Conviction (25 page)

“But you can’t erase something that happened already.”

“Well, in dying for us Jesus does, essentially, erase our sin. God looks on our sin as the morning mist.” He smiles. “I don’t think we’re just speaking academically
here. Were you wondering about possible applications for your own life?”

“Maybe. I guess I was wondering for someone like—” I look across his desk, where he’s got a wedding picture of him and Jenna and a bunch of Ellie. My heart’s doing
weird acrobatics in my chest. “Someone I guess like…Trey. God will still forgive him?”

Something I can’t quite name changes in his expression. I shouldn’t have said it—it wasn’t even what I meant. “Why do you ask?”

“Forget it. I’m sorry. Never mind.”

“It’s all right, Braden. These feel like honest questions. What makes you ask?”

“Ah, I guess just how he doesn’t want anything to do with God anymore, and—” I know they’re close, but somehow I doubt Kevin knows about the drugs. (Or that Trey
thinks Kevin’s a bad husband.) “I don’t know.”

“You know something, Braden, I’ve always thought there’s evidence of God at work in Trey’s life. He’s one reason I can understand God’s constancy. When my mom
first got sick, Trey was my rock. He shipped my mother meals packed in dry ice. He’s generous. He’s faithful. He’s honest with himself, even brutally so. He’s kind.”
He sees my eyebrows go up, and he laughs. “I didn’t say he was
nice.
”

“Fair enough.” No one has to tell me Trey’s done a lot for me. “But just in general, I mean, for…everyone, even if you’re good in most ways but then you
still sin—how long does God keep forgiving you?”

“God doesn’t limit his forgiveness toward us.”

“What about the verses that say things like if you keep sinning, then you haven’t known God or there’s no more sacrifice left for your sins?”

Kevin tilts back in his chair and studies the wall, thinking. Finally he says, “Do we ever deserve God’s mercy?”

“I guess only if we—”

“No. Never. There’s no
only if.
By definition we will never be good enough for it, we will never deserve it, and yet he gives it freely anyway. Right? You know
that?”

“But what if you…know all that, and you still deliberately do something you know is wrong? Like Peter? You know it’s wrong and you do it anyway?”

He looks at me more closely. “Braden, is there something you’d like to share? Something tells me you’re dancing around your real question here.”

I half knock over my chair standing up. I should have never brought this up. “No. Never mind. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s definitely not a bother, Braden. I’m just trying to see what—”

“No, no, it is. Sorry. And, um…please don’t mention this to Trey. He has enough to worry about as it is.”

I
t was warm inside the Denny’s when I walked in that day in January I went to meet my mom. I was wearing a collared shirt, tucked
in—I’d changed three times that morning before leaving—and I unbuttoned and then rolled up my sleeves, glancing around the restaurant. I’d meant to get there early, but it
had taken me six and a half hours to get there because I’d hit traffic and then there was snow coming over the Grapevine. My gas tank was running on empty and I was scared to park because the
neighborhood was maybe the worst one I’d ever seen and I had twenty-nine missed calls from my dad, but I was on time.

She was sitting in a booth near the window overlooking the parking lot, and—like I’d known I would—I knew her right away. She was thirty-six, I’d calculated, or maybe
thirty-seven, depending on whether her birthday came before or after mine. She looked older. She was heavy and shifted around in the booth tiredly, with effort, and there were thick, dark circles
under her eyes and she wore greenish eye shadow and a blue CVS shirt and khaki pants that bulged at the waist. She looked dull and worn out.

But still: my mom. She had the same eyes as me.

She looked up and saw me and lifted her hand off the table just high enough to wave. I came over to the table—not too fast, because you never want to look overeager—and slid into the
booth across from her. I said, grinning, “Wow. Hi.”

