Live by Night

“I came back and my father chased my mother from the house and beat the devil from me and taught me to pray again on my knees and without wishing for personal gain. To pray as a supplicant. To pray as a sinner. And the flame returned. On my knees, by the bed I’d slept in as a child. I’d been on my knees all day. I’d been awake most of the week. And the flame found my blood, found my heart, and I felt certain again. Do you know how much I’d missed it? I’d missed it more than any drug, any love, any food, maybe more even than the God who supposedly bequeathed it to me. Certainty, Mr. Coughlin. Certainty. It’s the most gorgeous lie of them all.”

Neither said anything for a bit, long enough for Carmen to return with fresh cups of coffee to replace the ones they’d emptied.

“My mother passed away last week. Did you know that?”

“I hadn’t heard, Loretta, I’m sorry.”

She waved off his apology and drank some coffee. “My father’s beliefs and my beliefs drove her from our home. She would say at him, ‘You don’t love God. You love the idea of being special to him. You want to believe he sees you.’ When I learned of her passing, I understood what she meant. I took no comfort in God. I don’t know God. I just wanted my mommy back.” She nodded several times to herself.

A couple walked into the shop, the bell tinkling over the door as Carmen came out from behind the counter to seat them.

“I don’t know if there’s a God.” She fingered her coffee cup handle. “I certainly hope there is. And I hope he is kind. Wouldn’t that be swell, Mr. Coughlin?”

“It would,” Joe said.

“I don’t believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe — or, I want to believe — he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name.”

He looked at her very carefully. “Or those we commit against ourselves in despair.”

“Oh,” she said brightly, “I’m not in despair. Are you?”

He shook his head. “Not even close.”

“What’s your secret?”

He chuckled. “This is a little intimate for coffee shop chat.”

“I want to know. You seem…” She looked around the café, and for a fleeting moment a wild abandonment slid through her eyes. “You seem whole.”

He smiled and shook his head repeatedly.

“You do,” she said.

“No.”

“You do. What’s the secret?”

He fingered his saucer for a moment, said nothing.

“Come now, Mr. Cough—”

“Her.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Her,” Joe said. “Graciela. My wife.” He looked across the table at her. “I hope there’s a God too. I so deeply hope that. But if there isn’t? Then Graciela is enough.”

“But what if you lose her?”

“I don’t intend to lose her.”

“But what if you do?” She leaned into the table.

“Then I would be all head, no heart.”

They sat in silence. Carmen came over and warmed their cups and Joe added a bit more sugar to his and looked at Loretta and felt the most powerful and inexplicable urge to hug her to him and tell her it would be okay.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“You’re a pillar of this city. Hell, you came up against me at the height of my power and you won. The Klan couldn’t do that. The law couldn’t. But you did.”

“I didn’t get rid of alcohol.”

“But you killed gambling. And until you came along? It was a lock.”

She smiled, then covered the smile with her hands. “I did do that, didn’t I?”

Joe smiled with her. “Yes, you did. You’ve got thousands of people who will follow you right off a cliff, Loretta.”

She laughed a wet laugh and looked up at the tin ceiling. “I don’t want anyone to follow me anywhere.”

“Have you told them that?”

“He doesn’t listen.”

“Irv?”

She nodded.

“Give him time.”

“He used to love my mother so much I remember him trembling sometimes when he got too close to her. Because he wanted to touch her so badly? But he couldn’t because we children were around and it wasn’t proper. Now she’s died, and he didn’t even go to her funeral. Because the God he imagines would have disapproved. The God he imagines doesn’t share. My father sits in his chair every night, reading his Bible, blind with rage because men were allowed to touch his daughter the way he used to touch his wife. And worse.” She leaned into the table and rubbed at a stray grain of sugar with her index finger. “He walks around the house in the dark whispering one word over and over.”

“What word?”

“Repent.” She looked up at him. “Repent, repent, repent.”

“Give him time,” Joe said again, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Within a few weeks, Loretta went back to wearing white. Her preaching continued to pack them in. She’d added a few new wrinkles, though — tricks, some people scoffed — speaking in tongues, frothing at the mouth. And she spoke with twice the thunder and twice the volume.

Joe saw a picture of her in the paper one morning, preaching to a gathering of the General Council of the Assemblies of God in Lee County, and he didn’t recognize her at first, even though she looked exactly the same.