For the Love of Mary Read online

  A NOVEL

  Christopher Meades

  To Claire

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  1 Christmas in July

  2 Long Driveway, Small Kitchen

  3 Casting the Second Stone

  4 Orange Fingerprints Everywhere

  5 The Cure for Burgeoning B.O.

  6 Teen Boy Makeover

  7 The Wingman’s Role

  8 Conversion for Heathens

  9 Cougars, Canyon Parties and Evil Clowns

  10 Conjugal Visit Cheetos

  11 Like Thieves in the Night

  12 Love in the Time of Expired Milk Products

  13 Waffle Cones Everywhere

  14 Stir Up a Hornet’s Nest

  15 Dave’s Refrigeration Emporium

  16 Sweet, Sweet Pain

  17 At the Car Wash, at the Car Wash . . . Yeah

  18 The Arranged Marriage of a Christian and a Hindu

  19 Presbyterians vs. Methodists

  20 The Friend Zone

  21 Quite the Public Menace

  22 Jesus vs. Gandhi

  23 Pious Pancakes

  24 Taste My Samosas

  25 Story of a Young Man, Undercover

  26 The Green Flash

  27 No Christmas This Year?

  28 The Ejaculation Schedule of the Messiah

  29 The Final Countdown

  30 To Catch a Peeper

  31 The First Supper

  32 To Confront a Peeper

  33 Locker Room Pepsi-Beers

  34 Sickly Humping Ferrets

  35 $1,000 a Day

  36 Village People

  37 Drop the F-Bomb

  38 Definitely a Goose

  39 Home Renovations

  40 Jesus Sighting in My Bedroom

  41 Operation Desert Storm

  Thank Yous

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  The end of chapter 26 is based on a very old joke about a nun and a priest. Many variations of this joke exist, with most having something to do with a car and a made-up Bible verse. I would quote the source, but the drunken lout who first came up with the joke in a pub some one hundred years ago has (most likely) long since walked through the Pearly Gates.

  I’ve taken some liberties with the release dates of video games, but never fear, I’ve only shifted the dates by months, not years.

  Also, apologies to my father, a man of infinite patience, for repeating here the true story of the first time I ever caught him swearing.

  1

  Christmas in July

  Before the signs caused all the hoopla, and well before our little rivalry made national news, I’d heard great things about the new church across the street. They had air conditioning, a banquet hall and an air-hockey table in the basement.

  My family went to the Passion Lord Church of God, a place my mother called “exclusive,” which was another way of saying it was sparsely attended. We were the small church in town, our little ramshackle country house of a chapel sitting kitty-corner to the newer, modern Church of the Lord’s Creation. While our choir was composed mainly of retirees with varying degrees of memory loss and halitosis, the Church of the Lord’s Creation had a rock band with a drop-dead gorgeous female lead singer and a guitarist who could play note-for-note any solo from Metallica’s landmark 1991 Black album.

  That was the first point of contention between our two churches: the sheer noise their band made. At our church’s Saturday picnic, my mother was talking about it as she took sandwiches out of the cooler and set them on the picnic table.

  “I’m going to call the sheriff again,” she said. “This time I’ll make him show me the noise ordinances on the books.”

  Everyone within five feet of my mother looked away. If they made eye contact, she’d go on about the noise for an hour.

  My father bit into his peanut butter and jam sandwich and immediately spat it out onto his plate. “Tarnation, Margaret!”

  Right away I knew what he was yelling about. Mom had put raspberry jam in his sandwich again. My father — name Donald: bald, stout and capable of picking a cooked Safeway chicken clean with his own two hands — hated raspberry jam. He preferred strawberry and had, for years now, insisted my mother put strawberry jam in his sandwiches. Only, Mom refused. This was her line in the sand. She gave Dad a dirty look and continued setting out bags of chips next to the sandwiches.

  “We’re a raspberry jam family,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you can go live with the heathens.”

  Dad’s face turned red. “I bought a jar of strawberry jam last week and put it in the cupboard next to the Oreos.”

  “I know,” Mom said. “I threw it away.”

  “Why?”

  “Because our house is too small to fit dozens of jams and marmalades.”

  And there was my mother’s thesis statement, an unsubtle one at that. She was straight-up telling my dad we needed a bigger house. For as long as I could remember, this was the central issue in their marriage. My mother wanted a house with a state-of-the-art kitchen, one with an island for chopping vegetables, a stove with more than two settings (lukewarm or scorch-the-roast-beef hot), flooring that wasn’t the color of ten-year-old mustard scrapings and a multitude of cupboards in all shapes and sizes. And my father wouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, pay for one. To punish him, my mother limited the kinds of food she’d allow in the house. We could have bacon in the refrigerator, but we couldn’t have maple-­cured bacon. We could have Lean Cuisine frozen pizzas but none of my dad’s favorite late-night Pizza Pops. And definitely no strawberry jam. My father was in the unenviable position of being starved out of his own house.

  Dad lowered his voice. “Tarnation, Margaret. We’ve ­already discussed this.”

