Can I Get An Amen? Read Free Page B

busy. He would become a nuisance, then a burden, before he was forgotten entirely. And what would happen to Daniel then?
Are you willing to sacrifice him, too, Gary?
    Though neither of us was a smoker, Luke and I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and kept one burning for almost the entire car ride. We stopped only once, at a dismal little rest stop where a tiny Hispanic woman stood in front of a bucket of filthy water, absentmindedly pushing a mop across the brown-tiled floor. Once we hit the New Jersey Turnpike, the highway rose above the sort of postapocalyptic industrial wasteland that often defines the state, with heat rising in waves off the acres devoted to stacks of empty cargo containers and oil tanks. But soon the blinding late-August sun was tamed by the lush green of the suburbs, where the men who sat in window-filled corner offices in Manhattan skyscrapers kept their homes.
    Luke asked me if Mom had told me the latest about our father’s newest project, Channing Crossing, and the financial issues it was going through. “Yeah,” I said, “she mentioned it.” Due to my mother’s almost biological need to prophesy doom, she had been
mentioning it
for months. My father, a real estate developer, had rolled the dice big-time on an enormous new mixed-use development in Pennsylvania that offered both housing and commercial space. Then the real estate bubble burst and what had seemed like a potential gold mine turned into a major financial liability.
    “I think it might be worse than she wants to admit,” said Luke as he turned into the long paved driveway of my parents’ very beautiful home.
    I felt my shoulders tense. Things were supposed to be
better
than my mother indicated, never
worse
. “Like, how much worse?”
    “I don’t know, Elle. I just think it’s weird that they didn’t rejoin Rook National this year.”
    I thought back to the conversation in which my mother hadsaid that they didn’t plan to renew their membership at the club. “But Mom said that Dad’s shoulder has been bothering him too much for golf.”
    “I know,” said Luke hesitantly. “But I think they are just temporarily in a tight spot. I’m sure it’ll pass, though.” And we both settled into that ambiguous but comfortable thought.
    . . .
    “Oh, praise you, Jesus!” came my mother’s elated voice as she saw Luke and me walk safely into the kitchen. She abandoned the bowl of pasta that she was tossing and, wiping her hands on a dish towel, bustled toward us. “I was so worried about y’all driving on that terrible I-95. Just last week someone from our church nearly had an accident with a tractor-trailer just outside Stamford.” I was first on the list for a hug and she reached her thin little arms up around my neck. At five feet six inches, she was the shortest member of my family by three inches. “My little Ellen. My poor little baby girl! I am so sorry, Ellen.” I hadn’t seen her in person since before Gary left. “I know that you can’t see it yet, but this is all part of God’s plan for you.”
    “Mom…,” I started by way of a warning, but she had already moved on.
    “Luke, thank you so much for going up there to help your sister.” She held him long and tight and I knew what she was doing. She was doing what she had done each and every time she’d seen him since he came out of the closet: she was trying to pray the gay out of him. She was trying to save his soul. While my mother adored Luke, she didn’t adore, as she put it, “his lifestyle.” His being gay was incredibly hard for my parents to accept, so she adopted a bifurcated view of her son: there was thegay part and then there was the rest of him, the part that God had made. When my mother came up for air she eyed us suspiciously. “Have y’all been smoking?”
    “Just crack, Mom,” answered Luke. “Some blacks were selling it by the side of the highway.”
    She swatted him with a dish towel and dropped that line of questioning.