“You know one day, he’s going to either kill me or boot me,” Levi said. He was stretched out on her bed, his legs extending a foot past hers.
“Shhh,” Betty whispered. Her dad was prone to popping up in doorways these days, his eyes lingering on her, his face a mix of something like consternation and wistfulness, if wistfulness had a knife’s edge to it.
“Dad’s not even here,” he said. “You know he goes back out at night, right, once Mom is asleep?”
Betty did know. She tried not to think about it. Not because she didn’t think that her dad was capable of being deceitful. But because she worried that he would see through her, see into her heart, which was rotting on the edges and turning black with rage, and then he’d punish her the way he punished Levi.
“You also know that I’m leaving soon, right?” He turned his head to the right, and she turned hers to the left.
“Maybe not. Maybe he’ll let you stay.”
“I don’twantto stay, Bets. And you shouldn’t want to either.”
“I don’t,” she whispered.
“Then we need to come up with a plan.”
Every few nights, he slipped into her room and prepared her.
When you have a chance to run,take it.
Stow money.
Be inconspicuous.
Don’t stay anywhere too long.
Be careful who you trust.
And when you can,find me.
“He might just let me leave,” she said. “All on my own.”
“You’re his youngest daughter, the last of his creations, the one who is supposed to carry on his promise in the name of God,” he whispered. “Or whatever. Something like that.”
“Patience can do that,” she said. She felt him shake his head.
“You haven’t been listening in to his sermons lately, have you?”
Admittedly, she had not. She sat in the pew and thought about how increasingly absurd her father looked at the pulpit, red-faced and shouting with spittle flying from his mouth. He was almost cartoonish, almost likehewas the one possessed by demons, not the rest of them.
“He’s been preaching more and more about the sanctity of the children, their path to righteousness in the name of their father.”
“He’s always done that,” she said.
“No, not like this, not about daughters being carved out of their father’s rib, not about them paying homage to their fathers to get to the gates of heaven. Don’t you see the way he looks at you now? How whenever you are in the same room together, he never lets you out of his sight?”
Betty had only recently gone through puberty, a late bloomer at fifteen. Now, on the cusp of sixteen, she unavoidably did catch her dad eyeing her, even in her itchy, modest clothing, the way her breasts couldn’t be tamped down, the way her dress hugged the curve of her hips. He wasn’t leering; he was instead irritable, like her womanliness offended him. Betty had been too naïve to make the connection.
“You think he’s speaking to me?”
“Well, I don’t think he’s speaking to me,” Levi said.
“I don’t want to get married,” Betty confessed. “Not at eighteen, not to someone Dad has chosen.”
“You won’t have to,” he said with such assurance that she believed him completely.
Six weeks later, she found the flip phone under her pillow. Two months after that, Levi was gone.
