Donut Days (3 page)

“Emma,” she said too brightly. “Where are you off to?”

Mrs. Knickerbacher was what people called a church elder, meaning she’d been at Living Word Redeemer since it had started up. She was also the biggest gossip in the church’s history—at least in my opinion. “She should carry a trowel with her, the way she always tries to dig up dirt on people,” I’d said to my mom once. My mom had clucked disapprovingly, though she didn’t out-and-out disagree with me.

“I—I have to go get Lizzie,” I said, looking past Mrs. Knickerbacher and trying to figure out how many more people I’d have to fight through before I’d get to Little Saints.

But Mrs. Knickerbacher wasn’t done tormenting me yet. She glanced around, and all the people nearby tuned in to our conversation instinctively. Then she smiled at me so coldly, I shivered.

“So tell us,” she said, a little too loudly, “how is that Harry Potter Bible study of yours coming along?”

Embarrassment erupted in all parts of my body, making me warm. Even my fingers felt heated. I looked down at them and could practically see them changing from white to red.

It was no secret that a while back, I’d tried to start a Harry Potter Bible study among the Living Word Redeemer teens. I hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. I’d simply wanted to look at the ways Harry Potter wrestled with good and evil and how that was similar to the ways Christians sometimes wrestled with good and evil—at least in the Bible. But then a bunch of kids went home and told their parents that I was trying to get people to read Harry Potter in
place
of the Bible, and people like Mrs. Knickerbacher had been so worried about me having demons, they’d asked my dad to consider having a special service where they laid hands on me and cast out my unholy spirits. Thankfully, my dad said that it wasn’t necessary, but he did give me a bunch of scriptures to memorize—“for punishment and edification,” he’d said—one of them being from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament: “The Lord God will help me, therefore I will not be confused.”

For a while there, I’d repeated it over and over, until it stuck to the insides of my brain like flypaper. I’d mumbled it like a mantra. Because, seriously, I
wanted
God to help me. I didn’t want to make everyone in the church mad at me, and I liked the idea that God could make me less confused.

But that had been months ago, and by now I knew the truth. God wasn’t interested in helping me. The more I’d spoken that scripture, the farther away God got, and the more confusing life became.

“Perhaps next time you can try to start up a Lord of the Rings Bible study,” Mrs. Knickerbacher said, her lips twisted into a condescending smile. A few people nearby cackled.

I glared at her, since I knew for a
fact
she had bigger problems than my choice in Bible studies. A few years ago, when I’d been snooping in my parents’ office files, I found out that Mrs. Knickerbacher’s husband had seen my dad for counseling about a porno addiction. A few pages later in the file it said that the couple had been to see my dad for marital counseling.

There’s a scripture about that, actually. Not about porno and counseling, but about not picking apart everybody else’s life when your own isn’t so picture-perfect. If I could have remembered it right then, standing there in the foyer while Mrs. Knickerbacher made fun of me, I would have quoted it to her. But unless my dad was making me memorize scriptures as punishment, I had a hard time recalling any of them.

“I have to go,” I said, and pushed my way through the crowd. Once clear, I ran the rest of the way to Little Saints.

I thought about how Nat told me one time there was an actual medical condition for people who used the Bible as an excuse to talk behind your back all the time.

“There is?” I’d asked.

She’d nodded. “Biblical Tourette’s.”

I’d laughed so hard when she said that, the pop I’d been drinking came out of my nose. But I didn’t feel like laughing now. I felt sick to my stomach, in fact, and I stopped running for a moment, leaning against one of Living Word’s walls just so I could catch my breath and not hurl. My best friend in the whole world hated me, the church thought I was a heathen, and I still couldn’t figure out why Mr. O’Connor had waded into the Minnetonka River on the day of our baptism. Make no mistake, I didn’t think his prophecy was even slightly true, but I couldn’t figure out what his motive could possibly have been for doing it in the first place.

I was stumped and I needed someone to talk to about all this. And the truth was, there was only one person who I
wanted
to talk to about this. I took out my cell and gripped it tightly. Could I call him? Could I dial his number after everything that had happened between us? I put the phone back in my pocket.

