Lady Neely wore a wide-brimmed hat, but hers hung low and almost obscured her eyes. But I could see enough of her to know that she did not have big, begging eyes like my mother; she was not beautiful like my mother. She did not have my mother’s round breasts and full hips, the kind that excited strange men on the street. Men my mother called “dirty motherfuckers” when they said nasty things to her as we walked past. First Lady Neely probably never walked anywhere. I saw her stepping out of a pink Cadillac in the church parking lot one day. I heard one of the church ladies standing nearby say she had earned that car selling Mary Kay.
Pastor Neely always drove a luxury car, a new one each year, gifts from the congregation. He parked it in our backyard, which was adjacent to the woods. Our house sat alone at the dead end of a gravel road. The nearest neighbor was a half a mile away, near my bus stop.
One day, in second grade, I ran that whole half mile home, excited to share some good news with my mother. I burst into the house, threw my backpack on the couch, and ran straight into the kitchen, breathless.
Pastor Neely sat at the table, hunched over. It was a Monday. He looked up from his plate of cobbler and said hello in that fake, forced way that drags out the o—the way people say it when they don’t enjoy talking to children. I said hello back, and he went right back to his cobbler. He ate surprisingly small spoonfuls, slowly. His full lips, slightly parted and glistening, made me think of the kissing I saw on TV and the movies. The spoon practically disappeared in his bear paw of a hand. His fingers resembled the thick sausages my mother made for breakfast sometimes on Sunday morning.
My mother leaned against the counter near the back door with her arms folded, watching Pastor Neely eat. She looked pleased—not particularly happy, but pleased. And yet she watched him so intently she also appeared ready to rush and block the door if he tried to leave.
“Mama!” I said, still gasping to catch my breath. “Guess what!”
“What?” She never took her eyes off the pastor.
“Latasha Wilson invited me to her birthday slumber party. Can I go?” The talk at school was Latasha Wilson lived in a two-story house and had a pink canopy Barbie bed. Her hair was always neatly pressed and pulled into a high ponytail of shiny, spiraling curls. Her father worked at a bank. The birthday party invitation, which I’d shoved down inside the front of my shirt, smelled like bubble gum. Latasha smelled like bubble gum. I bet her house smelled like bubble gum too. I couldn’t wait to find out.
“No,” my mother said.
I bit down on the “why not” that almost slipped out of my mouth. My mother’s eyes were still on Pastor Neely. His eyes were still on the cobbler. My eyes filled with tears.
“Go on and change out of your school clothes,” my mother said.
Tears spilled down my cheeks as I backed out of the kitchen. At first I stood in the hallway out of sight instead of going to the bedroom to change. Normally I did what my mother told me to do. But at that moment, I was too crushed.
I peeked around the corner. My mother had sat down at the table, across from Pastor Neely. She couldn’t see me peeking, but Pastor Neely suddenly looked up from the cobbler, right at me! I quickly moved out of sight, bracing myself. But instead of ratting me out, Pastor Neely asked my mother a question: “Why won’t you let the girl go to the party?”
I peeked around the corner again.
My mother sighed. “Because I like to keep to myself and she needs to learn to keep to herself too. It’s better that way. You go accepting invitations, then people expect an invitation in return. Then you got people coming in your house, looking at what you have and what you don’t have. And the next thing you know, your business is all over town.” My mother ran her fingertips along the edge of the table and smiled to herself. “And I’m sure you can understand not wanting to have your business all over town.”
Pastor Neely didn’t say anything. He just took another bite of cobbler and shook his head.
“And besides . . .” my mother said, “I’m trying to raise her to be satisfied with what she has. I know that lil girl Latasha’s mama and her daddy. Went to school with them. They’ve always been flashy, like to show off. He used to drive her around in his daddy’s Lincoln until his daddy bought him a Mustang. At sixteen years old. They got money and all that come with it. So you know Latasha don’t want for nothing and that birthday party is going to be over the top.”
“I don’t know these people,” Pastor Neely said, “but if the Lord has blessed them, and they want to celebrate their child’s birthday and invite your child to share in it, I don’t see the problem.” It was strange hearing Pastor Neely talk about the Lord outside of his pulpit. Instead of that scary, booming voice, he sounded like a regular person. A regular person who might convince my mother to let me go to Latasha Wilson’s birthday party. I crossed my fingers on both hands.
