Page 156 of Everything Under the Sun

“There is one thing I remember,” Atticus said after a moment. “She had the foulest mouth for someone so kind—but I’ll never forget her beating my legs with a switch when I said goddammit once.” He pointed at me. “Once being the keyword—I never said it again after that while under the same roof as her. But she used every curse word there was, except for that one. I always thought it was strange, one of her weird quirks.”

“Was your mother religious?”

“No,” he said right away. “She wasn’t religious—she was confused. I remember every Sunday morning we were late getting to church. We—my sisters and me—hated going to church because it was so stuffy in there. ‘Those big fancy churches that cost millions to build,’ my mother had said, ‘you can tell what’s important to them just by looking at the building. It’s the little churches on the hillsides, or tucked away in the woods that are blessed by the Lord. Because the people who worship there don’t care about fancy pews and extravagant carpet and high vaulted ceilings. The preacher doesn’t drive a forty-thousand-dollar car. His wife doesn’t have a new face every five years,’ and blah, blah, blah”—he pressed his fingers and thumb together, simulating a moving mouth—“So we never went to churches with air conditioning. And we hated it!” He laughed.

I chuckled.

Atticus lost his train of thought suddenly as if something bothered him. Was it the memory?

Noticing the dark shift in his face, I reacted quickly to combat it.

“You said she was confused?”

He nodded. “She was a complicated woman, my mother,” he said. “One day she was all about Jesus, the next day she was telling my father how religion was dangerous, that it was the true wolf in sheep’s clothing. Then she’d be back to church the next week, telling me and my sisters to read our bibles before bed”—he shook a pointed finger and cocked his head to one side, pretending to be his mother, mimicking her voice—“‘Say your prayers and learn the Word of God so you can make it into Heaven,’ she’d say. One year she declared herself a Buddhist!” He laughed again, shaking his head at the ridiculousness of it all.

“The truth was,” he went on, letting the laughter die, “my mother just needed to believe in something, like so many people do, I guess.” Then he smirked, and said critically, “It just needed to be something that didn’t take too much away from the things she liked. When someone in church pointed out to her that God didn’t approve of half the things she enjoyed, she decided she didn’t like Christianity much.”

We laughed together.

“Is she why you don’t believe in God?” I asked. I didn’t know why I’d said it; it just came out.

The question caught him off-guard; it stripped the smile from his face, and the humor from the moment. He looked me right in the eyes with a sort of determination I could not place.

He did not answer.

“Why do you believe in God, Thais?” He paused; wrinkles of curiosity deepened in his forehead. “Why do you believe in someone who took your family from you?”

I had never told Atticus whether or not I believed in God, but it was never something I neither openly displayed, nor tried to hide.

“God didn’t take my family from me,” I said with no emotion. “We all die, Atticus. Today, tomorrow, years from now; life and death go hand in hand like darkness and light—one cannot exist without the other. But God had nothing to do with their deaths.”

“He had nothing to do with saving them, either.” There was a contemptuous bite in his voice.

“I’m sorry, Thais,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I guess I’m just still at war with…God, for what He allowed to happen to my family—and yours. I’ll always be at war with Him.”

“But how can you be at war with Him,” I said gently, “if you don’t believe in Him?”

ATTICUS

I thought about it, and in the end had no worthy rebuttal so I said nothing.

“Look who’s back,” Thais said, her frown turning up again.

I expected to see Jeffrey coming through the woods, but it was George, crawling through the grass.

Thais went down the steps and picked the turtle up, her fingers latched to the sides of its shell. She smiled and peered in close to its face as its neck stretched out toward her; its little scaly feet moved back and forth in the air as if it were swimming.

“Thais, please don’t kiss the turtle; they carry diseases.”

She made a pffft sound with her lips at me and then turned back to George. “If he was good enough to eat,” she argued, “then he’s safe enough to kiss,” and then she planted a little kiss right on the top of its cartoonish head.

I laughed under my breath, even though I really, really wished she wouldn’t kiss the turtle with the same lips she kissed me with.

Thais put out a few blackberries in the grass for George and left it alone to wander in the yard. Eventually, it disappeared again.

And like clockwork, Jeffrey reappeared.

“Hi! Thais!” Jeffrey shouted as he shot through the trees and into the backyard, his arm raised high in the air. “I got you flowers, Thais!”

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