Jesus Saves Read Free Page B

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    At first her father sat at her mother's side, held her hand, sometimes touching her flushed cheek, the edges of his mouth turneddown with sympathy and his eyes glassy and red. He'd nod his head, agreeing with everything she said, about how unfair life was, how it didn't seem to make any sense. Sometimes he'd say something about the mysteries of God's Will, about cultivating strong faith, and her mother would get angry and ask him to leave the room, say she didn't like to hear him talk nonsense. Near the end, her eyes grew wild and desperate; she'd called him in to pray, but she wouldn't hold his hand, kept insisting that he grasp the hand of Ginger's old teddy bear. He'd finally relented and bowed his head, his body brittle with embarrassment. Her mother didn't believe in God anymore and she just laughed. After that, he rarely came into the room, just hovered at the doorway, asking the nurse if she needed anything.
    Ginger opened the closet and took down the shoe box from the top shelf that held all of the sympathy cards they received when her mother died. Most had little animals on them, blue birds and bunnies’ or a Jesus in soft focus looking wise and demure. One woman wrote in a shaky cursive script that God needed her mother in heaven, that he'd looked down from the clouds, seen her suffering, and decided she'd be better off with him. She took a skirt from a hanger and pulled it up around her waist, fastened the button. The floral skirt was the one piece of her mother's clothing she'd kept and though she knew the people at the church thought she was crazy, she wore it there almost every week.
    She needed to hurry; if she wanted to get to church before the sermon, she'd have to start walking now. It was late enough to walk along the highway in peace, without members stopping to ask if she needed a ride.
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    The hymn swelled, one of the old ones, its melody ponderous and Germanic. The usher pressed a bulletin into her hand and she slid into the last pew, a position saved for latecomers like herself. She was lucky. There weren't many typos in the bulletin this week. In the announcements that counted—the special thank you to Herb Clayton for making and donating the guest-book stand in the narthex, and the notice for the youth group dinner featuring com dogs, and the Martin Luther movie Wednesday night—everything was spelled correctly. She'd seen that movie a hundred times, always admiring Martin's short earnest hair-do and the part when rain blew in the window and he fainted because he was so afraid of God. The altar flowers, white carnations, yellow mums, red gladiola in a pulp paper vase, were given by Mr. Mulhoffer in memory of his beloved mother, the legendary Eva Mulhoffer, whose sauerbraten was as important to the history of the church as the founding ministers. It was Mulhoffer who put up the money for this new church. He argued in congregational meetings that the downtown area was dead, filled with drug addicts and petty criminals and that the future of the church was in the suburbs, where his pressed-wood furniture factory was located, down the highway, not far from the interstate entrance. He'd made a fortune in cheap colonial bedroom sets, Formica dinettes, couches that looked like overweight lazy-boy recliners. It was junky stuff, but Mr. Mulhoffer was not an unappealing man. He wore his white hair short and his pants pulled up over his big belly, and he was charming and friendly to everyone. But Ginger didn't like him because he believed unequivocally that anything new was better than anything old. His wife shared her husband's fanatical love of the new. Every Saturday she came by the church to urge Ginger's father to wear the new vestments, the minimalalb and the thin red stole with the machine-embroidered Alpha and Omega. Her father told Ginger that in the new vestments he felt like an alien in a bad sci-fi movie.
    She watched him sitting on the wood slab suspended from the white brick