My mother sat up straighter in her chair. When she spoke, it was slowly, as if she were trying to choose her words carefully. “They can raise their child however they see fit. But I’m not going to raise mine to go through life expecting it to be sweet, when for her, it ain’t going to be. The sooner she learns to accept what is and what ain’t, the better. She get a taste of that sweetness, she’s going to want it so bad, she’ll grow up and settle for crumbs of it.”
Pastor Neely glanced at me again, shook his head, and ate the last bite of cobbler.
I ducked back out of sight and uncrossed my fingers. My eyes filled with tears again. Without looking, I knew my mother would whisk away the empty cobbler pan, the pastor’s plate, and the spoon. I knew she would dunk them in the soapy dishwater in the sink, like she always did, so that I couldn’t even sneak a taste of the remnants later.
“You got the best cobbler in the world right here,” I heard Pastor Neely say, Latasha Wilson’s birthday party invitation apparently forgotten. He said this all the time. And because I believed he was a kind of Black Santa, I imagined him preaching at church on Sunday, traveling the whole world Tuesday through Saturday to try other mothers’ peach cobblers, but always coming back to my mother’s on Monday.
I went and changed out of my school clothes, then sat on the couch, unsure of what to do with this new feeling toward my mother: anger.
I heard them go into our bedroom and shut the door. I got up to put a TV dinner in the oven. Sometimes my mother remembered to put one in, sometimes she didn’t. The fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, and warm brownie was my favorite. I always ate the brownie first, while it was still gooey in the middle.
Sometimes Pastor Neely and my mother would be in the bedroom for minutes, sometimes an hour. Always there was laughter when they came out. My mother would be laughing at some joke I hadn’t heard, and she would wish Pastor Neely a good night. And he would laugh and thank her again for the peach cobbler.
I remember the laughter because the silence in our house between visits from Pastor Neely made me wish I knew the right jokes to tell to make my mother laugh like that. I didn’t know the right jokes, but maybe if I watched her hands as she sliced the peaches, counted how many times she stirred, and learned to gauge by smell the exact moment to take the cobbler from the oven—maybe I could make a cobbler that pleased God. And maybe that would please my mother.
On those Mondays that God didn’t come, my mother would toss the cobbler in the garbage after dinner, pour herself a large tumbler of Tanqueray, and send me to bed early. Sometimes he wouldn’t come for several weeks in a row. Or several months. I remembered one time a toothless old woman testified at church saying, “God may not come when you want him, but he’s always right on time.”
One Monday night, when I was eight, I lay in bed, restless, thinking about that cobbler in the bottom of the garbage can. But this night, I remembered that I had taken the garbage out and put in a fresh bag right before my mother threw the cobbler away. I got up, as if I had to go to the bathroom, but I went into the kitchen instead.
In the darkness, I reached down into the garbage can until my fingertips were wet and sticky. I grabbed a handful of the cobbler and shoved it all in my mouth at once. The sugary juice dribbled over the corner of my mouth down to my chin as I chewed. I savored the peaches and the soft bits of crust soaked through with the syrup. Nothing had ever tasted so good. From memory, I pictured every movement of my mother’s hands. How she dunked the peaches in boiling water, then ran them under cold tap water to slide the peels off. The easy way she wielded the knife to slice the peaches. The care she took to drain canned peaches when Georgia peaches were out of season.
I wanted to be those peaches. I longed to be handled by caring hands. And if I couldn’t, I wanted the next best thing: to make something so wonderful with my own hands.
“What are you doing?”
I swung around. My mother stood in the doorway with her bare arms folded. She wore a faded cotton nightgown that had been sky blue once upon a time.
“I asked you a question,” she said, her voice still thick with gin.
Tears streaked my cheeks, and my sticky fingers were still in my mouth. I bit down on them, not sure how to answer her, and afraid not to answer. My mother didn’t whup me often—by then, I had learned how to stay on the right side of her anger most of the time. But when she did, it was like she had lowered her bucket into an ancient well of fury that ran far deeper than my present crime. She would wail along with me as she hit me, saying over and over that I had to learn. I had to.
“Answer me.”
“I wanted some of the cobbler.”
“Is it yours?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What did I tell you about taking things that are not yours?”
“It’s stealing.”
“Who does that cobbler belong to?”
My mother and I had never spoken about what happened on Mondays, but instinct had told me it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about, and as a general rule, my mother had no patience for my questions.
“It belongs to . . . to God.”
My mother’s eyes widened. “Are you sassing me, girl?” She stepped toward me. I ran to the back door and pressed my back against it. Outside, I decided, was still scarier than inside.