I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I needed to wait before I called Jake O’Connor. In fact, I wanted to wait as long as possible before I went near an O’Connor again.

 

 

 

I stepped into Little Saints and tried to spot Lizzie among all the construction-paper crosses and cotton-ball lambs that were taped to every wall. The room’s overhead fluorescent bulbs hummed happily, spotlighting the permanent marker blotches on all the little worktables. I glanced past all the baby animal posters with captions that read, “Jesus loves a happy heart,” and saw Lizzie sitting on the floor among a handful of other kids. She was playing with a plastic Noah and two of every ark animal.

I grabbed her hand and said, “C’mon, Lizzie. We gotta go.”

“No!” she protested. She had just loaded the elephants into the wooden ship and didn’t want to leave.

“Seriously. Move it.”

Lizzie can play a typical seven-year-old for about two seconds before she remembers every single Bible verse she’s ever been taught. You could see “obey your elders” ticker-taping its way through her frontal lobe.

She lifted up her head and her blond ringlets fell away from her face. How she got to be blond was anybody’s guess—both my parents were brunets and my hair at present looked like dark, rotten wood. I hadn’t had much time to brush it before church.

“Okay,” Lizzie said finally, and stood up. Together we started walking back toward the sanctuary. The crowd had thinned outside the doors, and I exhaled when I saw Mrs. Knickerbacher was nowhere around. Lizzie hummed happily, and I noticed she smelled a little waxy. I wondered if she’d been eating crayons again.

When we got to the sanctuary, I made a beeline for the front pew, where my dad was alone, no longer mobbed. As we got closer, I noticed he wasn’t really doing anything—just sitting there, staring straight ahead. Plus he’d said he was going to get my mom, but she was nowhere in sight.

“Dad?” I asked, sitting next to him. “Are you okay?”

As if he was finally waking up from a bad dream, my dad nodded. His blue-gray eyes looked tired. He leaned over and grabbed my hand so hard, I thought I’d done something wrong. But instead of giving me a lecture, he opened my fingers and pressed his car keys into the palm of my hand.

“Emma,” he said, “I want you and Lizzie to leave now. Keep your cell phone on and don’t stop to talk to anyone.”

There was a note in his voice that sounded like fear, which made my whole body almost go numb, since my dad was never afraid of anything.

“But how will you and Mom get home?”

He looked toward the church stage, where my mom had given her sermon. “We’ll get a ride from someone. Don’t worry about that.”

Lizzie reached out to touch my dad’s hand, and he engulfed her small fingers with his massive ones. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, winking at her.

“But Dad,” I started tentatively, “where’s Mom?”

“She’s in the church’s meditation room,” my dad replied. “The church board has called an emergency meeting tonight and we need to stay, along with a handful of the elders.”

My dad rubbed his hands together while he spoke. I watched him for a few seconds. “So, um, did you even
know
Mom was going to give that sermon tonight?” I asked finally.

My dad’s hands stopped. “We’d discussed it briefly but hadn’t come to any conclusions. I guess the Lord led her to do . . . what she did.”

“How bad has it made things? I mean, what’s the church board going to say?”

My dad looked at me in a way that reminded me of a painting I saw once of a rugged, weather-beaten farmer carefully pouring milk into a dish for a kitten.
This is it
, I thought.
He’s going to actually tell me something
. We’ll have a
real
conversation about all the late-night meetings he and my mom have been going to, about how half their friends never call them anymore, and about how Mom doesn’t want to check the mail these days because she gets letters that make her hands shake. But then my dad just took a deep breath and said, “The church is going through a lot right now. It’s better if you go home.”

“Dad . . .” I stumbled, disappointed that he’d backed down from actually saying something. I swallowed, searching for the right words. I decided to press him about the donut camp. It was risky, but I had to get there.

“Dad, can I just drop Lizzie off at Mrs. Stein’s? I need to get to the donut camp.” Mrs. Stein was our neighbor, and she babysat for Lizzie all the time.

My dad blinked. “What?”

“The Crispy Dream donut camp. You said I could go. Starting tonight.”

My dad looked over his left shoulder, and as I followed his gaze, I saw Mr. O’Connor marching down the sanctuary aisle toward us, his black sport coat billowing out behind him like a cloak.

