Lily gently shook her daughter’s shoulder. “Wake up, sweetie. Time to go see your grandma and grandpa.” Who are batshit crazy, she thought, but obviously she wasn’t going to say this to a one-year old.
“Mama?” Mimi’s blue eyes, the image of her mother’s, were droopy with sleep. “Mick.”
“I’ll get you some milk, Mimi-saurus.” She supposed it was lucky that Mimi had been weaned from breast milk just before her first birthday, since the only kind of milk Lily could provide for her came in a can.
She carried Mimi downstairs and heated up some formula. After Mimi had sucked it down, Lily changed her diaper and brushed through her unruly baby hair — more out of habit than because it did any good.
Lily sighed and wished for a drink, a joint, an excuse. But there was no time for the first two, and her mind was too clouded by grief to think up an excuse. She grabbed her car keys and Mimi’s diaper bag.
It was time to go to church.
CHAPTER 2
Lily felt empty and unsettled as she drove out of downtown Atlanta and into Cobb County. She imagined it was much the same feeling native New Yorkers got when they crossed the line into New Jersey: the feeling of being among “them” instead of “us.”
Downtown Atlanta had character, history, and the tolerant do-what-you-want quality of the city.
Hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurants sat next door to gay leather bars. You could see the church once pastored by Martin Luther King, the Margaret Mitchell House, or (if your tastes ran to the morbid the street corner where Ms. Mitchell was fatally hit by a taxi. The junk-food establishments even had character and history: the Varsity, where comedian Nipsy Russell had once worked as a carhop, and the Majestic, the seedy all-night diner where Jack Kerouac used to kill time.
Driving through Cobb though, it was rare to see buildings that had been erected prior to 1975.
Restaurants consisted mainly of the usual suspects: McDonald’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Steak n’ Shake. The stores were links in multinational chains and were housed in sterile strip malls. If someone blindfolded me and dropped me in the middle of Cobb County, Lily thought, there would be no way I could figure out where the hell I was. The area had no distinguishing characteristics.
Calvary Baptist Church, the church where Charlotte’s family were having their little denial-fest of a memorial service, was the biggest, ugliest Protestant church on a street lined with big, ugly Protestant churches. Calvary was especially aesthetically offensive because of its puke-yellow brick and cream-colored, plantation-style columns. The plantation image was appropriate for the church, though, since the only black person ever seen on the premises was the janitor.
“Damn,” Lily muttered when she saw that according to the church clock, she was five minutes late. According to her battered Timex, she was two minutes early, but apparently her watch didn’t run on Cobb County time. She scooped Mimi up out of her car seat. “Okay, kid, you’ve never been to one of these before, and hopefully you’ll never have to go to one again. It’s called a church service.”
Once inside, Lily followed the sound of the maudlin organ music and slipped into a back pew in the sanctuary. An old lady in a wig that was slightly askew pounded on the pipe organ — one of those droning songs from the Baptist Hymnal. Was it “Rock of Ages” or “Blessed Assurance”? Lily could never keep those oldies-but-oldies straight, and her memory wasn’t aided by the fact that the goal of most WASP church musicians seemed to be to make all the songs sound as much alike as possible.
The stark white sanctuary was huge, but fewer than twenty people sat in the pews: Charlotte’s parents, recognizable because of Ida Maycomb’s helmet of rigidly coiffed brown hair and Charles Maycomb’s shiny bald pate; Charlotte’s brother Mike, there with his wife and two kids; and a few of Charlotte’s aunts and uncles. Lily figured that the other people in attendance were the types who waited around for the church doors to be unlocked so they could dart in and warm a pew. If this had been a real memorial service, instead of Ida and Charles Maycomb’s half-assed attempt to mark the passing of the daughter they never approved of, the turnout would have been pathetic.
After the pipe organ breathed its last, a puffy man whose gray hair matched his gray three-piece suit took his place behind the podium. “We gather here today,” he said, his voice dripping with mock solemnity, “to mourn the passing of the daughter of two of our congregation’s most beloved members, Ida and Charles Maycomb.”
Lily saw where this was going. Charlotte wasn’t even going to get top billing at her own memorial service.
“As Scripture has shown us,” the reverend continued, “there are few experiences more painful than the death of a child. When God tests Job, he takes his children from him. And just as Job wept for his lost children, today we join Ida and Charles Maycomb in weeping for their lost child, Charlotte Maycomb.”
Lily shifted Mimi’s weight on her lap. Lost child? Charlotte had been thirty-eight years old.
“And as always, Charlotte’s passing gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves: Are we really living our lives in a way that would make Jesus proud?” The rev was curiously puffy — not fat, exactly, but bloated, as though someone had given him an enema with the air from a bicycle pump. “Or when our time comes and we stand before Saint Peter at the pearly gates, are we going to have some explaining to do?
Today, as we observe Charlotte’s passing, I urge you all to think: If Jesus took you today, where would you spend eternity?”
Lily heard Ida’s sobs. No doubt she was contemplating her sinful lesbian daughter frying extra-crispy in the fires of hell. Lily had no doubt that Charlotte’s sinfulness was the not-so-subtle subtext of the rev’s little sermon. What made it all the more irritating was his delivery. For some reason, Lily didn’t object to the loud-mouthed hellfire-and-brimstone preachers as much as preachers like Mr. Calvary Baptist here. While the ideas he expressed were the same old damnation-and-judgment mambo, he spoke in sweet, subdued tones with a simper on his face that Lily longed to slap off. The only thing worse than regular hellfire and brimstone, Lily decided, was candy-coated hellfire and brimstone.