“Well,” she said, and inhaled. “Look at
you
.” And then she did, studying me so long I felt my face heating up, and I twisted my fingers together under the table.
Still, I was happy. Because if you spend your whole life thinking you don’t have something and then it turns out you have it after all, you realize all those times you let yourself hope were
worth it, in the end, because, I mean—my mom was here. In person, in front of me, on a Saturday afternoon, and she had my same eyes and chin, and probably everyone walking by could see that
we belonged to one another. She said, “You look older than I expected.”

“People say that sometimes,” I said, and even though I always get awkward around adult women, I knew enough not to say the same thing back to her. I was out of breath, kind of, like
I’d been running, which I hadn’t. I joked, “My dad just tells me I’m not aging well.”

She gave a kind of a half laugh, then glanced at her watch. “Well, listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m on my lunch break and I’ve only got about twenty-five
minutes.”

“Oh—that’s all right.” It was the longest drive I’d ever been on by myself, but even with all the traffic I hit on the way, it’d felt much shorter than it
was, something I wouldn’t mind doing regularly. “It wasn’t very far.”

“I already know what I’m going to order. You hungry?”

I told her I wasn’t; I’d eaten a bunch of beef jerky in the car. Then I said, smiling, “Isn’t it kind of late for a lunch break? They wouldn’t let you off
earlier?”

“You sure?” she said, squinting at the menu. “On me.”

“I’m okay. But thank you.”

She shrugged. “Well, suit yourself.” She ordered a club sandwich and a Coke, and then, as an afterthought, a second Coke for me, and I said, “Oh, thanks,” and I
didn’t tell her I never drank soda. Then, when the waiter was gone, she sat back and tapped her fingers on the table and said, “Well.”

She was watching me the way Colin looks when he watches YouTube videos, sitting back and waiting for something shocking to happen, and it was a little while before I realized it meant I should
talk first.

“So, um,” I said, motioning to her CVS shirt, “do you work there?”

I winced right after I said it. Sixteen years I’d been waiting for this, and that was the best I could do? I should’ve practiced what I was going to say. I guess I figured, sixteen
years later, there’d be so much.

“Yeah. I’m a pharm tech.”

“You aren’t a dancer?”

“I’m not a—oh, Lord, no.” She reached down and grabbed at the skin around her waist. “Do I
look
like a dancer? Lord. You need to get out more.”

“But you still stayed in LA?”

“Yep, been here, oh, about fifteen, sixteen years.”

“Sixteen.”

She raised her eyebrows at that, and a little smile went over her face, not necessarily a happy one. “I guess so.” She took a sugar packet and tapped it against the table.
“Well, so, how’s your daddy doing? You still live with him? He ever get remarried or anything?”

“He’s good. And yes, and no.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“Ah—no.” I was supposed to be at a scrimmage. I’d left at nine, when my dad was at the bank; by eleven, the time I was supposed to go with him to warm up before everyone
else got there, I’d already missed six calls and ignored four voice mails, too. I’d passed Fort Tejon right when the game was supposed to start, and I knew Cardy would be livid, but it
was a just a preseason scrimmage and the records for those didn’t matter and when I got back I’d run bleachers for him until I’d paid it back. The guys would figure I had a good
reason. And I wasn’t letting myself think about my dad.

“You didn’t tell your dad where you were going?”

“Not yet.” Something about the way she asked me made me think she didn’t know who he was, but then I guess when she knew him he was just a former pitcher and a janitor who
worked the night shift; he wouldn’t go into radio for a few more years. I said, hesitantly, “You, um, you might know my dad, actually. Do you ever listen to the radio much?”

“Sometimes. Why—” Then it hit her—I could see it in her face—and she said, “Mart
Raynor
. My
God.
I knew that sounded familiar. That’s
Mart
?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

She shook her head slowly, back and forth. “Well,” she said, and she let out a long, low whistle. “I’ll be.”