  My mother turned away and yanked a banana out of my sister’s hand. Caroline looked shocked at first and then she made a sad face, like a snowman whose coal smile had melted into a frown.

  It troubles me to say this, but Caroline was completely incapable of eating a banana in a non-erotic way. She couldn’t help herself. She once confessed that this was an involuntary impulse, which sounded strange to me. After all, no one was forcing her to eat long, phallic-shaped fruit in the first place. Still, she was adamant. There was no manner in which she could consume a banana without, at least for the first few bites, treating it like an appendage dangling from George Clooney’s nether region. My sister, Caroline, was like a drug addict with no desire or capacity to disengage from her self-defeating behavior. Her phallic banana-eating made our family’s attendance at church picnics uncomfortable. At least for me and my mom. I’m not sure anyone else noticed.

  It was July 20, 1996. I was fifteen and skinny with a peach-fuzz moustache that had become both a matter of pride for me and a great conundrum for my mother. At least twice a week, she and my father would openly debate ­whether or not they should force me to shave it off.

  “The boy is fifteen and he looks like a ’70s porn star,” Mom would say.

  My dad would shake his head. “As soon as you start shaving, it grows back in thick like a patch of weeds. Is that what you want?”

  And here is the ultimate issue with debating — each side only gets more firmly entrenched in his or her own point of view. Especially after pounding back a full box of Hochtaler wine. (It’s always a good year.)

  Caroline was eighteen and had no such follicle issues. She’d been shaving, plucking, trimming and/or waxing every hair her body dared to grow for the p
ast four years and, as a result, when she walked along the beach in her yellow polka-­dot bikini, she looked like a little girl. With breasts. And a banana-sucking problem. Which, according to my mother, always drew attention from “the wrong kind of people.”

  At this point, wrong kind of people or not, we would have been glad to have anyone attend our picnics. There were fewer than forty people gathered in the park across the street from the church. A few years ago, three hundred would have shown up. It was an irrefutable fact: the Passion Lord Church of God was losing members left, right and center to the Church of the Lord’s Creation.

  For most of my life, our little church at the corner of Ascott Street and Jedidiah Avenue was the only religious game in town. Years ago, when I was still in grade school, some optimistic soul had built a mosque on the other side of the railroad tracks. What that one devout Muslim failed to realize was that Parksville was 99.99 percent Anglo-Saxon white. The mosque was now a credit union and the town was still white, more or less, today.

  There were a few black families in our neighborhood, and an East Indian named Pushkar had moved into one of the big houses on Tantamount Avenue. Pushkar operated the local AMPM convenience store, which frustrated my father to no end. Despite the occasional redneck catchphrase flying out of his mouth, my dad was as progressive as any red-blooded male in a red state had ever been, and he often wondered out loud why the one East Indian family in town had to run a convenience store.

  “It’s a stereotype, Margaret,” Dad would say. “If he were a doctor or a lawyer, he could help change people’s opinions.”

  “I’m sure there are thousands of doctors and lawyers in India,” Mom would say.

  “But that’s my point. Why can’t they immigrate our way?”

  “They do, dear,” Mom would say. “But our government doesn’t recognize their licenses, so they end up driving taxicabs in New York City.”

  My parents would talk like this for hours, circling the same subject like a gumball orbiting a funnel. Only, unlike a gumball — which ultimately succumbs to gravity — they never arrived at a destination. There was really no point in interjecting. If they weren’t listening to each other, I highly doubted they would listen to me.

  The one person my mother listened to was Reverend Richard. With his grayish-white beard and year-round sunburnt complexion, Reverend Richard looked like a reverend, in the way that it would have been weird to see him in any other occupation, such as the guy bagging your groceries or ticketing your double-parked car. There was something reverential about him that came through in his eyes, something about the way he wore his black suit and white collar that made it feel like he was born into his profession.

  At our pious picnics, however, my image of him came undone. Reverend Richard would wear pleated khakis and a golf shirt with a tiny insignia of an alligator or a sailboat. It made him look ordinary . . . human even. If I were Reverend Richard’s stylist (if such things existed for small-town clergymen), I would have advised him to stay away from anything other than his priestly frock. Even at bedtime, he should only have been allowed to wear pajamas that were black with white trim.

  However he dressed, Reverend Richard had a deep, almost sacred tone of voice that came through whenever he spoke of his little church’s dwindling congregation.

  When construction of the Church of the Lord’s Creation had started four years earlier, none of us could believe its sheer size. It looked like the building blocks of an ancient Roman amphitheater as they poured those first concrete pillars. As the workers hammered and poured and fused and erected the goliath building, its shape started to form and we could all see what we were dealing with. It was a giant steeple with an enormous multi-room, multipurpose building underneath.

  For Reverend Richard, the swift erection of that steeple must have made him feel like he’d been fishing in a rowboat, happy as a clam, until some stranger pulled up in his yacht and threw three dozen lines into the water. I was only eleven when construction started, but I remember wishing I’d been a giant, so I could yank off random sections of the building and chomp down on them, the way the Fraggles did to the Doozers’ scaffolding, only ferociously, like an ogre gone wild. The giant me would bite off chunks of their baseboards and pillars and delight in watching the workers run and scream.

