Mother was stunned. Her face assumed the same expression as Grandma’s when Mom had laughed about meeting Fred Valentine at the ABC store.

            “Afraid of the music?”  A question she was asking herself. “But it’s not bad music, Lorraine. That’s a hymn.”

            “It’s not the music.” It was harder to explain than to hold back my tears. “You’re the one making it bad.”

            Mother let go of me as if she’d been slapped.  I watched her through eyes filled with tears, watched as tears gathered in her own, watched as she blinked them back and a closed look settled on her face. Was she thinking she’d birthed a nutcase like Lena Ellis? Was she thinking she’d better make a fast getaway? Finally, she took me in her arms and held me tightly, my flat chest flattening her breasts, waiting until the rhythm of my heart matched her own. 

            “Should we call Grandma?” I asked. Another thing Harold Brickman’s money had bought was the installation of a new hall phone.

            “No,” Mother gave me one last squeeze before she let me go. “Your grandmother doesn’t need to know.”

            I sniffed and nodded.

            “You’ve been asleep,” she said, her voice gathering force. “You’ve been asleep and have had a bad dream. Now, do you need to go to the bathroom?”

            I nodded, following her to the beach bathroom, which was beyond clean and seemed bigger than the first floor of our house. It was so clean that, though I had to go, I couldn’t.

            Mother waited outside the stall so long that she began to tap her foot. Soon, it took on the rhythm of the routine she was teaching the majorettes. It felt like my bladder would burst, but nothing was happening. She rapped on the door. 

            “Lorraine, hurry up. I want to get back to the boys, and I don’t want you wetting yourself on the way home.”

            Again, the note I’d heard the morning I’d eavesdropped in the kitchen. She was angry, and my mother was not an angry woman. In fact, if one of the Sunbeam girls had come to life, they’d have grown up to look just like her. Finally, my bladder, cooperating with fear and nature, let forth a stream, staining the water.

            It was now near the end of July, and Glorious Life Pentecostal had printed up flyers announcing the arrival of Reverend Stephen Fisher. They were plastered all over town: on telephone poles, in store windows, even on the bulletin board in the post office next to the MOST WANTED posters. The Mill Record inserted flyers in their issues, which was perhaps the most important advertisement because that weekly journal carried a lot of weight.  People in the rural areas who couldn’t or wouldn’t get delivery from Clovington or Burlington subscribed to it, most especially in the county next to ours, Davis.

            Grandma Lizzie told me that Davis County was a rough place but also deeply religious. She said that the Davis people would sit in the back pews.

            “How do you know?” I asked.

            “Because the women will drag the men, and those men wear muddy boots.”

            “How do you know?”

            “I don’t know how I know, I just do. Now stop sassing, and listen to me. When that crowd comes in, we’ll be up front, and I don’t want you waving or turning around.”

“Why? Don’t you want them here?”

            “Child, you get the strangest ideas. Of course, I want them here. I’m a Christian.”

            “Then why can’t I speak or turn around?”

            “Because it’s not nice to stare. Now, you mind what I said.”