I was surprised she could forget something like that. Wouldn’t you remember the name you went all the way down to the courthouse just to add to a birth certificate? I remembered everything
my dad ever said about her, even the things that weren’t true. The waiter came back then with the Cokes, and my mom ripped open the sugar packet and dumped it into her glass and then stirred
it with her straw. I must have looked startled because she smiled wryly. “Bad habit.”

I smiled back. Then I said—and I felt shy doing it, which seemed ridiculous—“You must really like sugar, I guess? My dad said, um, when I was a baby you used to give me Ring
Pops instead of a pacifier.”

“
Ring
Pops.” She made a startled laughing sound. “I forgot all about that. Good Lord, can you imagine? It’s a wonder they let me have children after that.”
She crumpled her sugar packet and shook her head. “Well, you know something, it’s funny where life takes you.”

I let that one rest between us a moment. It was warm in the restaurant, a homey yellow glow from the lights overhead and the gentle sound of the silverware clinking, and at the table next to us
there was an old couple in their eighties, probably, and he was eating an omelet and she was eating soup. I watched them for a long time, their hands trembling over their silverware, then I said,
“You have other kids?”

“I’ve got three girls.” I thought maybe she was going to say more, but then the waiter came back with the sandwich and set it down on the table. My mom removed the toothpick
from one half and gestured at her plate. “You want any? It’s got bacon.”

“No, thanks.” I cracked my knuckles under the table. I realized I should’ve ordered something, just so I had something to do with my hands, and also because you shouldn’t
make someone eat alone. “So you have—you have three girls?”

Her mouth was full. “Uh-huh.”

“How old are they? What are their names?”

“Ten, six, and four.”

Four’s how old I was when Trey was sixteen. She didn’t answer when I asked their names; maybe she hadn’t heard. I said, “Do they live with you and everything?”

It was an easy question—hardly even a question; really I was just giving her an opening to tell me about them—but she didn’t answer right away. She picked up the little
container with all the miniature packets of jam, even though she hadn’t ordered toast, and studied it. There were cushions of puffy fat around her knuckles, and she wore a gold wedding band
and she had pinkish nail polish that was starting to chip. She replaced the jam carefully in the container and drummed her fingernails against the tabletop so they made a clicking sound.

“Listen,” she said finally, “I always figured…” She exhaled, then looked away. “When I was twenty, I was real wild and I did lots of stuff nice girls
don’t do. But now that I’m a mom, I try to teach my girls there’s consequences to your actions, even if I didn’t know that when I was twenty, so I knew if you ever tried to
contact me, it was the right thing to do to at least own up to the past.”

She took a bite of her sandwich. Mayonnaise squirted onto the corner of her mouth. Then she set the sandwich back down on the plate and reached into her purse and laid an envelope on the
table.

“I don’t have much for you. I never even told my own mother about you. When I had my oldest daughter, I even told the doctor she was my first. I’m not real proud of my past,
but I’m a different person now. Now I try to always do right by my girls. But here.” She slid the envelope across the table to me. It was thick and yellowish. “When I got your
message, I remembered I had this.”

My fingers weren’t moving right even if I wanted them to. The envelope lay on the table between us, next to my untouched silverware and the sign advertising the limited-edition
cinnamon-bun cheesecake.

“There’s just about a hundred bucks in there. It’s funny, I forgot all about it until I heard from you, and I had to dig all the way into my filing cabinet before I got it. But
when I first moved out here, I was waiting tables to make rent, and every week I made sure to put away a couple bucks for you.” She half smiled. “There was times I was down to a single
can of tuna fish and I just had to eat it with a spoon, but I never dipped into that money once.”

There was something settling down around my heart like that spray when you put new paint lines down on a field, like it was slowing down the valves. “I don’t want money,” I
said slowly. “You should’ve bought yourself groceries. My dad does fine. I never needed that.”

She shrugged, like it didn’t matter, but she looked upset. “Back then and for a girl in my situation, a hundred dollars was a lot of money, you know. Sure wasn’t nothing to
save it up for you.”