My words came tumbling out. “No, Mama. I’m not sassing you. You make the cobbler for God.”
“I make the . . . ?” Mama dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. “You think that . . .” She made a sound, something like laughing and coughing and choking all at once.
“Sit down.”
I sat in the chair across from her. “I know you don’t understand why some things are the way they are,” Mama said. “You just haven’t lived long enough to know. But I know. I know what’s best. I know what’s good for you.”
Mama reached over and touched the back of my hand. The thrill of her touch made me forget for a moment that I was in trouble.
“One thing you gotta understand, though: Pastor Neely is not God,” she said. “He is a friend of mine. That’s why he comes by here.” She spoke with a softness that matched her touch and tamped down my fear. Even when she continued, saying “But that ain’t nobody’s business but mine,” some of the softness remained. I wished this softer mama would show up more often.
“Do you understand me?”
I didn’t. Not completely. But I understood enough to know I was being asked to keep a secret. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
And it was an easy secret to keep. First there were the questions of who I would tell and why they would care to know. Not being allowed to spend time with my classmates outside of school had positioned me firmly on the sidelines of any group of girls that would have had me in the first place. Pretty much everybody on our side of town was poor. But thanks to my too-small or too-large Goodwill clothes and run-over shoes, the other girls never found themselves last in the elementary school pecking order.
And while those girls (save Latasha Wilson) weren’t much better off than me, at least their hair was brushed into carefully parted, well-oiled ponytails with barrettes most days. This currency of being neat and cared for was always out of my reach, a fact that was evident every time I stood on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror, struggling to wrestle my giant ball of thick hair into a single puff atop my head. Mama always said she had never been good at that kind of thing—she had loose curls that didn’t require taming—and she was relieved when I could finally do it myself.
So I had no real friends to confide in about Pastor Neely, and the idea of saying anything at all—not to mention my mother’s business—at length to an adult? The idea of it made my stomach flip-flop.
Even if my mother hadn’t asked me to keep her secret, what happened one Monday when I was ten guaranteed I would never tell.
One hot day in late May, I was walking home from the bus stop. Our electricity had been shut off again, and all the windows in our house were open, to catch a breeze. As I approached the house, one of those wished-for breezes swept past, lifted the curtains at our bedroom window and held them in mid-air long enough for me to see Pastor Neely’s huge, bare ass, to see him standing and thrusting against my mother, crushing her against our dresser.
As I walked closer toward the front door, the curtains continued their air dance, and I could see more of Pastor Neely. I could see him gripping my mother’s hips with those fat sausage fingers of his covered, I imagined, with sticky syrup from the cobbler, oozing down my mother’s body, and I hated him. This was sex, the it girls at school giggled about behind their hands.
I got my first period a week later, a shock to both my mother and me. I didn’t know what was happening, and at first my mother would only say, “You’re too young, you’re too young . . .” Her crumpled face and the bulky pad between my legs felt like a punishment.
By the time I turned eleven, I was covered in pimples and wore a 36D bra. My mother was more embarrassed by my breasts than I was, always chastising me to cover up, as if that was possible. I sensed her retreating even further away from me, so I made the first move. I moved out of our bedroom, took over the living room, and slept on the couch.
When I stopped going to church, my mother didn’t push.
Even though I no longer ate the peach cobblers out of the garbage can at night, my hunger remained. I still watched my mother make them because I didn’t want to forget how she did it. Maybe I could make one for myself. Once I asked if she could buy extra peaches so that I could make a cobbler. “I don’t have money to waste on you messing around in my kitchen” was her answer.
At fourteen, I got a job at the mall, at Thom McAn shoe store. I would buy my own damned peaches.
I made my cobblers on Friday nights when my mother would hole up in her bedroom with a bottle of Tanqueray and I had the kitchen to myself. I didn’t change a single step or ingredient, so my cobblers tasted as good as my mother’s, even better eaten off a plate instead of my fingers. I ate cobbler with every meal throughout the weekend until it was all gone. I would soak the empty pan in the sink, my hands lingering in the warm dishwater. I had made something wonderful.
Only once did my mother acknowledge my cobbler making. She came out of her room one Friday night and stood in the doorway of the kitchen wearing an oversized flannel shirt, gin in hand, watching me. The liquor made her slower and more deliberate, softer, and even more beautiful somehow. Her hair was out of its usual bun, and it flowed over her shoulders. She was in her mid-thirties, but looked girlish, like a life-sized doll.
