Read Online What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay by Amanda Cockrell - Free Book Online Page A

continued. Grandma Alice’s father ran a movie studio; she was a Hollywood princess when she was young. “We’d serve coffee and dance with the boys who were home on leave. It made me feel like I was doing something to help keep my husband safe. Some kind of sympathetic magic—I danced with those lonesome boys here, and somebody would be nice to him over there.”
    “Did you dream about the stuff they told you?”
    “They never talked about the war, really. They just wanted to be normal for a few days. But yes, I dreamed. My head made things up. All David’s letters home to me were censored, of course. They weren’t allowed to write about troop movements or anything that might give the enemy information. So we pretended we were discussing movie plots when he wanted to tell me where they were shipping him.”
    “You never told me any of this, Mom,” Ben said.
    “Well, it didn’t come up,” Grandma Alice said lightly. “I was just glad when your brothers got through Vietnam without getting drafted. You, I didn’t have to worry about; you were too young.”
    “Now we have nice new wars.” Ben sighed and speared a lamb chop.
    “There was another demonstration downtown,” I said. I’d passed it on the way home from St. Thomas’s. “There were a lot of people holding candles and signs, and they were selling bumper stickers that said W HEN J ESUS SAID LOVE YOUR ENEMIES, I THINK H E MEANT DON’T KILL THEM.”
    Ben smiled. “Your mom wanted me to go stand with them. She can’t, because the school board will get on her case, so she wanted me to take a stand for the family’s political convictions. I mentioned that she seemed to have forgotten she’s left me.”
    That almost made me laugh, it sounded so like Mom. When I got ready for bed I thought about what Felix had said, about praying. Please God, I thought, just let me have my own dreams. I don’t know whether God really listens to individual people or not. If he does, he must have a thousand ears. And I would think the people getting blown up in Afghanistan and murdered in Africa would drown out people like me. Just in case he was listening, though, I said, Please make Mom come home. Please get her back together with Ben.
    How can he keep things straight, all the things people are asking him? What does he do when two people ask for opposite things? And what about all the people who keep saying God is on their side? How can he be on both sides? And how could he be on anybody’s side who wants to blow somebody else up in his name?
    Even the churches can’t decide that one. There’s a big sign outside the Baptist church that says S UPPORT O UR T ROOPS and one outside the Unitarian church that says P EACE V IGIL 7 P.M.
    At the peace demonstration there was a car with a bumper sticker that said:
    D YSLEXICS, REMEMBER THAT D OG LOVES YOU.
    A MESSAGE FROM THE UNTIED CHURCH OF DOG.
    Maybe God really is a dog, and he loves everybody but he can’t help them do things or get things or win the lottery, or wars. That probably isn’t an idea I should talk over with Father Weatherford. With Wuffie or Grandma Alice, maybe. Sometimes I think those two old ladies know stuff nobody else does. Grandma Alice had a cousin who died in the Holocaust. The family tried to get her out but it was too late. Grandma Alice doesn’t talk about it much. If she still believes in God, I guess he must be out there somewhere.
    I went to sleep thinking about God, and Felix’s dreams stayed out of my head. But in the morning they were still so real in my memory—as if they had to be real somewhere, and inhabit somebody’s head—that I hoped that didn’t mean Felix was having them. It was Saturday, and the more I thought about it, the more I worried about him. So I went back over to St. Thomas’s and found him in the herb garden at the back of the church, weeding.
    The herb garden was the Altar Society’s idea—to make the church look just like it did when it was founded in