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me for a long
moment, while she listened. Then she handed the phone to me and
said, “It’s your mom.”

Chapter Eight
    It’s your mom.
    That was all I needed to hear. My mother
never called me at work and there was only one reason why she would
have done it that day.
    As Didi said later, the funeral was
“psychedically surreal” in its awfulness. The only thing that got
me through it was having her by my side. My mother tiptoed close to
full-on hysteria when she found out Didi was coming. But I just
blanked out her face turning red and repeated over and over, “No
Didi, no me.” Mom and her cult hadn’t totally given up on me at
that time so, after lengthy consultations with her pastor and the
sisters, who were directing her every move in life by that time,
she agreed to allow my best friend to attend.
    I didn’t ask her permission to ride over
with Didi to the HeartLand Compound, where she’d arranged for the
funeral to be held. I just left. Nothing on earth could have gotten
me to cram into the HeartLand van. Didi parked in the huge lot
surrounding the complex of buildings—church, school, fellowship
hall, crafts store—that was HeartLand’s Albuquerque center. Neither
one of us left the ’Stang, we just watched the SUVs and vans drive
up and women in lace bonnets and men in suspenders pile out and
parade into the church, the men leading, the women and children
following behind, as if there were dangers ahead that the head of
the house would have to deal with. Indians, crack dealers, who
knew? I felt as if I were watching a movie that had nothing to do
with any life I could have ever imagined living.
    “Jesus, why don’t they all just get buggies
and be done with it?” Didi asked. “Bunch of Amish wannabes.” Didi
had dressed as conservatively as she could out of respect for
Daddy. But even her most sedate skirt was still a foot above her
knees and her hair was currently bleached white with pink
stripes.
    “Come on,” Didi said, opening her door.
“This will be a freak show and a half.”
    The church looked like a giant wooden barn
with lots of big oak beams and wooden pegs holding everything
together instead of nails. Inside, all the men and boys were
sitting on one side and all the women and girls were on the
other.
    An usher with an Abraham Lincoln beard led
us to the front row and seated us next to my mother. My right side
prickled where it almost touched her. I leaned away from her and
into Didi. The service was worse than I imagined it would be. Of
course, it had all been arranged without anyone consulting me.
Hearing strangers talk about Daddy was awful. My mother hadn’t even
asked if I wanted to speak. The brethren and what Didi called the
sistern stood up and recounted stories that were supposed to
illustrate what a good Christian Daddy was. I wanted to scream that
none of them had the tiniest idea about who my father was. Daddy was a good Christian but not in the way they were talking
about.
    Their pastor, a tall man with broad
shoulders whom the sistern all had crushes on, took the pulpit and
made a big show of placing his Bible on the lectern and opening it
reverently. He made a bigger show of starting to read, then looking
up to show that he knew the passage by heart. “Let not your heart
be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s
house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where
I am, there ye may be also.”
    My mother was sniffling beside me, dabbing
at her eyes and nose with a balled-up Kleenex. The pastor looked
straight at her and asked, “Sister, why do you weep? This should be
a day of rejoicing, for your husband has gone before you to prepare
a place just as Jesus did. If you truly believe, there should be a
smile on your face.”
    The prickling on my side turned to waves of
revulsion when Mom obeyed,