“You think you know what you doin’, huh? Think you so smart. Smarter than everybody.”
I turned away and went back to stirring the batter for my crust.
My mother walked over to me, so close I could smell the gin on her breath. “There’s book smart, and there’s life smart,” she said. “If you was life smart, you wouldn’t try and be anything like me.”
I imagined asking Pastor Neely to try my cobbler. But besides our awkward hellos, we never said a word to each other. If I was in the kitchen when he arrived, I would leave and go into the living room. Still, I imagined him tasting my cobbler and telling me it was better than my mother’s—the best in the world. I also imagined serving him a piece with ground-up glass baked into the crust and watching him crumple to the floor. More than that, I wanted my mother to know and be proud that I could make a good cobbler. Mostly I just wanted my mother.
By eleventh grade, I had tired of fighting off boys and gave in. But none of the boys I fooled around with in the park behind the school deserved my peach cobbler. Mostly they just wanted to mess with my breasts, and mostly I just wanted to be touched.
One Monday night, in mid-January of my junior year, my mother came into the living room with me after Pastor Neely left. I felt my chest tighten. I much preferred our usual routine where I couldn’t bear to look at her after he left and she didn’t seem to want my company either. But that night, she joined me on the couch and handed me a piece of paper.
“This is the Neelys’ address. They are expecting you Tuesdays right after school. For tutoring. Trevor is having trouble in math,” she said. “I told him how you get straight As and all in the advanced classes. He’s just going to tell her that the school recommended you as a tutor.”
He. And her. So we were not going to say Pastor Neely’s name or his wife’s name.
Of course, there were many things we were not going to say.
I was going to keep my mouth shut, as expected. As it was always expected.
That first Tuesday, when First Lady Neely threw open the front door of their McMansion before I could even knock, I realized that she was black, not white. Up close I could see her full lips and broad nose. And looking at her relaxed hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, I could tell it was almost time for a touch-up.
“Hello, Olivia! I’m Marilyn Neely,” she said, ushering me into the foyer. “But you can call me Miz Marilyn. And I hope you don’t mind,” she said, wrapping her bony arms around me. “I’m a hugger!”
Realizing that she wasn’t the white woman ice queen I remembered from years ago made me feel even worse about being in her home. I willed myself not to stiffen at her touch, tried to remember that I hadn’t done anything wrong, that I wasn’t the one betraying her. I touched her back lightly during the hug, and I could feel her shoulder blades protruding. I felt huge by comparison, like I could crush her bones with one hard squeeze. With one hard truth.
I felt light-headed at the image of such power, at the memory of Pastor Neely’s naked ass, and at the thought of my mother. What if this woman can read my thoughts? I swayed and almost lost my balance.
“Are you okay, honey?” Miz Marilyn held me by my shoulders with a surprisingly strong grip. On each of her hands, three huge diamond rings sparkled.
She guided me to a small sofa inside the foyer. “This settee has been in my family for fifty years,” she said. “My papa used to say settee was French for ‘useless chair’!”
She laughed at her own joke, and I tried to smile, but my lips, like the rest of me, were shaking. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little weak. I skipped lunch today.” Which wasn’t a complete lie. I skipped lunch most days because cafeteria food was gross and I preferred the company of books over that of my peers.
Miz Marilyn clapped her hands. “Well, come on into the dining room. I have a nice snack prepared, and that is where you and Trevor will be working. Trevor!” she yelled up the stairs.
Trevor Neely was a star football player and college-bound senior at Woodbury Academy, a local private school. He was fair, tall, and lean like his mother. No doubt he had his pick of girls at school. I thought he would have a problem with his tutor being a year younger than him, and a girl. But if either of those things bothered him, he never said.
After his mother introduced us and then left, closing the pocket doors of the dining room behind her, Trevor stared openly at my breasts. His gray eyes flashed with confidence.
I picked up a finger sandwich, chicken salad, from the tray Miz Marilyn had prepared. Between bites, I said, “So . . . why don’t you show me what you’re working on in precalc?”
But Trevor kept staring, at my breasts, into my eyes, then back to my breasts.
“Yes,” I told him. “I have big tits. Huge boobs. Giant hooters. Enormous knockers. And yes, you’re cute, but your eyes don’t work on me. Now cut the bullshit, and let’s get to work.”
Trevor laughed, showing his perfect teeth. “You all right,” he said. “You all right.”
