Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [48]
“You smell like the devil,” she would say, not without good humor.
He was wound too tight for the soft-spoken old ladies who taught children’s church, so he sat beside his aunt in the adult sanctuary, chewing Wrigley’s or sucking hard candy while he amused himself drawing unkind cartoons of the minister farting at the pulpit. Rather irreverently, Aunt Jenny kept her favorite Pew Art on the fridge.
She rarely made him do the chores his mother had demanded he complete. She explained her lawn mower was too unwieldy for a boy to handle. She decided the car wasn’t so dirty it needed immediate washing. Most afternoons she made Eli sit with her at the kitchen table, eating sugar cookies and playing board games. Eli loved the way her kitchen smelled of sweet things freshly baking. He loved how all her furniture matched. He liked to sit on the love seat in the living room and run his sensitive, quivering hands up and down the edge of the seat cushions, the crushed velvet slick beneath his palm if he pushed in one direction, the fibers resisting when he pulled his hand the other.
When summer was only half over, and carting Eli to Jenny’s house became more a punishment for his mother than it was for him, she announced he’d served his time and informed Jenny he wouldn’t be coming back. He took a month off church. Things were better. Roker was gone. The new boyfriend was an idiot, but gentle. Eli had his usual Sunday pastimes to keep him busy, fishing and harassing his brother. Some nights he still locked himself in the bathroom, took secret satisfaction in drawing blood from his own arms with unwound paper clips and kitchen paring knifes. He worried about Jenny:Who would she play Monopoly with? Who would eat her cookies? He got his church clothes back out in resignation: He just couldn’t be worrying about her all the time. He didn’t want her to feel lonely, he explained to her on their way to service. She nodded and said she agreed that she wouldn’t know what to do without him.
Aunt Jenny was no missionary, but she did her bit. She taught Eli to bless his food before eating and to recite the Lord’s Prayer before bed. She answered his theological inquiries as best she could: why God was invisible, why He was so angry in the Old Testament, why the churchgoers drank grape juice and called it blood.
The way he described his childhood, Aunt Jenny was an anchor of sanity in his otherwise chaotic world. Even in high school, when he only went to services to stare at the uniformly gorgeous back row of the junior high all girls choir, he still spent whole afternoons at Jenny’s, sleeping on her couch, mowing her lawn, eating the food she cooked only for him.
Eli had Jenny all to himself. Aden would have nothing to do with her. Aden had friends and clubs. He had been labeled Gifted and reaped all the rewards that came with the title. The teachers loved him. Their mother sobered up enough to attend his parent-teacher conferences, basking in the praise. He was soon being courted by costly private schools that offered to pay his way.
Aden’s intellect eclipsed Eli’s more practical talents: Eli could put anything back together in better shape than it had been in when he took it apart. He was terrible at math but had an innate skill for carpentry. He knew cars. These talents merely impressed upon teachers the need to keep Eli under close surveillance. Whenever he was sent to the principal’s office for gluing the teacher’s pens to her desk or drawing dirty pictures on desktops, the principal wanted to know the same thing: why couldn’t he be more like his brother? Eli didn’t mind. He loved that people loved his brother. And when it did bother him, there were bottles from the pantry to silence the unwelcome thoughts and endless blades with which to cut and mask the hurt.
He couldn’t say when the drinking began in earnest. He’d been sipping from his mother’s beer bottles for as long