Sweet Jesus Read Online Free PDF Page A

that God will take care of them?
    He
does
take care of them, Mary-Beth said, stressing the present tense.
    With my own vigilance and God’s love.
    They’ll be fine.
    But that life persists at all, such a tiny flame, seems like such a miracle to me.
    It
is
a miracle.
    I’ve just had my doubts, you know? I mean, maybe we’ve got it all wrong, Mary-Beth. Maybe life is just a brutal rat race to succeed, after all, without higher purpose or redemption, and I’ve just dragged three more unsuspecting victims into the fray.
    I think your fears are wildly exaggerated, Mary-Beth said, and need a little dose of reality.
    I’m up to my eyeballs in reality, Connie said. What I need is a dose of the mystical.
    Mary-Beth put her plate down, wiped her mouth, and tucked her feet up onto the couch. I fear, she said, that our evangelical Anglican isn’t getting enough Pentecostal on her Sunday mornings.
    Just
something
to bolster my faith, Connie said, looking baffled and resigned.
    Mary-Beth picked up the remote and pointed it at the TV . When’s the debate supposed to come on again? she asked and started blinking through the channels.
    In about fifteen minutes, Connie said and stared at her watch longer than it took to tell the time. She realized, at that moment, that she could imagine a life in which she had no faith.
    There had been a period in her youth when she’d lost her focus, turned her eyes away from God. Her parents never knew, it wasn’t radical, but she’d had a quiet rebellion. At seventeen, she had a boyfriend. They’d done cocaine. Connie thought about it now – it didn’t make her cringe, she wasn’t ashamed – two tiny white envelopes in a small ziplock bag hidden among her underclothes. Her younger sister had found it one day. How triumphant and betrayed Hannah had looked, brandishing the bag like some proof of heresy, grateful for once of being spared the burden of being bad, but hurt too, by the exclusion of Connie’s secrecy. Hannah had acted as if she took Connie’s privacy as an indictment of her own character, and it pained Connie to know that this might have been true. She felt her sister wasn’t to be trusted. She was too moody, and prone to bouts of anger that left everyone in its wake toppled like palm trees after a hurricane. In fact, Connie had, on more than one occasion, thanked God explicitly for not endowing herwith Hannah’s temperament and her ambiguous, unreligious life. It seemed chaotic and unhappy to her.
    They’d been raised Christian, and Connie had never really strayed. Her faith was an inheritance from her parents, but she’d also made it her own by a decision of intellect. She’d decided to believe in Christ’s message. It struck her as truthful and it suited her. Connie had been married for nine years. If someone asked her, are you happy? she would probably respond that happiness is not the point. The point is to live in accordance with God’s will, and by the fruit of your actions will you be judged. Only then do you reap the rewards, and so far – Connie couldn’t help but think – things were looking pretty good in that respect.
    She had always wanted a view of the ocean and now there it was, right outside her window. At the bottom of the sloping landscaped lawn, you took a narrow path of red-brown wood chips through the rhododendrons to a grey pebble beach upon whose shores lapped the cold waters of the Pacific. Her husband, Harlan Foster, had bought her this house. It had been built by a highly sought-after Vancouver architect, on a hectare of oceanfront property, for a man whose marriage collapsed before he and his wife had a chance to move in. The price was more than Harlan thought they could afford, but Connie was thrilled. The house had a state-of-the-art kitchen, two stone fireplaces – one in the living room, one in the split-level family room – and the dining room had a vaulted cathedral ceiling with a chandelier four feet across. There were six bedrooms,