Revival Season by Monica West (romantic novels to read txt) 📕

through the wall of steam as people started to trickle through the double doors. Normally, the line would be in the hallway before Papa said the closing prayer, but people came in one or two at a time. Per Ma’s request, I had already made Papa’s plate with a turkey leg, a heap of green beans, and two biscuits.

Papa entered the multipurpose room, and I grabbed his plate so he didn’t have to wait in line. Some motion near the side window rustled the bushes—the profile of a man and a girl who was a head shorter. Dawn and her father. With Papa’s plate in my hands, I elbowed my way past Ma.

“Be careful, Miriam,” Ma squeezed out of clenched teeth as I pressed past her awkward third-trimester body, jolting it into the open cabinet door. I let myself out of the kitchen and wove through the short line of people who were picking up plates and grabbing cups. On the way outside, I bumped into Papa and handed him his plate.

“Where are you going?” Papa called as I jogged out of the multipurpose room, his voice echoing in the hallway.

The wind outside had picked up since we had arrived that morning, and my heart was beating faster than my shoes slapping the concrete. The driver’s-side door was open as Dawn’s father lowered himself inside.

“Dawn,” I yelled.

We had been standing close to this exact spot on the night when she’d asked me to heal her. Breathless, I approached Dawn’s closed passenger door and banged on the window. She opened it and stepped outside; I followed her around the side of the car to the rusted trunk. Her face had more color in it, her cheeks chubbier, her breathing at normal intervals as she spoke to me.

“Hi, Miriam,” she said. “I tried to find you earlier but didn’t see you during the service.”

“I was cooking in the back.”

She looked at the front of my flour-covered apron and nodded. I hadn’t thought about what I would say to her when I saw her; I grasped the apron’s fabric and ran it between my fingers as I tried to formulate the right question. “How are you feeling?”

“That’s why I wanted to find you.” She leaned closer to me, and her voice dropped. “I felt weird right after the—you know—so it seemed like all the other times.” Another gust of wind ripped through the parking lot—she paused and looked around. A few other parishioners mingled outside, making small talk that wafted over to where we stood.

“I went back to my cardiologist for a checkup. Do you know what they told me?”

I shook my head. Dawn’s father rolled down the window and poked his head out. “Hurry up, honey. We’re running late,” he said.

“Coming.”

“What did they say?”

“My heart function is normal. I can’t remember the last time I had a normal checkup. The doctors couldn’t believe it, especially since I haven’t had the latest surgery yet.”

“Honey!” her father called.

“Gotta go. Thanks, Miriam. See you around.”

She wrapped me in a hurried embrace and jogged back to the car door as though she’d been jogging all her life. That had to be proof of something. I held on to that picture as she looked around once again with a wan smile before sinking into the car’s upholstery.

I played her words over and over again. Maybe, like with Micah, a normal checkup could just mean that an abnormal one was on the horizon. But maybe it had worked. Euphoria should have felt like all my neurons and synapses firing at the same time—something that should have made my body feel lighter—but I sank onto the ground. My hands grasped small piles of gravel next to the tiny rainbows that appeared in the shiny black oil puddle. I closed my lips around a prayer that I couldn’t utter aloud, the prayer that ran counter to everything I’d ever learned or been taught: Thank You, Lord, for healing Dawn through me. Give me the strength to seek You and do Your will.

In bed in the middle of the night, I couldn’t stop thinking about how my hands had touched something and made it whole again. But then my thoughts were interrupted by music that wasn’t gospel riding the heat currents through the vent beneath my bed. At first I thought I was dreaming, but the music continued even after I got up and crept downstairs, passing the front window where I saw an empty driveway. Papa had been leaving early a lot more these days, staying gone for hours at a time and offering no explanation about where he’d been when he returned. I imagined long, closed-door meetings with the deacon board as he tried to replace Deacon Johnson, meetings that were too volatile for him to let us overhear.

When I got closer to the kitchen, the music slid into my veins—the hi-hat’s tinny tapping was persistent as guitars and drums faded, leaving nothing but a woman’s mournful voice singing about a man who left her, her high notes breaking away from the music and modulating until they landed on a sound more animal than human. A pair of feet padded a syncopated rhythm in the kitchen’s dimness—quick steps that were out of pace with the slow words and music. When I craned my neck around the corner, all of the weight of Ma’s growing body was raised on the balls of her feet. Her eyes were closed, and her right arm was bent several inches in front of her as though she were holding someone who wasn’t there. She looked younger than I’d ever seen her, unencumbered by the heaviness of pregnancy and revival season that had stooped her shoulders. I watched her reflection as she passed the black mirrored pools of the kitchen windows; my eyes slid to her undulating hips that drove her from the cabinets to the stove, buffeting her against the refrigerator and back toward the sink, her face tilted upward. Her limbs threaded