“Use the back door,” my dad said. “Drive to Mrs. Stein’s. Leave my car there and have Mrs. Stein take you to the camp. Under no circumstances will you turn off your cell phone. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“All right then,” he said. “Go.”

I grabbed Lizzie, and we bolted for the back door.

I
glanced in the rearview mirror as Lizzie and I sped away from Living Word Redeemer and was surprised at how warm and friendly the church looked. The lights were on inside, giving it a cozy glow, and all the landscaping my mom had done earlier that summer made the exterior extra bright and welcoming.

With such a peaceful facade, it was hard to imagine the inside of the church roiling with turmoil, but I bet that was exactly what was happening—especially now that the board members were being called in to discuss my mom’s sermon.

“I don’t want to go to Mrs. Stein’s,” Lizzie said, interrupting my thoughts. “Can’t I just come with you tonight?”

“Sorry,” I said. “No can do.”

“But Mrs. Stein smells like cough drops,” she protested.

I smiled, trying not to laugh out loud. Sometimes Lizzie could be a pretty funny, cool kid. Except, of course, when she drove me crazy, which was a lot. Like when she’d skip around the house, singing “This Little Light of Mine” with her heart in every word. Or when she’d pull cupcakes out of her Easy-Bake Oven and hand them to my mom, saying, “Eat this in remembrance of me.”

When we read
Hamlet
junior year in English and learned about literary foils, I actually thought about Lizzie and wondered if she was mine.

She was petite, whereas I was built like a rugby player. There was also the fact that Lizzie liked anything that was pink and ruffled and frilly and I’d rather eat glass than put any of that stuff on. I wasn’t a total tomboy, and I certainly wore lip gloss and makeup, but I knew I was never going to just plain . . .
sparkle
the way she did. It was hard to be around her and not think God had put an angel on loan just for you.

Lizzie interrupted my thoughts by loudly
haaa-
ing her breath on the window and drawing a steamy heart on the glass. “That’s for Mommy,” she said, pointing to it. “Mommy says her heart is full every time she looks at me.”

“Must be nice,” I mumbled, thinking how I was more apt to give my mom a heart attack. But it wasn’t hard to see why Lizzie would make my mom’s heart swell.

She breathed on the window a second time and drew another heart. “There’s my heart,” she said. “It gets filled up with love about you.”

I glanced over at the streaky, lopsided heart and suddenly wondered why Lizzie had to be so darn sweet. Because it meant I felt like a huge pile of dog crap every time I bossed her around or told her the angel wings she made out of paper and strapped to her back with Band-Aids were stupid.

I looked at the heart Lizzie had drawn for me and tried to think nice thoughts. After all, it wasn’t
her
fault my mom totally adored her and bought her clothes, where I had to mow, like, six lawns before I could head over to Old Navy for some jeans. I shouldn’t be mad at Lizzie just because of the way my
mom
acted. “Um, thanks for the heart,” I said. “That’s nice.”

Lizzie picked at her little-girl tights. “Where are you going tonight?” she asked.

“I’m going to a donut campout.”

“What’s a donut campout?”

“Well,” I said, trying to find the right words, “it’s kind of like this campsite that people go to before a Crispy Dream donut store opens.”

“Why?”

“Because they really love the donuts,” I said, which was only partly true, since the stories about the Crispy Dream camp in our local paper, the
Paul Bunyan Press,
had seemed to indicate people had a slew of reasons for coming to the camp. Like Lloyd Barker from Fargo, North Dakota. Last week, the
Press
had quoted him as saying: “I’m planning to drive 350 miles to Birch Lake just to be one of the first in line. I was at the opening of the Kansas City Crispy Dream not too long ago, and my goal is to be at a Crispy Dream opening in every state in the Union.”

There was a picture of Lloyd with the article too. He was standing on his farm in Fargo, wearing overalls and a plaid flannel shirt, and smiling so big, you thought his face might crack. His rough farmer hands were like loaves of bread, and both of them were clutched around a box of Crispy Dream donuts. The box was empty and the caption read: “Lloyd Barker looks forward to a fresh dozen.”