We sat in the living room; the carpet was the same crisp white from my
childhood. The visit was short and polite. He talked about Grandma, whom
he had cared for long after she ceased to recognize him. I talked about
England. Grandpa mentioned my mother, and when he spoke of her it was
with the same look of awe that I had seen in the faces of her followers. I
didn’t blame him. From what I’d heard, my parents were powerful people in
the valley. Mother was marketing her products as a spiritual alternative to
Obamacare, and she was selling product as fast as she could make it, even
with dozens of employees.
God had to be behind such a wondrous success, Grandpa said. My parents
must have been called by the Lord to do what they have done, to be great
healers, to bring souls to God. I smiled and stood to go. He was the same
gentle old man I remembered, but I was overwhelmed by the distance
between us. I hugged him at the door, and gave him a long look. He was
eighty-seven. I doubted whether, in the years he had left, I would be able to
prove to him that I was not what my father said I was, that I was not a wicked
thing.
Tyler and Stefanie lived a hundred miles north of Buck’s Peak, in Idaho
Falls. It was there I planned to go next, but before leaving the valley, I wrote
my mother. It was a short message. I said I was nearby and wanted her to
meet me in town. I wasn’t ready to see Dad, I said, but it had been years since
I’d seen her face. Would she come?
I waited for her reply in the parking lot at Stokes. I didn’t wait long.
It pains me that you think it is acceptable to ask this. A wife does not go
where her husband is not welcome. I will not be party to such blatant
disrespect.fn1
The message was long and reading it made me tired, as if I’d run a great
distance. The bulk of it was a lecture on loyalty: that families forgive, and
that if I could not forgive mine, I would regret it for the rest of my life. The
past, she wrote, whatever it was, ought to be shoveled fifty feet under and left
to rot in the earth.
Mother said I was welcome to come to the house, that she prayed for the
day when I would run through the back door, shouting, “I’m home!”
I wanted to answer her prayer—I was barely more than ten miles from the
mountain—but I knew what unspoken pact I would be making as I walked
through that door. I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the