He showed me his last test, on which he’d gotten a 69 percent. We went over his mistakes for about half an hour, then he asked to take a break. We ate sandwiches and sipped Coke. This time when Trevor looked at me, I found myself looking away. He really was cute.
“Have you seen that new Fat Boys video? With the Beach Boys?”
“ ‘Wipeout’?”
“Yeah, that’s it. It’s a trip,” he said, laughing.
“I heard the song on the radio, but I haven’t seen the video.”
“What? They play it, like, fifty times a day on MTV.”
“I don’t have cable.”
“You don’t have cable?”
I shrugged.
“But I know you watch The Cosby Show.”
“Yep. You know who I can’t stand? Vanessa. She is so annoying!”
“She makes me glad I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
“Me too. Though I wouldn’t mind Denise. She’s cool.”
“That honey is foine. I wouldn’t want her for a sister, though. That’s illegal!”
We both cracked up, and then silence followed. My hand rested near Trevor’s on the dining room table. His fingers were not stubby sausages like his father’s. They were long and slim, and I wondered how they would feel inside me, how he would feel inside me. What if I went all the way with him? Something I hadn’t done before. I pictured it: Trevor and me, naked and all tangled up, groping and sucking, on the dining room table beneath his mother’s crystal chandelier. I felt sick again at the thought, this time at the pit of my stomach. Sick with desire. The words took shape in my mind, black and slick like oil, rising from the page of a trashy novel I’d gotten from the grocery store the week before.
In that moment, I understood how enough desire could drown you, take you all the way under.
I closed my eyes, cleared the fantasies, and pulled myself back to the surface.
At home that night, I took the envelope of money Miz Marilyn had given me and dropped it on the kitchen counter next to where my mother stood washing dishes. I headed for the living room.
“How was it?” my mother called after me.
I stopped without turning around to face her. How was it? How was it? Was she serious? Oh, it was about what you would expect from spending time with the wife and son of the preacher your mom is fucking on a weekly basis.
“Fine,” I said, my back still turned.
“That’s it? Just ‘fine’?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Here. Take this. It’s yours.”
I turned around. My mother held the envelope out to me.
“No, ma’am. I don’t want it.”
“Here,” she said. She shook the envelope. I sighed and took it.
“Sit down.” I sat at the table, and my mother sat across from me. “Tell me about the house.”
“It’s . . . big. And . . . full of old, expensive furniture.”
My mother frowned. “What else? What about her?”
“What about her?”
“Watch your tone. And don’t get smart with me.”
“I’m not. I just . . . I don’t know what you want me to say.” I shrugged. I felt a strange sense of loyalty to Miz Marilyn and to Trevor. None of us asked to be in this situation.
“She was nice.”
“And . . . ?”
“And . . . I don’t know. She’s not white.”
“You thought she was white?” My mother laughed, loud and throaty. “No, she’s just high yellow. As black as he is, he likes a high-yellow woman, of course.” My mother was only a shade or two darker than Miz Marilyn. I was darker than my mother, but not as dark as Pastor Neely. A sick feeling came over me, for the third time that day: could Pastor Neely be my father? My mother only ever said he was someone I wouldn’t want to know.
As if she’d read my mind, my mother said, “Just like your daddy. Black as midnight, but chased high-yellow and white women nonstop.”
“May I be excused?”
My mother looked disappointed. “I made you a TV dinner.”
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”
“Did you eat over there?”
“Just some sandwiches.”
“What kind?”
I had to bite my tongue. I couldn’t believe she was giving the third degree about a damn sandwich. I just wanted to go take a shower. “Chicken salad.”
“And what else?”
“Coke.”
“And that’s it? Hmph.”
“Yes, that was it,” I said. “May I please be excused?”
My mother waved me away.
Later that night and many nights after over the months I tutored Trevor, I drifted in and out of dreams about him. I had liked a couple of the boys I’d fooled around with, had liked a few others from a distance. But Trevor was the first boy I really crushed on. His big, curious eyes; the round tip of his nose; and his full lips. A smile or a laugh was never far from his mouth. I wanted to kiss him. Every Tuesday brought a new opportunity to kiss him. The way I would catch him looking at me, I was sure the feeling was mutual. But all I allowed myself to do was inhale the sweet mix of hair grease, soap, and sweat emanating from him when our heads hovered together over his precalculus textbook. On the rare occasions when I did allow our eyes to meet for longer than a second, Trevor would smile, satisfied. And I would be flooded with a mix of desire and irrational guilt. Trevor couldn’t blame me for what my mother and his father were doing. And while I certainly wasn’t going to tell him, my knowing and his not knowing just felt wrong somehow. But what could I do?
