“I have to go now. There’s a prayer service in town; they’re waiting for me.” Although he might have given her the impression that he was presiding at the prayer service, which wasn’t exactly true, he hadn’t lied, either. There was a service—the memorial for the crewmen who had drowned on the Neptune II—but the only reason they’d be waiting for him was because he was planning to pick up his brother, Harley, who was supposed to offer some remarks. Charlie had already written them out for him.
“God be with you, Sister,” he concluded. “If you don’t abandon Him, He won’t abandon you. Never forget that.”
“I try not to.”
“PayPal,” Rebekah urged in a low voice from the doorway.
“Right,” Charlie said, so wrapped up in his divine mission that he had almost forgotten the Lord’s instructions to find the means to spread the word. “And don’t forget to send in your tithe via PayPal.”
The woman nodded, blowing her nose into a wadded-up ball of Kleenex.
“Bless you, Sister.”
“Bless you,” she said, before signing off.
Rebekah, sighing in exasperation—“You must think this place runs on prayers instead of money!”—wheeled him down the ramp to the garage, then helped as he hoisted himself into the driver’s seat of the blue minivan. His upper-body strength was still good. While Rebekah stowed the chair in the back, Bathsheba huddled over a book. If Charlie asked her what she was reading, she would claim it was Scripture, but more than once, it had turned out to be one of those Twilight books about vampires and such. Charlie had had to chastise her severely.
The service was scheduled for noon, and Charlie knew that Harley would barely be up in time. He backed the car out of the garage, using the array of rotary cable hand controls that allowed him to drive without having to use his feet on the gas or brake pedals; it was all done by twisting the specially installed shift on the steering wheel. The driveway was long and bumpy, and the main road wasn’t much better.
“I don’t like you talking to that woman so much,” Rebekah said.
It took a second for Charlie even to figure out who she was talking about.
“She’s just calling for sympathy,” Rebekah went on.
“She’s dying, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s no excuse. We all die.”
“She’s part of my flock.”
“Then shear her and be done with it.”
Bathsheba tittered in the backseat, and Charlie glanced in the rearview mirror.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
After they’d moved in with him, it had taken Charlie a few days before he realized that Bathsheba wasn’t just shy—she was actually a bit slow. Her older sister looked after her.
Still, he needed help around the house, and even more help running the Vane’s Holy Writ website and church. Rebekah had a lot of business sense, and Bathsheba could be entrusted with the simple housekeeping chores and such. Beyond that, however, she could be a problem. “We’re not going to have any trouble today, are we?” he asked over his shoulder.
Bathsheba pretended not to know what he was referring to.
“No fits? No antics?” The last time they’d set foot in the Lutheran Church, which served as the all-purpose house of worship for Port Orlov, Bathsheba had claimed to be assailed by devils. Raised in a tiny fundamentalist, Northeastern sect that had splintered off the mainstream a hundred years ago, the two women had arrived in Port Orlov with some pretty well-established, if unorthodox, ideas. But Charlie chalked up incidents like that last one to those damn books Bathsheba read. Thank God the town library, housed in the community center, consisted of about three shelves of tattered Reader’s Digest books.
“Don’t you worry about my sister,” Rebekah said sharply. “You take care of that brother of yours.” Indeed, he was planning to do just that; he had a very full agenda for both Harley and those two screw-loose friends of his, Eddie and Russell.
They drove in silence until they reached the outskirts of the town, then turned onto Front Street, pulling in between the lumberyard and the gun shop. The trailer still rested on the rusty steel hitch, a foot off the ground.
“Go get him,” Charlie said to Rebekah, and she said, “It’s cold out. Just honk the horn.”
Obedience, Charlie thought, would be the theme for his next video sermon.
He honked, and watched as the window blind was raised. He could see the outline of Harley’s head, framed by the pale violet glow of the snake tank. Charlie had never actually been inside the trailer, but Rebekah had been, and she’d filled him in on the gory details.
The door opened and Harley stumbled down the steps, still zipping his coat. His hair looked wet from the shower. He climbed into the backseat next to Bathsheba, who stashed her book out of sight. Charlie looked back and said, “Show me the speech you’re going to make.”
“What speech? I’m just gonna say a couple of things and sit down as fast as I can.”