The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [134]
"Lola's parents are pretenders," she claimed. "They say the right words, but words mean nothing if there's no feeling behind them."
Mom wasn't the only perceptive person in our family. "What about Dad?" I asked.
She stared at me for a long moment. Then she looked away, asking, "What do you mean?"
"He says the right words. But I don't think he believes them."
"Well," she said, her coldest eyes finding me. "Don't repeat those words. Do you understand me?"
I understood, but that didn't matter.
We weren't the only people watching, and ideas, particularly the dangerous ones, have their own lives. Like diseases, they can be carried on the wind, growing wherever they find weakness.
A couple years after our arrival, Salvation's first Mayor was drummed out of office. Three young girls were pregnant, each naming him as the father, and maybe that was true. Maybe. What mattered was that he was shunned, and mom became a very prominent citizen. She belonged to the new Mayor's inner circle, suddenly attending meetings and seeing to important but vague duties, holding no official station but acquiring a considerable reputation nonetheless. People couldn't stop smiling at her, even when they despised her. She formed a Bible study group, and women fought for the chance to sit in our living room, reading about God's mercy and judgment. When those ladies visited, dad would vanish. Then he started to skip Sunday church. And here the story can be told one of two ways: either my mother protected my father, deflecting criticisms to keep him safe for as long as possible. Or she was the acidic force that decided something had to be done about the doubter in our midst.
Either way, one morning I woke to find Dad's hand over my mouth. He told me to follow him, and we walked out back, past the battery shed holding yesterday's sun and the woodpile holding forty years of sunshine. That's the way that one-time teacher would talk to me, explaining how the world worked. But there weren't any lessons that day. He barely had time to confess that he was leaving, leaving right now, and this was good-bye.
I didn't ask why. There wasn't any need. All I said was, "Take me."
He shook his head. "I can't, Noah. No."
"Where are you going?"
"I'm not sure," he admitted, looking worried about whatever would come next.
I didn't feel scared. Until that moment, I didn't appreciate how much I wanted to be free of this town and its people - most of these people, at least -and that's why I asked to go with him, and that's why I was furious watching this man that I loved climb alone into a truck that probably didn't have enough fuel to run fifty miles.
He felt sorry for me. I could see that. To make both of us feel better, he said, "I'll be back some day. You'll see."
He was lying. I knew it, but maybe he didn't. He was lying to himself, just like he did for years when he pretended to believe whatever his crazy wife would tell him to believe.
I started crying. On bare feet, I chased that truck west on the river highway, and I kept running hard even when I couldn't see my father anymore. Then I stumbled and skinned both knees and limped home, finding my mother sitting at the kitchen table. She had been crying but her tears were finished by then. She looked old and extra stern. The woman used to be pretty. Before she was a mother, she was beautiful. I knew that from the old pictures. But that woman died during these last years, and what sat before me was tough and incapable of telling even a pitying lie.
"He did what was best," she claimed.
"Leaving like this, before the harm spread to his loved ones ..."
"But what about me?" I blurted.
"You?" She stared at me. Then after a shrug of the shoulders and one bored sigh, she admitted, "You'll thrive or you'll perish, Noah. Either way, your fate is entirely up to you."
The RV sits on the ornate brick road that borders