All of this cemented my understanding of God as a twisted puppet master watching his creations bounce around, trapped and tangled up in tragedies for his amusement.
Despite the tension, Trevor and I always got back to the work, back to the reason for my being there: he wanted to do well in precalculus, and I wanted him to do well so that he would graduate and I could stop hugging his mother every week, like a Judas by proxy, and frustrating my mother with reports of turkey sandwiches, sloppy joes, and corn dogs. But I would miss spending time with him, guilt and all.
I managed to avoid Pastor Neely for four Tuesdays of tutoring. But on the fifth Tuesday, he opened the door when I rang the bell. I took a step back. My mouth went dry, and I did not return his hello.
Pastor Neely grinned and extended his hand to me the way he did to parishioners during the love offering. I looked down at those fat sausage fingers, and my stomach lurched. He dropped his hand and his grin, but his voice was cheerful. “Come on in. Olivia . . . is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
I stepped partway into the foyer, but kept one foot close to the door, imagining the fallout if I just turned and ran.
Trevor came bounding down the stairs. He froze on the last stair and narrowed his eyes at his father. “Where’s Mom?”
“She went to check on your Aunt Catherine. She hasn’t been feeling well lately.”
“Oh,” Trevor said. He didn’t move from that bottom stair.
“Well, just do whatever you do when your mother is here,” Pastor Neely told Trevor. “I’ll be downstairs in the study.”
Trevor waited until his father was gone before stepping down into the foyer.
“Come all the way in,” he said. “You look like you ready to bolt. You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Sometimes people are intimidated by my dad. You look scared.”
I managed a laugh I hoped was convincing. “Me? Scared? Please. You looked scared.”
Trevor’s face reddened a bit, and he looked at the ground. “I was just surprised to see him home this early. That’s all.”
I wasn’t buying it. But then he flashed me a smile, so I dropped it.
Miz Marilyn had left us grilled cheese sandwiches wrapped in foil on the dining room table.
Trevor took a huge bite out of a sandwich. “My mom’s not the greatest cook in the world, but she makes a good grilled cheese.”
I took a bite. The sandwich was buttery and delicious. “This is goo—,” I started to say, but Trevor was on me, his lips on mine, his body pressing mine against the table.
I swallowed the bits of sandwich in my mouth and then returned Trevor’s kiss. He slid his hands beneath my shirt and cupped my breasts. I moaned and placed my palm on the table to steady myself.
Trevor reached around to unhook my bra. “No!” I whispered. “We can’t. Your dad . . .”
“. . . is in his study.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Trevor held his hands up and backed away. “You’re probably right.”
I exhaled, relieved that he wasn’t upset, but also screaming with joy inside, already replaying the kiss in my mind.
“Now you expect me to just sit here with blue balls and solve some polynomial equations,” Trevor said. He made a big show of walking wide-legged to his chair.
“You are so silly,” I said.
And after that, we started each tutoring session with a brief make-out session. We knew that if Miz Marilyn was going to check on us, it wouldn’t be in the first few minutes. Oddly enough, making out with Trevor made me feel less guilty where he and Miz Marilyn were concerned. For a few moments at least, I could forget about our parents, and just be a girl kissing a boy she liked. Simple.
At the end of April, Miz Marilyn turned sixty. “It’s my birthday!” she announced as she threw the door open to let me in.
“Happy birthday!” I said.
“I am sixty years old today. No spring chicken!” she chuckled. “You know, Trevor was my miracle child, my change-of-life baby . . .” Trevor had come into the foyer, but turned on his heel when he heard the topic of conversation. Miz Marilyn reached out and pulled him back.
“I thought it wasn’t God’s will for me to ever be a mother, but he gave me my beautiful boy when I was forty-three!” she said, throwing her arms around Trevor.
“Ma, come on, cut it out,” Trevor said, squirming away. “I need to study.”
“All right, all right,” Miz Marilyn said. “I’ll leave you two scholars to your work.”
In the dining room, Trevor tried to kiss me. “No!” I hissed and pushed him away. I turned my back to him to wipe away tears.
“Okay . . .” he said. “That time of the month, I guess.”
“You’re not funny.”
