Chapter One
All the good Bible names must have been taken when Enoch Miller was born.
“Can’t we do ‘Daniel’?” his dad would have said.
And his mom would have been like, “‘Daniel’? So that people think we only go to church on Easter? We may as well name him ‘Matthew.’ Or ‘James.’ Next you’ll suggest ‘Thomas.’”
“My name is Thomas, sweetheart.”
“Your mother was Episcopalian. I rest my case.”
“What about ‘Jacob’?”
“This congregation already has three ‘Jacob’s.”
“‘Isaac’?”
“It’s a little try-hard. I’m looking for a name that’s try-really-really-hard. Like—not quite ‘Zebediah,’ but close.”
Enoch Miller.
Enoch, Enoch, Enoch.
He looked terrible in that brown suit. He’d looked terrible in it two years ago, back when it fit, and now he looked ridiculous. The pants were too short, and the buttons strained on the jacket. He should just wear it open, who was he kidding. He was built like a front door, no waist at all. Imagine a rectangle with legs, crammed into a brown suit. That’s what Enoch Miller looked like. (Enoch, Enoch.)
He was walking up the church aisle, counting people, standing up extra straight like he was doing something really important. Like, “Jesus said I was the only person who could handle this. Better give me some space.”
It wasn’t fair that the boys got jobs to do during church services. They got to take attendance and manage the audiovisual equipment. Some of them, the older boys, even got to watch the parking lot. Imagine getting to skip half the service to stand outside in the sunshine—or the rain, Corinne wouldn’t mind the rain. She’d take any job at all.
Enoch got to read the Bible sometimes. As a job. He got to stand onstage and read the selected passage for the week, before an elder led the discussion. Enoch would go up there, and another boy would come up behind him to adjust the microphone to Enoch’s height. Because that was a job, too. Microphone boy. (Enoch used to be a microphone boy; he’d graduated.)
Corinne could adjust microphones. She was able. She could read the Bible out loud. She could stand outside in the parking lot and chew gum. She could walk up and down the aisles verrrry slowly with a pencil and a notepad, mouthing the headcount to herself.
Put me in, Coach. (Where “Coach” is “Jesus.”)
Not in this lifetime, girly. (Jesus would say.)
The Sunday service was two hours long. (Tuesday and Thursday services were shorter.) Corinne was allowed to go to the bathroom twice on Sundays—but only because her family was trashy and sat in the back of the church.
The un-trashy people sat up front, and their daughters were expected to hold their water, and their sons got to hold the microphones.
Corinne’s family were serfs. Her dad was an unbeliever, and her mom was a convert, so they all bore the stink of the outside world. Her family had been coming to this church three times a week for a decade, but the word was still out on them.
Maybe they deserved it.
Because even though Corinne never broke any spoken rules, she sort of hummed over lots of unspoken ones. And her mom let her. Her mom was soft; she let the younger kids run wild, too. That’s why they all sat in the back row—because Corinne’s brothers wouldn’t stay in their seats, and they drew pictures instead of taking notes. The whole family was kind of embarrassing.
So who cared, really, if Corinne went to the bathroom twice in two hours, and if she always went to the bathroom downstairs, even though she knew you weren’t supposed to be downstairs without a reason.
“I don’t like the upstairs bathroom,” she’d tell her mother. “People can hear you flush.”
The church basement had thick, emerald-green carpeting left over from the 1970s. There were small study rooms down there, and a library, and a room for the furnace and the cleaning equipment.
If you used the downstairs bathroom, you could sit in the stall as long as you wanted. There was never a line. Sometimes Corinne would sit there so long that she peed twice. Then she’d wash her hands like a surgeon and spend a few minutes examining herself in the mirror.
She always looked bad. She was fat, and her face was broken out, and she wasn’t very good at putting on makeup—and you had to be really good at makeup to wear it to church, because it had to look like you weren’t wearing any at all.
She wore long skirts with elastic waists, and solid-colored crewneck sweaters.
The girls upstairs in the front rows wore dresses.
They had bodies for dresses. Waists that would take a zip. Arms like Seventeen magazine models—the same circumference from wrist to shoulder.
The girls upstairs had money for dresses. And matching tights. And low-heeled pumps that their mothers let them wear when they turned fourteen, but not a day earlier.
Corinne would look at herself in the downstairs bathroom mirror. She’d suck in her stomach, stick out her tongue. Pull the ends of her dishwater-blond ponytail to tighten it. (It never looked the same after you fixed it that way.) She’d pick at her nail polish (no one explicitly said that you couldn’t wear nail polish to church) and scrape at it with her teeth.
And then she’d peek into all the study rooms … The one with the green chairs that used to be upstairs before the church was remodeled. The one with the mural of Noah’s ark. The library. Corinne would walk along the bookshelves, running her fingers thump-thump-thump over the spines. She wouldn’t turn on any lights. She wasn’t supposed to be down here.
She’d peek in the furnace room, too. It smelled like store-brand Pine-Sol.
Sometimes, when she’d run out of distractions, she’d linger on the staircase, listening to the services happening on the other side of the lobby. Standing. Bouncing on the edge of a step. Making lines in the thick green carpet with the toes of her black flats.
Enoch Miller had caught her there before.
“What are you doing out here, Corinne?”
“I went to the bathroom.”
“Yeah, well, what are you doing now?”
“Standing. I had a leg cramp. What are you doing?”
“It’s my job to check the basement.”
“You must be very important. Brother Miller.”
“You’re missing services, Sister Callahan.”
“Well, you don’t miss a beat. No wonder they trust you with the basement.”
Copyright © 2022 by Rebecca Morrow
