Lay It on My Heart Read Online Free Page A

my father has noticed. “I want to hear this news,” she says to me. “And I want to see the clever new school clothes your mother’s made.”
    â€œI’m a Christian, too,” Phoebe is saying. “I’m willing, too. I lived on faith alone for the whole year, too. We all did, if you happened to notice.”
    â€œWe were taken care of,” my father says.
    â€œAnd you said that the Lord said a year. One year. Which is over.”
    â€œI’ve had some further revelation,” my father says.
    â€œWe’re just heading upstairs now,” says Daze. As she edges around my father in the doorway, she kisses him on his gaunt cheek, right above the beard, and says, “Son,” but he keeps right on talking.
    â€œThe Lord was preparing us, Phoebe.”
    I’m standing up now, but I can’t take my eyes off the opening of my father’s sleeve, his scissoring fingers. “I saw lepers, Phoebe. In this day and age. Covered in sores. People who couldn’t feel their own skin burning if they were on fire. And do you know there are children in this very county born with tails?”
    â€œCharmaine,” Phoebe says, pointing to the door.
    I follow Daze into the foyer, and the kitchen door shuts behind me. Daze heads up the stairs, limping a little, and I’m careful to go slowly behind her so she doesn’t feel rushed.
    In my room she pulls me into a hug.
    â€œI don’t feel good,” I say into her chest, which is bony above her low, flattened bosom.
    â€œIt’s an unusual thing, the way God reveals himself to your father,” Daze says. “But there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
    â€œHave you seen any of those children with tails?”
    â€œNot tails,” says Daze. “Not really. Well, tails, but not like you’re thinking. More like little growths along the spine. The county health system leaves something to be desired.”
    I reach around behind my back and finger the ridges of my backbone. My womanhood cramps up again. There seems no end to the treachery of the body. But when I share the news with Daze, who as a rule avoids discussion of bodily matters, she congratulates me and gives me Tylenol from a bottle in her handbag. She also fishes out the extra plastic egg of pantyhose she always has on hand for runs and places it on my bedside table. “Now that you’re a woman,” she says. Then I lie down and she sits beside me.
    Out my window, the rain is gone and the sky has turned clear. It’s getting dark slowly, and the crickets sound like they’re saying, “OKAY, okay, OKAY, okay,” in a kind of resignation loud enough to drown out the voices of my parents downstairs. The cross on top of the water tower flickers on in the distance, as it does every evening at dusk. Some nights it’s bright enough to wake me up, the white light playing off town rooftops in one direction and, in the other, spilling over the rolling county fields.
    When my grandfather died, Daze came to live with us for a while. She used to tell me stories before I went to sleep, the same stories over and over, and even though I am thirteen, and less of a child than I have ever been, I ask her for one now, one that I know by heart. She tells me about the day I was born, how she and my grandfather got the call and sped to Saint Joseph Hospital in Lexington to meet my parents. It was January, bitterly cold, the road from East Winder treacherous with black ice. My grandfather prayed the whole way. At the hospital he took me out of Phoebe’s arms and dedicated me then and there, with his booming evangelist’s voice, to the service of the Lord. Two nurses stuck their heads in to see what the commotion was about and ended up laying hands on me right along with the rest of the family.
    Daze tells me how sick Phoebe was afterward and how much help she needed and that she was sorry Phoebe didn’t have her own