Trevor shook his head. We sat down and went over the problems he missed on a pop quiz. Then he started his homework, stopping to ask questions when he needed to. After a while, I started to pack up and leave.
“What are you doing?” Trevor looked at his watch. “We’ve still got fifteen minutes left.”
“So you’re a timekeeper now?” I snapped.
“No, I just . . .” Trevor looked dejected. “I just had a question about number six.”
I sighed, dropped my bag, and sat back down in the chair. “Look,” I said. “If your mother wants to hug you, let her. Don’t be an asshole.”
The following week, Trevor answered the door when I arrived. He wore a Public Enemy T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts. Message: I’m a jock, and I’m righteous. How could I possibly stay mad at him?
I stepped inside. “Where’s Miz Marilyn?”
“She and my dad just left to go the hospital. My aunt’s really sick.” His voice cracked a little, and he pretended to cough to cover it up.
“I’m sorry. I hope she’s okay.”
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “I heard my mom say she might not make it. Her heart is failing. They are going to make a prayer circle around her. Like that’s going to help.”
“You don’t believe in prayer?”
Trevor looked at me. “I’m a PK. Of course I believe in prayer.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
“What’s a PK?”
“Preacher’s Kid. I thought everybody knew that.”
“Well, you thought wrong.”
We stood there, staring at each other.
“I never told anybody,” I said, “but I don’t believe in prayer either.”
Trevor did that half-smile thing and shook his head. “I bet you have a lot of secrets.”
“I’m good at keeping secrets.”
Trevor reached for my hand, and I gave it to him.
Upstairs in his bedroom, Trevor put a cassette in his boom box and pressed Play. As Keith Sweat crooned “Make It Last Forever,” we kissed and undressed each other.
“Wow,” Trevor said once my bra and panties were off. Instantly his hands were everywhere. For once I didn’t feel embarrassed or annoyed. I felt powerful.
I pushed Trevor back on the bed and straddled him, letting my breasts sweep against his face.
“You ever did it before?” he asked.
“No. You?”
He hesitated a beat too long, so I knew that no matter what he said, the truth was that he hadn’t.
He told the truth. And then together we figured out how to put on the condom.
Trevor closed his eyes as he positioned himself between my legs. I wondered what he was thinking about. I was trying not to think about his father and my mother. The white-hot pain of him entering me brought me to tears. Tears from the fresh pain and from old hurts ran together.
“You want me to stop?” Trevor asked, still thrusting.
I never wanted him to stop.
When it was over, we finished the risky business of removing the condom. My fears of getting pregnant, all the what-ifs I had held at bay while we were doing it, they all came flooding back. My mother would kill me. And Miz Marilyn . . . I didn’t even want to think about how upset and disappointed she would be. If Trevor was thinking about any of this, he didn’t show it. He just adjusted the pillow beneath our heads, laid back, and smiled at me.
I propped myself up on one elbow. “Don’t you think we should go back downstairs? Your parents could come back at any time.”
“They’ll be praying for hours. Trust me.”
So I laid down on the pillow next to him and stared at the ceiling. “Now what?”
“You didn’t like it?”
“No, it’s not that . . . I don’t know. It’s weird. How something can feel right and wrong at the same time.”
“My father would say that what we just did is plain wrong, a sin. Fornication.”
“Do you believe that?”
He shrugged.
“Do you believe in God?”
He shrugged again.
“For a long time,” I said, “I thought your father was God.”
“Yeah. You and me both.”
And then Trevor reached for me with one hand and for a condom with the other.
Miz Marilyn’s sister died a few days later. When I showed up for Trevor’s next tutoring session, I brought Miz Marilyn a peach cobbler I’d baked. I had hoped that Pastor Neely wouldn’t be there and was relieved when he wasn’t. It would be the last tutoring session; Trevor had finals, then graduation, and then he was off to More-house in Atlanta.
“I’m so sorry about your sister,” I said.
“Thank you, dear,” Miz Marilyn said. “She’s at peace now.”
Miz Marilyn’s eyes were red from crying. It was the first time I’d seen her without a full face of makeup, and her hair was loose and a bit bushy. But she clapped her hands when I showed her the cobbler. “Oh, my word! It almost looks too good to eat. Almost! Trevor!”
As Miz Marilyn chattered on about the cobbler and how her sister used to make good apple cobblers, “God rest her soul,” I noticed a new framed picture on the hall table. In it, Trevor wore a tux, and his arm was around a pretty light-skinned girl in a seafoam-green prom gown. Her makeup was flawless and her hair was done up in glossy ringlets. They looked like wedding cake toppers, posed and stiff.
