“Surely you’d be in a better position to get her to open about it than I would.” I said.
Naomi looked up and shook her head again. “She’s spent her whole life being told not to talk about things at home, even with me. I’m afraid I’m missing something basic because I’m too used to the patterns of their daily life. I can’t bear the thought of not doing something to help her.” She put a hand to her heart. “So when Kenneth told me about everything you’ve done to help people, it just seemed like—well, to be honest, it seemed like the hand of God in my life.” She took a shuddering breath and I could see tears shining in her eyes. She looked at me with a direct and vulnerable expression.
My heart pinched and I couldn’t help but feel an urgent desire to help. She was a young woman asking for my help on behalf of her vulnerable younger sister. How could I say no? I hadn’t been able to save my stillborn daughter, Georgia, over twenty years ago, and whenever I heard about a vulnerable young girl, I couldn’t help but want to help her in Georgia’s place.
Naomi went on, “And I have to tell you that I had almost come to stop believing in God at all. But if I fell in love with Kenneth in part because God wanted you in my life, then I’m going to use you. I need to know if Talitha is okay. It’s the only way I can marry Kenneth and pursue my career without constantly looking back and worrying about her. And about everyone else.”
Kurt made a “hmmm” noise, but otherwise did not make a comment about the wisdom of my getting involved in Naomi’s family drama.
The waitress brought our meats on heaped platters that looked far too big for us to actually consume everything in one meal. We all gamely started skewering meat and cooking it anyway. When I’d taken my first too-hot bite and then gulped water to cool down my mouth, I put down my skewer to let it cool.
“I still don’t understand what you think I can do,” I said to Naomi.
She hadn’t eaten anything on her skewer yet; she was too busy fiddling with it. “Well, I was thinking that maybe if you went to visit them, you’d see things with a more objective eye than I can. And maybe you can get people to talk to you when they won’t talk to me. I don’t know.”
It seemed equally likely that I would see nothing more than Naomi could. But she sounded desperate and I wanted to help her. I liked her already, and I sympathized enormously with her desire to help her younger sister. What did I have to lose?
“Visit them?” Kurt asked, around a bite of his own meat. “Just show up on the doorstep and announce herself?”
Naomi made a negative gesture with her hand. “My father has already said he wants to invite you two up to the house to meet the families. He’ll expect Kenneth and me to be there, too. But if I delay for a bit and tell him I have to do some studying, that might give you enough time to see things without my interpretation coloring it all.” She looked directly at me at this.
“We’d be up there by ourselves?” said Kurt dubiously.
Did he think that polygamous cooties were going to get on him?
Naomi turned to him, flushed. “My father will probably make you listen to a lecture on the history of polygamy and why it’s God’s holiest path.”
“You mean, he’s going to try to convert us,” said Kurt darkly.
“Not convert, exactly,” Kenneth explained. “Believe me, I’ve already heard the spiel. It’s annoying to listen through the whole thing, but he can take no for an answer. You just let him talk about it and then tell him you feel differently and that will be that.”
Clearly Kenneth had lived through it. I was sure Kurt and I could do the same. After all, he and I both knew about how sacred polygamy had been in the early days of the church. We also knew it had been rejected by every prophet since Wilford Woodruff, so it wasn’t as if we were going to change our minds about its current practice.
“I’ll see what I can see,” I said.
“Thank you so much,” said Naomi, letting out a long breath.
“How old is Talitha?” I asked, starting to gather information.
“Ten,” Naomi said. “And she’s my aunt’s daughter, not my mother’s.”
“What?” I said, confused.
Naomi sighed. “My father is married to my mother, Rebecca, and to my mother’s younger sister, Sarah. So technically, Talitha is only my half-sister and my cousin, but we grew up in the same house and I’ve always thought of her as my baby sister.”
I cringed at the thought of two sisters being married to the same man. It wasn’t incest exactly, but it seemed too close to it for my tastes. Still, I knew that it had happened fairly often in the history of the church. If a man made one sister happy, people seemed to think he could make another sister happy. And the two sisters would already know how to live with each other, right?