I love it. I love sharing food with all these crazy-ass, totally imperfect people like me.
My mom stabs another piece of corn and puts it on my dad’s plate. “How are you doing?” she asks Aisha.
Aisha says, “Scrambled.”
I reach over and squeeze her arm. “Scrambled how?” I ask.
“I’m sad, but also I’m done,” she says. “Like truly done with them. And I’m done letting them own God. Nobody gets to use God as a weapon against me anymore. I just fucking reject that stuff. Nobody owns my God.”
I know my mom wants to say, “Language,” but she doesn’t. Turk smiles. “Good. Good for you.”
“You should trademark God,” my dad says.
Mom exhales. “I love you, Matthew. I do. But shut up, please. Really.”
My dad smiles and zips his lips closed.
Apple, meet tree, I guess. Because the sad truth is that the trademark comment came into my head too. So I zip my lips shut too, and my dad laughs.
Aisha says, “I think that’s the worst thing you can do to a person. Make them believe that whatever you think about them, that’s what God thinks too.”
That makes me remember Pastor Logan, because the one thing that has not happened today is the thing I most want to see. I want to know what in the world he was thinking, keeping what he knew a secret from my dad for so long, all while continuing to pretend to be this close, caring friend of the family.
“The pastor,” I say to Turk. “Let’s ambush him. I’ll go with you. Go over there and just watch his eyes pop out of his skull when he sees you. I want him to burn.”
Turk shakes his head. “I get it, but no. I don’t think so.”
I’m shocked. Outspoken religious rebel Turk? He’s not going to confront the pastor? I look over at Aisha for support, and she seems game.
Turk takes a drink of water. “Explain this to me. How did you find me? How did all this get started?”
I describe going over to ask the pastor a few questions, and Aisha seeing one of Grandma’s boxes. I tell him what it took to get the box, and how Pastor Logan came so close to catching me in his attic that he nearly sat on my head. My mom looks like she’s going to have a heart attack. My dad laughs.
“So do you want the twelve-step reaction to all this?” Turk asks.
This shuts my dad’s laughing up, and I shake my head. “No thank you, please,” I say, and I cut off a piece of chicken breast and stuff it in my mouth with my fingers.
When no one else says anything, I relent. “Fine, go ahead,” I say.
“We talk about cleaning up our own side of the street. We ask the question, ‘What’s my part in this?’ I cannot change someone else. It isn’t my job, actually, to tell the pastor what he did wrong. I’m happiest if I do the best I can do, and leave the rest to God.”
I stick my finger down my throat dramatically and look at Aisha.
She isn’t laughing. “That’s like me and my dad,” she says. “I can’t make him do the right thing. I just have to take care of me.”
“You got it, dear,” Turk says, putting his arm around her. “That’s it exactly.”
Aisha gives me a gloating look and sticks her tongue out at me.
“Teacher’s pet,” I say. “So I’m supposed to just let God punish him, as if God sits around punishing people for their ways?”
Turk shakes his head. “What business is it of yours whether he’s punished?”
“Well, he should be.”
“So you’re God now?”
I shrug. “I’d be a good one.”
“No doubt,” Turk says. “But maybe for now, you can figure that the pastor is punishing himself. You don’t think he feels a little bit guilty about his role in all this?”
I think about it. The pastor has been taking care of my dad for years. Of course there must be some guilt in there. I’d never thought about that before.
So after dinner, I go over to the pastor’s by myself.
He answers the door in his red-and-white striped pajamas. “Carson,” he says.
“I’m just here to say sorry for stealing that box.”
He sucks in his lips. “I had a feeling you might be responsible for that.”
“It was wrong of me to steal it, and I’m sorry. But the stuff in it belongs to my family, so we’re going to keep it.”
He lowers his gaze to the ground. “Do you know?”
I nod. “My granddad’s lover is next door.” I want the word lover to scald him.
“I’ve prayed about this,” he says. “I’ve prayed and prayed.”
I have so many things I want to yell. The rage is heating my chest from the inside. But Turk said not to. So I don’t.
“I promised your grandmother. It was her dying wish. She did not want your father to have to deal with who his father was.”
It’s like an apology without the apology. Instead of just saying sorry, which I would actually like to hear, all I’m getting is a rationalization.
So I put my trembling hand up. “Nope. Not interested. None of my business.”
I walk away with the pastor still standing there at the open door.
WHEN I WAKE up in the morning, I find my nose being tickled by a bunch of rubbery strands. I sit up, and Aisha is standing there, a proud look on her face.
“Behold, the new, improved, softer Porcupine of Truth!”
I look down. Aisha has replaced the broom bristles with rubber bands that appear to have been cut in half.
I shake my head. “And you did this because —”
“Hey. Porcupine two point oh is a great improvement. Far fewer God-related injuries. Puncture wounds and the like.”
“I do prefer the softer version,” I admit, picking her up and turning her over and over in my hands. “I mean, who likes being attacked by a truth porcupine, after all?”
We take her upstairs to show Turk, who is breakfasting and thrilled with the change, since he had been one of the first to mention his discomfort with our bristly deity, on the plane.
“I like a God that is more approachable. Less prickly,” he says.
“True dat,” Aisha says.
He picks it up and admires her handiwork. “Finally, the rubber meets the God,” he says, and we look at him funny. “It was supposed to be a play on ‘the rubber meets the road.’ Sorry.”
“My grandpa would have had a better one,” I say, and Turk nods.
The Billings Zoo has some animals. Not like a ton, but some.
It also has some damn beautiful paths to walk down, and probably the biggest change, when I go back for the second time, exactly two weeks after the first, is that I notice this.
That, and I have my family around me.
Some of my family can’t be here. My dad, because it would just be too much for him. My mom, because she’d rather be with my dad. But Aisha and Turk are definitely my family now, and I certainly don’t feel close to alone anymore.
“You know how the sika deer got their name?” I say.
“I’m truly afraid to ask,” Turk replies.
Aisha hijacks it. “It was this one deer. A doe. Got totally tired of being around only other deer. Where were the walruses? The goats? She whined and whined until the other deer shunned her, and then she started her own breed: ‘sick-a deer.’ ”
Turk puts his arm around her. “Are you sure you don’t have a little Smith blood in you?”
“If only,” Aisha says, and she half rolls her eyes at me to show me she’s basically kidding, that my people aren’t so great either.
I elbow her in the ribs. “Hey. Anytime you want to decide that you’re straight and take my name, you know where to find me.”