“—my best china and silverware. Because a special treat calls for special dishes. Oh, didn’t Trevor and Monica look lovely?” Miz Marilyn asked when she saw me staring at the photo. “They took that picture in her backyard. The Caldwells have a beautiful home up in Hillcrest. A perfect backdrop.”
A Woodbury Academy girl from Hillcrest. Whose mother hadn’t been fucking his father for over a decade.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s perfect.”
In the dining room, I could barely swallow a bite, but Miz Marilyn and Trevor dug into the cobbler. They both said it was the best they’d ever had. Miz Marilyn closed her eyes every time she took a bite. I tried to absorb all this goodness, but I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t even belong there, sullying her spotless home. Trevor finished his first helping, pushed his plate aside, and ate directly from the pan. I wanted to stab him with my fork.
Trevor kept stealing glances, asking me questions with his eyes. When Miz Marilyn left us alone to study, he stopped me when I asked to see his homework. “You okay?”
“It’s not your concern.”
“Whoa. You pregnant?”
“What? No!” I said, way too loudly.
“Then what—”
“Nothing. Let’s just go over your homework.”
“You’re not going to tell me what’s the matter?”
What was the matter? What was I expecting? For him to take me to the prom just because we’d had sex? He hadn’t told me he had a girlfriend, but I also hadn’t asked. What did he owe me? What did anyone owe me?
“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Trevor said. “Yeah.”
Yeah? That was it? Yeah?
The next forty minutes felt like a year. Trevor finished his homework. I checked it, and we went over the ones he missed. I spoke as little as possible. My voice was slow and heavy and felt like it belonged to someone else.
When the session was over, I grabbed my bag to leave.
“Wait,” Trevor said. He stood up and pulled me to him.
“Let me go.” I pushed him away.
Trevor shrugged. “All right. If that’s how you want to be.”
How did I want to be?
I wanted to be free of other people’s secrets.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s how I want to be.”
In the foyer, Miz Marilyn handed me my cleaned baking pan and my last pay envelope. “With a bonus!” she said, hugging me. As I stepped outside, she called after me. “Please come and see me, anytime. This big old house will be lonely come fall.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, knowing I never would.
As soon as I was on the street and out of sight, I ran. I ran and cried the entire bus ride home.
I stormed into the house and found my mother in the kitchen, putting away groceries.
“How was—?”
“Take it!” I threw the envelope at her chest. She put up her hands to block it, and the envelope fell at her feet. I dropped the empty cobbler pan and kicked it across the room as hard as I could. It slammed into the bottom of the stove.
“Girl, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but—”
“I don’t want his money, and I don’t want him in this house ever again!”
My mother’s laugh was dry and scornful. She crossed the room and got right up in my face. “Whose money do you think keeps us in this house? When was the last time you remember the lights being shut off? Or the water? You can’t, can you? Instead of talking about what you don’t want, you need to be thanking him.”
I shook my head. “No. I won’t ever thank him for cheating on his wife, for bringing me around his family,” I said. “And I would have rather been homeless, but I guess I should thank you for fucking him all these years to keep a roof over my head.”
My mother raised her hand and slapped me so hard across the mouth, I almost lost my footing. I raised my hand to slap her back, and she looked up at it. “Go ahead,” she said. “Take your best shot. And then get the hell out of my house.”
I balled my hand into a fist. “Why couldn’t you leave me out of this?” Tears streamed down my face. My mother kept her eyes on my raised fist. “Look at me!” I screamed. But she wouldn’t.
“You could’ve said no,” my mother whispered.
“Could I, really? I don’t recall being asked. So don’t you try and turn this on me!”
My mother slapped me again. “You watch your mouth!”
I raised my fist again. “I hope Pastor Neely chokes and dies on the next cobbler you make.”
“Don’t talk like that, Olivia! God don’t like ugly.”
“There’s nothing you can say to me about God. Ever. Because you’re the ugliest. You and Pastor Neely. The ugliest.” My chest was heaving, and I couldn’t stop the tears even if I had wanted to. “So you don’t have to worry anymore, Mama,” I said, “about me wanting to be anything like you. I swear, my life won’t be anything like yours. Because it will be sweet, and it won’t be crumbs.”
And then I dropped my fist. Because in the meantime, I had nowhere to go.