Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“You mean Alabama?” Elise said.

“He means heaven,” I said, reaching for the breadbasket and knocking over my glass in the process. The wine spilled all over the white tablecloth, pooled in my plate.

“Nice job,” Elise said.

“Jess,” my father said, like I’d ruined everything, like everything had been going so well up till now. He got angry when I spilled things, when I swallowed water too fast and it went down the wrong way. It was like he thought I did these things on purpose.

The busboy took my plate away and brought a towel, sopped it up, but there was still red everywhere, terrible as blood.

My father opened his menu. “Order anything you want.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Elise said. Nothing good ever came after that. It was never How would you like a bowl of ice cream? Or There’s a good movie playing . Why don’t we all go see it?

“What’s that?” he asked.

“How are we paying for this trip?”

“With the money we saved for this purpose,” he said.

“We know you lost your job,” she said, and I recalled a dinner, much like this one, after our father had gotten that job: white tablecloths and oversized menus, Order anything you want.

“I can order the lobster?” I asked.

“Your father said you can order whatever you want,” my mother said.

“Have you been leaving the house in the morning and going to the park?” Elise asked. “Or the library?”

I couldn’t remember him with a briefcase at all.

“I need you to leave this table,” he said. “And I don’t want to see your face for the rest of the night.” He said “face” in a really nasty way, like it was the most horrible thing ever.

“And don’t you leave your room,” my mother said. “I’m gonna be up there to check on you in half an hour.”

My sister finished her wine and put her hands on the edge of the table like she was going to push. Then she stood and left as the waiter was walking over to take our order. He stood there smiling and we were all so tense I could feel how awkward we were making him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, asked if he should come back in a minute. Something about it was satisfying—he wasn’t a part of us, didn’t belong. We were unhappy together, miserable even, but it was ours.

“No, we’re ready,” my father said. Then he looked at my mother and asked what she wanted. She ordered the surf and turf with a salad and a loaded baked potato, and the rest of us followed suit.

I imagined my father at the kitchen table a few weeks from now opening the credit card bill, the smell of pot roast we’d be eating for days. My mother would have us bag up all our old clothes for the Ultcheys and the other families who had given their money away, as if they needed our worn-out clothes, while my father assured them that we would all be in heaven soon, that this was not the life He had intended for us. I wondered whether he really believed it, if he’d ever believed.

The busboy brought another basket of bread and my father tore off a piece. He spread a thick layer of butter on it and immediately dropped it on his shirt.

“Seems like I can’t hardly eat without getting something on me,” he said, dipping his napkin into his ice water. I watched as he rubbed his shirt until a large wet spot stuck to his chest.

When the salads came, we stabbed at the pieces of lettuce. I drank the little bit of wine in my glass and didn’t ask for more. After a while, my mother attempted to make pleasant conversation but neither my father nor I were interested. It must have been the quietest meal of my life. My father didn’t even pray when the steaks and lobster tails were placed before us.

After dinner, I pulled my mother aside and asked if I could get Brother Jessie’s number. I’d prepared an answer but she didn’t ask, just got out her phone and called it out to me.

When I got back to the room, Elise wasn’t there. There was a note on the desk: “Meet me at the Irish bar. You can wear my blue dress.”

I sat on the bed, staring at Brother Jessie’s number. Though I saw him twice a week at church, and sometimes on Saturday mornings for breakfast in our kitchen, I’d never had any reason to call him. It made me nervous, talking on the phone to people I wasn’t used to talking on the phone to.

I hit the call button. On the second ring, he answered.

“Brother Jessie?” I said. “This is Jess Metcalf.”

“Jess,” he said, “it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“That’s good to hear,” he said. His voice sounded different. People always sounded different on the phone; they used their phone voices. “So tell me, what’s happening?”

“We’re in Arizona. Somewhere around Phoenix, I think.”

He made some affirmative-sounding noises so I said other stuff—how it felt like we’d been driving for a very long time, how things weren’t going very well. I told him about the car accident, the flat tire. He said car trips were like that, accidents and flat tires, that those things weren’t out of the ordinary.

“It was a really bad accident,” I said. “A man died. I touched his neck, trying to feel for a pulse.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“And there was a little girl. I think she was in a coma.” I felt like crying, but if I started, it might go on forever. I’d cry for Tammy and the bird woman and the Las Vegas girl, for my mother and father and the baby Elise wouldn’t have and my cousin who had died before she’d figured out how to live.

“We’re all praying for y’all,” he said. “The whole congregation.”

“Thank you.”

“What you’re doing is a good thing.”

“Thank you,” I said again. And then, “How come? Why is it a good thing?”

He took a swallow of whatever he was drinking, ice clinking in his glass. “You’re spreading the word,” he said.

“We haven’t been spreading the word that much.”

“I’m sure you’re doing what you can.”

“No,” I said. “We’ve hardly talked to anyone.”

“Maybe your father thinks it’s best for you to concentrate on each other right now.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing. I feel kind of lost,” I said. I wanted to tell him everything, wanted him to say I was okay, that we were okay, but he wouldn’t. He’d be disappointed. He might be angry.

“It sounds like you’re about to make a breakthrough,” he said, the ice clinking again.

“It does?”

“Jess, forget about your family and the trip for a minute. Have you prepared yourself for Him?”

“That’s why I’m calling, I don’t feel prepared at all. I don’t even know if I want it to happen.”

He paused for a moment, as if to let this sink in, and said, “What if it’s not Him you’re doubting, but yourself?”

That sounded right. I had no reason to trust myself.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said, and his baby, Rachel, started crying. She had some kind of deformity, one side of her face pocked with strawberries, a tumor eating up her eye. A benign tumor, my mother said, not life-threatening or even painful, though I didn’t know how she would know whether it was painful or not. The only time I’d held her, I put my hand over the bad side of her face to see what she would have looked like normal, what she was supposed to look like. She would have been a pretty baby.

His phone fell to the floor and he picked it up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You still there?”

“I’m here.” I turned on the TV and pressed mute—no matter what station you left it on, it defaulted to the hotel’s channel. At the spa, a smiling brunette was giving a pretty Asian woman a facial. I wondered if they hired actors or if these were real employees.