  That was how I felt during construction. Once the building was in place, dwarfing our small church, stealing the very sunlight from the air every summer’s day during the three o’clock hour, I didn’t give it much thought. It was just a large building next to a small building I visited once a week, a place where I mostly sat in silence and replayed that week’s TV shows over again in my head. I didn’t actually listen to the sermon. I was just a warm body filling up a seat in the pews — a warm body in that I was there but not really there, like one of those stars the newspaper said that telescopes could see but had actually burnt out millennia ago.

  Originally, the Church of the Lord’s Creation wasn’t even supposed to be built in Parksville. Years ago, word had spread of an alternate location in the nearby city of Springfield that was the new church’s first choice. Rumor had it that just before construction was scheduled to start, the reclusive oil baron who’d been financing the project did a sudden about-face and picked Parksville instead, choosing to retire in peace to a quaint small town. Rumor also had it that the oil baron suffered a massive heart attack hours after he wrote the check to finance the church of his dreams, leading to lots of money and no captain to steer the ship.

  My mom called shenanigans, refusing to believe the mysterious-benefactor story and suggesting instead that a syndicate of big-city charlatans and back-alley swindlers had taken out a series of high-interest loans from multiple financial institutions, some as far away as Kuwait, all for the purpose of laundering mafia money through her precious little community. My dad said that both stories were “complete and utter malarkey,” and told Mom that if she was so interested in exposing the truth, she should call Crime Stoppers.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. All the conjecture in the world couldn’t stop the Church of the Lord’s Creation from coming to Parksville. It would still be okay, Mom insisted, as they were planning on erecting the new building all the way across town.

  As luck would have it, the Church of the Lord’s Creation switched building sites a second time because of a single gravestone found while excavating the weeds in the vacant lot they’d selected. I’d never seen the gravestone, but apparently there was a woman’s name (Agnes Petrich), an occupation (seamstress) and a date (New Year’s Eve, 1897), and that was enough to spook the Church of the Lord’s Creation to move all the way across town. Often, late at night, when the Hochtaler sweats kicked in, my mom would curse Agnes Petrich and her pre-indoor-plumbing life and death (which Mom assured us was likely from a mixture of syphilis and gout). If it hadn’t been for that one long-forgotten skeleton, the big church never would have been erected across the street. The sunlight wouldn’t have been stolen. Everything would have been just the way it always was.

  The first to jump ship were the Wittys. It was the second Sunday after the church opened, and I can still remember my family getting out of our car and spotting the Wittys exiting their vehicle in the parking lot across the street. They weren’t even ashamed. Where was their contrition? Their remorse? Where was their humanity? Joan and David Witty simply stepped out of their Subaru, removed their young children from their car seats and brazenly walked into the other building for Sunday service, without a single thought as to how this might affect their eternal souls.

  My mother could hardly contain herself. I remember her wishing out loud that the Witty children be plagued with the same pox that afflicted Agnes Petrich. In retrospect, hoping that small children catch syphilis — or, at the very least, burst out in all sorts of inflamed pustules — probably wasn’t the nicest thing my mother ever said, but we were all so stunned. The Wittys had abandoned Reverend Ric
hard. Judases! Each and every one of them.

  The next to go were the Craigs. Then the Knox family. The parishioners toppled like dominoes. In less than three months, our little Passion Lord Church of God’s throng was cut by two-thirds. It was like watching patrons flee a corner store only to bustle through the doors of the newly constructed Walmart. And while none of us should have been surprised, most of us were. Even Caroline and I, who went to church only because our mother insisted, were offended.

  My best buddy since grade school, Moss Murphy, attended the new church with his parents. He described the place as “wicked freaking awesome like you wouldn’t believe.” Besides the air conditioning to keep you from sweating through your shirt, the air-hockey table in the basement turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg. To hear Moss Murphy describe it, the new church basement was like a Chuck E. Cheese’s where all the games actually worked, only you didn’t need to use a token each time you wanted to try the mini-bowling.

  One evening when Reverend Richard was at our house for dinner, he asked Moss Murphy what the sermons were like.

  “They’re good, I suppose,” Moss Murphy said.

  “But what specifically are they teaching? How is Minister Matthew? Do the parishioners look happy? Do they look fulfilled?”

  Moss Murphy stared at Reverend Richard like a deer caught in the headlights, his eyes widening with each passing second. Before his pupils could take over his entire face, Reverend Richard placed a consoling hand on Moss Murphy’s shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, Moss. Just follow where your heart takes you.”

  Moss Murphy nodded his chubby cheeks and walked into the other room, his heart taking him to a half-finished bag of cheese puffs.

  Reverend Richard’s faith in his remaining flock, were it to have faltered — momentarily or for keeps — never wavered in public. At least, I never noticed it wavering in public. This was the summer I became awake, the dividing line between my youth and adulthood, the summer I was saved. And not saved in the way one might think. Suffice it to say, during those warm July days in 1996, Reverend Richard could have come into the church weeping or cursing or wearing an enormous fruit hat, and I might not have noticed.